Human Events Patrick J. Buchanan Nov 7, 2005
The Romans conquered the barbarians—and the barbarians conquered Rome.
So it goes with empires. And comes now the penultimate chapter in the history of the empires of the West.
This is the larger meaning of the ritual murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the subway bombings in London, the train bombings in Madrid, the Paris riots spreading across France. The perpetrators of these crimes in the capitals of Europe are the children of immigrants who were once the colonial subjects of the European empires.
At this writing, the riots are entering their 12th night and have spread to Rouen, Lille, Marseille, Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Cannes, Nice. Thousands of cars and buses have been torched and several nursery schools fire-bombed. One fleeing and terrified woman was doused with gasoline and set ablaze.
The rioters are of Arab and African descent, and Muslim. While almost all are French citizens, they are not part of the French people. For never have they been assimilated into French culture or society. And some wish to remain who and what they are. They live in France but are not French.
The rampage began October 27 when two Arab youths, fleeing what they mistakenly thought was a police pursuit, leapt onto power lines and were electrocuted. The two deaths ignited the riots.
Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, a candidate to succeed President Chirac, is said to have infuriated and inflamed the rioters. Before the rampage began, he promised “war without mercy” on crime in the teeming suburbs where unemployment runs at 20% and income is 40% below the national average. He has denounced the rioters as “scum” and “rabble.”
Like the urban riots in America in the 1960s, which the Kerner Commission blamed on “white racism,” Paris’s riots are being blamed on France’s failure to bring Islamic immigrants into the social and economic mainstream of the nation. Solutions being offered range from voting rights for non-citizens to affirmative action in hiring for the children of Third World immigrants.
To understand why this is unlikely to solve France’s crisis, consider how America succeeded, and often failed, in solving her own racial crisis.
While, as late as the 1950s, black Americans were not integrated fully into our economy or society, they had been assimilated into American culture.
They worshipped the same God, spoke the same language, had endured the same Depression and war, listened to the same music and radio, watched the same TV shows, laughed at the same comedians, went to the same movies, ate the same foods, read the same books, magazines and newspapers, and went to schools where, even when they were segregated, they learned the same history.
We were divided, but we were also one nation and one people. Black folks were as American as apple pie, having lived in our common land longer than almost every other ethnic group save Native Americans. And America had a history of having assimilated immigrants in the tens of millions from Europe.
But no European nation has ever assimilated a large body of immigrant peoples, let alone people of color. Moreover, the African and Islamic peoples pouring into Europe—there are 20 million there now—are, unlike black Americans, strangers in a new land, and millions wish to remain proud Algerians, Muslims, Moroccans.
These newcomers worship a different God and practice a faith historically hostile to Christianity, a traditionalist faith that is rising again and recoils violently from a secular culture saturated in sex.
Severed from the civilization and cultures of their parents, these Arab and Muslim youth may hold French citizenship and carry French passports, but they are no more French than Americans who live in Paris are French. Searching for a community to which they can truly belong, they gravitate to mosques where the imams, many themselves immigrants, teach and preach that the West is not their true home, but a civilization alien to their values and historically hostile to their nations and Islam.
The soaring Muslim population is a Fifth Column inside Europe.
Nevertheless, their numbers must grow. For not only do they have a higher birth rate than the native-born Europeans, no European nation, save Moslem Albania, has a birth rate (2.1 births per woman) that will enable it to endure for many more generations. The West is aging, shrinking, and dying.
Yet, to keep Europe’s economy growing and taxes coming in to fund the health and pension programs of Europe’s rising numbers of retired and elderly, Europe needs scores of millions of new workers. And Europe can only find them in the Third World.
Nor should Americans take comfort in France’s distress. By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics in the United States, half of them of Mexican ancestry, heavily concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans still believe by right belongs to them.
Colonization of the mother countries by subject peoples is the last chapter in the history of empires—and the next chapter in the history of the West—that is now coming to a close.
I say: Let the Hispanics have the United States. There are plenty of Hispanics in Florida and they are wonderful people. They have every right to enjoy the prosperity and freedoms of the United States as everyone else.
The Mexicans are correct in saying that the Southwest belongs to them: the United States stole that land from them in an illegal and immoral war back in the 1840’s. The Mexican-American war was a war of aggression and it resulted in the United States acquiring massive wealth in the form of natural resources such as gold, silver and oil. If Mexico was allowed to keep this territory there stands a good chance that it would not suffer from the poverty that compels Mexicans to come to America.
There is no intrinsic virtue in Western culture. Remember the 20th century? European wars killed 100 million people. Europeans also invented all of the weapons of mass destruction including the nuclear bomb. The West and the Soviet Union authored the insanity of Mutually Assurred Destruction. So if Western culture is coming to an end, I say: Let it end.
People do not yet realize the deep significance of this event, which will affect the Continent for years to come! I’ve referenced your blog entry within mine HERE. Thank-you for a very thoughtful post!
#2. Mr. Matthews, your logic is unassailable and clear. It is simple justice that dispossessed peoples be reenfranchised on the land that was taken from them. The American Southwest should be returned to Mexico. At the same time, the “Hispanics” should return to Spain and return the land they conquered centuries ago to the native Mexicans. White Americans should return to Europe, black Americans to Africa, and Asian-Americans to Asia. Of course, this has to happen in Canada too, and South America. Justice will be achieved when Native Americans are reestablished on the land of their ancestors. Come to think of it, their ancestors arrived in North America by way of the great land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, so they too should retrace their steps. I guess true justice demands that peoples worldwide examine their histories and return to their places of origin. That puts all of us back in… let’s see… central Africa? Mr. Matthews, you and I had better buy some land in Olduvai Gorge right away, because real estate prices there are about to go sky high. Maybe we can get a timeshare.
As for your shortsighted, simpleminded diatribe against Western culture, keep in mind (or put it in your mind) that all cultures produces excesses that turn to evil, not just Western culture. Millions have died in China and the Middle East too. Non-European cultures are just as bloody and evil as the West. And would you really want to deprive the world of the achievements of Western culture? No more modern medicine, electric and electronic technology, or agricultural advances, let alone the society that has best allowed human endeavor and achievement to flourish for the good of all.
Get some real historical perspective before you post another silly little rant like the one you just did.
Aztecs: My favorite indigenous culture
Like many other cultures, the Aztecs left some monumental buildings. The ancient Egyptians built the pyraminds and the Sphinx, among many other things. The Greeks left us the Parthenon, among many, many other things. The Aztecs stand out in their own way. The monumental buildings of the Aztecs not only show the military success of the monarch by showing the King leading lines of prisoners of war, they show graphic and detailed scenes of torture. Panel after panel after panel of carved stone showing very clear scenes of human cruelty . Aztecs were also known for human sacrifice. They would slaughter literally thousands of people to the Sun God by cutting the heart out of a living human being.
There is evidence that the Aztecs had figured out the Pythagorean theorem (it is almost necessary if one wishes to build a solid structure) but they never developed geometry beyond that. The Greek Euclid took miscellaneous pieces of mathematical knowledge and constructed a comprehensive branch of mathematics–geometry. He arranged fundamental concepts(axioms)first, then showed how more complex conclusions could be build from those fundamental concepts. This approach is followed in every other branch of mathematics since Euclid’s time: calculus, statistics, discrete logic, differential equations, and so on. We owe that all to Euclid.
Mr. Matthews: There is nothing “intrinsically valuable” in any culture. The value of a culture (as well as the disvalue) comes from the hearts, minds, and souls of the people whose lives create and sustain the culture. From that aspect, you are really asking for your own murder. You are inextricably bound up in Western culture. Everything you think or do has its foundation in Western culture.