THE PERILS OF A POLEMICIST :

The earthquake in France (Pat Buchanan, April 24, 2002, TownHall.com)

Though a rightist, Le Pen...is not a conservative in the American sense, nor can he be considered pro-American. Like many European nationalists, he puts himself "socially on the Left, fiscally on the Right, and nationally, wholly for France."

What led to the explosion of support for the septuagenarian Le Pen?

One cause is what his National Front calls "the invasion." France is now host to five million Moslems, though she is neither a huge country like the United States, nor has she a history of assimilating immigrants. Also, these five million Arabs and Moslems have been associated with rising crime and assaults upon French citizens, including a riot last year at the France-Algeria soccer match, where Parisians were forced to lock themselves in their skyboxes for their own safety.

There is also the sense that French culture is being swamped by America's, and France's national identity, even her language, is being lost. What is happening in France is happening to a degree in every country of the West where the populations are dying as the great migrations from the Third World have only just begun.

The earthquake in France may portend the earthquake to come in the West, and even in America. Nor is this necessarily an unhealthy thing. As Georges Bernanos wrote of an earlier time, to be a reactionary today may simply mean to be alive, because only a corpse does not react anymore -- against the maggots teeming upon it.

Here in just a few paragraphs we see the tragedy of Pat Buchanan. On the one hand, he's one of the only political commentators in America to have clearly understood the inevitable tensions that are rising as a result of the West's demographic crisis (declining native populations with rising immigration to compensate for the birth dearth) and its modern multiculturalism (resulting in a failure to assimilate the new immigrants).

On the other hand, by the point where you are at least implicitly referring to these immigrants as "maggots", you've slipped over the edge into a frightening form of race-baiting. For the blame really belongs not on them, but on us. It is our own declining birthrates that are forcing us to recruit workers abroad and it is our acquiesence in the anti-Western social agenda of the Left that is turning what was once an American "melting pot" into an undigestable "mosaic" The difference of course it that where once we required immigrants to learn English and brought tremendous social pressure to bear on them to adopt American ways and ideals, now we are so bashful about the superiority of our own culture that we fail to impart it fully to our new citizens. The American motto--E Pluribus Unum--calls on us to forge one culture out of many peoples. Today, instead, we seem to believe that we can remain a coherent and viable nation even if our society totters upon many different, sometimes even antithetical, cultures.

We owe it not just to ourselves but to the newest Americans to inculcate the American/Western values upon which our nation is based in them and in their children. We have historically been a richer and better nation for the contributions of our great diversity of citizens, but they have in turn been richer and better for having to integrate themselves into our Western Civilization. If we are to avoid the sorry fate of France, we must require that integration again. Give us your tired, your poor, your weary, yearning to breath free, but let us recognize that it is a unique function of our traditional culture that America is free.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 24, 2002 3:53 PM