Conception Day in Russia

From Pat Buchanan and related to an earlier posting of mine...

In Russia's Ulanovsk region, Sept. 12 is Conception Day.

Workers are given the day off, and encouraged to go home and do their best to conceive a new Russian. The hope is to have a bumper crop of babies on Russia's national holiday, nine months off.

Conception Day has occasioned much mirth and ribald humor. But for Mother Russia, the issue of her children is no laughing matter.

Two decades ago, the Soviet Union was three times the size of any of the other giant nation -- the United States, Canada, China, Brazil -- and the third most populous, with nearly 300 million people. Came then the great crack-up of 1990-91.

The Baltic republics -- Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia -- broke free first. Next were Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova in the west; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

These amputations removed a third of the territory and half the population of the Soviet Union. Yet the remnant, Russia, remained twice as large as any other nation and still boasted a population of 150 million.

Since the 1990s, however, Russia has been losing population at a rate of 750,000 a year -- not to emigration, but to death. By one count, the Russian population is down to 143 million. President Putin has predicted that only 124 million Russians will be alive in 2015. In 2000, the United Nations projected that, at its present birth rate, by 2050 Russia's population would fall to 114 million.

In a 2005 study, the United Nations estimated that, together, Ukraine and Russia will lose 50 million people -- 25 percent of their combined populations -- by mid-century. The Slavs are dying out, and the geostrategic implications are enormous...

From there, Mr. Buchanan goes on at length, in applying the numbers to his familiar assessments of the domestic/cultural and foreign policy implications. After that, he concludes:

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and have dominion ... over every living creature." So reads Genesis. And so European Man once preached and practiced. But having lost his empires along with his faith, European Man no longer sees himself as commissioned by God.

Indeed, he no longer believes in God. Among our best and brightest are many whose purpose is to enjoy life to the fullest and to end it, when the time comes, as painlessly as possible.

Which seems to suit the rest of the world -- China, India, Islam, Africa, Latin America -- fine, as all look forward to a magnificent inheritance.

If demography is destiny, the West is finished. And, if so, does it really matter all that much who rules in Baghdad?