The demography of terror

German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn says that the West is doing everything it can to stop violent turmoil in the Middle East and Africa. The trouble is, everything it knows how to do is wrong.

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.

His argument recognizes one of the realities of human psychological and physiological development: young men with testosterone flowing like lava, and actuarially in their healthiest and strongest years, are the most prone to violence of any population group. As long as their societies offer them attractive options and a hopeful future, their most aggressive impulses can be damped or channeled into acceptable outlets. But when societies produce far too many young men above the numbers it can usefully absorb, the young men are frustrated and angry. They go nuts.

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.

Most societies, including Western ones, have experienced this phenomenon at one time or another in their history. Many have overcome it, reaching a balance between the numbers of young men and available resources. But that isn't true in many Third World countries — especially Muslim ones, where the politico-religious culture encourages dysfunctionally large families.

As Heinsohn notes, "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 [i.e., 1.2 billion] — an increase of 800 per cent [emphasis mine]."

So-called "humanitarian" aid to desperate countries, given without any conditions to improve their demographic situation, does nothing except allow uncontrolled breeding — adding to what Heinshohn calls the "youth bulge," the cohort of young men with no future in a stable society and nothing to do with their raging energy except fighting and terrorism. It's trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

The standard liberal rejoinder is that we have to keep pouring in economic aid to create economically viable societies. That would be great if it worked. It doesn't. No country on earth — not the United States, not China, not Switzerland, not Norway, none — has or ever will have a need for six or eight or 10 young men per family. In the case of failed states, even less so. The very idea is laughable, so ridiculous that only someone who makes a good living in an international aid agency could believe it.

It's especially loony to keep lobbing resources into dark holes of fanaticism like Palestinian territories, which gives them the resources to breed more young violent madmen.

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 women 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 offers a compelling argument for certain politically incorrect truths, and spells out why it is culturally suicidal for Europe to be welcoming large immigrant populations that can't fit into a modern society and become a burden on the welfare system and such productive natives who remain there. Before long, the welfare system will collapse under the weight.

But he is not himself free from doctrinaire political correctness — hardly surprising for a European, but disappointing in someone who has demonstrated the courage to go against the multi-culti dictatorship. When he says, "For that purpose they [European countries] need young people who have grown up in a high-tech society. It is not because Africans or Muslims are not as intelligent as others, they are just not socialised in a way that makes them useful in our societies," he is either practicing self-protection or is remarkably ignorant for a sociologist. The evidence is in — the average sub-Saharan African IQ is around 70. They are socialized in a way that is appropriate for a low-IQ society. They cannot, as a group (there are individual exceptions, of course) be socialized in a way that is appropriate for a European society.

Heinsohn also has a spectacularly naive idea of the immigration policies of non-European Western countries, which he imagines are based on "quality" rather than "quantity" of immigrants. As if.