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

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Gramsci was a sharp observer who saw that Bolshevism did not work. Only through terror could the regime compel obedience. Gramsci concluded that Leninism had failed. The Russian people had not been converted to communism; they loathed it. Their land, faith, families, icons, and Mother Russia all meant far more to the Russian people than any international workers’ solidarity. The Soviets were deluding themselves, Gramsci concluded. The Russian people had not changed. They were obedient only because resistance meant a knock at the door at midnight and a bullet in the back of the neck in the basement of the Lubianka. Even the czar had evoked more love and loyalty than the hated Bolsheviks.

Rather than seize power first and impose a cultural revolution from above, Gramsci argued, Marxists in the West must first change the culture; then power would fall into their laps like ripened fruit. But to change the culture would require a “long march through the institutions”—the arts, cinema, theater, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, and the new electronic medium, radio. One by one, each had to be captured and converted and politicized into an agency of revolution. Then the people could be slowly educated to understand and even welcome the revolution.

In 1923, Lukacs and members of the German Communist party set up, at Frankfurt University, an Institute for Marxism modeled on the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. After some reflection, they settled on a less provocative name, the Institute for Social Research. It would soon come to be known simply as the Frankfurt School. In 1930, a renegade Marxist and admirer of the Marquis de Sade, Max Horkheimer, became its director.

At Horkheimer’s direction, the Frankfurt School began to retranslate Marxism into cultural terms. The old battlefield manuals were thrown out, and new manuals were written. To old Marxists, the enemy was capitalism; to new Marxists, the enemy was Western culture. To old Marxists, the path to power was the violent overthrow of the regime, as in Paris in 1789 and in St. Petersburg in 1917. To the new Marxist, the path to power was nonviolent and would require decades of patient labor. Victory would come only after Christian beliefs had died in the soul of Western Man. And that would happen only after the institutions of culture and education had been captured and conscripted by allies and agents of the revolution. Occupy the cultural institutions of the West, its “fortresses and earthworks,” and the state, the “outer ditch,” would fall without a fight.

ABOUT THIS SAME time, music critic Theodor Adorno, psychologist Erich Fromm, and sociologist Wilhelm Reich joined the Frankfurt School. But, in 1933, history rudely intruded. Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Berlin, and as the leading lights of the Frankfurt School were Jewish and Marxist, they were not a good fit for the Third Reich. the Frankfurt School packed its ideology and fled to America. Also departing was a graduate student by the name of Herbert Marcuse. With the assistance of Columbia University, they set up their new Frankfurt School in New York City and redirected their talents and energies to undermining the culture of the country that had given them refuge.

Edmund Burke once wrote, “I would not know how to draw up an indictment against a whole people.”16 Adorno and the Frankfurt School, however, had just done exactly that. They flatly asserted that individuals raised in families dominated by the father, who are flagwaving patriots and follow the old-time religion, are incipient fascists and potential Nazis. As a conservative Christian culture breeds fascism, those deeply immersed in such a culture must be closely watched for fascist tendencies. These ideas have been internalized by the Left. As early as the mid-1960s, conservatives and authority figures who denounced or opposed the campus revolution were routinely branded “fascists.”

The school openly stated that whether children learned facts or skills at school was less important than that they graduate conditioned to display the correct attitudes. When Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind that “American high school graduates are among the most sensitive illiterates in the world,” with some of the lowest test scores on earth in comparative exams, but the highest scores for sensitivity to issues like the environment, Bloom was testifying to the success of the Frankfurt School.20 Parents may consider today’s public schools costly failures where children no longer learn. To the Frankfurt School, they are a success; for the children coming out of them exhibit all the right attitudes. On entering college, these students now go through orientation sessions, where they are instructed in the new values that obtain on college campuses—to get their minds right, as the warden said in Cool Hand Luke.

But the importance of schools in conditioning the minds of the young was soon surpassed by that of the new media: TV and movies. As William Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, writes: The entertainment industry … has wholly absorbed the ideology of cultural Marxism and preaches it endlessly not just in sermons but in parables: strong women beating up weak men, children wiser than their parents, corrupt clergymen thwarted by carping drifters, upper-class blacks confronting the violence of lower-class whites, manly homosexuals who lead normal lives. It is all fable, an inversion of reality, but the entertainment media make it seem real, more so than the world that lies beyond the front door.

For cultural Marxists, no cause ranked higher than the abolition of the family, which they despised as a dictatorship and the incubator of sexism and social injustice. Hostility to the traditional family was not new to Marxists. In The German Ideology, Marx himself wrote that patriarchal males consider wives and children first as property. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels popularized the feminist conviction that all discrimination against women proceeds from the patriarchal family. Erich Fromm argued that differences between the sexes were not inherent, but a fiction of Western culture. Fromm became a founding father of feminism. To Wilhelm Reich, “The authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in miniature … . Familial imperialism is … reproduced in national imperialism.” To Adorno, the patriarchal family was the cradle of fascism.

To decapitate the family with the father as its head, the Frankfurt School advocated the alternatives of matriarchy, where the mother rules the roost, and “androgyny theory,” where male and female family roles are made interchangeable, and even reversed. Female boxing, women in combat, women rabbis and bishops, God as She, Demi Moore’s G.I. Jane, Rambo-like Sigourney Weaver comforting a terrified and cringing male soldier in Aliens, and all the films and shows that depict women as tough and aggressive and men as sensitive and vulnerable testify to the success of the Frankfurt School and the feminist revolution it helped to midwife.

Millions of Western women now share the feminists’ hostility to marriage and motherhood. Millions have adopted the movement’s agenda and have no intention of getting married and no desire to have children. Their embrace of Marcuse’s Pleasure Principle, their tours of duty in the sexual revolution, mean marriages put off. And, as our divorce and birthrates show, even the marriages entered into are less stable and less fruitful. In the depopulating nations of Europe, even in the old Catholic countries, use of contraceptives is almost universal. Contraception, sterilization, abortion, and euthanasia are the four horsemen of the “culture of death” against which the Holy Father will inveigh to the end of his days. The pill and condom have become the hammer and sickle of the cultural revolution.

Thus did a tiny band of renegade Marxists help subvert American culture and begin the deconstruction of our republic. On the tombstone of architect Christopher Wren is written, “Lector, si monumenta requiris, circumspice.”29 “Reader, if it is monuments you seek, look about you.” So it may be said of Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, and Marcuse, four who made a revolution.

Political correctness is cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance. By classifying its adversaries as haters, or mentally ill, writes journalist Peter Hitchens in his lament for his country, The Abolition of Britain, the new regime imitates the methods of the Soviet Union’s Serbsky Institute, which used to classify political dissidents like Natan Sharansky as insane before locking them up in a psychiatric hospital.32 What Americans describe with the “casual phrase … political correctness,” says Hitchens, is “the most intolerant system of thought to dominate the British Isles since the Reformation.”33 As it is in the United States. To oppose affirmative action qualifies one as a racist. To insist there are roles in society unfit for women, such as Navy carrier pilot, is to be branded a sexist. If you believe immigration is far too high for our social cohesion, you are a nativist or a xenophobe. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association was bullied by gay rights militants into delisting homosexuality as a disorder. Now anyone who considers it a disorder suffers himself from a sickness of the soul called homophobia.

Third, 1960s television could convey the tactics and triumphs of campus radicals and urban revolutionaries instantly to their peers. And the medium, now matured, no longer the fifties fiefdom of Howdy Doody and Matt Dillon, could not only transmit the new ideas, it could reinforce them by creating new visual realities. The fourth indispensable element was Vietnam. If the war meant sacrifice, bloodshed, perhaps death, the Woodstock generation wanted no part of it. What Marcuse offered was intellectual cover for cowardice, a moral argument for malingering, a way to dodge the draft while feeling superior to those who went. The “real heroes” of this war, said Senator Fulbright and New York mayor John Lindsay, are in Canada. The message fell upon receptive ears in the Ivy League and not only there. Finally, the old American establishment was broken on the wheel of Vietnam—the war that liberalism launched and could not win— and its moral authority was shattered in the eyes of the young. The path to power was thus opened to the political vessel of the counterculture, the McGovern campaign of 1972, among whose most enthusiastic workers was young Bill Clinton, the pride and paragon of the Woodstock generation.

Jacques Barzun suggests that the sixties generation simply picked up where the twenties generation left off. The era of sex, booze, and jazz led naturally to the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Only the degeneration was briefly interrupted by the intrusive reality of Depression, World War, and Cold War. Once the 1950s were finished, a new generation took up where the Roaring Twenties crowd had left off when the market crashed in 1929. But if the hedonism of the sixties flowed from the hedonism of the Prohibition Era, there is this difference: that 1920s generation did not hate America. A few “Lost Generation” writers fled the country, but the social rebels of the 1920s were not revolutionaries. After all, they elected Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover in the greatest Republican landslides in history. The sixties intelligentsia was different. As Eric Hoffer wrote, “Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.”

By 2050, a third of Europe’s people will be over sixty. In the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, one in ten will be over eighty!3 The median age of a European will be fifty, nine years above the median age of the oldest nation on earth today, Japan. In Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America and the World, former commerce secretary Pete Peterson writes: Within the next thirty years, the official projections suggest that governments in most developed countries will have to spend at least an extra 9 to 16 percent of GDP annually simply to meet their old age benefit promises. To pay these costs through increased taxation would raise the total tax burden by an unthinkable extra 25 to 40 percent of every worker’s taxable wages—in countries where total payroll tax rates often already exceed 40 percent. Or, if we resort to deficit spending, we would have to consume all the savings and more of the entire developed world.

If Europe wishes to maintain its social safety net, there are three options: trillions of dollars in new tax revenues must be found; European women must begin bearing two and three times as many babies; or Europe must import millions of workers each year. These are the stark choices the Old Continent faces. Yet, as Joseph Chamie of the UN Population Agency notes, “No demographers believe birth rates will rebound. How much will it take to convince a woman to have four children? People are concerned about their appearances, their education, their careers.”5 Europe’s birthrate has been falling for decades. It is no fluke. A birthrate below replacement levels is common to every nation in Europe but Albania, which is Muslim. This is not a matter of conspiracy but of consensus, of free choice. European women have decided they want one or two children, or none, and they have the means—contraception, sterilization, and abortion—to effect these choices. And European women consider these personal desires to be far more compelling than demographic studies describing what Europe will look like when they are seventy or eighty, or gone.

No nation will be more adversely affected by its collapsing birthrate than Russia. Her population is projected to fall from 147 million to 114 million by 2050. As Russians are dying, China, even under its one-couple-one-child policy, expects 250 million more people by 2025. They will not be staying home. Chinese men already outnumber the women available to marry by 40 million. If Mother Russia is nervous, she should be. For even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has twice as much land as China. Three-forths of the enormous Russian land mass lies east of the Urals, but only 8 million Russians live in the trackless expanses of the Russian Far East, fewer people than there are in the Czech Republic. To their south, however, live 1.25 billion Chinese, with 250 million more on the way. This relative handful of Russians occupies the northern half of the largest continent on earth, a land mass larger than the United States, filled with the world’s most vital and desirable resources: timber, oil, gold.

China has long looked on slices of Siberia as “lost territories,” stolen in the nineteenth century when China was weak and beset by revolution and preyed upon by Western imperial powers. During the Taiping revolt that took twenty-five million lives, the czar’s agents swindled the Chi’ing Empire out of 350,000 square miles north of the Amur and between the Ussuri and the sea. This land, now Siberia’s Maritime Province, is twice the size of California, and fits around Manchuria like a cupped hand. Vladivostok, Russia’s port on the Sea of Japan, naval base of her Pacific Fleet, was founded in 1860 on land that had belonged to the Chinese until that year. And as Russia has had to surrender all the lands taken from Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Uzbeks, Tadziks, and Turkmen, what was taken from China will also be reclaimed.

RUSSIA’S OTHER THREAT comes from the ex-Soviet republics to its south—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan. Let us add Afghanistan, where Islamic rebels delivered the coup de grace to the Soviet Empire. Moscow seeks to reassert its authority in this region it calls its “near abroad,” but Russians are historically European and Orthodox Christian, while these people are Asian and Islamic and bitterly resentful at having been colonized and communized. It seems less likely that Russia will be driving south to recapture these lands than that Islamic migrants will be coming north, with, perhaps, Islamic warriors to tear off chunks of Russia, such as Chechnya. Russia’s ally in the Caucasus, Armenia, another Christian nation, has joined Russia, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Spain among the nations with the lowest fertility rates on earth. Armenia, too, has begun to die. By 2025, Iran’s population will be approaching that of Russia. Already, Iranians are menacing the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Moscow’s retreat from Asia appears as inevitable as Chinese and Islamic encroachment on territories once dominated by czars and commissars. Gazing at these population projections, Russia’s Academy of Science has coined a new term, catastroika.17 The scientists understand: demography is destiny.

With half of Russia’s population today, these six nations in twenty-five years will have almost as many people, and the Russians will be older and grayer and these Islamic peoples younger and more virile. In the nineteenth century, immense, mighty, and populous Russia pressed down upon what the czars called “the sick man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire. By present projections, the populations of Turkey and Russia will be comparable in 2050. By 2100, there will be only eighty million Russians. Who will be the “sick man of Europe” then; who the predator and who the prey?

From the the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the great Western nations colonized most of the world. Beginning in 1754, Americans crossed the Alleghenies and drove the French and then the Spanish off their continent, swallowed half of Mexico, corralled the surviving Indians on reservations, pushed over the Rockies to the Pacific, and vaulted to Hawaii, Midway, Guam, and the Philippines. On the other side of the world, Russians under the Romanovs were seizing all the lands from the Arctic to Afghanistan, from Prussia to the Pacific, and down the panhandle of Alaska to Sitka. Led by the British, European nations were invading and colonizing Africa, south and southeast Asia, and establishing enclaves on the coast of a helpless China. The reels of history are now running in reverse. The great retreat of the West, begun with the collapse of Europe’s empires after World War II, reaches climax this century, as the second great Islamic wave rolls into Europe and the peoples of Central Asia and China reclaim what the czars took from them in centuries past. By 2050, Russia will have lost slices of Siberia and will have been pushed out of the Caucusus and back over the Urals into Europe. “If a clod be washed away by the sea,” wrote the poet Donne, “Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were … therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

General Schwartzkopf’s army could have marched into Baghdad, hanged Saddam, and imposed a “MacArthur Regency.” But, with existing U.S. and allied force levels, and the reluctance of Europeans and Arabs to march again with us, it is not likely there will ever be a Desert Storm II.

One year later...

The day of Europe is over. The coming mass migrations from the Islamic world will so change the ethnic composition of the Old Continent that Europeans will be too paralyzed by a threat of terrorism to intervene in North Africa, the Middle East, or the Persian Gulf. Europeans already ignore U.S. sanctions on Iran, Iraq, and Libya. As their populations become more Arabic and Islamic, paralysis will set in. We should know. From the 1850s until World War I, U.S. policy toward the British Empire was held hostage by the Irish, whose votes were decisive in states like New York.

In October 1933, the New York Times quoted Hitler’s Ministry of Justice as saying that ridding society of these poor creatures would make it “possible for physicians to end the tortures of incurable patients, upon requests, in the interests of true humanity.”40 The money saved could be used to benefit “those on the threshold of old age.”41 The language of tenderness is familiar to us all. It calls to mind the words Walker Percy put in the mouth of Father Smith in The Thanatos Syndrome: “Do you know where tenderness leads? … Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.”42 In making their case, the Nazis could cite Churchill, who “wanted the curse of madness to die,” and George Bernard Shaw, who had said in 1933, “If we desire a certain type of civilization we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in.”43 The führer’s thoughts exactly, G.B.

In twenty-five years, there will be 2 million Palestinians inside Israel, 7 million on the West Bank and in Gaza, and 7 million in Jordan—16 million Palestinians living cheek-by-jowl with 6 million Jewish Israelis. (Sixty percent of the Jordanian population is Palestinian.) In 2050, there will be 3 million Palestinians inside Israel, 12 million on the West Bank and in Gaza, and 10 million in Jordan—25 million Palestinians living alongside 7 million Jewish Israelis at midcentury.

War pre-empted this projection.

At the beginning of the seventh century, the Mediterranean world was Christian. But, within fifty years of Muhammad’s hejira to Medina in 622, the armies of Islam had swept over the southern coast of the Inland Sea. Early in the eighth century, Arabs and Berbers brushed aside weak Visigoth resistance, overran Spain, and crossed the Pyrenees into France, where one of the decisive battles of history was fought. At Tours, the “Hammer of the Franks,” Charles Martel defeated the Muslims, who withdrew back over the mountains. ‘“Thus was Christendom saved in the tongue between the rivers, a little south of Chatellrault, and a day’s march north of Poitiers,“wrote Hilaire Belloc.50 Except for the tiny kingdom of the Asturias, which would be the base camp of the Spanish Reconquista, Islam dominated the Iberian peninsula for centuries. Not until 1492 did Ferdinand and Isabella finally drive the Moors out of Spain. In the East, the Islamic invasion came later. In the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire entered the Balkans and defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. In 1453, Constantinople fell. In 1683, the Turks were at the gates of Vienna when they were stopped by the Polish king John Sobieski. But not until 1913 were they finally driven out of most of the Balkans.

Israel was driven out of Lebanon by Hezbollah and is being pushed off the West Bank and out of Gaza by intifadas in which the suicide bombers of Hamas are assuming the lead role. In Turkey and Algeria, elections in the 1990s brought to power Islamic regimes, which were removed by methods other than democratic. In Egypt, Muslim militants have renewed the persecution of Christian Copts. Islamic law has now been imposed in ten northern states of Nigeria.

While the ideology of “Islamism” has failed in Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan to create a modern state that can command the loyalty of its people and serve as a model for other Islamic nations, the religion of Islam has not failed. In science, technology, economics, industry, agriculture, armaments, and democratic rule, America, Europe, and Japan are generations ahead. But the Islamic world retains something the West has lost: a desire to have children and the will to carry on their civilization, cultures, families, and faith. Today, it is as difficult to find a Western nation where the native population is not dying as it is to find an Islamic nation where the native population is not exploding. The West may have learned what Islam knows not, but Islam remembers what the West has forgot: “There is no vision but by faith.”

In its 1948 war of independence, Israel expanded well beyond the borders set by the UN. Exploiting blunders by Egypt’s Nasser and the UN’s U Thant in 1967, Israel seized the Syrian Golan Heights, Arab East Jerusalem, the Old City, Gaza, and the West Bank, and occupied all of Sinai to the Suez Canal in six days. In 1982, Israel drove to the suburbs of Beirut and expelled the PLO. But the retreat of Eretz Israel had already begun. In 1973, the Egyptians recrossed the canal and took back western Sinai. Five years later, the entire peninsula was restored to Egypt. In the 1980s and 1990s, Islamic militants conducted a guerrilla war that forced the Israelis out of Lebanon, and Palestinians launched an intifada that forced Israel to offer land for peace. By 2000, Prime Minister Barak offered 99 percent of the Golan Heights for peace with Syria and 95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, plus East Jerusalem, for peace with an independent Palestine. Assad and Arafat rejected the offers.

Is it in the nature of things that nations and civilizations rise, expand, dominate, and rule, only to recede and offer equality to their subject peoples—an offer accepted, until those subject peoples acquire the power to rise, expand, and dominate themselves? Is our era of the equality of nations really the end of history or but a temporary truce, a phony peace, an armistice, a time of transition from a day of Western dominance to a day when the West pays tribute? British historian J. E. Frond once wrote that “if ten men believe in something so deeply they are willing to die for it, and twenty men believe in something so deeply they are willing to vote for it, the ten will give the law to the twenty.”55 As we look at America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, which peoples today show a greater disposition to die for their dreams? Is all our prattle about the equality of peoples willful self-delusion? Is it but the prelude to a renewed struggle to control the destiny of men and nations, a struggle that a rich, depopulating, dying West, with its deep aversion to war, bred of the bloodbaths of the twentieth century, is destined to lose? As Sophocles said, one must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been. Is it the evening of the West?

The Christianity that conquered the world was not a milquetoast faith, and the custodians of that faith did not believe all religions were equal. One was true; all the rest were false. From the pulpits of Christian churches today we hear mournful apologias for past sins: “We were wrong to accompany the old conquistadors, wrong to impose our faith on native peoples, wrong to be the handmaidens of empire. We confess, we beg forgiveness from those against whom we and our fathers have sinned.” Now this may be the way to heaven, but it can lead to hell on earth. History teaches it is the whimpering dog that gets kicked. Who will convert to a religion whose priests or preachers go about in sackcloth and ashes doing expiation for the sins of centuries past? Will the people now taught that they were victims of Christian racism be satisfied with apologies? Will they let bygones be bygones? Or will they say, “These Christians, whose ancestors oppressed and robbed us, are now paralyzed with guilt and powerless to resist. Let us take back what they took from us; then let us take what they have”?

Does the remorse of “mainstream” Christian denominations mean they have ascended to a higher moral plane, or is this but a manifestation of their loss of faith in the truth and superiority of Christianity? If the West expects a long life, it had best recapture the fighting faith of its youth. For it is in the nature of things that nations and religions rule or are ruled. Times of equality are temporary truces in an endless struggle. “Homo homini lupus,” said the Roman playwright Plautus: “Man is a wolf to man.” Added Thomas Hobbles: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.”

As Golda Meir once said, Israel never had a better friend than Richard Nixon, who rescued her nation in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But the Richard Nixon the author recalls was not blind to the forces of history. He used to say, “A statesman must take the long view.” In San Clemente once, after he hung up from a courtesy call from Yitzhak Rabin, a friend we had met in Israel days after the Six-Day War, my wife, Shelley, asked the ex-president what the prospects for Israel were. “The long run?” Nixon responded. He extended his right fist, thumb up, in the manner of a Roman emperor passing sentence on a gladiator, and slowly turned his thumb over and down. I never asked him what he thought about the prospects of the West.

In 1821, a newly independent Mexico invited Americans to settle in its northern province of Texas—on two conditions: the Americans must embrace Roman Catholicism, and they must swear allegiance to Mexico. Thousands took up the offer. But, in 1835, after a tyrannical general, Santa Anna, seized power, the Texans, fed up with loyalty oaths and fake conversions, and now outnumbering Mexicans in Texas ten to one, rebelled and kicked the tiny Mexican garrison back across the Rio Grande. Santa Anna led an army north to recapture his lost province. At a mission called the Alamo, he massacred the first rebels who resisted. Then he executed the four hundred Texans who surrendered at Goliad. But at San Jacinto, Santa Anna blundered into an ambush. His army was butchered, and he was captured. The Texans demanded his execution for the Alamo massacre, but Sam Houston had another idea. He made the dictator an offer: your life for Texas. Santa Anna signed, and Texas had its independence.

Eight years later, in his final hours in office, Pres. John Tyler decided to write his own page in history by annexing the Texas republic, denying the honor to Jackson’s protégé, James K. Polk, who had won the White House on a pledge to bring Texas into the Union. An enraged Mexico now disputed the U.S. claim to all land north of the Rio Grande. To back up that claim, Polk sent Gen. Zachary Taylor to the north bank of the river. When Mexican soldiers crossed and fired on a U.S. patrol, spilling American blood on what Polk claimed was American soil, he demanded and got a swift congressional declaration of war. By 1848, soldiers with names like Grant, Lee, and McClellan were in Montezuma’s city. A humiliated Mexico was forced to cede all of Texas, the Southwest, and California. To ease the anguish of amputation, the U.S. gave Mexico fifteen million dollars.

In 1910, the troubles began anew. After a revolution that was antichurch and anti-American, U.S. sailors were roughed up and arrested in Tampico. Wilson ordered Veracruz occupied by U.S. Marines until the Mexicans delivered a twenty-one-gun salute to Old Glory. As Wilson explained to the British ambassador, “I am going to teach the South Americans to elect good men.”2 When the bandit Pancho Villa led a murderous raid into New Mexico in 1916, Wilson sent General Pershing and ten thousand troops to do the tutoring. Despite FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, President Cárdenas, in 1938, nationalized U.S. oil companies on a day still honored in Mexican history. Pemex was born, a state cartel that would collude with OPEC in 1999 to run up oil prices to thirty-five dollars a barrel to gouge the Americans who had led a fifty-billion-dollar bailout of a bankrupt Mexico in 1994.

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON, author of The Clash of Civilizations, calls migration “the central issue of our time.”7 He divides immigrants into the “converts” who come to assimilate to our way of life, and “sojourners,” who come to work a few years and return home. “New immigrants” from south of the border, he writes, “are neither converts nor sojourners. They go back and forth between California and Mexico, maintaining dual identities and encouraging family members to join them.”

American leaders are not reacting “with vigor,” even though one Zogby poll has found that 72 percent of the people want immigration reduced, and a Rasmussen poll in July 2000 found that 89 percent wanted English to be America’s official language.10 The people want action. The elites disagree and do nothing. Despite our braggadocio about being “the world’s last superpower,” the U.S. lacks the fortitude to defend its borders and to demand, without apology, that immigrants assimilate into society.

Western nations are already breaking up over ethnicity and culture. Secessionist movements have broken apart the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia and are beavering away in France, Spain, and Italy. In 2001, Germany began a year-long celebration of old Prussia. In England, the Union Jack is being replaced on taxicabs and at World Cup soccer games with the medieval Cross of St. George.

Not Prussia!!!

A North American Union of Canada, Mexico, and the United States has been proposed by President Fox, with a complete opening of borders to the goods and peoples of the three countries. The idea enraptures the Wall Street Journal.14 But Mexico’s per capita GDP of five thousand dollars is only a fraction of America’s, and the income gap between us is the largest on earth between two large neighbor countries.15 Since NAFTA passed in 1993, real wages in Mexico have fallen 15 percent. Half of all Mexicans now live in poverty, and eighteen million subsist on less than two dollars a day, while the U.S. minimum wage is headed for fifty dollars a day.

Consider the student organization MEChA, whose UCLA chapter, a few years back, was chaired by one Antonio Villaraigosa, who came within forty thousand votes of being mayor of Los Angeles in 2001. MEChA stands for Movimento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, the Chicano Student movement of Aztlan. What is El Plan de Aztlan for which MEChA exists? In its own words, MEChA aims to reclaim the land of their fathers that was stolen in the “brutal ‘gringo’ invasion of our territories.”28 With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan.29 In El Plan, “Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.”30 The MEChA slogan is “Por la Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.” Translation: “For our race, everything. For those outside our race, nothing.”

So that's what Mecha at UCSD was about!

Under Fox, Zinser, and Castaneda, Mexican policy has shifted to support of the illegals entering the United States. An Office for Mexicans Abroad has been set up to help Mexicans evade U.S. border guards in the deserts of Arizona and California by providing them with “survival kits” of water, dry meat, granola, Tylenol, antidiarrhea pills, bandages, and condoms. The kits are distributed in Mexico’s poorest towns, along with information on where illegals can go for free social services in California, no questions asked. In short, Mexico City is now aiding and abetting an invasion of the United States, and the U.S. political response is one of intimidated silence and moral paralysis.

As the invasion rolls on, with California as the preferred destination, sociologist William Frey has documented an out-migration of African Americans and Anglo-Americans from the Golden State in search of cities and towns like the ones they grew up in.40 Other Californians are moving into gated communities.

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Concerns about a radical change in America’s ethnic composition have been called un-American. But they are as American as Benjamin Franklin, who once asked, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them … ?”41 Franklin would never find out if his fears were justified. German immigration was halted during the Seven Years War. Former president Theodore Roosevelt warned, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

For a quarter of a century, from 1968 until 1992, the Republican party had a virtual lock on the presidency. The “New Majority,” created by Richard Nixon and replicated by Ronald Reagan, gave the GOP five victories in six presidential elections. The key to victory was to append to the Republican base two Democratic blocs: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern white Protestants. Mr. Nixon lured these voters away from the New Deal coalition with appeals to patriotism, populism, and social conservatism. Success gave the GOP decisive margins in the industrial states and a “Solid South” that had been the base camp of the Democratic party since Appomattox. This Nixon-Reagan coalition proved almost unbeatable. McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis could carry 90 percent of the black vote, but with Republicans taking 60 percent of the white vote, which was over 90 percent of the total, the GOP inevitably came out on top.

For a quarter century, Democrats were unable to pick the GOP lock on the presidency, because they could not shake loose the Republican grip on the white vote. With the exception of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide of 1964, no Democrat since Truman in 1948 had won the white vote. What broke the GOP lock on the presidency was the Immigration Act of 1965. During the anti-Soviet riots in East Berlin in 1953, Bertolt Brecht, the Communist playwright, quipped, “Would it not be easier … for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”46 In the last thirty years, America has begun to import a new electorate, as Republicans cheerfully backed an immigration policy tilted to the Third World that enlarged the Democratic base and loosened the grip that Nixon and Reagan had given them on the presidency of the United States.

California took a third of these new citizens. As non-Latino white registration fell by one hundred thousand in California in the 1990s, one million Latinos registered.56 Now 16 percent of the California electorate, Hispanics gave Gore the state with hundreds of thousands of votes to spare. “Both parties show up at swearing-in ceremonies to try to register voters,” says Democratic consultant William Carrick. “There is a Democratic table and a Republican table. Ours has a lot of business. Theirs is like the Maytag repairman.”57 With fifty-five electoral votes, California, home state of Nixon and Reagan, has now become a killing field of the GOP.

Ron Unz, father of the “English for the Children” referendum that ended state-funded bilingual education, believes the LA riot of 1992 may have been the Rubicon on the road to the balkanization of California. The plumes of smoke from burning buildings and the gruesome television footage almost completely shattered the sense of security of middle-class Southern Californians. Suddenly, the happy “multicultural California” so beloved of local boosters had been unmasked as a harsh, dangerous, Third World dystopia … . the large numbers of Latinos arrested (and summarily deported) for looting caused whites to cast a newly wary eye on gardeners and nannies who just weeks earlier had seemed so pleasant and reliable. If multicultural Los Angeles had exploded into sudden chaos, what security could whites expect as a minority in an increasingly nonwhite California?

Harvard economist George Borjas, who studied the issue, found no net economic benefit from mass migration from the Third World. The added costs of schooling, health care, welfare, social security, and prisons, plus the added pressure on land, water, and power resources, exceeded the taxes that immigrants contribute. The National Bureau of Economic Research puts the cost of immigration at $80.4 billion in 1995.59 Economist Donald Huddle of Rice University estimates that the net annual cost of immigration will reach $108 billion by 2006.60 What are the benefits, then, that justify the risks we are taking of the balkanization of America?