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Pat Buchanan
2000 Reform Party Presidential Candidate; Author, The Death of the West: How Mass Immigration, Depopulation and a Dying Faith Are Killing Our Culture and Country
It was a tough thing to leave the Republican Party, but I wanted to try and build a new party that would represent my views and values, because I thought the Republican Party was moving away from them. However, late in the campaign of 2000, I realized I wasn't going to succeed. As the campaign went on, I thought, I'm not doing very well, but I am getting some votes. My tombstone could well read, "Here lies Pat Buchanan. He elected Al Gore." So, I started saying to myself a little prayer: "Lord, don't let that one be on my tombstone." And you know what? A voice came through the clouds and said, "Patrick, since you've led a relatively good life, I'm going to do you a favor, just this once. I'm going to help you defeat Al Gore and help you elect George W. Bush…You know all those Jewish folks down in Palm Beach County that love you so much? At the polls they think they're going to vote for Al Gore, who they want, but they're going to vote for you, and as a consequence of that, George Bush is going to be elected president." Then he said, "But Patrick, if you ever try something like this again, I won't be there to help you." So that's how it all ended up in the year 2000.
At that point I decided it was time to tell the straight, unvarnished truth about the condition of our country and Western civilization. The thesis of The Death of the West is quite simply this: The West is dying. There is not a single Western country, not a single European country, except Muslim Albania, where the birthrate is sufficient to keep the country alive. Between now and the middle of this century, Europe's population will decline by the exact amount as if all the people of Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Germany completely disappeared. Europe's population will shrink by 128 million people. The median age in Europe in 2050 will be 50 years old. One-tenth of Europe will be over 80 years of age. As this population ages, shrinks and dies, the place set aside for their children is going to be filled up by mass migration from North Africa, the Middle East and southern Africa. In order for Europe today to maintain 50 years from now the same ratio of workers to retirees, which is about five to one, they will have to bring in over one billion immigrants - as much as the population of China.
Russia and Texas
Russia had 147 million people two years ago; it now has 145 million. By mid-century, it will be 114 million. I got my statistics from the United Nations - Joe Chamie. I told him to take the present birthrate and simply run it out to the end of this century. He gets Russia down to 80 million. Asian Russia is equal to the U.S. in size but has a population of ten million. They are aging and dying off. Those lands were stolen from China when China was weak. When I was in the Nixon White House, in 1969, there were clashes between Russian and Chinese troops along the Ussuri River and the Amur River. The area where Vladivostok is right now was taken from China in 1860. These older Russians will die out, and the Chinese will take it back. How will they do it? Not necessarily militarily. They're going to do it the way we took Texas.
In 1821, the Mexican government said they had an empty province up north, so let's invite in the Americans. They've only got to do two things: convert to Catholicism and swear allegiance to Mexico. In 1835, there were 3,000 Mexicans in Texas and 30,000 Americans. So when General Santa Anna took power in Mexico City, the Americans kicked the Mexican army out and declared independence. That's how we got Mexico. And that's how China will get back Russia in the Far East. In the middle of this century, the people of Alaska are going to look across the Bering Strait, not at old, friendly Russian folks, but at tough, young, Chinese pioneers.
We have 35 million Hispanics in the U.S. - 13 percent of a huge population. In 1950, 1960, it was one percent of a population half the size of ours. What is the difference between the current immigration into America as compared to the immigration when our parents came here? One, almost all our parents came here legally. Half a million Mexicans get into the U.S. illegally every single year. Two, when our parents and grandparents came here, they came to be Americans, to learn the language, know the history, adopt the heroes. The Mexicans who come here are hard-working folks, but they are proud Mexicans. They don't want to become Americans. They retain their Spanish language, watch Spanish television, listen to Spanish-speaking radio and go back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico. They want dual citizenship. Culturally and socially, they want to be part of Mexico, and economically, they prefer to be part of the U.S. because of our standard of living. In that way lies Balkanization. You have two cultures, two languages, as you have on the West Bank between Israel and the Palestinians. You're going to end up with two nations. The new immigrants are coming to a country where multiculturalism is preached, telling you to keep your separate identity and to demand racial entitlements and ethnic preferences.
A growing and expanding population is the sign of a species that is healthy, just like a dying population is an endangered species. People of European descent have now fallen to 16 percent from 25 percent of the world's population, and in every Western country the native-born population is dying out. I've traced it back to the mid-1960s, when the baby boom that had run from 1946 to 1964 started to trail off.
The Counterculture Culprit
What happened back in the 1960s? The counterculture. A generation came onto the campuses in 1964. That was the year you had Mario Savio. It was the beginning of a counterculture that was anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-Western. The famous intellectual, Susan Sontag, said in 1967, "The white race is the cancer of human history." The idea was that the West was not only a flawed civilization, but responsible for slavery, imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy - all the evils of the world, sanctioned by the Christian Church. A tremendously hostile counterculture arose in antithesis to Western culture and civilization. It captured the intellectuals, but it did not succeed politically.
Politically, there was success in the conservative movement. After 1964, Richard Nixon won the election and we converted that into a 49-state landslide in '72. After that broke apart, in 1980 Ronald Reagan rode out of the West and won 44 states. Then we won 49 states again. With Reagan's victory, we defeated communism in the Soviet Union. But while we were winning the Cold War, we were losing the cultural war at home. What was represented by McGovern - acid, amnesty, abortion - was prevailing among the young. This counterculture is now dominant in the American media, Hollywood and television. We have all this blasphemous art. In high schools and grammar schools, they hand out condoms to children. If something like that had happened in the '50s, they would have been lynched or indicted and sent to jail.
This cultural revolution, which went to war against the traditional culture in America, has triumphed among the elite. Neither Ronald Reagan nor Richard Nixon could win 49 states today. With that culture, the counterculture that I believe is carcinogenic, the nations and peoples began to die. T.S. Eliot said that when a religion dies, the people soon discover they no longer have anything to live for. Hilaire Belloc wrote, "Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe." Christianity, which is fundamentally the religion of the West, is basically dormant and dying in Europe. In the U.S. there are strong pockets of religious faith: Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism. And the Southern Baptists, evangelicals, fundamentalists and Catholic traditionalists are strong. But overall, the faith has died among a huge segment of the population, and that's the part of the population that has begun to die.
As a result of this, more and more women are having zero, one or, at most, two children. You have an average birthrate of 1.1 children in many European countries. That's only half the rate needed to keep them alive. For the salvation of the West, to preserve the West as a separate, unique civilization, it is going to need a massive conversion of the heart. That is beyond politics.
Defending the Borders
In the next 50 years, the Third World will grow by the equivalent of 30 to 40 new Mexicos. If you go to the end of the century, the white and European population is down to about three percent. This is what I call the death of the West. I see the nations dying when the populations die. I see the civilization dying. It is under attack in our own countries, from our own people. The descendents of Mario Savio are attacking it, and also the folks coming into this country from China and Mexico. What is the "greatest generation" to them? Iwo Jima, Valley Forge, the Gettysburg Address - what does it mean to them? In our colleges and universities the history of America is not being taught. In a study they gave 550 college seniors from the finest schools in America - Harvard, Dartmouth, Penn. - a basic history test. One-fourth of these seniors knew who the American general at Yorktown was. One-third knew that "of the people, by the people, for the people" was associated with the Gettysburg Address. However, 99 percent were able to identify "Beavis and Butthead," and 98 percent Snoop Doggy Dogg. No one has yet challenged my numbers in all the interviews I've done. I didn't invent them. Ninety percent of them come from the U.N. and the other ten percent come from The New York Times, which is not a strong Buchanan paper.
If necessary, you've got to declare a moratorium on all immigration into the U.S. You have to, if necessary, put American troops on the border to protect our borders. What are we doing defending the borders of Kosovo, Kuwait and South Korea when the borders of the U.S. are bleeding and hemorrhaging? History ought to be taught to children from the first day, from kindergarten through first grade all the way through every year of high school, as it was taught to me when I was growing up. These ideas are necessary if we want to maintain the unique, different nation we are. Solzhenistsyn said that God has made every nation with a unique face. A nation should be preserved. The great battle we all face is to preserve the great character, identity, independence and sovereignty of the United States of America.
