"I actually think the film has something going for it to the extent it portrays the delusional dream for quasi-imperial domination of foreign lands by a massive and technologically superior army."

You mean like the British in India?

Or the Americans in South Korea?

Or Europeans in North America, for that matter?

The fact is, lots of empires have left lots of large, lasting and on the whole positive legacies in the countries they've conquered (India may be a mess in a lot of ways, but without the British legal and commercial influence what would it be? Pakistan, that's what.) It's simpleminded to think that resistance movements always win, that empires are always exercises in disastrous hubris... or that those highly selective lessons necessarily apply to any given case today.

I saw 300 on Friday, and I have to say that it was the most unintentionally funny movie I have seen in a long time. I had never imagined Xerxes as a drag queen.

In any case, it's narrative structure does not easily fit any of the current issues in our politics, and it's not really useful to talk about whether Bush is Leonidas or Xerxes.

It's definitely worth deconstructing comic books. Still, it fascinates me that I gave them up before junior high, whereas judging by this and Matt Yglesias, male bloggers don't and become celebrities that way. No wonder I can't make a buck as a writer.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Mgmax, you say that

>> India may be a mess in a lot of ways, but
> without the British legal and commercial
> influence what would it be?
> Pakistan, that's what.
Well, Pakistan and India (and Bangladesh; I'm not sure about Sri Lanka) happen to be the pieces into which the British Rule was split up in 1947.

And I would not talk about "positive legacies" for the conquered peoples in any of the cases you quote (just one little known example from India: in the late 18th century, the indian textile industry was the largest in the world. It was destroyed by the competition with Lancashire mills only after the british empire imposed a ban on the export of Indian textiles to England, and after heavy taxes were imposed on indian textiles sold in India itself).

However I agree with your main point: it is quite true that external conquest is possible, and as you say
> It's simpleminded to think that resistance
> movements always win,
only, in order to achieve a lasting victory, military superiority was never enough, unless it was so complete that the conquered population could be annihilated (sometimes involuntarily: most of the american natives were killed by european diseases rather than european guns).
More commonly, conquerors formed some kind of alliance with local groups (e.g. Britain allied with indian rajas; the US allied with the South Korea nationalists and military; the USSR allied with the communist parties of eastern Europe), and ruled by co-opting them in the imperial order.

Spartans are the “West” of the Persians. The Spartan warrior or “guardian” class fetishized “manliness” and stoicism. (The reference to a “glorious death” is surely a reference to the much more satisfying The Last Samurai) The truth is that the virtues that the Spartans celebrated back then are cheered by the audience for this movie in this country, as well as their American peers in Iraq and Afghanistan right now.

Actually, 'glorius death' (virtuous) by 'manliness' is approved of by some of the lesser known, but well-regarded, neocons. Harvey C. Mansfield, writing for the Claremont Review of Books, compares self preservation, as advocated by Locke and Hobbes, to Burke's view of virtue.

Mansfield believes that virtue, combined with manliness, should trump self preservation. Take that Mgmax:

To defend ourselves, we could take another look at Burke. Burke stands for the dominion of conscience over the mind, which is not a refusal to think but an unwillingness to abandon scruple. And, lest conscience make cowards of us all, he combines it with a manly freedom, which replaces the right of self-preservation and promises to keep democracy powerful and brave. [Emphasis added]

War does not determine who is right - only who is left. Bertrand Russell

"...To be sure, we shouldn’t be surprised at the outrage. I totally agree that the film’s surprising early success ($70 million worth during opening weekend!) is partly fueled by 9/11 anxieties about the so-called “clash of civilizations” – the very stuff that makes the “war on terror” so damn frightening...."

You claim the clash of civilizations is frightening and then later you act as though it would not exist if not for Bush invading Iraq.

The Persians are at war with us! The Islamists are at war with us. They made a formal declaration of War against us in the 90s and even before that informally.

Trotsky famously said, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Bush did not invent this clash of civilizations.

Why do you feel you have to apologize for Western civilization? The 300 under leonidas, Themistocles at Salimis, the battle at Platea, all these battles saved democracy and the concepts our western civilization are based.

One of the challenges of our current struggle is the opportunity to ask our selves if we are going to intellectually defend the culture we take for granted or if we are going to fall back on the 1960s protests to dump "western civ" from the curriculum as a "testosterone laden, sexist, imperialist" dogma of fascism. 40 years later we realize how damaging and ridiculous that was, but when we are being bombed on our homeland soil by the descendents of Xerxes not for any other reason than our western values are abhorrant to them, we must decide who we are.

The fact that you start off saying you are scared of the clash and then launch into a knee jerk bashing of the qualities of strength that are required to protect liberty and democracy, shows that you are still too scared to accept that this clash has consequences that draw on very deep moral questions.

The concepts referred to in the movie would have been snuffed in the cradle if not for these men and men like Themistocles. They argued with a wishy washy group of legislators that didn't want to admit that Persia was coming. When they did come they again vascilated. They fought over political feifdoms and put the defense of the nation second. The heroes saved humanity and we are the beneficiaries, albeit ungrateful mostly.

The Spartans were Europeans and if you want to call them that, they were white. Sorry.

The Persian Army that crossed the Hellespont was a dragnet of cultures from 3 continents and if you think that it is multicultural to enslave with equal opportunity, then antebellum deep south was multicultural.

The reason they are testosterone laced is because they spent their entire lives fighting to defend themselves which is something we couldn't relate to in a pre-911 world. Are they sexist? Women in Sparta were probably more powerful in many ways than most cultures in existence today. Men and women lived very separate lives, but did women wield power, definitely.

Was Leonidas masculine and Xerxes feminine, by all historical accounts, yes. As Seinfeld would say, not that theres anything wrong with that.

Was that culture perfect, hardly. Did it lead to the growth of western civilization, the renaissance, the founding fathers in America and even the political movements that we appreciate in the 20th and 21st centuries, more than most people can ever comprehend. If you want to look at the part of the glass that is half empty, fine.

Our culture is best. We are right. The enemies that we face now are wrong. They are evil. We face an enemy that is waging war on us not vice versa.

You may wish to make the 300 hundred into Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner marching along side some victim of Western imperialism, but that is a square peg in a round hole in this story.

The 300 is the American soldier. Leonidas is George Bush. Xerxes is Osama and Ahmedinijahd.

We are right and they are wrong and only one of us will come out on top. It makes you uncomfortable for anyone to express with such certainty that America is the good guy, but without apology, sometimes we are the good guy and this time we will win, no matter what it takes. No vascilating legislators are going to stop that.

Osama Bin Laden said, We will beat them because if they can not morally defend the values of there own culture then no one else will and we will outlast them.

300 is a great movie and how it got past the Hollywood censors I have no idea.

People on both sides will flip this film however they please; but I was struck by some of the dialogue in the film. "Freedom isn't free" is straight from the pages of the right wing playbook. What's important isn't how our enemies see the film but how people here do. We have the power to walk away from Iraq and Iran -- or not. They can't really make us leave. So to the extent that the film reinforces militaristic attitudes in this country, it's a pro war film.

BTW, did anyone else notice the disappearance of the helots from the history of this film? Here are the Spartans fighting for "freedom" against the slave driver Xerxes, when Spartan society itself was made possible by a form of slavery. I would have called it an attempt at irony, except it was obvious after watching a few minutes of this film the only irony here was unintentional.

In times of peace, the wise man prepares for war. -- Horace

The blade itself incites to violence. -- Homer

If you have ever read Thomas Sowell's "Conquests and Cultures", it becomes incredibly clear, the British being conquered by the Romans and other examples, it demonstrates how two similar peoples in time diverged because one was conquered and another was not and languished.

Before someone misunderstands the point, I knew a friend who was hit by a car and he spent a year in and out of the hospital. He later told me, it changed him and saved his life, but he joked, that does not mean I want to get run over again. A more direct example, I spoke to a person recently who's husband had fought for the Germans in WWII. She said they could not run fast enough to surrender to the Americans. Good choice.

"We do not live in the past, but the past in us." Conquest is a major part of that past and a major shaper of the cultures of the world today. Wars of conquest have changed the language, the economy, and the moral universe of whole peoples. As a result of conquests, the Western Hemisphere is today a larger region of European civilization than Europe itself. Even those in the Western Hemisphere who hate European civilization express that hatred in a European language and denounce it as immoral by European standards of morality. The history of conquests is not just about the past, it is very much about the present and about how we came to be where we are economically, intellectually, and morally.

--from Chapter 1 of Conquests and Cultures

Thanks for the correction!

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Luigi, didn't I see those quotes in Rome: Total War?

As for freedom, it certainly isn't free. Sometimes it costs 30% of your income.

Interesting assesment. So you are arguing that this is a conspiracy by the US government to brainwash the young people which you consider of low intellectual aptitude who become droids or automatons for a corporate capitalist society of mysogynistic males who have not yet been enlightened by well meaning liberal brainwashers.

I suppose you are going to explain that you actually support the troops. The ones that you just demeaned and mocked as having no free will and no brains.

Read some Epictetus and maybe this movie will make sense to you Trotsky.

Please help me to understand how the fallacy you refer to applies to the above point.

ok.

You claim the clash of civilizations is frightening . . .

The Persians are at war with us! The Islamists are at war with us. They made a formal declaration of War against us in the 90s and even before that informally.

Bush did not invent this clash of civilizations.

Why do you feel you have to apologize for Western civilization?

We are right and they are wrong and only one of us will come out on top. It makes you uncomfortable for anyone to express with such certainty that America is the good guy, but without apology, sometimes we are the good guy and this time we will win, no matter what it takes.

Our culture is best. We are right. The enemies that we face now are wrong. They are evil. We face an enemy that is waging war on us not vice versa.

and

Where one culture is no better than any other. One bunch of burka wearing, apocolyptic, hegemonistic, fascist, mass murdering of innocents, beheading, suicide cultists is equal in preference and quality to any other culture.

So, one bunch of burka wearing murderers has, in your mind, clearly become an entire culture. For you, Osama bin Laden typifies a civilization. Thus, you have identified a larger group with an unrepresentative subset.

Fallacies, incidentally, are not only creatures of formal logic, but a mistakes in any sort of reasoning. I'm not that worried about whether it was inductive, deductive, or retroductive. If you really want, though, here you go:

Your argument:

1. The Islamists are representative of eastern culture.
2. The Islamists are at war with us.
3. Therefore, eastern culture is at war with us.

Your first premise is false and your conclusion fallacious. It is the same as saying:

1. Chocolate is a candy.
2. Chocolate make me sick.
3. Therefore, all candy will make me sick.

Sure, imperialism has some benefits for the conquered population. I had always thought that the modern opinion was that those same benefits could be transmitted via trade and other cultural exchanges, without having the downside of war, economic exploitation, and the loss of freedom associated with imperialism.

Osama Bin Laden said, We will beat them because if they can not morally defend the values of there(sic) own culture then no one else will and we will outlast them.

Sad to see you taking OBL's side against the side of ordinary Americans. Personally, I would prefer to see people stand up for American values.

Like proper spelling, for instance. How can you pretend to be standing for American culture when you cannot even spell "their" correctly?

" Like proper spelling, for instance. "

Is "they're" a verb in "their", Rick?

Oh, I guess the word "like" is the verb.

Rick if the best you can do is sift through 1,264 words and find a typo, that tells me you have no valid argument on substance.

If you are going to start playing games of picking out typos, at least use proper grammar and stop using sentence fragments.

Let me know when you have a a real argument.

Are you aware of the posters name, Rick?

Oh, It's Rick our friendly neighborhood spell checker who uses sentence fragments to correct others grammar.

Other peoples' blood is pretty cheap.

In times of peace, the wise man prepares for war. -- Horace

The blade itself incites to violence. -- Homer

Edited because most of what I wrote was irrelevant in the end. It really didn't matter--there is no benefit in trading minor jabs. Here is the big point:

Trying to mischaracterize statements intended as a defense of our culture, has the effect of short circuiting our ability to defend our rights, our freedom and the single greatest force for hope and justice for the human race.

You're a fool. Courts defend our rights. Laws protect our freedom. Osama bin Laden does not have the ability to take those things from us.

You're operating on the false assumption that our culture needs defense--that we actually need people out front shouting our cultural values and reinforcing them. I believe our culture is strong and self-defensive--that it is not seriously challenged by people who live in caves and advocate a return to a 9th century societal organization. Our culture has produced societal goods enjoyed by people around the world, and that is what people desire. They want things like the rule of law, the modern administrative state, and a dynamic growing economy. These things cross cultural boundaries, they benefit people, and they protect our culture from the "moral attacks" of people like bin Laden. What power can "moral" attacks have in the face of these goods?

You have accepted bin Laden's belief:

"Osama Bin Laden said, We will beat them because if they can not morally defend the values of their own culture then no one else will and we will outlast them."

I don't see any reason to think he was right on this count. I don't see any reason to think he has been right about anything, but that's not the point. Tell me why you think bin Laden is right. Why would you engage the enemy on his own terms--on ground so disadvantageous to to those of us who aren't Muslim and may not share a similar sense of morality?

Last time I checked, bin Laden's moral attacks on our values have not made a dent in our culture. I would suggest that you have made a categoy mistake in accepting bin Laden's beliefs--that OBL himself made the mistake. Our culture cannot be destroyed by a moral attacks, and OBL cannot outlast us. These people do not have the material resources necessary to outlast the strongest economy in the world--rather the strongest 5 or 6 economies in the world. Your belief that our civilization will fall without a moral defense is simply false.

I'll write about chocolate later if I feel like it. Suffice it to say that "validity" is a property of arguments while truth is a property of propositions. An invalid argument can be composed of propositions that are all true. It's best if you don't confuse the two.

I think John Haber has a point about comic books - and it's true that much of pop-culture cinema references comic books. One thing that makes comics so popular (it's the most prolific form of publishing in the world...even trumps the bible) is what's not there in the narratives. There are huge gaps in comic narratives, and the only way the story can work is if the reader fills in those gaps with her/his imagination. There's even a term for this: diegesis. Comics are superdiegetic.

This thread shows this wonderfully. The "deconstruction", as Haber mentions, is the work of the readers, not of those responsible for the 300 film. But it is the film's lack of content that allows all these various readings - as a successful comic work 300 can "mean" just about anything we want it to mean. In other words, we can have this conversation with or without the film - and in fact we have had this discussion without it many times.

In The Morphology of the Folk Tale, Vladamir Propp demonstrated (1928) that the tens of thousands of Russian folk tales he studied could be reduced down to 17 stories (which he called functions). Each of the 17 were iterated endlessly with different characters playing the parts. The Prince, the woodsman, the baker and so on all did the same thing in each of Propp's categories.

Like folk tales and myths, comics' redundancy are the seat of their popularity. Without even being aware of it, the reader already knows the outcome of the story - no matter how cleverly it is disguised with ducks instead of woodsmen, milkmaids instead of princesses. The simple fact is that the sense of knowing something is very pleasurable - moreso if you are unaware that you know it.

People are still arguing that Orwell's 1984 targets communism or capitalism. Both arguments have considerable merits, of course - cherry picking evidence aside. Tolkein to his dying day insisted that his Hobbit tale was not an allegory of modern times, or even a metonomy, for that matter. Yet many of us "true believers" don't believe him.

So how far can we go with 300? My feeling is that we've already gone too far already in this thread. We would cross some forbidden boundary if we started ascribing motive and intent to the authors, of course.

All that aside, I'm not sure we can cite ancient Greece any more fundamental to so-called "Western Civilization" than we can to ancient Persia. I've always wondered if members of the Aryan Nation understand that Aryan and Iran are the same words.

Neoboho

He has killed thousands of Americans on every continent, he started a war, he has ilicited an antiwar movement led by groups that support Hezbollah.

I would consider that a dent.

I was just getting to it, and I'm glad to hear you were waiting for a response, because I sincerely enjoyed your response. There are a few on this board that have gone into great detail about the debate between natural law and a position similar to yours. I find it fascinating.

You're a fool. Courts defend our rights. Laws protect our freedom. Osama bin Laden does not have the ability to take those things from us.

You're operating on the false assumption that our culture needs defense--that we actually need people out front shouting our cultural values and reinforcing them.

I disagree with this argument. I believe the founders when they refered to our rights as "..inalienable, ...endowed by our creator..." that they refer to a set of human rights that are in some sense fundamental, are not awarded by human power. This is a deep conviction of conservatives, because government is secondary at best.

Our rights are inalienable, they are defended by the people. The people defend them as individuals or in groups that they come into voluntarily. It is truly one of the pillars of western civilization and furthermore it is a theme addressed in the movie "300". Submission is the nature of the philosophy of OBL and Xerxes and the meaning of the word Islam (although we are not at war with Islam).

Freedom is the core of our culture. Like a youth, with increased freedom comes increased responsibility. The courts "interpret" the laws and these rights. The people through their consent defend them. Part of that defense is the need to fight and even more importantly the will to fight for those rights.

Our culture cannot be destroyed by a moral attacks, and OBL cannot outlast us. These people do not have the material resources necessary to outlast the strongest economy in the world--rather the strongest 5 or 6 economies in the world. Your belief that our civilization will fall without a moral defense is simply false.

Democracies in general and especially the point in history where we stand, tend to want quick decisive wars. This was true in Ancient greece as well. In John Keegan's book, "a history of warfare", he described Islam's contribution to Warfare, the Jihad as the first incidence of the belief in offensive war based on a philosophy. OBL and Al Qaeda have inherited a long tradition of multigenerational warfare. When they think of war, it lasts for centuries, we think of months or years.

Demographically, with birthrates 5-6 times that of their fellow Europeans, Muslim immigrants in western Europe will surpass their Native counterparts by mid century. The Russian military will be a muslim army within a decade. The French are in the midst of an intifada that suffers more casulaties(not deaths) than we do in Iraq. Politicians in France this week passed surprising laws regarding gays, but not so surprising when you read into the story that the laws are meant to appeal to immigrants. Italy has negative growth in its birthrate.

Islamic radicals once said the womb of the Arab woman will defeat you. When you say do I buy into this rhetoric? I don't fight their rhetoric, I deal in facts. The current war is being fought with youth and will. The west is an aging population, the US to a lesser extent. They have will based on an idea to fight for generations.

John Adams once said when discussing the decsion to stop paying ransom to barbary terrorists, "...We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever".

Our vascillation in the global war on terror, which in reality is actually World war 4, is proof that our will to defeat them has serious challenges. IF the years pass by and we hide behind the walls of the two oceans, our allies will slip away as they did in the 1930s. Fascism as a culture or a philosophy had surprising appeal in the US and around the world, especially in the mideast. That was a moral conflict, between our ideals and Hitler's. We fought a war on ideology again in the Cold war. We lost our will but regained it and destroyed the Soviets.

Your reference to our luxury, our material wealth, our economic and technological strength being so superior to the Islamo-fascists. Teddy Roosevelt ushered in the 20th century as one whose victors will win based on technology and economic strength. We built planes, ships, guns and an economy that would overpower our adversaries in three great global conflicts.

The end of WWII was a race to capture the technology and scientists of the enemy. We were not sacking booty, we were dividing the brain trust of our enemies. The war started out as one that would be fought with battlships, but discovered the hard way that it would be fought with carrier groups. Military historians argue that Nations are always fighting the present war with the assumptions of the last.

You are assuming that technology will be the primary decider in this conflict. Technology is only powerful if you have the will to use it. We have a congress that is arguing over a spending bill that will include a provision to deny the President the ability to use our superior technology on a nuclear Iran. It is virtually a promise to the Iranians that if they choose to walk away from the negotiating table, there is no stick and no carrot. That is diminished will. That is why technology is trumped by will to fight. If we redeploy, they continue to grow and they follow us home. It is not like the soviets, not one bit.

Back to the original point of the thread. Xerxes rolled over the greek cultural sister states in Lydia, Ionia, Macedon, Thrace. Some submitted, some fought, some died. They were divided. The arguments against Themistocles were to not spend money on Triremes, the war ships that he asked for, because if the Persians came west they would have to defeat so many other nations first, it would take years, they have plenty of time to go east to meet them and defeat them before they grow in strength. They did not have the will. They talked about having the will in the future, but that was just talk.

The Persians came fast, they overwhelmed their adversaries, and a surprising number of greek allies submitted. They gave up their values for peace and security. The Spartans stood by their code.

I have seen small men beat large men in a street fight many times. Having the ability to negotiate from strength is crucial. Having the will to fight when necessary is a matter of survival if you want to live free. It really is a clash of cultures. It is a clash of our moral philosophy versus theirs.

Tell me why you think bin Laden is right.....Your belief that our civilization will fall without a moral defense is simply false.

That is exactly my point. I don't think is right that he will win. He is not always wrong. If we can't accept the fact that he can think strategically, then we are lost as well. WE have to have the will to fight and win. We can only have the will to fight if we believe we have something worth defending and that the very thing we need to defend is the exact thing he wants to take away. He doesn't want our money or our luxuries, he wants to destroy our freedom because it is abhorrant to him.

Regarding your remark that we don't have to shout about our values....that is part of the problem with our will. We can't even whisper why America is great without someone screaming about flag waving imperialist fascists. If someone claims Bin Laden despises Democracy, the thought of someone that ignorant is nonsense and the person saying it is laughed at.

People laughed at a little corporal in Germany too and tens of millions died. Islamofascism is not a guy in a cave as you call it. It is a serious threat and it is a deadly threat and it could possibly the greatest threat we have ever faced.

I'll write about chocolate later if I feel like it. Suffice it to say that "validity" is a property of arguments while truth is a property of propositions. An invalid argument can be composed of propositions that are all true. It's best if you don't confuse the two.

You are restating my point. The two examples that you made were not the same. I understood your point.

Thank you for the response. Honestly, that is one of the most interesting response I have heard in some time. If I find the links to the previos threads on natural law, you might find both sides of the debate illuminating.

Re: Demographically, with birthrates 5-6 times that of their fellow Europeans, Muslim immigrants in western Europe will surpass their Native counterparts by mid century.

I've had this argument before (maybe with tyou, maybe with someone else) and what you say here is mathematically impossible, unless you are suggesting that the native born people of Europe will also experience a massive spike in death rates. The sort of replacement you posit requires multiple human lifetimes-- probably on the order of 300 years. Moreover this ignores the effect of non-Muslim immigration into Europe (much of it Christian or Hindu) from Africa, the Caribbean and India. These latter people actually have higher birthrates than Muslim immigrants so if all else stays the same there might be a "brown and black" majority in Europe someday but it will never be a Muslim one.

I'm not so sure that India without British influence would have been all that much of a mess.

You will recall that India, as late as the 17th or 18th century was on a technological par with Europe. Its principalities were smaller, but they had firearms and artillery, and cavalry. The people enjoyed a relatively high standard of living, and indian goods and textiles were superior to many of the European counterparts, thus making them valuable.

British administration may have brought benefits, but it is not clear that Indians would not have procured these benefits or analagous benefits for themselves.

On the other hand, there appear to have been a few 19th century famines that devastated Indian society which appeared to have been deliberately or negligently engineered by British rule.

If you ask me, starving to death is not a direct benefit.

Actually, I'm thinking that the comment was more along the lines of the decadent roman and byzantine Empires throwing away their treasuries to hire mercenary armies.

It seems that the American people are happy to spend billions on weapons and weaponry. But the right wing would rather have others fight do its fighting for it.

Never a muslim majority? Never is a big word. Regarding a massive death spike, if the population is aging, they have to go some time. The percentage of the population by definition that is dying is going up.

I don't have the exact numbers, but I will provide some examples later, so here lets brainstorm. Italy has a birthrate of about 0.8 per couple, lets round that to one. If muslims have 5 kids per couple, lets do some math. If the ethnic italian population is 50 million and the average age is 50, that means about half of those people will be dead by 2030. 25 million left. lets say the other 25 million were having babies, thats 12.5 newborns. Lets say those newborns have a child, in 2030. Thats 6.25 more.

If all the Italians mentioned here except the first 25 million I mentioned that would die still lived, including those that are now 50 and under a median age , let say they lived to a hundred to be fair. You would have 43.75 ethnic Italians in 2050.

Now, the aging population will need caretakers and the economy will need young labor to work. We can assume that immigration from muslim countries will increase. But to be fair, I will consider no immigration of muslims as silly as that sounds. Lets pick a number of the muslim population, lets say one million. If Muslims are having 5 kids per couple and they have them quite young. If each couple has 5+ thats 2.5 million today and another 7 by 2030. Then by 2050, another 18. Thats 28 million.

Now I know my math and my method is off by a bit, so please don't hold me to this, but I am only demonstrating that even if I am off a bit, this example shows how they could be at 40% of the total population by 2050 and I skewed most all the variables in your favor, including a depleted workforce receiving no new muslim immigrants in a country with a bad illegal immigrant problem. It is obvious that the next set of babies will push them well past the shrinking Italian race.

It is hard to accept, but its true, if there is no change, Europe as a people will be beyond the point of return in my children's lifetime.

Italy has a much smaller muslim population than France or denmark or other countries, where their population is as large as our largest minority groups.

Even if the hindus and Christians that are coming in grow as well, they are not as resistant to assimilation and they do not have the tradition of a melting pot like we do. My earlier point about carrying the ideals of western civilization to the next generation, who will be our allies in Europe when the radicalized minorities start their intifadas in earnest like they are beginning to do in Paris. The French are spineless, how can they defend themselves against that kind of pressure?

Even if my assumptions are off somewhat, the fact is our traditional allies are going to start shrinking and we are left alone.

Saying never a muslim majority in Europe is a bold prediction. If it was me that had this discussion with you before, then let me know if you would like to dig up some numbers and we can both look into it some more. I think it is a topic worth consideration.

Re: We can assume that immigration from muslim countries will increase.

That's a big assumption. More Muslim immigrants will become less acceptable as they make trouble and immigration will bec hoked off and, if Europe needs workers, it will allow immigration from other regions. (I mentioned India, Africa and the Caribbean). But that's another big "if". So far Europe does not seem to need workers at all; in fact it has problem employing all the people it does have. And take a look at another aging society: Japan. Are the Japanese importing workers? Are they in danger of being replaced by some other population? It does not appear to be so.

Re: If Muslims are having 5 kids per couple

That's too high. The correct number (an average across many countries) is 3.7.

Re: Even if my assumptions are off somewhat, the fact is our traditional allies are going to start shrinking and we are left alone.

OK, let's sy the population of Europe falls back to what it was 70 years ago. That's a reasonable possibility. Well, um, 70 years ago our "traditional allies" consisted of just two countries, Britain and France, and we were not far from going to war with a couple of other Euroepan countries that are now our allies. Hmm, how many people does a country need to be powerful? Go back further in time: in 1900 with a population much smaller than it is now Europe dominated the whole globe, inclduing countries like India that were far, far more populous than their ruling power.

As for the "ethnic minorioties determine foreign policy" argument, when has this ever been the case in the past? The US had a huge German-descended population in 1917 and 1941. This did not stop us from going to war with Germany. Nor did our Japanese population keep us from war with Japan. Nor has our Arab population prevented the Iraq War.

Re: Saying never a muslim majority in Europe is a bold prediction.

You're right. "Never" is a bad word to use. How about "for the foreseeable future". And let's not forget that all sorts of things can happen in that future. What effect will global warming have on the situation? Will there be a major pandemic? A global war of some sort? How about rtadical life extension technologies? Robotization of society to an undreamed of degree?

"The French are spineless"

Uh huh. Expert on French culture? Know a lot of french people? Speak the language? Familiar with the history? Can distinguish Breton from Acadian from Cajun from Parisienne? Thanks a lot for that racist generalization.

I felt like the color saturation enhanced the visual intensity. Why did you prefer the storyline over the visual effects?