The Youth Bulge--Upheaval By HJS

This important European study I will provide in two parts because of its length. This first part will touch on Europe and the Middle East; the second part will look at Europe again, the United States, and that bête noir of ours, the welfare state. You will be introduced to a newly recognized phenomenon—the Youth Bulge, the breaking out of youth from a stagnant pool of the status quo into violent upheaval.

I thank Dr. Carl Goldberg for bringing this work to my attention. The full report is linked directly below. HJS

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/06/continent-of-losers.html

Monday, June 04, 2007
A Continent of Losers
by Baron Bodissey
Interview: A Continent of LosersWhile the European populations are shrinking and the best-qualified young people are leaving, we continue to allow mass immigration of unqualified Muslims, who will soon make our welfare states collapse. Add to this the fact that the Muslim world has built up a “youth bulge”, which according to experience will lead to mass murder and whose effects cannot be offset by foreign aid. The originator of these bleak predictions is the German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, who believes that the game is over for Europe.

By Lars Hedegaard

Authorised translation from the Danish by SapphoBREMEN: If the leaders of the American-led “Coalition of the Willing” had known Gunnar Heinsohn’s research, they would most likely never have left their troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. They would quickly give up any thought of intervention in Sudan’s Darfur province. They would tell the Palestinian 10-children families that the West will no longer pay for their unrestricted childbirths. Western opinion-makers and politicians would also abandon their pet theory that virtually any act of violence in a belt from Northern Africa to the Philippines - in addition to miscellaneous acts of terror all over the world - are caused by the unsolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And worst of all seen from the prevailing political consensus in the West: Heinsohn does not believe for a second that economic aid and hunger relief in countries with large youth populations can prevent wars, social unrest, terror or killings. On the contrary he is convinced that in some cases material aid may start the killings. This is because starving people do not fight, they just suffer. However, if you give a lot of young men enough to eat and a certain education in a society where there are too many young men so that not all can get the recognition and positions that they feel entitled to, it may lead to violence.

The 63-year-old sociology professor at the University of Bremen published his findings in his sensational and politically incorrect book Söhne und Weltmacht: Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen [Sons and World Domination: Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations], published in 2003. The book became widely known and discussed after the prominent German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk had characterised it as being as groundbreaking as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Sloterdijk thought that the book might pave the way for a new realism within a field that might be labelled “Demographic Materialism”.

Heinsohn is not concerned with the absolute size of populations, but rather with the share of teenagers and young men. If this share becomes too big compared to the total population, we are facing a youth bulge. The problem starts when families begin to produce three, four or more sons. This will cause the sons to fight over access to the positions in society that give power and prestige. Then you will have a lot of boys and young men running around filled with aggression and uncontrollable hormones. And then we shall experience mass killings, until a sufficient number of young men have been eradicated to match society’s ability to provide positions for the survivors.

According to Heinsohn, 80 per cent of world history is about young men in nations with a surplus of sons, creating trouble. This trouble may take many forms — a increase in domestic crime, attempts at coups d’état, revolutions, riots and civil wars. Occasionally, the young commit genocide to secure for themselves the positions that belonged to those they killed. Finally, there is war to conquer new territory, killing the enemy population and replacing it with one’s own.

But, as Heinsohn emphasizes again and again, the unrest and the violent acts caused by youth bulges have nothing to do with famine or unemployment. In his book he describes it as follows: “The dynamic of a youth bulge — it cannot be emphasized too often — is not caused by a lack of food. A younger brother, who may be employed as a stable hand by the first-born son and who may be well fed and perhaps even fat, does not seek food but position, one that can guarantee him recognition, influence and dignity. Not the underweight but rather the potential losers or the déclassé are pushing forward” (p. 21).

In recent years the West has been facing a gigantic youth bulge in large parts of the Muslim world. This bulge is created by a Muslim population explosion. Over the course of just five generations (1900-2000) the population in the Muslim countries has grown from 150 million to 1 200 million — an increase of 800 per cent. As a comparison the population of China has grown from 400 million to 1 200 million (300 per cent). The population of India has risen from 250 million to 1000 million (400 per cent).

Sappho has visited Gunnar Heinsohn at his office at the University of Bremen, which awarded him a life-long professorship in 1984.

Youth bulges and violence-What is the definition of a youth bulge?“There is no commonly accepted definition. The Frenchman who first used the term in 1970 said that a youth bulge existed when 30 per cent of the men in a population were between 20 to 24. I changed it to 30 per cent between 15 and 29. This means that if you take 100 males from a country, then 30 of them will be between 15 and 29.”

“But remember that this 30 per cent group of young men will not pose any danger if they are hungry or lack education. To be dangerous they must be in good physical and mental shape.”

Heinsohn emphasises that there are lots of wars and killings in history that do not emanate from youth bulges. The Hitler movement and the Mussolini movement in the 1920s can be explained as youth bulge phenomena. The early Nazis and Fascists had an average age a bit below 30. The Bolshevik movement in the period around the 1917 Revolution can be described in the same way. But by the time Hitler started WWII, many German families were down to only one son.

So Hitler’s attack in 1939 was not a youth bulge phenomenon. Neither was the Holocaust. The killing of the Jews was not caused by young German men wanting to take their positions, even though there are theories that make this claim.

Nor do the killings organised by the later Marxist-Leninist regimes — that may have killed 100 million people — have anything to do with youth bulges. The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was driven by millions and millions of farmers’ sons without land — that was a youth bulge event.

Stalin’s Gulag, however, does not fall into this category.- What about Mao’s killings in China?“

Again, in the 1930s Mao’s movement was carried by a youth bulge, but when he took power in 1949 and started his great purges by killing landowners, the youth bulge was already gone.”- So the predominant ideology of the West, namely that we can fight war and violence by alleviating hunger and creating jobs in the third world, is wrong?

“Every year the five German peace research institutes publish a report, and every year it has the following conclusion: If we win the struggle against hunger, we have defeated war. On the contrary —youth bulge research shows that if you are successful in eliminating immediate material poverty and hunger in a country with a youth bulge, violence starts to escalate.”

“In Europe we have just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Rome Treaty and in all the newspapers we could read that this treaty ended war in Europe. This is absolutely wrong. If the Germans after 1945 had reproduced as they did between 1900 and 1914, then we would have had a German nation of almost 500 million citizens, and we would have had about 80 million German men between 15 and 29. In reality we have 7 million.

And we may well ask ourselves whether these 80 million would have been as peaceful as the present 7 million, or would have been detonating bombs in Breslau or Danzig.” (These former German cities - now called Wroclaw and Gdansk - were ceded to Poland following Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945, ed.)

Demographic capitulation- - - - - - - - - -“This brings me to something that I call ‘Demographic Capitulation’. It has a very simple definition: Take all the men aged 40-44 and compare them to the boys aged 0-4. Demographic capitulation is when you have 100 males aged 40-44 compared to less than 80 boys aged 0-4. In Germany the numbers are 100/50, in the Gaza Strip they are 100/464. I have compared some numbers for you, and these show that Denmark is on the verge of Demographic Capitulation. Your numbers are 100/80.”

Heinsohn’s statistical overview shows that if Denmark had reproduced at the same rate as the Gaza Strip (from 240 000 to 1.4 million between 1950 and 2006), then we would not have had a population of 5.5 million (compared to 4.3 million in 1950), but 25 million - more than New Zealand and Australia combined. In that case the median age of Danish males would have been 15 (in reality it is 39), and there would have been 3.6 million men of battle-ready age (15-29), whereas the real number is only 470 000. (Median age must not be confused with average age. A median age of 15 means that there are as many people below 15 as there are above 15, ed.).

Whereas such countries as Germany and Japan have capitulated demographically, other countries are characterized by “Demographic Armament”. Apart from Gaza this is situation in among others the three Muslim countries Afghanistan (100/403), Iraq (100/351) and Somalia (100/364). It is no coincidence that they are marked by widespread and extreme acts of violence and will be for several more years into the future. This also holds true for Gaza and the Palestinians in general.- So you do not believe that the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is realistic?“

No, and the main reason is the big mistake that was made in Oslo in 1991, when the secret negotiations between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin started. The error was that nobody took any notice of the Palestinian population explosion. The Palestinian population has multiplied almost 6 times within the last 50 years. We should have done two things:

Israel should have stopped its settlements, and the world community should have said to the Palestinians: Every child in Palestine will be fed by the world community as before, because by accepting that every Palestinian child is a refugee, the world community has a responsibility for the number of children born. But from January 1st 1992 you will have to pay for your newborn children, just as a woman does in Lebanon, in Tunisia and in Algeria. That is what they should have told the Palestinians.

Why am I mentioning these three countries? Because in those societies a woman has fewer than two children on the average. Had we done that 15 years ago, we would have seen a generation of young Palestinian men with few reasons to commit violence against each other or against the Jews. But we did not, and therefore I do not believe in the peace process, even if Hamas should decide to sign everything. Their young men will tear such agreements to pieces.”

Heinsohn points out that it is the USA and the EU, and particularly the Scandinavian countries, that pay for the enormous Palestinian child production. We must cease this support, so that the Palestinians pay for the children they bring into the world after a certain point in time.

- Why cannot the Palestinians just work like everybody else and earn their own keep?“Palestine is a special case. They never had any chance of developing because they have always been on international support.”Poverty and religion- From your book one gets the impression that youth bulges create poverty, whereas we in the West have regarded youth bulges as a result of poverty?“

If a youth bulge changes a state into a failed state, then one will see a breakdown of the market and of production, and this will lead to poverty. If we look at current examples of countries with increasing violence — Pakistan and Bangladesh — we can see that both have managed a steady increase in the average income per capita — and even a significant growth. Thus we have created the primary conditions for making the young men both well fed and well educated, which leads to them becoming unruly. If these young men successfully destroy the country’s infrastructure, it will result in poverty. I have followed this process closely in the West African state of The Ivory Coast. Here they have had a system of seven children for every woman, at the same time as the average income has increased. When the killings started, the average income fell.”

- How do you explain the fact that the Muslim Middle East was deeply underdeveloped before there was any sign of a youth bulge, even before the Europeans — who get the blame for most things — had set foot on its soil? Is it not necessary to add religion to the explanation?“

Let us look at the small countries in Europe that were capable of conquering and colonising large parts of the world from around 1500, starting with Portugal and Spain. Our explanation is usually that there was a pressure on resources because of overpopulation. The opposite was the case. When Spain started its conquests in 1493 with Columbus’ second expedition, Spain had a population of six million, but in 1350 it had had nine million inhabitants. Spain was not overpopulated. There was, however, a sudden a growth in childbirths because in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII had decreed that birth control was punishable by death, which caused an immediate explosion in births. In the middle ages the average number of children per family was 2-3; now it was suddenly 6-7. That caused the median age in the population of six million to be 15, whereas the nine-million population of 1350 had had a median age between 28 and 30. So there was no lack of land or food.

However, there was a sudden scarcity of positions. Previously there had been one or two boys in the family. One could take over the farm and the other might become a tenant somewhere else. Now you had three sons who had food but no positions, and these boys started the conquests and the colonising. It was quite telling that the Spaniards called them secundones, the second sons.”

“Where does religion enter the picture? These young men — 95 per cent of them — were normal, good boys and saw it as a sin to kill or mistreat the conquered populations in the colonies. They knew the difference between themselves and psychopaths or common murderers. So when they went into action, they had religion to tell them that they were not murderers, but people who would kill the infidels, the sinners and the unjust with a clean conscience. People who executed orders from a higher power as they would not want to be seen as disobedient.”

“For this reason I do not call these conquerors and colonisers — Spaniards, Englishmen and Danes — Christian, but Christianists. The same distinction as with a Muslim and an Islamist. These young Spaniards were not Christian, but Christianists, who needed this ideology to justify their terrible killings.”New religions arise in no timeHeinsohn is also hesitant to ascribe to Islam a core from which one may deduce later actions or patterns of action.

As an example he mentions the movement of 1968, to which he himself belonged.“When the time is ripe, new religious pamphlets and books will be written on the spot and in no time. From your holy books — the Koran, the Bible, The Communist Manifesto etc. — you take what fits your purpose. You know that you are going to use violence but want a justification. For you are a righteous person. But when the youth bulge is spent, the books that were distributed in millions of copies cannot even be sold in second-hand bookshops. Everybody knows that they are full of rubbish.

But while the movement is on, these young men are impervious to arguments. So the false ideas do not arise from holy scripture. [NOTE: There is no sign that this sociologist ever read the holy scriptures -- either of Christianity or of Islam. CG] They are generated by the young men themselves because they need wrong ideas to justify their actions. Consequently you cannot stop them by explaining that their ideas are wrong. The movement is not created by wrong ideas. On the contrary, the wrong ideas are created by the movement. Islam does not create Islamism, young Muslims do.” [NOTE: Except that "Islamism" is fully supported by the holy scriptures of the Koran and Hadith. CG]According to Heinsohn’s calculations there will be approximately 300 million young Muslim men in 2020, but not all of them will be angry. A growing number of Muslim nations — Algeria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Iran, Turkey and the rich Emirates — have all fallen under the demographic replacement limit. Iran now has a fertility rate of 1.7. That is the same as in Denmark, but less than in France. These countries still have a youth surplus from earlier, but in a few years they will no longer have any youth bulges that make them pose any danger.

Consequently he does not believe that the Iranian masses will set the whole region alight. This scenario is a projection of the situation immediately before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and during the war between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988, when Iran could send hundreds of thousands of boys and young men out into the minefields. These teenagers are no longer there.