Youth Bulge - The Book of Pleasure Review of the book "Weltmacht und Söhne" by Gunnar Heinsohn
Send of the German scholar, the Italian translation of the title may sound "Sons and world power. Terror in the rise and fall of nations, "published in 2003, it offers an analysis of the outbreak of civil unrest, wars and terrorism, identifying the main cause of the demographic evolution of a people and giving it to himself, in the context of genesis of these phenomena, is secondary to the lack of economic resources and the diverse political and religious ideologies. That argument, just as unable to reach the root of the problem is revealed as radical as to arouse indignation in the reader wonder when it is most expensive in the primacy of the spirit into biological (and here I dare you to look inside the spiritual sphere, even the economic element). In particular, the decisive factor for the rise of violence that may occur both inside and outside the borders of a nation is found in the presence, within the population of a single country, a percentage rate of at least 20% young people between 15 and 24 years (which gives rise to a youth bulge
) or a percentage rate of at least 30% of children under 15 years (as which produces a bulge
children). In both cases, as you can see, the determining factor is an excess of young, precisely a bulge (bulge
) of the population pyramid. Under this thesis, the author resize both the explanatory power of theories on Malthusian population crisis, based on an imbalance between the amount of subsistence allowance and the number of inhabitants of a given region, as the value of the whole ' wide libellistica seeing in American wars on the one hand and Islamic terrorism on the other, a sure sign of a clash of civilizations between mutually incompatible cultures.
The line of argument that supports this novel hypothesis, that the pages of the text betrays its debt to the studies of Fuller and Bouthoul , sometimes proceeds in a manner not entirely linear, yielding to digressions which, however, not here is to underestimate the interest because they serve to enrich wise, but overall his exposition is clear and leaves no room for ambiguity of interpretation. Also, turns out to be particularly appreciated the prudence of the author, who, to escape the predictable criticism that move against an explanatory model monocausal detail in more than one place of his work
that the hypothesis concerning the youth bulge
not want to cancel the value of all other explanations of the origins of wars and terror
, but only to affirm, in most cases, the subordinate position with respect to it. For example, Heinsohn explains that, yes, the first fifteen years of the twentieth century was marked by a youth bulge
German and Russian, which leaves the claim that the turmoil of the Weimar Republic, which culminated in the Nazi dictatorship, such as those that led the Bolshevik Revolution were generated by an excess of male children, however, states that what happened next in the years of Nazi power and the war on both sides of Lenin and Stalin's cruelty was not supported by any other
youth bulge. In this way appear to be excessive criticism of sociologists as Klingholz
, who argue that countries with a demographic similar to that in which they are the nations that promote terrorism do not find themselves in a state of internal or external conflict, while countries like the United States are perpetually at war without their demographic profile is characterized by youth bulge
; Heinsohn says of the 67 countries with an excess of male children over 60 are in situations of conflict: just enough to legitimately say that he not convinced have found a necessary and sufficient condition. In this context it is also to be placed when the clarification of the German scholar points out that the demographic analysis must be accompanied by the study of moral duties, restrictions and laws of all the other pressures that a company exercises to ensure a future existence through the new generations or risk falling into a one-dimensionality biologistic
.
Proceeding in more detail in the discussion of the text, the idea that may perhaps surprise the reader most is the attempt to explain Islamic terrorism by giving the violent ideology that supports a marginal role compared to that played by the high proportion of young males in the countries affected by religious extremism, given their huge number, they can not find adequate outlet for his social ambitions: "Religion offers an extra dose of oil for a fire which original fuel not derived from it " . The origin of today's Islamic violence as aggression expansion of European colonial powers that from the late fifteenth century turned out to conquer the world, not to mention incidents of domestic crises that always reflects the countries of the Old Continent and were represented For example, the English revolutions seventeenth century and the wars on the territory of the Germanic throughout the modern age, would have a similar explanation: "Yeah, where for several generations of fathers leaving two million to three million male children have difficulty. Where two million fathers will give birth to six or even nine million, the situation becomes very serious " . Moreover, in the argument continues Heinsohn, add a clear distinction between the starvation and death like heroes. The country origin of instability and violence are not enough to identify those with undernourished youth, but in those where young people are at least moderately nourished and even sufficiently instructed: "The bread you beg. It kills for the status and power " . Consistent with these statements, the author is not afraid to go against or even being accused of cynicism and with courage makes clear that "the greater success will be achieved by the struggle against hunger and illiteracy especially young men who aim to positions of rank high become bellicose " .
From what has been said will justify the geopolitical framework outlined by the author, far from considering that China is the greatest danger to the West, which instead would be coming to terms for a subdivision planetary spheres of influence, pointing to countries with an absolute number of young people below the Chinese but with a youth bulge also well above 30%, such as the Gaza Strip, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, the biggest challenge of the next two decades. In fact, according to the estimates proposed by the German scholar, from 2020-25, the population bomb triggered by sub-Saharan African and Islamic countries should begin to be defused, if I may say a bomb that will explode your in the coming years, in other words, the Islamic world, that in the last century has increased by eight times the its population, would be destined to follow a fate similar to that experienced by Latin America, which - after a lot of population growth not less than that of Islamic countries and after the wars and violence that have derived from - has launched in recent decades to overcome political and social instability, leading to a deflation of the youth bulge .
The text proposes a large number of other interesting considerations, but here we shall confine ourselves to mentioning only those that we consider most significant and therefore we start from what the author said about the sudden population growth from Europe the fifteenth century, the explanation is found in the extermination of so-called witches, to be considered the midwives of the time and the only ones able to exercise birth control (which in spite of the clichés this was clearly before the modern age) . The increase in the percentage of the entire population that ensued was the main reason of colonial expansion of European powers, but it seems worthwhile to note that the author, consistent with the assumption that the theoretical model of youth bulge does not exhaust any explanation of the dynamics of power, in the fourth chapter of his book indicates throughout the property owned by the new European economy a cornerstone of European conquest of the world. On a different level we report the frequent references in the text to the future global geopolitical framework within which Heinsohn sees a few more decades of domination for the U.S. power that is already experiencing a downward trend but also thanks to a greater demographic dynamism more credible than his challenger, namely China, may be delayed for at least another half century leaving the scene. What, however, in this context, issues of our major concerns is the role that the author attributes to the United States under defense of democracy and international stability. In our opinion, too much trust is placed in the intelligence of the phenomena associated with the youth bulge by the Bush administration, which, according to Heinsohn, the military would carry out the commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq following the advice of strategists youth bulge, while at the same time is warned Europeans to ignore at the peril of their own safety, the demographic dynamics that dictate the political agenda instead of overseas. About the German scholar seems to ignore the economic projects of energy supply of the Americans.