LIFE TRIUMPHED OVER TERROR on September 11, 2001, in a way we should reaffirm during this week. Allow me to travel a curving path to show you how.

Only one thing can save Sweden, according to parliamentary candidate Teres Kirpikli.

"I want erotica and porn on television every Saturday, all day," the married mother of three told Agence France-Presse. "Then people would feel like having more sex."

This Christian Democratic Party candidate's motive is more practical than passionate. Sweden is facing demographic disaster because each couple is having only about 1.5 babies, far short of the 2.1 needed to reproduce its population.

Unless its birthrate soon rises, welfare-socialist Sweden's notorious sky-high tax rates will have to increase and crush Generation X, Y, and Z'ya Later workers to pay for the impending flood of Baby Boomer retirees. The same is true across Europe, where the average birthrate is only 1.4 babies per couple.

Kirpikli hopes that a weekly dose of pornography will act like a pump to get the nation's reproductive juices welling up.

In France the birthrate is closer to 1.7 babies per couple, but almost the entire difference from Sweden's comes from the 15 percent of France's population that are Muslim immigrants from North Africa who have 3.5 or more babies per couple. These immigrants have become a major source of political friction in France. The Moors were defeated by Charles Martel, "the Hammer," when they tried to conquer France in 732 A.D., but now millions fear that these immigrants are supplanting French culture not by making war but by making love.

The French have long had Saturday night pornography on their otherwise-dull television networks. But now, reports the BBC, "Many French legislators blame hardcore porn for a recent spate of sex attacks by schoolchildren on other schoolchildren."

A recent poll by France's audiovisual watchdog agency reportedly found that 64 percent of the 1,000 citizens polled wanted to ban this televised pornography. This opinion was essentially the same whether a citizen's politics were right-wing or left-wing. One difference was that more than three out of four women wanted to pull the plug on porn, but only a scant majority of men, 51 percent, wanted to cut it off.

Perhaps French men were more passionate and patriotic about saving their nation from a declining birthrate.

But the pornography Ms. Kirpikli looks to for Sweden's salvation has been no salve or panacea for a similar reproductive letdown in France. (Why should we expect mere sex to beget babies in lands with widespread use of the birth control pill, government-provided abortions, and the French-developed RU-486 abortion pill?)

"Sweden tried pro-natalist incentives in the 1980s, and boosted its birth rate to 2.01, just below replacement level (2.1), by 1990," wrote Rod Dreher last February. "But by 1995, Sweden's birthrate was back down to 1.5."

In Europe things like tax incentives for being married or having kids, or knowing that a welfare state can take the financial place of a job or spouse, have not done the trick.

European lives are entangled in redistributionist social safety nets where failure brings no penalty or risk. They also live in Big Government spider webs where the rewards of hard work get sucked away in taxes. The safety net and the freedom-denying web have made millions of European lives lifeless. The cry from that Italian movie echoes across Europe's increasingly barren landscape: "Marcello, I'm so bored…."

In a less secure time, beginning with the year 1348 A.D., the Black Plague swept across Europe and killed half its entire population.

(Had it killed a few more, speculates famed science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson in his current novel The Years of Rice and Salt, the world today might be in its seventh century of rule by Muslims and Buddhists, with Europe and everything its culture achieved having been cut off by a germ. History turns on tiny things.)

So how long did it take Fourteenth Century Europe to reconstitute its population after the Black Death killed one of every two people? It took only six generations — less than 120 years. This was a time when people lived and loved hard, had faith, and loved life.

Today's Europe by contrast, hopelessly infected and devitalized by socialism, exhibits no love, no faith, no will to live. Socialism is apparently a far more virulent and deadly disease to humankind than the Black Plague. If America had wisdom, we would quarantine and eradicate every vestige of socialism from our body politic to preserve and defend human health.

After the loss of about 350,000 Americans in World War II, what followed? I did, conceived literally during the month of Victory in Europe Day. (It's always fun to ponder what was happening in the world nine months before you were born.) And so, too, arrived millions of others in that vast reaffirmation of life called the Baby Boom. (Yes, this is the same demographic "pig in the python" now poised to shatter the world's socialist welfare states' Ponzi-scheme economics.)

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were also followed nine months later by a miniature Baby Boom. This, too, was the affirmation of life against death, as couples were reminded by the horror of what matters most. Trifles and our usual daily frets and preoccupations were blown aside by that awful day's events.

And as our species has done through African floods and ice age blizzards, through plagues and wars, millions discovered welling up from deep inside themselves the almost-forgotten power of life over death, what poet Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower."

Millions challenged the terror and the dark by affirming life with one another in the embrace of love. They rediscovered a strength in one another, a power that was no longer passive but active. They were, after all, the children of pilgrims and conquistadors and survivors of the slave passage, not thin-blooded Europeans too cowardly to make the trek to a New World. They made love — not the kind Europeans and other Leftists imitate from porno flicks, but the kind of love that makes babies.

And now this living legacy affirming life over terror is three months old. What shall we call these new Americans — Generation T? The Baby Bombs? And one excellent way to celebrate this week would be by giving them more brothers and sisters to fill our land with strength and joy. This is how Americans can best answer those who want us gone.