It's evening in America, Buchanan says, and immigrants are to blame (Buchanan interview)

Pat Buchanan is aware that potential readers of his new book already either adore him or disdain everything he writes "because I am the one writing it."

So in The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, $25.95), the ex-presidential candidate and conservative pundit is trying to back up his apocalyptic projections with facts and figures provided by such disparate sources as "Russian leader Mr. Putin, a British archbishop and the United Nations. By drawing on what anyone would have to consider neutral sources, this makes my message far more powerful."

Low birthrates are decimating the population of almost every European country - by 2050, only one-tenth of the world's population (America included) will be of European descent.

The unchecked influx of immigrants into America, legal and otherwise, is gradually handing the nation over to insurgents who come to force their foreign values on us rather than accepting ours.

Political correctness on the part of unwitting Americans plays into the hands of those who intend to obliterate our culture.

The events of Sept. 11 may provide enough of a wake-up call, Buchanan says, to make "the death of the West" only a threat rather than a certainty.

"The book is about a point I've been making for a long time, that the West is dying," Buchanan says during a lengthy phone conversation. "If we don't change how we do things, we'll be gone by the middle of this century, if not before. The horror of Sept. 11, I think, awoke a lot of Americans to new realities. It's a healthy thing to remember there are people out there who want to destroy us."

In Buchanan's opinion, it took terrorist attacks on New York City and the Washington, D.C., area to drive that message home to an American public more intent on hedonism than heroism.

"The '90s were a time of prosperity I've likened to the 1920s," Buchanan says. "The '20s were about money, drinking, jazz. The '90s were money, drugs, rock. The '20s ended with the stock market crash, the Depression, then on to Hitler, Tojo, Stalin. The 1990s ended on Sept. 11. We're at the kind of place Walter Lippmann called 'a plastic moment,' a time when people can change their destiny. I hope this book helps that. I'm not so much predicting these awful things will happen as saying, 'This is what the end is if the numbers remain the same.' "

Not that he holds much hope: "To many American young people, people like me belong to a bad old era. They've been taught that in school, indoctrinated in it. They want to say goodbye to the way our generation did things. This is why I don't think much will be done about the problems we face."

Buchanan acknowledges he's saying things that most Americans would prefer not to hear and that many condemn as racist and inflammatory.

"My response is that it's too late in the day for political correctness," he says. "After Sept. 11, with those acts perpetrated by people we literally welcomed into this country, Americans ought to be aware there is such a thing as too much diversity, too much welcoming. Look: I've said that if you bring 100 Zulu tribesmen into Virginia and 1 million British, the British would be assimilated more comfortably. I base that on those British coming into an American culture based on English law and tradition. And when I said that, something that seems like a simple statement, I've been accused of racism."

Now, Buchanan says, "I could substitute Iranians or Saudis for the Zulu, and people might understand." And, he adds, originally citing the Zulus was in no way racist "because I'm friends with the Zulu ruler. It's just a matter of acknowledging the differences in culture."

Potential immigrants should be judged by one measure, Buchanan adds: "Are they likely to carry on our culture, which makes America a unique country and civilization? Or are they not?"

Population explosions in Islamic, African and Latin American nations are coinciding with a decline in the U.S. birthrate, Buchanan notes, citing U.N. studies. To bolster "American cultural" numbers, Buchanan concludes in The Death of the West, American women should be encouraged via tax breaks to increase the country's population: "A free society cannot force women to have children, but a healthy society can reward those who preserve it by doing so."

Though he doesn't broach the subject in The Death of the West, in conversation Buchanan is willing to also discuss his own future.

"Politically speaking, I ran two times for the Republican nomination," he says. "We came close in '96, and we'd have gotten it instead of [Bob] Dole with one more primary win. In 2000, we tried to create a new party. It didn't work. So my political career is probably over."

"I've done my best to say the things I thought necessary, and I intend to keep writing books and to keep speaking out," he says. "I love doing it. I hope the Lord gives me 25 more years. If people don't like me or my message, well, that's not my concern. Political correctness is almost an impenetrable shield of basic realities."

"unwilling to define what they mean by "culture"

Ok..fair enough:

American culture is rooted in the heritage and traditions of Enlightenment and Reformation Europe, with additional contributions stemming from the experiences of people from that tradition in pioneer America. It generally consists of the Anglo-Saxon political/legal tradition stretching back to the Magna Carta, the English language, and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition (with emphasis on Reformation Protestantism).

A Hindu who speaks Urdu and believes in the caste system is not an American (regardless of citizenship).

An Arab who speaks only Arabic, worships the Islamic faith, and believes in Sharia Law is not an American.

A Cuban who only speaks Spanish, likes Castro's socialism, and who worships chicken-sacrificing Santaria...is not an American.

Now, I do believe that certain individuals from India or Arabia or Cuba can abandon their past traditions and adopt American ways. (Dinesh D'Souza is an example). But, having said that, my estimation of the probability that immigrants from these lands would want to do so in any statistically significant numbers is slim. Thus, I believe that we should not allow immigration from places like these.

It is also important to analyze the alternatives to these principles of social organization in America. If my definition is not true (though, every generation of Americans before this one would have believed my previous description to be completely obvious and not even worthy of debate)...then what IS America?

The current definition is an anti-definition. Basically, multiculturalism holds that there is no heritage or set of beliefs and traditions which distinguishes American from anywhere else (and, it holds that the assertion of such ideas is evil and racist).

Most liberals believe that the ideology of multi-culturalism is some daring creation of the baby-boomers in the 60s. In reality, numerous times in the past, multi-culturalism has been explicitly attempted....always with disasterous results. Yugoslavia, the USSR, Austria-Hungary, late Imperial Rome (though, not the Republic) are examples. In each case, a version of PC was used to attempt to create a society divorced from any particular heritage. In Tito's Yugoslavia, individuals could be prosecuted for merely saying anything that could be construed as "nationalistic" (not unlike current university speech codes). Each of these societies had internationalist brainwashing in the educational system...quotas/affirmative action....and a variety of other now-familiar rules and policies that attempted to throw a wet blanket over the differences that existed between population groups in their societies.

The unfortunate reality is that each of these societies ultimately collapsed into constituent parts. In each case, the elite-driven attempt to create a univeralistic civilizational model stumbled (usually economically, then socially, and ultimately militarily) and fell.

In my own estimation, America is dangerously close to the point of no return. If our current immigration policies continue, along with the legal and educational propaganda of multi-culturalism, we will soon see our nation begin the much-worn path of these previous multi-ethnic civilizations....which is sad, since it doesn't have to end that way.

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