Buchanan and “White America”
Cross-posted from PoliBlog:
Via Human Events we have Pat Buchanan to go along with my Bill O’Reilly post from yesterday: Path to National Suicide
According to the Census Bureau, from mid-2005 to mid-2006, the U.S. minority population rose 2.4 million, to exceed 100 million. Hispanics, 1 percent of the population in 1950, are now 14.4 percent. Their total number has soared 25 percent since 2000 alone. The Asian population has also grown by 25 percent since 2000.
The number of white kids of school age fell 4 percent, however. Half the children 5 and younger in the United States are now minorities.
What is happening to us? An immigrant invasion of the United States from the Third World, as America’s white majority is no longer even reproducing itself. Since Roe v. Wade, America has aborted 45 million of her children. And Asia, Africa and Latin America have sent 45 million of their children to inherit the estate the aborted American children never saw. God is not mocked.
And white America is in flight.
This is breathtaking, and not in a good way.
I have noted Buchanan’s equation of “White”/”European” with “American” before, but I continue to be stunned by it (although I should know better by now). That he can continue to spout this bilge and still be treated like a legitimate commentator is disheartening. It certainly speaks very poorly of Human Events for publishing this piece .
Understand the basic thesis: less Whites in the United States equals “national suicide.” In other words the American “nation” is white people whose culture is somehow endemic to them and only them. For example, Buchanan clearly refers to “our” culture when referring to the assimilation of Blacks in the 1960s (I won’t get into the issue of discussing the assimilation of people who had lived here for generations–or the fact that maybe slavery, Jim Crow and segregation may have had something to do problems of integration….):
In 1960, 18 million black Americans, 10 percent of the nation, were not fully integrated into society, but they had been assimilated into our culture.
Emphasis mine.
Certainly when he asks “What is happening to us?” he is referring to Whites, rather than using an inclusive “us.” So I guess he just assumes that he readers are all White.
Surely being American has to do with certain ideas and ideals, not to mention being born here (or naturalized), living and working and contributing to the lives of one’s fellow citizens. Americans, I should like to tell Pat, come in all hues. Perhaps Pat needs to get out of the house more often, but it really doesn’t take a lot of looking to discover this fact.
The notion that the waves of darker hued persons swarming into America to overtake the Whites is somehow God’s punishment should be offensive to Christians–as if Mexicans coming across the border to work in our fields and clean our fast food restaurants is to be likened to some Biblical plague of locusts.
He also demonstrates a great deal of historical obtuseness, given that none of the following is analogous to the United States:
All over the Western world, multiethnic, multicultural countries are coming apart over language, ethnicity, history. The Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, Yugoslavia into half a dozen. Czechs and Slovaks divorced. Scots want separation from England. Catalans and Basques seek independence. Corsicans and Bretons want out of France. Northern Italians want to secede. Only immigrants who prefer Ottawa prevent Quebecois from breaking free of Canada.
Indeed, in most cases we are talking about circumstances of artificially constructed states (the USSR, Yugoslavia) and the one case that he cites as staying together he attributes to immigrants–does he even read what he is writing?
And if this column is what Bill O’Reilly was referring to when he said that Pat Buchanan “is right” then the argument that O’Reilly isn’t really concerned about the “white Christian male power structure” is rather weak.
A reminder as to what O’Reilly said on May 30, 2007:
O’REILLY: .what “The New York Times” wants and the far-left want? They want to breakdown the white Christian male power structure of which you are a part and so am I. And they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically breakdown the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say that you’ve got to cap it with a number.
Again: that Pat Buchanan is considered a serious commentator by any significant segment of the population is a disgrace.
h/t for the Buchanan article:
Buck Naked Politics
A minor point, but I think this is not true:
USSR was not an artificially constructed state. With some degree of truth that could only be said with relevance to Baltic states that were allowed independence after the revolution, but were re-taken by Stalin during the WW2. All the rest of the USSR had basically the same borders as the old Russian Empire, which was the result of the hundreds years of history.
Switzerland is a multi-ethnic, multi-language country that isn’t “coming apart”. There are any number of others.
While I think there is a good argument to be made for a unifying national language, that isn’t it. A better reason is status. Even in relatively egalitarian Switzerland there are status distinctions made among the various languages and, indeed, even among dialects of the languages. For example, speakers of Schwyzertutsch, the Swiss dialect of German, are considered bumpkins.
The idea of formalizing and permanentizing class structures in the United States by self-selection via maintaining linguistic distinctions doesn’t appeal to me very much.
True. Then again, Those that are moving into Switzerland, are tending to adopt its culture.
The Elephant in the room that everyone keeps dancing around, is culture.
Nikolay:
What I meant was that the USSR was built around the Russia empire, which the Soviets enlarged, building a ring of buffer territory around Russia itself. The breakup of that conglomeration was inevitable once the central power in Moscow was broken. We are not talking about states that asked to join up or that didn’t have pre-existing identities, cultures and histories. We are talking about pre-existing states added primarily, if not exclusively, by force.
Take, for example, places like Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, which were never treated as equal to Russia. Or, places like Lativia, Estonia and Lithuania, which were added to the USSR in WWII.
Indeed, one could go one. For Buchanan to act as if the fleeing of these (and other) Soviet Republics from Russia when the situation presented itself represents either a radical misunderstanding of the situation or serious disingenuousness.
It is no surprise that once Communist Party lost power in the USSR that these states started to seek independence. This is not a situation that is in any way analogous to the USA.
The counter-example of Switzerland is an excellent one. One could also cite Belgium, for that matter.
That is just not the case. Soviet Russia was not larger than Russian empire. Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all belonged to the Russian empire. The only “enlargement” of Russian empire done by the Soviets was in some “no man’s lands” in Asia. And there were also Finland and Poland which belonged to Russian empire but didn’t become part of the USSR. Of course, many of those republics fought for independence when they were part of Russia, and they naturally broke from USSR. But, anyway, the breaking up of the USSR was not the end of artificial Communist entity, which while gaining some territory after WW2 was still smaller than Russian empire, but of the hundreds years of tsarist Russia.
This is not really important for the Buchanan’s article, but it just seems to me that it’s a common misunderstanding, to think that the end of USSR was just the end of Communism, when in fact it was the end for the historical efforts of countless generations of Russians. On the other hand, it’s probably true that Russian empire, just as any other empire, was an artificial state.
I will say this: my phrase “artificial state” is a poor choice of words, as all states are artificial by definition.
And in regards to the USSR: it inherited the Russian Empire, as it was in 1917. And while the Baltic states did gain independence at one point, they were re-absorbed into the USSR in 1940.
Both our Grandpaents came to the USA legally.
They had to have a sponsor, or came as indentured
servants for three years before applying for citizenship, and all had to learn to speak English. NOW!
The emigration laws we have on the books are just fine, and the imigration quotas established in the 60s, should stay the same.
I think legal emigration should be stopped for a year or two.