In his latest book, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, author Patrick Buchanan writes, “Historians may one day call ‘the pill’ the suicide tablet of the West.” Why would people embrace something that clearly causes their destruction? Power. As he explains, that’s what the decline of the West is about: power over God and each other. Western civilization has Christianity at its foundation, so it cannot survive under the control of people who want power over God and His eternal laws.
Advances in the technology and accessibility of contraception and abortion, along with revisionist history that teaches self-loathing, are significant contributions to the “Death of the West.” Buchanan offers an urgent and eloquent defense of why it’s worthwhile for the human race that Western civilization live on. Why should we care that our population is stalled or decreasing, immigration from the Third World shows no sign of abating, and culture is rapidly changing for the worst? Americans and Europeans should not be so easily persuaded that, in the words of Susan Sontag, “the white race is the cancer of human history.” Who else has contributed comparable literature, poetry, architecture, painting, sculpture, music, scientific theory, law, philosophy, human rights, government, or technology? The list could go on.
Buchanan offers a compelling argument, complete with statistical analysis, to prove that the Western world has a declining population and immigrants from the Third World are increasing their numbers and encroaching on what have been historically Western lands and cultures. In fact, “of Europe’s forty-seven nations, only one—Muslim Albania—was, by 2000, maintaining a birth rate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely.” Twenty-first century Western society encourages every “lifestyle” except traditional nuclear families with several children. Many Western women are choosing careers over children, and the effects will be staggering. The current projections are that population will so substantially decline in Europe over the next 50 years that a radical cultural shift will take place. In America, legal and illegal immigration continues at such a pace that in 50 years America will be a country with no majority race. The West is not reproducing enough to stay even at replacement rate. Eventually, our numbers will be so small as to render us insignificant on a global scale.
The second part of the equation is the cultural revolution whose main modus operandi is to shame America and Europe into being so humiliated at their past that they willingly surrender their influence in the world. The first line of offense is indoctrination in schools. Few institutions have been such effective tools of cultural revolutionaries as those of higher education. Most of academia is thoroughly and unashamedly liberal. The Frankfurt School, whose ideas were influential in American teacher’s colleges as early as the 1940s and 50s, “openly stated that whether children learned facts or skills at school was less important than that they graduate conditioned to display the correct attitudes.” Sounds familiar!
That revisionist history has wound its way into the culture is evident in the disdain that substantial numbers of highly educated people have for various American icons like Christopher Columbus and George Washington. In the name of the First Amendment, most standards of common decency have been tossed out by the courts. As Buchanan notes, American culture itself has undergone definite change: “While America remains a predominately Christian society and country, her public institutions and popular culture have been thoroughly de-Christianized.”
Buchanan’s ideas for reclaiming American society include appointing conservative Supreme Court justices, defunding the cultural revolution, and local moral censorship. The real question is whether the people of Western civilization will fight for their own survival. Frankly, the signs aren’t good, but hope exists that people can be moved to action through means such as this book. As a character in the popular new movie The Lord of the Rings, concludes: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world…besides the will of evil.” Those who read this book should remember that things may look grim now, but we must always have hope.
Cara Camden is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, and currently works in Washington, D.C.
(This article courtesy of HLI Reports, a publication of Human Life International.)
