The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

by Patrick J. Buchanan

When Richard Nixon took his oath of office in 1969, there were 9 million foreign-born in the United States. When President Bush raised his hand, the number was nearing 30 million. Almost a million immigrants enter every year; half a million illegal aliens come in with them. The adjusted census of 2000 puts the number of illegals in the United States at 9 million. Northeastern University estimates 11 million, as many illegal aliens as there are people in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.6 There are more foreign-born in California—8.4 million—than people in New Jersey, more foreign-born in New York State than people in South Carolina. Even the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920 was nothing like this.

In 1960, only sixteen million Americans did not trace their ancestors to Europe. Today, the number is eighty million. No nation has ever undergone so rapid and radical a transformation. At Portland State in 1998, Mr. Clinton rhapsodized to a cheering student audience about a day when Americans of European descent will be a minority. Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within five years there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than fifty years there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.

Every few years, a storm erupts when some public figure blurts out, “America is a Christian nation!” She was once, and a majority yet call themselves Christians. But our dominant culture should more accurately be called post-Christian, or anti-Christian, for the values it celebrates are the antithesis of what it used to mean to be a Christian. “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before me” was the the first commandment Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. But the new culture rejects the God of the Old Testament and burns its incense at the altars of the global economy. Kipling’s “Gods of the Market Place” have shouldered aside the God of the Gospels. Sex, fame, money, power—those are what our new America is all about.

THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION that began with the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 died with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The dream of its true believers was to create a new socialist man. But police terror, the camps of the Gulag, and seventy years of indoctrinating children in hatred of the West and the moral superiority of Marx and Lenin did not work. Communism was The God That Failed. When the mighty structure built on a foundation of lies came crashing down, the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia threw the statues of Stalin and Lenin and the books of Marx and Engels onto the landfill of history without looking back. But where Lenin’s revolution failed, the one that erupted on the campuses in the sixties succeeded. It put down roots in society, and it created a new America. By 2000, the adversary culture of the sixties had become our dominant culture, its victory conceded when the political base camp of traditionalism raised a white flag in Philadelphia. On the moral and social issues—the fight for the sanctity of human life and the return of God to the public square of this land we used to call “God’s Country”—the Republican party raised its gloves and pleaded, “No más.”

The West is dying. Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization. Today, in seventeen European countries, there are more burials than births, more coffins than cradles. The countries are Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Russia.16 Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox—all the Christian faiths are represented in the great death march of the West.

A century ago, Gustave Le Bon wrote in his classic The Crowd: The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples … . The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought … .The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.17 Le Bon was speaking of his own time, the end of the nineteenth century, but what he wrote is truer of ours.

As late as 1960, European people, including Americans, Australians, and Canadians, numbered 750 million, one-fourth of the 3 billion people alive. Western nations were in the baby boom of the century. Shorn of their empires, the wounds of war healed, they seemed alive with vitality. Indeed, neo-Malthusians were bewailing the population explosion, warning darkly that the earth’s resources and land were running out. They were laughed at. By 2000, however, no one was laughing. While world population had doubled to six billion in forty years, the European peoples had stopped reproducing. Their populations had begun to stagnate and, in many countries, had already begun to fall. Of Europe’s forty-seven nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by 2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely. Europe had begun to die.

The prognosis is grim. Between 2000 and 2050, world population will grow by more than three billion to over nine billion people, but this 50 percent increase in global population will come entirely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as one hundred million people of European stock vanish from the earth. In 1960, people of European ancestry were one-fourth of the world’s population; in 2000, they were one-sixth; in 2050, they will be one-tenth. These are the statistics of a vanishing race. A growing awareness of what they portend has induced a sense of foreboding, even panic, in Europe.

In 2000, the total population of Europe, from Iceland to Russia, was 728 million. At present birthrates, however, without new immigration, her population will crash to 600 million by 2050. That is the projection of World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revision Highlights released by the authoritative UN Population Division on February 28, 2001. Another study has Europe’s population plummeting to 556 million by midcentury.3 The last time Europe’s population showed a drop of this magnitude was during the Black Plague of 1347-52.

How bleak is the situation? Of the twenty nations with the lowest birthrates in the world, eighteen are in Europe. The average fertility rate of a European woman has fallen to 1.4 children, with 2.1 needed just to replace the existing population. Says columnist Ben Wattenberg: This does not mean ZPG (Zero Population Growth), this means ZP—Zero Population.5 Americans in NATO will soon be defending a vast Leisure World. If the present fertility rates hold, Europe’s population will decline to 207 million by the end of the twenty-first century, less than 30 percent of today’s. The cradle of Western civilization will have become its grave.

Why is this happening? Socialism, the beatific vision of European intellectuals for generations, is one reason. “If everyone has the promise of a state pension, children are no longer a vital insurance policy against want in old age,” argues Dr. John Wallace of Bologna’s Johns Hopkins University: “If women can earn more than enough to be financially independent, a husband is no longer essential. And if you can also have sex and not babies—and this seems to be true now of Catholic Italy as it is of secular Britain—why marry?”6 By freeing husbands, wives, and children of family responsibilities, European socialists have eliminated the need for families. Consequently, families have begun to disappear. When they are gone, Europe goes with them. But as Europe is dying, the Third World adds one hundred million people—one new Mexico—every fifteen months. Forty new Mexicos in the Third World by 2050, while Europe will have lost the equivalent of the entire population of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway—and Germany! Absent divine intervention, or a sudden desire on the part of Western women to begin having the same-size families as their grandmothers, the future belongs to the Third World.

“My reason for not having kids is that I like to sleep. I read a lot, and 1 can sleep throughout the night,” says Gabrielle Thanheiser, thirty-four, a banker in Berlin vacationing in Rome with her live-in boyfriend.12 “We are DINKS,” confirmed Andreas Gerhmann, thirty-seven, using the acronym popular even in Germany for “double income, no kids” couples.13 In the long run, the self-indulgence of DINKS like Gerhmann and Thanheiser may prove more fateful for the German people than the Third Reich.

In December 2000, however, more ominous news came in. Russia’s birthrate had already plummeted to 1.17 children, below Italy’s. Its population had fallen to 145 million; one estimate had it headed to 123 million by 2015. “If you believe the forecasts made by serious people who have devoted their whole lives to studying this question,” warns President Putin, “in 15 years’ time there will be 22 million fewer Russians. Just think about that figure—it’s a seventh of [Russia‘s] population.”23 A loss of 22 million Russians in fifteen years would be greater than all the Soviet Union’s losses in the Hitler-Stalin war. Putin went on to add ominously, “If the present tendency continues, there will be a threat to the survival of the nation.” Life expectancy for Russian men is now fifty-nine, and two of every three pregnancies in Russia are terminated before birth. Russian women average 2.5 to 4 abortions each, and Russia’s death rate is now 70 percent higher than the birthrate.

Mr. Chamie projected Russia’s population, at present birthrates with zero immigration, out to the century’s end, and came up with fewer than eighty million Russians in 2100, roughly the population of the United States when Theodore Roosevelt left office in 1909.

“Demographers have calculated that by the end of this century the English people will be a minority in their homeland. The English are not having enough children to reproduce themselves,” writes the syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts.27 This is the first time in history, says the London Observer, “that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine or disease.”

Japan’s birthrate is half what it was in 1950. Her population is projected to crest soon at 127 million, but fall to 104 million by 2050, when there will be fewer than half as many Japanese children as there were in 1950 but eight times as many seniors as in 1950. Her dynamism will be dead, her Asian role diminished, for there will be fifteen Chinese for every single Japanese. Even the Philippines, which had only a fourth of Japan’s population in 1950, will have 25 million more people by 2050. The reason for Japan’s baby bust? More than half of all Japanese women now remain single by thirty years of age. Known as “Parasite Singles,” they live at home with their parents and pursue careers, and many have abandoned any idea of marrying and having children.31 “Live for myself and enjoy life” is their motto.

Of the 190 nations on earth, Japan is the oldest, with a median age of forty-one—for Japan was the first modern nation to legalize abortion (1948), and her baby boom ended soon afterward, long before the end of the baby booms in the West.

Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not “bury” us. We buried him. Neville Chute’s On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Crash of ‘79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millenium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire or disintegration of the Soviet Union? Is it not possible that today’s most populous nations—China, India, and Indonesia—could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same back shelf as the predictions of “nuclear winter” and “global warming”? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying. They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World. Western fertility rates have been falling for decades. Outside of Muslim Albania, no European nation is producing enough babies to replace its population. As years slip by, that birthrate is not stabilizing; it is falling. In a score of countries, the old are already dying off faster than the y...

The ability to pull out of this dive diminishes each year. No end of the birth dearth is in sight, and all the social and cultural indicators show that more and more Western women are converting to the idea of having no children. Moreover, there is an arithmetical certitude about some aspects of demography. Italy cannot have more young adults of childbearing age in 2020 than it has teenagers, children, tots, and infants today. No existing population cohort can be added to, except by immigration. Only the mass reconversion of Western women to an idea that they seem to have given up—that the good life lies in bearing and raising children and sending them out into the world to continue the family and nation—can prevent the Death of the West.

Western women are terminating their pregnancies at a rate that represents autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry and an end of their nations. “Cherishing children is the mark of a civilized society,” said Joan Ganz Cooney.35 Why are children no longer cherished as they once were? What caused the sea change in the hearts and minds of Western women, and men? And is it reversible? For if it is not, we can begin to write the final chapters of the history of our civilization and the last will and testament of the West.

And ye shall be left few in numbers, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldst not obey the voice of the Lord thy God. —Deuteronomy XXVIII: 28 Holy Bible, King James Version

The postwar baby boom began in 1946, peaked in 1957, and fizzled out in 1964. But just as the World War II generation was about done having babies, and the baby boomers themselves were about to begin, a new and more convenient way to prevent pregnancies was discovered. Historians may one day call “the pill” the suicide tablet of the West. It was first licensed in 1960. By 1963, 6 percent of American married women were using Dr. Rock’s invention; by 1970, 43 percent were “on the pill.”

By 1966, however, the Finkbine affair was ancient history, for 6,000 abortions were being done every year. By 1970, that figure had leapt to 200,000 as Governors Rockefeller of New York and Reagan of California signed the most liberal abortion laws in America.2 By 1973, 600,000 abortions were being done.3 That year, the Supreme Court, with three of President Nixon’s four nominees concurring, declared that a woman’s right to an abortion was protected by the Constitution. Within a decade, the number of abortions had soared to 1.5 million a year, and abortions had replaced tonsillectomies as the most common surgical procedure in America. Since Justice Blackmun’s decision, 40 million abortions have been performed in the United States. Thirty percent of all pregnancies now end on a tabletop in an abortionist’s clinic.

In 2000, the Food and Drug Administration approved RU-486, a do-it-yourself abortion drug for use in the first seven weeks of pregnancy. As no U.S. firm wished to be associated with RU-486, a China-based company began quietly to produce the drug. Cynics might characterize China’s role in producing RU-486 for America as an act of assisted suicide for the one nation blocking Beijing’s path to Asian hegemony and world power.

Dutch demographer Dirk van de Kaa traces the phenomenon to four transformations: (A) A shift from the golden age of marriage to the dawn of a new age of cohabitation. (B) A shift from a time of “king-child” with parents to that of king-parents with one child. (C) A shift from preventive contraception, to benefit early children, to self-fulfilling contraception, to benefit parents. (D) A shift from a uniform family system to a pluralistic system of families and households, including single-parent families.

But the parents who had gone through the Depression and the war were determined that “my kid’s not going to have it as rough as I did.” So the baby boomers were raised differently, spending almost as many hours in front of a television as in school. By the mid-1950s, parents had a serious rival for their children’s attention, and youngsters had an entertaining and witty ally, and a privileged sanctuary to retreat to, in the age-old struggle against parents. The message that came from TV, especially the ads, was instant gratification.

The sixties’ rebels, however, were not the revolutionaries. Converts to the revolution came to college thinking and believing one way and left thinking and believing an entirely different way that changed their whole lives. Hillary Rodham, the Goldwater Girl who came to Wellesley in 1965 and left as a social radical in 1969, with new values, a new moral code, and a steely resolve to change the corrupt society in which she had been raised, is as good an example of the revolutionary as Mr. Bush is of the rebel.

As political science professor James Kurth of Swarthmore writes: The greatest movement of the second half of the nineteenth century was the movement of men from farm to the factory … . The greatest movement of the second half of the twentieth century has been the movement of women from the home to the office … . [This] movement separates the parents from the children, as well as enabling the wife to separate herself from her husband. By splitting the nuclear family, it is helping to bring about the replacement of the nuclear family with the non-family.

In 1950, 88 percent of women with children under six stayed home, where they often had more kids. Today, 64 percent of American women with children under six are in the labor forced.

Writing in the Spectator, Eleanor Mills is an authentic voice of her generation: “The fact is that girls like me—i.e., healthy, hearty, middle-class women in their 20s—are just not breeding.”8 Why not? Because, she writes, “my generation’s twin preoccupations are, unfortunately, looks and money.”9 She quotes one of her many childless contemporaries: “If I had a kid,” said Jane, an advertising executive, thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I take for granted. Every Saturday at 10:30 A.M. when we are still in bed, my husband and I look at each other and just say, ‘Thank God we weren’t up at 5 A.M. caring for a brat.’ We have such a great time just the two of us; who knows if it would work if we introduced another person into the equation?”

The richer a nation becomes, the fewer its children, and the sooner it begins to die. Societies organized to ensure the maximum pleasure, freedom, and happiness for all their members are, at the same time, advancing the date of their own funerals. Fate may compensate the Chinese, Islamic, and Latin peoples for their hardships and poverty in this century with the domination of the earth in the next.

Ironically, the unmentioned India is likely the future. (Or AI will take over.)

This vision of American free labor was at war with the view being espoused by Marx and his patron and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: “The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex into public industry and … this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”13 Is it not a remarkable coincidence how global capitalism’s view of women—as units of production, liberated from husbands, home, and family—conforms so precisely to the view of the fathers of global communism?

This system fell apart in the 1960s, when feminists managed to add “sex” to the discriminations forbidden by the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had been written to protect the rights of African Americans. This turned the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into a siege gun against the family wage. “Men Wanted” ads were declared discriminatory and outlawed. Gender equality replaced “moral contract.” The rights of individuals took precedence over the requirements of family. Women’s pay soared, and as women began moving into occupations that had been largely restricted to men—medicine, law, the media, the academy, the upper bureaucracy, and business—families began to crumble.

Between 1973 and 1996, writes Dr. Carlson, “the [real] median income of men, aged 15 and above, working full-time, fell 24 percent, from $37,200 to $30,000.”

In 1970, only 36 percent of women aged twenty to twenty-four were unmarried. By 1995, 68 percent were in the “never married” category. Among women twenty-five to twenty-nine, the “never marrieds” had soared from 10 percent to 35 percent.

Writing on the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in The New Oxford Review, Catholic columnist Joseph Collison observed: Early feminists had been fiercely antiabortion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the first women’s rights convention in 1848, called abortion “a disgusting and degrading crime.” … And Susan B. Anthony, early crusader for the women’s vote, wrote that “No matter what the motive … the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life; it will burden her soul in death.” It was in fact the 19th century feminists who campaigned to pass the laws that criminalized abortion.26 Collison adds that in early editions of The Feminist Mystique, Betty Friedan’s seminal work, abortion went unmentioned. It was not a feminist issue in the early 1960s.

Ideas Have Consequences is the title of the late conservative Richard Weaver’s famous little book, and the success of feminist ideas has had consequences for our country. They may be seen in the 1,000 percent increase in the number of unmarried couples living together in the United States, from 523,000 in 1970 to 5.5 million today.39 The 2000 census also reports that, for the first time in our history, nuclear families account for fewer than one in four households, while single Americans who live alone are now 26 percent of all households.40 Marriage is out of fashion.

Back in 1990, Katarina Runske, an author far less famous than the American feminists, published in Britain a book called Empty Hearts and Empty Homes, in which she addressed the inevitable result of all this antimale, antimarriage rhetoric. Feminism, she said, is a Darwinian blind alley. In biological terms, there is nothing that identifies a maladaptive pattern so quickly as a below-replacement level of reproduction; an immediate consequence of feminism is what appears to be an irreversible decline in the birth rate. Nations pursue feminist policies at their peril.

Oddly, that most politically incorrect of poets, Rudyard Kipling, saw it all coming back in 1919: On the first Feminian Sandstones, we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbor, and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.”

“Any human society,” wrote anthropologist J. D. Unwin, “is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom. The evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation.”43 What is now called the Greatest Generation came of age in the Depression and World War II. It displayed great energy and gave America a position of unrivaled preeminence. The baby boomers and Gen-Xers, by and large, opted for “sexual freedom.” Soon we shall see if Unwin was right. The early returns suggest that he was, that the West will not survive its experiment in sexual liberation in recognizable form. As the conservative columnist Jenkin Lloyd Jones observed, “Great civilizations and animal standards of behavior coexist only for short periods.”

Nowhere is the overthrow of the old moral order more evident than in how homosexuality is seen today, and yesterday. In World War II, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who wore the “old school tie” of FDR, was forced out of office for propositioning a sleeping car porter. LBJ feared that the arrest of aide Walter Jenkins, caught in a police sting in a men’s room at the YMCA, might cost him millions of votes. Rising GOP star Bob Bauman lost his House seat when caught soliciting teenagers in the tenderloin district of D.C. That was then; now is now. The turning point came when Gerry Studds, who seduced a sixteen-year-old male page, defied House sanctions and was reelected in Massachusetts, a Catholic state. Barney Frank easily survived House chastisement for fixing parking tickets for a live-in male lover who was running a full-service whorehouse out of Barney’s basement, and, in the Clinton era, he began to bring his boyfriend to White House socials. In 2001, John Ashcroft was lacerated during his confirmation hearings by former Senate colleagues for having opposed the nomination of homosexual James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg. Hormel, broadcasting the San Francisco gay pride parade, had laughingly welcomed the transvestite “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” who mock the pope and Catholic nuns. Truly, the world is turned upside down.

Euthanasia has come to Europe and is coming to America. Upon what moral ground do we any longer stand to stop it? Dr. Kevorkian, a ghoul in an earlier age, some of whose victims were just depressed, not dying, gets a sympathetic profile on Sixty Minutes. In the Age of the Individual, people believe in this life, not the next; in the quality of life, not the sanctity of life; and no one wants to be told how he should live his life. “Americans are not going to lead 21st-century lives based on 18th- and 19th-century moral ideals,” writes sociologist and public intellectual Alan Wolfe: “Any form of higher authority has to tailor its demands to the needs of real people.”48 After a millennium and a half, paganism is the “comeback kid.”

In Caesar and Christ, Book III of his Story of Civilization, historian Will Durant argues that “biological factors” were “fundamental” to the fall of the Roman Empire: A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian … . A law of Septimus Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men. In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time [250 A.D.] been halved. He mourned to see “the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.” Only the barbarians and Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.50 How did Rome reduce its population? “Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished … . Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect.”51 Adds Durant: “Perhaps the operation of contraception, abortion and infanticide … had a dysgenic as well as a numerical effect. The ablest men married latest, bred least and died soonest.”52 Christians were having children, the pagans were not: “Abortion and infanticide, which were decimating pagan society, were forbidden to Christians as the equivalents to murder; in many instances Christians rescued exposed infants, baptized them, and brought them up with the aid of the community fund.”

The new gospel has as its governing axioms: there is no God; there are no absolute values in the universe; the supernatural is superstition. All life begins here and ends here; its object is human happiness in this, the only world we shall ever know. Each society establishes its own moral code for its own time, and each man and woman has a right to do the same. As happiness is life’s end and we are rational beings, we have a right to decide when the pain of living outweighs the pleasure of living and to end this life, either by ourselves or with the assistance of family and doctors.

If many Americans look back on their history with disgust, who can blame them? For, as Myron Magnet writes in The Dream and the Nightmare: Campus after campus [has] jettisoned traditional Western civilization great books and great ideas courses as obsolete … . An alternative canon, supposed to be adequate to the new reality, emerged: Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, later even the lyrics of Bob Dylan, shouldered aside Plato and Montaigne. The relevant message was Western Society’s oppressiveness, stifling the instinctual satisfactions for the privileged and tyrannically exploiting the poor and nonwhite at home and in the Third World.

After an in-depth study of the 1987 Justice Department figures on victims of crime, Wilbanks discovered and reported the following: • In 1987, white criminals chose black victims in 3 percent of violent crimes, while black criminals chose white victims fifty percent of the time. • When the crime was rape, white criminals chose black women in 0 percent of their assaults, while black criminals chose white women in 28 percent of assaults. Of eighty-three thousand cases of rape, Wilbanks could not find any in which the rapist was white and the victim was black. • White criminals chose black victims in 2 percent of their robberies ; but black criminals chose white victims in 73 percent of their robberies.

Ten years later, in 1999, the Washington Times published the findings of a study on interracial crime by the New Century Foundation, which relied on the 1994 Justice Department statistics. The NCF study supported Wilbanks’s findings. • Blacks had committed 90 percent of interracial violent crimes in 1994. • As blacks were 12 percent of the population, these figures meant they were fifty times as likely to commit acts of interracial violence as whites. • Blacks were 100 to 250 times more likely than whites to commit interracial gang rapes and gang assaults. • Even in the “hate crimes” category—less than 1 percent of interracial crimes—blacks were twice as likely to be the assailant as the victim.

On August 4, 1914, the Social Democrats stood in the Reichstag and, to a man, voted the kaiser’s war credits, joining the orgy of patriotism as the armies of the Reich smashed into Belgium. Marxists were stunned. The long-anticipated European war was to be their time. “Workers of the world, unite!” Marx had thundered in the closing line of his Communist Manifesto. Marxists had confidently predicted that when war came, the workers would rise up and rebel against their rulers rather than fight fellow workers of neighboring nations. But it had not happened. The greatest socialist party in Europe had been converted into a war party, and the workers had thrown down their tools and gone off to fight with songs in their hearts.

As the horrors of the western front unfolded, they waited. But even Ypres, Passchendaele, and the Somme, where hundreds of thousands of British soldiers went to their deaths over a few yards of mud, did not cause the workers to rise up in the homeland of the Industrial Revolution. Neither the French nor the German working class broke at Verdun. The 1917 mutiny in the French trenches was swiftly put down. New blows came at war’s end. After the Russian Revolution, Communist coups were attempted in Budapest, Munich, and Berlin. The Bavarian Soviet was quickly crushed by German war veterans. Rosa Luxemburg, who had led the Spartacist uprising, and Karl Liebknecth were clubbed and shot to death in Berlin by Freikorps. The Budapest regime of Bela Kun lasted a few months. The workers failed to rally to the revolutions launched in their name. Trotsky sought to make the Red Army the spear point of revolution. Invading Poland, he was hurled back at the Vistula by Polish patriots under Marshal Pilsudski. Nothing the Marxists had predicted had come to pass. Their hour had come and gone. The workers of the West, the mythical proletariat, had refused to play the role history had assigned them. How could Marx have been so wrong?

The first dissenting disciple was the Hungarian Georg Lukacs, an agent of the Comintern, whose History and Class Consciousness had brought him recognition as a Marxist theorist to rival Marx himself. “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution’” said Lukacs. “A worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation, of new ones by the revolutionaries.”4 As deputy commissar for culture in Bela Kun’s regime, Lukacs put his self-described “demonic” ideas into action in what came to be known as “cultural terrorism.” As part of this terrorism he instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Women, too, were called to rebel against the sexual mores of the time.