Extra! Extra! Pat Buchanan in Pravda! Jude Wanniski December 19, 2001

Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Pat Sees Eye-to-Eye With Moscow

For most of the 30+ years I’ve known him, Pat Buchanan has been going toe-to-toe with Pravda, the Russian daily newspaper whose name translates as “Truth.” I had to laugh the other day when he told me he was about to be interviewed by the paper and he seemed amused as well. I’d prepared another memo for today, but when he sent me the link to the interview and I read it, I knew it was on the margin and had to be brought to your attention. It is quite long and would easily take a half hour if it were televised, but it is a fascinating read that covers a sweep of history, current events, and Pat’s vision of the future, by which I mean the century ahead. I’m always in partial agreement with Pat and certainly share his views on Yugoslavia, Iraq and the Israeli/Palestinian clash, but because of our differences on economics, I have a different take on the future, i.e., once we get the dollar and the world back on a gold standard.

You will have to go to the Pravda link to read the entire interview http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/12/18/23938.html , but I decided to select an appetizer that might get you beyond any prejudices you have about Pat. As I’ve said before, he is a much better commentator than he is a presidential candidate.

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Q. You are coming out with a new book, The Death of the West. It appears this book is about the decline of civilizations. Have you read Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West? If so, did Spengler’s work influence your latest work? In your opinion, why is the West dying, and is there anything that it can do to stay alive?

A. No, I did not read Spengler, though I am familiar with his thesis. If there were two writers who reflect my views, they are the poet T. S. Eliot and the former Trotskyite who became a great Cold Warrior and Man of the Right, James Burnham, who wrote Suicide of the West. But a friend who read my book tells me it makes Spengler sound like an optimist.

Why is the West dying? First, for a simple reason, its people are dying. There is not one European country, except Moslem Albania, where the population is not stagnant or falling. In not one European nation are women having enough children to keep the nation alive. In some twenty European nations, there are already more burials than births, more caskets than cradles. Russia is one of them. Second, the dying peoples of European descent are being quickly replaced by immigrants from non-Western nations. Chinese and Islamic peoples will be moving into Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Arab, African and Islamic peoples are moving into Europe in the hundreds of thousands every year. America is being swamped. We have 35 million Hispanics, and 1.5 million immigrants coming in every year, a third of them illegal aliens, and 90% of them from the Third World. There are 45 million people in our country who do not speak English at home. We face the same Balkanization that pulled the Soviet Union apart.

By 2050, a majority of Americans will trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa and Latin America, not Europe. America will be, predominantly, a Third World country. While these are hard-working good people, they will not preserve the Western heritage, history, heroes, literature, faith or culture. All the subject peoples from the Western colonial empires, from China to Southeast Asia, from India and Pakistan, to Arabia and Africa, are sending their peoples north to invade the Mother Countries of the West. Invading armies go home, immigrant armies do not. The West is being invaded, peacefully, and occupied. Mexicans and even Mexican-Americans talk of a Reconquista, the recapture of the lands they lost to America in The Mexican War.

Third, the great Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc said: “The Faith is Europe, Europe is the Faith.” In Europe and Russia, the Christian faith is dying. In America, Christianity is under assault. Secularism and hedonism, the values of the 1960s, are dominant in our media, culture and education. On issues like abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, pornography, a pagan world view predominates. Our rivers and lakes are being cleaned up, but American culture is being poisoned and polluted. In Europe, the churches -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- are emptying out, while the mosques are filling up.

Fourth, as President Ronald Reagan warned us: We have forgotten who we are and where we came from. To America’s cultural elite, the Crusaders are villains, the great explorers and conquerors of the New World were genocidal racists, our Founding Fathers were evil slave-owners, the old cowboys and soldiers who won the West are accused of cultural genocide and atrocities against the Indians. The battle flags and the statues of Civil War heroes from the South are being torn down. America’s young learn no history at all. Many are ignorant of their past. Our civilization will not survive if we do not know who we are or where we came from, or if we hate those who went before us and gave us all that we have.

Finally, Western countries are surrendering their national sovereignty to transnational institutions. There are powerful ethnic forces pulling apart Britain, Spain, France, Canada. Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the USSR have already broken up. There are secessionist movements even inside Russia. In Western Europe, all the ancient nation-states are selling out their sovereignty and independence to disappear inside a bureaucratic superstate called the EU. This is the great fight that succeeds the Cold War. I would hope Russia will struggle to retain its national identity, independence, sovereignty, culture and faith.