← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 20209 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2005-09-14
2005-09-14 19:12 | User Profile
Neocon propaganda tries to portray Iran as some sort of mad-dog Islamic country, ready at any time for collective suicide for the glory of Allah - but actually Iranian population is secularizing [B]quickly[/B], and their fertility level follows right along with the modernization process, as elsewhere in the world.
This is what CIA Factbook says about the current situation: [COLOR=Blue][B] Total fertility rate: 1.82 children born/woman (2005 est.)[/B][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ir.html#People[/url]
That's less than in France!
Women's rights are also growing - really, Iran is becoming less and less the reactionary ogre that pro-Israel propaganda paints it to be.
(We also see, once again, the correlation between women's emancipation and the collapse of fertility)
[url]http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=5679[/url] [FONT=Arial] [SIZE=5] Iran Achieves Replacement-Level Fertility[/SIZE] [B] by Allison Tarmann
(Population Today, May/June 2002) [/B] [B] Having dropped from around 5 to just under 3 between 1989 and 1996, Iran's total fertility rate has again plunged ââ¬â this time to 2.[/B] Iran, an Islamic country, has followed a unique and rapid path to replacement-level fertility. The speedy fertility decline, which has surpassed demographers' projections, coincided with the revival in late 1989 of government efforts to slow population growth through a national family planning program.
...
[B]Such widespread acceptance of the two-child norm is largely due to the national campaign encouraging small families[/B]; to the national health care network, which has delivered family planning to all parts of the country and to families from all income levels in the context of primary health care while also reducing infant mortality; to government programs promoting rural development and literacy; and to the country's Islamic leadership's support for family planning. (For background on the country's family planning efforts, see the July/August 1999 issue of Population Today.)
The combination of all these factors, while not altering women's legal rights, has improved women's status, according to Farzaneh Roudi, a policy analyst with the Population Reference Bureau. [B]"Many people from outside Iran assume that, because the government obliges women to wear veils, the government also obliges them to use contraception," she said, "but the reproductive health program is based on freedom of choice."[/B] She noted, though, that "choice" does not, as it does in some other Muslim countries like Turkey and Tunisia, mean access to abortion, which remains illegal in Iran except to save a mother's life (although abortion is thought to be practiced in some urban areas). [B]With control over their reproduction, Roudi said, women are choosing to have fewer children and to be more in control of their lives[/B]. As they spend less time engaged in reproduction and childrearing than they did a generation ago, they have more time to be active in public life ââ¬â to engage in volunteerism and to participate and vote in national and local elections. In rural and urban Islamic Council elections in 1999, more than 7,250 women were candidates.
... [/FONT]
2005-09-15 00:58 | User Profile
Petr,
It might not be all bad. This could be good for these Islamists, because most of children will be born to the most Islamic people. As long as there is no alien Immigration the Islamist should be able to keep power.
In America Immigration is in the form of secularized Mexicans and Chinamen. If it were not for Immigration; White Christian would be able to make gains in control of the US over time, due too their higher birthrate.
2005-09-15 09:17 | User Profile
Not bad? I'd be lying if I'd say that I am happy to see non-Christian people multiply - therefore I more or less consider these to be good news.
Petr
2005-09-17 19:42 | User Profile
The cynical neocon writer "Spengler" from[I] Asia Times [/I]has just commented upon this phenomenon as well - as a whole, Muslim birthrates are coming down and [B]fast[/B]:
[url]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GI13Ak01.html[/url]
[FONT=Arial][B] Sep 13, 2005
[SIZE=5]Demographics and Iran's imperial design[/SIZE]
By Spengler[/B]
[B]Aging populations will cause severe discomfort in the United States and extreme pain in Japan and Europe by mid-century. But the same trends will devastate the frail economies of the Islamic world, and likely plunge many countries into social chaos.[/B]
By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran - converging on America's dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran's per capita GDP of $7,000 - especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits.
The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems. But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down, horribly and irretrievably so. Below, I will review the relevant numbers.
[B]In a recent essay, I argued that declining Muslim population growth rates give the Islamists just one generation in which to strike out for their goal of global theocracy (The demographics of radical Islam, August 23). Muslim birth rates are collapsing as literacy rises, that is, as the modern world intrudes upon traditional society. [U]Islamic traditional society is so fragile that it crumbles as soon as women learn to read[/U].[/B]
But the Islamists will not wait for traditional society to unravel. I grossly underestimated Iran's new president Mahmud Ahmadinejad in a report on the Iranian elections (Iran: The living fossils' vengeance, June 28).
In programs made public on August 15, Ahmadinejad revealed a response worthy of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin to the inevitable unraveling of Iran's traditional society. He proposes to reduce the number of villages from 66,000 to only 10,000, relocating 30 million Iranians. That is a preemptive response to the inevitable depopulation of rural Iran, in keeping with a totalitarian program for all aspects of Iranian society.
As Amir Taheri wrote in Arab News on August 20, "He [Ahmadinejad] wants the state to play a central role in all aspects of people's lives and emphasizes the importance of central planning. The state would follow the citizens from birth to death, ensuring their health, education, well-being and leisure. It will guide them as to what to read and write and what 'cultural products' to consume so as not to be contaminated by Western ideas."
Reengineering the shape of Iran's population, the central plank of the new government's domestic program, should be understood as the flip side of Iran's nuclear coin. Aggressive relocation of Iranians and an aggressive foreign policy both constitute a response to the coming crisis.
Iran claims that it must develop nuclear power to replace diminishing oil exports. It seems clear that Iranian exports will fall sharply, perhaps to zero by 2020, according to Iranian estimates. But Iran's motives for acquiring nuclear power are not only economic but strategic. Like Hitler and Stalin, Ahmadinejad looks to imperial expansion as a solution for economic crisis at home.
Iran wants effective control of Iraq through its ascendant Shi'ite majority, and ultimately control of the oil-rich regions of western Saudi Arabia, where Shi'ites form a majority. As Pepe Escobar reported from Tehran (Iran takes over Pipelineistan , Sep 10), Ahmadinejad wants to make Iran a regional power not only in production but in transmission, through a proposed oil pipeline through Iraq and Syria.
This may appear to be a desperate gamble, but conditions call for desperate gambles. Ahmadinejad is not a throwback, as I wrote with a dismissiveness that seems painful in hindsight. He has taken the measure of his country's crisis, and determined to meet it head-on. Washington, from what I can tell, has no idea what sort of opponent it confronts. Iranian dissidents were supposed to push their country toward democratization, following the glasnost model of Soviet deterioration, and contagion from the new democracy in Iraq was supposed to hasten the process. Ahmadinejad's ascendancy took Washington by complete surprise. Now there is nothing obvious the US can do to reduce Iran's influence among Iraqi Shi'ites, or to prevent Iran from pursuing its nuclear ambitions.
The rising elderly dependent ratio, that is, the proportion of pensioners in the general population, has given rise to a genre of apocalyptic literature in the West: governments will raise taxes, debase the currency, cut pensions and flail about hopelessly as the cost rises of supporting the rising number of aged. In the US, pensioners now are 18% of the population, but will become 33% by 2050, according to the United Nations' medium forecast. In other words, a full additional 15% of the population will require support from the remaining population.
Shifting a full 15% of the population from the ranks of the working to the ranks of the retired will place an uncomfortable burden on American taxpayers, to be sure. [B]But the shift in the case of Muslim countries is much worse. Between 2005 and 2050, the shift from workers to pensioners will comprise 21% of Iranians, 19% of Turks and Indonesians, and 20% of Algerians. [/B]That is almost as bad as the German predicament, where the proportion of dependent elderly will rise from 28% in 2005 to 50% in 2050.
Each employed German worker will have to support a pensioner in 2050. A simple way to express the problem is that German productivity must rise by 0.8% per year between now and 2050 simply to maintain the same standard of living, for that is the rate of productivity growth that would allow a smaller number of German workers to produce the same amount of goods and services. That is not inconceivable; during the 1990s, German productivity grew at such levels. Productivity growth in the Arab world and Iran has been low or negative, and is not likely to improve.
As I observed in my June analysis of Iran's presidential election, "From an economic standpoint, Iran is a changeling monster, an oil well attached to an iron lung, as it were, maintaining with subsidies a rural population that is no longer viable. Oil and natural gas earn $1,300 a year for each Iranian, roughly a fifth of per-capita GDP. The Islamic republic dispenses this wealth to keep alive a moribund economy. Government spending has risen by four-and-a-half times during the past four years, financed via the central bank's printing press, pushing inflation up to 15% pa [per annum], while unemployment remains at 11%."
Iran's ultra-Islamist government has no hope of ameliorating the crisis through productivity growth. Instead it proposes totalitarian methods that will not reduce the pain, but only squelch the screams. Iran envisages a regional Shi'ite empire backed by nuclear weaponry. And Washington, from what I can tell, has not a clue as to what is happening.
Apart from Iran, the population dynamics described above will lead to more rather than fewer terrorist demonstrations. A school of thought represented by Daniel Pipes, for example, holds that "terrorism obstructs the quiet work of political Islamism", as Pipes wrote on August 3 in the New York Sun. "In tranquil times, organizations like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Council on American-Islamic Relations effectively go about their business, promoting their agenda to make Islam dominant and imposing dhimmitude (whereby non-Muslims accept Islamic superiority and Muslim privilege). Westerners generally respond like slowly boiled frogs are supposed to, not noticing a thing."
Here I think Pipes is wrong; the Islamists have to strike quickly and decisively, not only to advance their cause in the West but also to consolidate their power in home countries where conditions will become unstable before long. [/FONT]
2005-09-17 23:20 | User Profile
[SIZE=3]And here's that earlier article of "Spengler" that he referred to in the piece below - I do tend to to agree with the idea that we shouldn't fearfully exaggerate the power of Islam:[/SIZE]
[url]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GH23Aa01.html[/url][FONT=Arial] [B]
Aug 23, 2005
[SIZE=5]The demographics of radical Islam[/SIZE]
By Spengler [/B]
General staffs before World War I began war planning with demographic tables, calculating how many men of military age they might feed to the machine guns. France preferred an early war because its stagnant population would not produce enough soldiers a generation hence to fight Germany. Only Israelââ¬â¢s general staff looks at demographic tables today, to draw prospective boundaries that will enclose a future Jewish majority.
Demographics still provide vital strategic information, albeit in quite a different fashion. Todayââ¬â¢s Islamists think like the French general staff in 1914. Islam has one generation in which to establish a global theocracy before hitting a demographic barrier. Islam has enough young men - the pool of unemployed Arabs is expected to reach 25 million by 2010 - to fight a war during the next 30 years. Because of mass migration to Western Europe, the worst of the war might be fought on European soil. [B] [U]Although the Muslim birth rate today is the worldââ¬â¢s second highest (after sub-Saharan Africa), it is falling faster than the birth rate of any other culture[/U]. By 2050, according to the latest UN projections, the population growth rate of the Muslim world will converge on that of the United States (although it will be much higher than Europe's or China's). [/B]
Falling fertility measures the growing influence of modernity upon the Muslim world. Literacy rates, especially female literacy, best explain the difference between the very high fertility rates of pre-modern society and the moderate fertility rates of industrial countries, as I showed in a recent study (Death by secularism: The statistical evidence, August 1, 2005).
[B]This is clearly the case in the Muslim world where the lowest rates of adult literacy correspond to the highest population growth rate. Literacy alone explains 58% of the variation in birth rates among Muslim countries. [/B]
Urbanization, literacy, and openness to the modern world ultimately will suppress the Muslim womb, in the absence of radical measures. In a new volume of essays on modern Islamic thought, the Islamists Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M Nafi observe, ââ¬ÅRather than being a development within cultural traditions that is internally generated, 20th century Islamic thought is constitutively responsive; it is substantially a reaction to extrinsic challenges.ââ¬Â [1] The challenge stems from the transformation of Muslim life:
[I]In the Middle East of 1900, for example, less than 10% of the inhabitants were city dwellers; by 1980, 47% were urban. In 1800, Cairo had a population of 250,000, rising to 600,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. The unprecedented influx of immigrants from rural areas brought the population of Cairo to almost 8 million by 1980. Massive urbanization altered patterns of living, of housing and architecture, of the human relation with space and land, of marketing, employment, and consumption, and the very structure of family and social hierarchy.[/I] [2]
The sharp fall in the Muslim population growth rate expresses the extreme fragility of traditional society. Translated into the Islamist vocabulary (citing again Taji-Farouki and Nafi), this means that: [I] A Muslim sense of vulnerability and outrage is further exacerbated by the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of American popular culture and modes of consumerism and the transparent hypocrisy of the American rhetoric of universal rights and liberties. It is also stoked by Western ambivalence towards economic disparities in the world.[/I] [3]
Rapid urbanization, to be sure, produced growing pains in every case on record. Britain transported its displaced population to America and then to Australia, including the ââ¬Åclearingââ¬Â of entire Scots villages forced onto ships for Canada. But Britainââ¬â¢s urbanization coincided with rapid economic growth and improving living standards. The Arab worldââ¬â¢s urbanization has only created a stagnant pool of urban poor. As the London Economist summarized in the United Nations Arab Development Report for 2002:
[I]One in five Arabs still live on less than $2 a day. And over the past 20 years growth in income per head, at an annual rate of .5%, was lower than anywhere else in the world except sub-Saharan Africa. At this rate, says the report, it will take the average Arab 140 years to double his income, a target that some regions are set to reach in less than 10 years. Stagnant growth, together with a fast-rising population, means vanishing jobs. About 12 million people, or 15% of the labor force, are already unemployed, and on present trends the number could rise to 25 million by 2010.[/I] [4]
[B]Excluding Indonesia, the Muslimââ¬â¢s world literacy rate stands at only 53%, against 81% for China; Arab literacy is only 50%. Only 1% of the population owns a personal computer. It is delusional to believe that the Arab world, which now exports (net of oil) as much as Finland, might come to compete with China, India and the rest of Asia in the global market for goods and services.[/B]
Just as the Muslim population peaks, the one bounty that nature has bestowed upon the Arabs, namely oil, will begin to diminish. According to the US Department of Energy, conventional oil production will peak just before 2050 at the present 2% rate of production growth.
[B]In short, the Muslim world half a century from now can expect the short end of the stick from the modern world. It has generated only two great surpluses, namely people and oil. By the middle of the century both of these will have begun to dwindle.[/B] But at the moment it has 25 million idle young men. No leader can remain in power who does not give them a destination to march to.
By no means does that imply that all of these 25 million will become suicide bombers, but a great many of them are likely to emigrate to Europe, including Eastern Europe, where populations are stagnant and about to decline. A Muslim takeover of Western Europe surely is a possible outcome.
Notes
[1] Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M. Nafi, Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century (Tauris: London 2004), p 9 [2] Ibid, p 2 [3] Op cit, p 14 [4] Economist, July 4, 2002 [/FONT]