The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  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.

  Even if accepted by the Arabs, what guarantee has Israel that these are the last territorial demands on the Jewish state? Why should the Arabs, after having digested what Israel gives up, not pursue the goal of expelling the “Zionist entity” from the Middle East? Israelis say they are offering their neighbors a just peace, but Arabs may see Israel as a nation in retreat, trying to cut the best deal it can. Why should the Arabs not believe that as war brought Israel to the table to offer land for peace, more war will produce more land for peace?

  From the Arab standpoint, war works. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 led to Israel’s surrender of Sinai. Hezbollah’s jihad drove Israel out of Lebanon. Two intifadas have forced Israel to offer to yield almost all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. As for Israel’s military might, it has no more halted her retreat than military superiority halted the retreat of the West. Did Russia’s twenty thousand nuclear weapons prevent the loss of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the rest of Moscow’s empire in the Caucasus and Central Asia?

  Here is the analogy with the West. 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?

  MILITANCY, MARTYRDOMS, AND, yes, intolerance are the marks of rising religions and conquering causes. Early Christians who had accepted death rather than burn incense to Roman gods were soon smashing those Roman gods—no equality for them. Baptizing Clovis, the bishop of Reims admonished the king of the Franks, “Bend your neck. Burn what you worship, worship what you burn!”56 Not very ecumenical, Your Grace. Protestant monarchs and Catholic kings alike did not flinch at burning heretics or drawing and quartering them at the Tyburn tree. 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.”57

  AS ISRAEL is an affluent modern nation surrounded by poor neighbors with historic grievances, so the West is a prosperous modern civilization surrounded by poor neighbors with historic grievances. And as Western intellectuals are harshest about Western history, so Israel’s “post-Zionist” “new historians” paint their nation’s birth in its blackest hues. And as the West believes all nations will be content with what they have, some Israelis believe the Palestinians will be content in their Bantustans in Gaza and on the West Bank. But why should they? When Chinese outnumber Russians twenty to one instead of ten to one, why should they not seek to reclaim what was taken from them when Russia was strong and China was weak?

  Israel confronts an Islam with an ancient history as a fighting faith and peoples willing to die for a cause, while America shares two thousand miles of border with Mexico. So perhaps the analogy is inexact. But then America is not the country she once was. In 1953, an unsentimental old soldier named Ike ordered all illegal aliens out of the United States in “Operation Wetback.” Can anyone imagine Mr. Bush ordering five or ten million illegal aliens expelled from the United States?

  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.

  SIX

  LA RECONQUISTA

  The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a shot.1

  —Excelsior

  National Newspaper of Mexico

  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. On his last day in office, Andrew Jackson recognized the Lone Star Republic of his old subaltern, who
had led Old Hickory’s Tennesseans in the 1814 slaughter of the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend.

  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.

  Mexicans seethed with hatred and resentment. 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. One is reminded of Italian statesman Cavour’s response when asked the diplomatic goal of his unified nation in 1859: “To astonish the world with our ingratitude.”3

  The point of this history? Mexico has an historic grievance against the United States that is felt deeply by her people. They believe we robbed their country of half its land when Mexico was young and weak. There are thus deep differences in attitudes toward America between old immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, and today’s immigrants from Mexico. And with fully one-fifth of all peoples of Mexican ancestry now in the United States, and up to a million more coming every year, we need to understand the differences between the old immigrants and the new, and the America of yesterday and the America of today.

  1. The numbers pouring in from Mexico are larger than any wave from any other country in so short a time. In the 1990s alone, folks of Mexican ancestry in the United States grew by 50 percent to twenty-one million, and that does not include the six million Hispanics who refused to tell census takers their country of origin. Mexican Americans are also concentrated in the U.S. Southwest, though the Founding Fathers wanted immigrants spread out among the population to ensure assimilation.

  2. Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race. History and experience teach us that different races are far more difficult to assimilate. The sixty million Americans who claim German ancestry are fully assimilated, while millions from Africa and Asia are still not full participants in American society.

  3. Millions of Mexicans are here illegally. They broke the law to get into the United States, and they break the law by being here. Each year, 1.6 million illegal aliens are apprehended, almost all of them trying to breach our bleeding Southern border.4

  4. Unlike the immigrants of old, who bade farewell forever to their native lands when they boarded the ship, for Mexicans, the mother country is right next door. Millions have no desire to learn English or to become citizens. America is not their home; Mexico is; and they wish to remain proud Mexicans. They have come here to work. Rather than assimilate, they create Little Tijuanas in U.S. cities, just as Cubans have created a Little Havana in Miami. Only America hosts twenty times as many people of Mexican descent as of Cuban descent. With their own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films, and magazines, the Mexican Americans are creating an Hispanic culture separate and apart from America’s larger culture. They are becoming a nation within a nation.

  5. The waves of Mexican immigrants are also coming to a different America than the old immigrants. A belief in racial rights and ethnic entitlements has taken root among our minorities. This belief is encouraged by cultural elites who denigrate the melting pot and preach the glories of multiculturalism. Today, ethnic enclaves are encouraged to maintain their separate identities, and in the barrios ethnic chauvinism is rife. “The integrationist impulse of the 1960s is dead,” writes Glenn Garvin in Reason, “Liberal chic in the 1990s is segregation, dressed up as identity-group politics.”5 If today Calvin Coolidge declared, “America must remain American,” he would be charged with a hate crime.6

  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.”8 Of the 1.6 million arrested each year crossing the U.S. border, Huntington warns:

  If over one million Mexican soldiers crossed the border Americans would treat it as a major threat to their national security and react accordingly. The invasion of over one million Mexican civilians, as [Mexican president Vicente] Fox seems to recommend, would be a comparable threat to American societal security, and Americans should react against it with vigor.

  Mexican immigration is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country.9

  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.

  Perhaps our mutual love of the dollar can bridge the cultural chasm, and we shall all live happily together in what one author calls The First Universal Nation.11 But Uncle Sam is taking a hellish risk in importing a huge diaspora of tens of millions from a nation vastly different from our own. And if we are making a fatal blunder, it is not a decision we can ever revisit. Our children will live with the consequences, balkanization, the end of America as we know her. “If assimilation fails,” writes Huntington, “the United States will become a cleft country with all the potentials for internal strife and disunion that entails.”12 Is that risk worth taking? Why are we taking it?

  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. People identify less and less with the nation-state, more and more with kith and kin. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, independence parties have been formed, and 14 percent of British Columbia now favors separation from Canada.13

  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 o
f 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. Throw open the border, and millions could flood across into the United States in months. Is our country nothing more than an economy?

  OUR OLD IMAGE is of Mexican folks as docile, conservative, friendly, Catholic people of traditional beliefs and values. There are still millions of these hard-working, family-oriented, patriotic Americans of Mexican heritage, who have been among the first to answer America’s call to arms. And any man, woman, or child, from any country or continent, can be a good American. We know that from our history.

  But the demographic sea change, especially in California, where a fourth of the people are foreign-born and almost a third are Latino, has spawned a new ethnic chauvinism. When the U.S. soccer team played Mexico in the Los Angeles Coliseum a few years back, the “Star-Spangled Banner” was hooted and jeered, an American flag was torn down, and the American team and its few fans were showered with water bombs, beer bottles, and garbage.16

  Two years ago, the south Texas town of El Cenizo declared Spanish its official language and ordered that all official documents be written in Spanish and all town business conducted in Spanish.17 Any cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities was made a firing offense. El Cenizo has, de facto, seceded from the United States.

  In the New Mexico legislature in 2001, a resolution was introduced to rename the state “Nuevo Mexico,” the name it carried before it became a part of the American Union. When the bill was defeated, the sponsor, Rep. Miguel Garcia, suggested to reporters that “covert racism” may have been the cause—the same racism, he said, that was behind naming the state New Mexico in the first place.18