Read The Book!
Posted on 02/04/2002 9:52:14 PM PST by ouroboros
Through a syndicated column, a long career as a CNN pundit and three quixotic presidential campaigns, the former Republican presidential aide Patrick J. Buchanan has established himself as the country's most prominent foe of immigration. In his tirade ''The Death of the West,'' he makes clear that he sees newcomers as only part of the problem. Braiding two separate complaints, he argues, first, that plummeting birthrates will make white people a minority in much of the West; and, second, that an intolerant liberal elite has transformed America's culture, wrecking its most precious traditions -- which happen to be its bulwark against getting swamped by foreigners.
Buchanan's demographic alarum marks the re-emergence of a genre of racial-doom books not seen (for reasons that are obvious enough) since before World War II. In 1960 a quarter of humanity was of European descent, Buchanan notes; today whites make up just a sixth of the human race, and they're aging. The American birthrate is below replacement level for the first time since the Depression. Of the 22 countries with the world's lowest birthrates, 20 are in Europe, and Spain's median age will be 55 in a few decades. Barbarians will soon be at the gates. Only 8 million Russians will be living in the mineral- and oil-rich lands east of the Urals, irresistible lebensraum for a Chinese population rising toward 1.5 billion. Europe's generous welfare states, viable in a society that has 5 workers per retiree, will buckle once that ratio falls to 2. Short on labor, Europe must choose either penury for its elderly or a huge immigration from Africa and a ''second great Islamic wave.''
Buchanan's explanation of what sent our own country to hell in a handbasket is the standard-issue cultural-conservative one. Abortion, pornography, euthanasia, gun control and political correctness are the crimes; feminists, liberal judges and Marxisant scholars are the perpetrators. Americans of different stripes will agree with at least some of Buchanan's assertions: that racial activism has taken on aspects of a religion in the hands of the hard left, that international prosecutors pursue rightists like Augusto Pinochet with far more zeal than leftists like Fidel Castro, that the ideology of ''human rights'' was put to the service of imperialism in Kosovo, that ''hate crimes'' legislation has less to do with justice than with ideological special pleading, that political correctness -- the punctiliousness that Americans bring to matters of race, gender and sexual orientation -- maintains a tenacious hold on public life, chilling free discussion. Future historians will snicker at it, as we do at Victorian prudery; but they will also shudder, as we do at McCarthyite persecution.
Still, just as there were real perverts in Victoria's day and real Stalinists in McCarthy's, there are real segregationists in our own. Buchanan focuses to the point of obsession on the crusade against symbols of the Confederacy, from Virginia's abolition of Confederate History Month to the vandalism of a statue in Selma of the Confederate general and Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest. While claiming to reject ''the blood-and-soil idea of a nation,'' he does not recognize a difference between ''civilization'' on the one hand and race on the other. You can tell this by the way he flings around the term ''third world'' as a synonym for ''nonwhite.'' California, he says, ''is on its way to becoming a predominantly third world state'' (which will surely be news to the English biochemists and French stockbrokers queued up to enter it).
Much of this provocation is surely ladled out just to rile the bien-pensants. Buchanan loves ideological dust-ups (''The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution'') and purple oratory (''Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry''). His signal debating trick is a cheap one, ever beloved of rabble-rousers -- to take a broad historical trend and find someone to scapegoat for it. Thus, Republicans are fleeing social issues not because they cost votes but because ''the media have whispered in Republican ears.'' The 20 years after World War II were a ''golden age of marriage,'' but this superb modus vivendi ''fell apart in the 1960's, when feminists managed to add 'sex' to the discriminations forbidden by the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964.'' And Americans, in his reading, were duped out of their ancestral faiths by a few wily atheistic savants from the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse chief among them.
Buchanan is now reflexively hostile to any evidence that the United States retains any strong points at all. He deplores the fact that no top college has an American history requirement. But clearly universities are doing something right, for in what other country does the biography of a hitherto little-studied 18th-century politician spend months on the best-seller list, as David McCullough's ''John Adams'' has done? Buchanan also detects, quoting James Burnham, a ''deepening loss, among the leaders of the West, of confidence in themselves and in the unique quality of their own civilization.'' This is a bizarre complaint from one who rails at the International Monetary Fund and at the ''braggadocio'' of those who declare the United States the world's only superpower. Western leaders, in fact, are self-confident as never before -- and the central pillar of that self-confidence is their belief that, to some extent, all cultures are becoming Western ones.
In 1992, Buchanan electrified the Republican National Convention with a declaration that Americans were locked in a ''religious war'' and a ''cultural war'' for the nation's soul. What distinguishes ''The Death of the West'' from his lament then is that today he considers that war decisively lost. ''A new generation has now grown up,'' he writes, ''for whom the cultural revolution is not a revolution at all, but the culture they were born into and have known all their lives.'' Far from coming to an accommodation with this new order, he is past even wishing the country well: cultural revolutionaries ''have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for -- their country, not ours.'' Having spent years fighting what he took to be a dangerous faction in American life, Pat Buchanan has come to realize that what he has been fighting is America itself. He has decided he prefers the fight to the country.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
Do you even know the meaning of the word ? Do YOU even have the faintest idea, who this author is , and his background ?
Aquatic wrote:Read the book, then make judgements.It baffles me as to why any fan of Pat needs to shell out one red penny to read what Pat has to say in his latest book. Just pay a free visit to the websites of such well-respected think-tanks as National Alliance and Ku Klux Klan, who for years have been sounding the alarm against “non-white” invasion and impending demise of “white” race, the very same theme that got Pat's juices flowing.
Anyone who supports Buchanan’s position on race and immigration must have the intellectual fortitude to declare that National Alliance and Skinheads are visionaries who have been viciously maligned by the liberal press.
Posters like this understand full well the tactics of a peaceful revolution, i.e., attack your opponents character so he must defend that instead of his argument...then repeat the accusation, i.e., "He's a racist, he's a bigot, he's a facist" until it becomes a "fact" in the minds of the public.
READ THIS BOOK!
(And damn the trolls...)
The speech that Republicans are just NOW recovering from. But hey...Thanks for ridding us of those 3500 Palm Beach Gore votes and effectively destroying The Reform Party, Paddy! Now, get lost.
It's a natural process, some have bigger birth rates then others, and I really think that Pat Buchanan should realise it. Unless he thinks that it shouldn't be so and it has to be "fixed". I can only wonder what that would mean. Oh, and I am a "white European", according to Pat one of the endangered. Funny, i don't feel that way.
NP, Why not?? The 90s conservatives {globalists and their ilk} call Buchanan much worse with a whole lot less justification. They line up with the progressive democrats {globalists and their ilk} to do so. Peace and love, George.
I would like to know if you've read the book. Because this focus on race qua race seems to miss the point. I haven't finished the book, but clearly the book addresses that peculiar juncture where race and culture collide, or rather, synthesize. Surely you can't be ignorant of historical trends regarding race and culture, and particularly western culture. Frankly, I find that the discussion of race is only incidental and the primary focus of the book is on the death of the western culture, unfortunately for those of us who would discuss it, possessed almost entirely by those light skinned whities of European descent. So unfortunately the discussion focuses on the incidentals, i.e., race, rather than the truly alarming spectacle of the death of western culture. If you do not find this alarming, I would recommend you spend a little time doing a cursory reading of the history of the Roman Empire. The funny thing is, that what the Romans called Barbarians, are what we call whites and include among those races who form the west (the Germanic tribes). Yet, at that time, their culture was foreign, and frankly destructive. So while you may focus on race, clearly the danger lies in the loss of culture.
Furthermore, Buchanan notes the precariousness of the Israeli situation, noting the skyrocketing birthrate of the Palestinians. So, in your analysis, which race is Buchanan obsessing over in this instance? Surely you must know that they are at least as closely related as the Germans and the French. Buchanan is not obsessed with race--I suggest you look in the mirror.
Caldwell just now noticed that?
If your definition of that term is anything other than Homo sapiens, you've just violated JimRob's rules. Buh-bye....
I think there was a whole chapter on this one in How to Lie with Statistics....
Er, you might want to rewrite this sentence to clarify the referent to which those descriptions apply.
This is the reason Buchanan writes his books.
Stir up the faithful (just look at how many Buchanan threads we've seen in the last month), then others want to see what the pitchforkers are squealing about.
Buchanan loves a fight. Every book he's ever written has provoked one.
He may believe what he writes, but he knows how to use hyperbole and touch all the right symbols (the Confederacy, "whiteness," "Western culture").
IOW, he's a book publisher's dream.
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