It’s a little early for Halloween, but the latest book by the disgusting paleocon and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan seems designed to scare the bejeebers out of the American people about illegal (and more ominously, non-white) immigration.
The book, “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” is currently ranked as Amazon.com’s number one seller– disturbing, but hardly proof of overwhelming public support for Buchanan’s ideas.
The Think Progress website reports:
In his new book, State of Emergency, Pat Buchanan argues for “an immediate moratorium on all immigration.” Why? To preserve the dominance of the white race in America. Buchanan explains on pg. 11:
America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.
Indeed, Buchanan argues quite explicitly that only whites have the appropriate “genetic endowments” to keep America from collapsing. From pg. 164:
In 1994, Sam Francis, the syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Times…volunteered this thought:
“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted by a different people.”
Had Francis said this of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people, it would have gone unnoted. But he was suggesting Western civilization was superior and that only Europeans could have created it. If Western peoples perish, as they are doing today, Francis was implying, we must expect our civilization to die with us. No one would deny that when the Carthaginians perished, Carthaginian civilization and culture perished. But by claiming the achievements of the West for Europeans, Francis had passed beyond the bounds of tolerance. He was summarily fired.
MSNBC has a summary of the book, which seems to conflate Mexican immigration to the United States with Muslim immigration to Europe, and proclaim one great threat to Western civilization.
I wonder if Buchanan found room in his book to mention that by the third generation, 100 percent of Latino immigrants to the US speak English as their first (and often only) language. Or that a large portion of the American soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan have Hispanic surnames, and that some of them are the children of illegal immigrants.
I suspect Buchanan’s warnings will appeal to a number of frequent Harry’s Place commenters (whom I further suspect are a tiny minority of our actual readers). But here’s something I’ve been wondering about:
On the one hand, we have our flat-out racist and antisemitic commenters, isolationist opponents of US and UK intervention in the Middle East and support for Israel, akin to Buchanan. (It should come as no surprise to anyone that Buchanan’s column appears at Justin Raimondo’s antiwar.com site. Or that Raimondo supported Buchanan’s three campaigns for president. Or that the Stop the War Coalition site links frequently to antiwar.com.)
On the other hand, we have our commenters who view every Muslim as guilty (of something) until proven innocent. These commenters tend to be strongly pro-Israel but also (mysteriously to me) supportive of US efforts to extend democracy to the Middle East, including the invasion of Iraq. If the vast majority of Middle Easterners are Muslims, and if Muslims are (as they seem to believe) inherently anti-democratic, how do they think this is going to happen?
Anyway both groups of commenters will probably find things to agree with in Buchanan’s book– particularly in Chapter 11, “Eurabia.”
None of this means the US should neglect the security of its borders. And those of us on the Left should recognize that helping to spread political, social and economic equality around the world can reduce the desperation that now drives so many people to immigrate, legally or otherwise.
But hysterical rants from the likes of Pat Buchanan are not part of any serious solution.
(Hat tip: David Weigel.)
