Townhall... It Can't Happen Here
By Pat Buchanan
November 9, 2011
Friday,
thousands in Moscow, giving
Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring, “Russia for the
Russians!”
marched through the city shouting racial slurs against peoples from the
Caucasus.
In
Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is Hausa
for “Western education is sacrilege,” massacred 63 people in a terror
campaign
to bring about sharia law. Seven churches were bombed.
Sunday,
The New York Times reported
that Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan are suffering “horrific abuse” following last
year’s
pogrom.
Ethnic
nationalism, what Albert
Einstein dismissed as “the measles of mankind,” and religious
fanaticism are
making headlines and history.
Welcome
to the new world disorder.
What
has this to do with us? Perhaps
little, perhaps everything.
In
three weeks of my radio-TV tour to
promote “The Suicide of a Superpower,” no question has occurred more
often than
one about the chapter “The End of White America.” Invariably, the
question
boils down to this:
Why
should we care if white Americans
become a minority? America, interviewers remind me, assimilated the
immigrants
of a century ago -- Italians, Poles, Jews, Slavs -- and we can do the
same with
peoples from the Third World.
And
perhaps they are right. Perhaps
the year 2050 will see an America as united as the America of Dwight
Eisenhower
and JFK.
Yet
there are reasons to worry.
First,
the great American Melting Pot
has been rejected by our elites as cultural genocide, in favor of a
multiculturalism that is failing in Europe. Second, what we are
attempting has
no precedent in human history.
We
are attempting to convert a
republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an
egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes
of
planet Earth.
We
are turning America into a
gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave
of the
most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no
common
faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.
What,
then, will hold us together? A
Constitution over whose meaning we have fought for 50 years?
Consider
the contrasts between the old
and new immigration. Where the total of immigrants in the “Great Wave”
from
1890 to 1920 numbered 15 to 20 million, today there are 40 million here.
In
1924, the United States declared a
timeout on all immigration. But for almost half a century since 1965,
there has
been no timeout. One to 2 million more immigrants, legal and illegal,
arrive
every year.
Where
the old immigrants all came from
Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has
never had
the same success in assimilating peoples of color.
The
Indians we fought for centuries
live on reservations. And if we did not succeed with a few million
Native
Americans, what makes us think we will succeed in assimilating 135
million
Hispanics who will be here in 2050, scores of millions of Indian
ancestry?
We
have encountered immense
difficulty, including a civil war, to bring black Americans, who have
been here
longer than any immigrant group, into full participation in our society.
This
was a failing that the last two
generations have invested immense effort and enormous wealth to
correct. But we
cannot deny the difficulty of the problem when, 50 years after the
civil rights
revolution, one yet hears daily the accusation of “racist!” on our TV
channels
and in our political discourse.
Ought
we not first solve the problem
of fully integrating people of color, before bringing in tens of
millions more?
Another
factor is faith. After several
generations, Catholics and Jews melded with the Protestant majority.
But
Muslims come from a civilization that has never accepted Christian
equality.
The
world’s largest religion now, with
1.5 billion believers, Islam is growing in numbers, strength and
militancy,
even as Muslim fanatics engage in eradicating Christianity from Nigeria
to
Ethiopia to Sudan to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan.
Is
it wise to bring millions more into
our country at such a time?
Will
that advance national unity and
social peace? Has it done so in the Turkish enclaves of Berlin, the
banlieues
of Paris, Londonistan or Moscow?
Here,
again, are but a few of the
differences between the old and new immigration:
Today’s
numbers are twice as large.
Where the old immigration stopped after 30 years, ours never ends.
Where
the old immigrants were
Europeans, today’s are Third World people who have never been fully
assimilated
by any Western country. Where those arrived from Christian nations,
many of
today’s come from a civilization that battled Christianity for 1,000
years.
Where
Western powers ruled the world
in 1920, today the West is aging and dying, and much of the world is on
fire
with anti-white and anti-Western resentment of 500 years of European
domination.
In
1920, Western people were nearly
one-third of mankind. Today, Western man is down to one-sixth of the
world’s
population, shrinking to one-eighth by 2050, and not a tenth by
century’s end.
When
did the American people assent to
our taking this risk with their republic?
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