The deputy commander-in-chief for coordination of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), General Mohammad-Reza Naghdi, said in a recent interview on Iranian TV that Europeans were losing the sense of their own national identity, and that the Western lifestyle had placed European societies on the path to extinction. He could have said exactly the same thing about the United States of America.

The March 31 exchange on Iran’s Ofogh TV began when an interviewer asked Naghdi: “If I am not mistaken, you expressed an opinion about the French national soccer team. You said that out of the 23 team members, 15 were Africans, and that of the 12 members of their national basketball team, ten were Africans. You inferred that France has no national identity.” It was an interesting question, because if an interviewer had asked it in France or any other country in Europe, or in the U.S., he or she would have been excoriated as a “racist” and likely fired, simply for asking the question. When a topic, any topic, can be more freely discussed on Iranian TV than on American TV, you know there is something wrong.

Naghdi didn’t berate the interviewer for “bigotry.” Instead, he answered: “The West delineates a certain lifestyle for societies, and how we should live. What has this done to the West itself? It has caused negative population growth, which forces them to import population from abroad. European societies will reach a point, within several decades, where you will have to search for a single person of the European race in France or in England, for example.” Well, yes, and not just France or England. Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) recently conducted a “micro-census” that found that fully twenty-five percent of the people in the country have a “migrant background.” Given the low birth rates of native Europeans all across the continent, it isn’t hard to see where this is tending. As far back as 2005, the renowned historian Bernard Lewis said that Europe would be Islamic by the end of this century, “at the very latest.”

Naghdi continued: “In this situation, there is no more meaning to national identity. According to statistics, if you hold free elections in England in 2060, a Pakistani or an Indian will be the prime minister, and [British] Parliament will be filled with [immigrants] from Iraq, India, and so on. What will be the meaning of national identity there? There will be no such thing as the English people anymore. This will be a different nation and different society.” There is more.