September-December 2007 |
Volume
12, Number 2 |
|---|
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, Patrick J. Buchanan; New York, St Martin’s Press, 2006; 320 pp.
Reviewed by Martin Sheehan
American political commentator, paleoconservative crusader, former Nixon adviser and presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, has produced a third instalment to what may be called his Decline of the West series of books.
In The Death of the West (2002), Buchanan charted the influence of the 1960s counter culture on western societies, linking counter cultural ideas to western moral decline, the falling birth-rate, and the collapse of traditional communities. In Where the Right Went Wrong (2004), Buchanan described the way in which the Republican Party, once the bastion of middle-class conservatism, was converted to liberalism (also known as neoconservatism), and how the Bush Administration used the events of 9/11 to justify a global Wilsonian crusade to advance liberal democracy. In his latest book, State of Emergency (2006), Buchanan takes a last despairing look at how, as he sees it, the idea of the old America republic was sold out by both Democrats and Republicans in favour of a multicultural, anti-Western future in which the Latinisation of America seems the most likely outcome.
It should be stated at the outset that this book is not pleasant reading, and is unlikely to appeal to Catholics already won over to the contemporary Church’s support for multiculturalism. Australian Catholics – and let’s face it, there are plenty of traditionalist Catholics who go along with this agenda – have long supported an end to the White Australia Policy, not only in terms of a government policy supporting whites-only immigration, but also in terms of actively supporting the conscious dismantling of European cultural dominance in Australia through immigration and settlement policies seemingly designed to create what our former Governor-General Bill Hayden once called a “honey-coloured” race in Australia. But it is important that we look again at the policies of the past thirty years to see where we might be heading.
“Civilisations,” says Buchanan, paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee, “die when they fail to resolve the crisis of the age.” And the crisis facing modern America, and the Western world in general, is how to assimilate the millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, forcing their way through our borders every year. The surge in immigrant numbers in recent times dwarfs any immigrant intake in the past two hundred years. The US faces the prospect of assimilating thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants that enter every year, often with the aid and at least the tacit support of the Mexican government. Europeans face the daunting task of assimilating thousands of Muslim immigrants that enter Western Europe every year, many from some of the poorest and most backward parts of the Islamic world.
Reconquest’s advance guard
According to Buchanan, this influx of alien peoples into the West, many of whom are either unassimilable or deeply hostile to Western culture, is an existential crisis for the West far more profound than that offered by the extremists of Al-Qaeda. Already in parts of the south-west of the US, and in Western European countries like Holland and France, immigrant communities are starting to flex their political muscles, demanding special rights for their communities, some even proclaiming that they are no longer a part of the host country.
In the US, illegal immigration from Latin America has been pursued by successive Mexican governments to advance Mexican strategic interests. According to Buchanan, Mexican officials refer to Mexican illegal immigrants as “heroes” and provide them aid and assistance in the form of maps and tips on how to avoid US border patrols, and once they have arrived, how to exploit the US welfare system. Many Mexicans seem to harbour a deep hostility towards America, for its conquest of Texas, New Mexico, and California in the early nineteenth century. Thus, many Mexicans see illegal immigrants entering the US as the advance guard of a bloodless Mexican reconquest of the American south-west. This state of affairs has also been advanced, according to Buchanan, by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has allowed the American south-west to become a part of Greater Mexico so to speak, where Mexican immigrants can go in search of better jobs and higher pay.
How did this situation come about? How was it that the mass migration of people from the Third World to the First World became the greatest challenge to the continued existence of the Western world after the end of the Cold War? Buchanan blames our political and cultural elites largely for the slow destruction of the West through mass migration, through their Panglossian obsession with the multiculturalist fantasy that peoples from vastly different cultural and religious backgrounds could live together in peace.
But it wasn’t just the anti-Western animus and self-loathing of the Western intellectual elites, says Buchanan. Equally to blame were the Western economic and business elites of the corporate world who saw in the wretched, benighted masses of Africa, Asia, and Latin America a source of cheap labour and a means of lowering their costs through the lowering of minimum wages.
It is a bleak picture that Buchanan paints, and in many respects the mind revolts against this analysis. How can this be correct, I found myself saying? How could we have let things go this far? Surely things aren’t that bad? Surely something can be done to turn things around? But then again, the West has been on a suicidal course for some time now.
Abolishing ourselves
All the life-giving sources of Western culture and society have been undermined and insulted by our cultural elites. The Christian religion is mocked and pursued from the public square as the source of irrationality and superstition. Marriage and the family are derided as oppressive and homophobic, and as the sources of guilt and neuroses. Children are taught in schools that Western civilisation is inherently racist, genocidal, and authoritarian, while other civilisations, from the Aztec to ancient China, are held up as inherently enlightened and tolerant.
So, why not abolish ourselves and bring in others to take our place? That certainly seems to be the attitude of many on the political Left. The people have let them down for long enough, with their patriotism and family values and their propensity to turn to religion, that is, Christianity (other non-Western religions are OK, it seems), for solace. And our greedy corporate elites seem determined to smash union power and abolish minimum wages by calling for more immigration from the Third World, even if that means the end of what is distinctive about our society. This seemingly unlikely alliance between the multiculturalist Left and the corporate Right makes sense if you think about it. Each gets what it wants out of the deal.
Huge experiment
Or am I completely wrong about the whole thing? And maybe Pat Buchanan is also completely wrong. After all, it is passing strange that a staunch Catholic like Pat Buchanan is lamenting the demise of Protestant America at the hands of Catholic Mexicans. Maybe the Latino deluge will do America a world of good, sweeping away the secular, liberal dross dominating modern America. What is certain, however, is that through deregulation, multiculturalism, and mass migration policies we have embarked on a gigantic social experiment, with consequences we are yet to see clearly. What is also certain is that the West will never be the same again.
And the Church is in a precarious position. Once seen as the defender of Western civilisation and traditional morality, increasingly the Church is seen rather as the defender of the Third World poor and marginalised. In countries like Australia, the Church supports multiculturalism and mass migration, including a more tolerant attitude to illegal immigrants and refugees. Maybe the Church will gain from all this change. Then again, the Church may be inviting its enemies into the very heart of what once was known as Christendom. Only time will tell.
