The crisis of Western civilization consists of three imminent and mortal perils: dying populations, disintegrating cultures, and invasions unresisted.
History repeats itself. After the Roman republic spread out from Rome, the town on the Tiber, to rule Italy and “the Middle Sea of Earth” from Spain to Jerusalem, from Carthage to Hadrian’s Wall, the conquered peoples made their way to the imperial capital. Rome became a polyglot city of all the creeds and cultures of the empire.
Patrick J. Buchanan was a senior advisor to three American Presidents, ran twice for the Republican nomination, in 1992 and 1996, and was the Reform Party’s Presidential candidate in 2000. Mr. Buchanan is author of more than 10 books–including Suicide of a Superpower, State of Emergency, and Where the Right Went Wrong. He is also Editor Emeritus of the political magazine, The American Conservative. Buchanan gives brilliant insight into the plight of America in this book.
But these alien peoples brought with them no reverence for Roman traditions, no love of Roman culture. And so, as Rome had conquered the barbarians, the barbarians conquered Rome. In the fifth century, beginning with the Visigoths in 410, the northern tribes, one after another, invaded and ransacked the Eternal City. And the Dark Ages descended.
And as Rome passed away, so, the West is passing away, from the same causes and in much the same way. What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilization no longer defended.
In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill writes: “To the Romans, the German tribes were riffraff; to the Germans, the Roman side of the river was the place to be. The nearest we can come to understanding this divide may be the southern border of the United States. There, the spit-and-polish troops are immigration police; the hordes, the Mexicans, Haitians and other dispossessed people seeking illegal entry.
In his Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Oxford’s Peter Heather challenges previous historians and attributes the fall of the empire to Rome’s refusal to block great hordes of refugees that arrived at its border late in the fourth century: “In 376, a large band of Gothic refugees arrived at the Empire Danube frontier, asking for asylum. In a complete break with established Roman policy, they were allowed in, unsubdued. They revolted, and within two years had defeated and killed the Emperor Valens—the one who had received them—along with two-thirds of his army, at the battle of Hadrianople.”
At first, “this sudden surge of would-be Gothic immigrants wasn’t seen as a problem at all,” writes Heather. “On the contrary, Valens happily admitted them because he saw in this flood of displaced humanity a great opportunity.” The Roman historian Artmianus wrote of how warmly the Goths were welcomed. What Valens had done was the Christian thing to do, but it had never been the Roman thing to do.
From Rome to Now in the U.S. Now the tape has begun to run in reverse. In 1960, there were perhaps five million Asians and Hispanics in the United States. Today, there are 57 million. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of all Mexican, Central American and Caribbean peoples have moved into the United States. One to two million enter every year and stay, half of them in defiance of America’s laws and disdain for America’s borders. No one knows how many illegal aliens are here. The estimates run from 12 to 20 million.
This is not immigration as America knew it, when men and women made a conscious choice to turn their backs on their native lands and cross the ocean to become Americans. This is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history. Nothing of this magnitude has ever happened in so short a span of time.
There are 36 million immigrants and their children in the United States today, almost as many as came to America between Jamestown in 1607 and the Kennedy election of 1960. Nearly 90 percent of all immigrants now come from continents and countries whose peoples have never been assimilated fully into any Western country.
Against the will of a vast majority of Americans, America is being transformed. As our elites nervously avert their gaze or welcome the invasion, we are witness to one of the great tragedies in human history. From Gibbon to Spengler to Toynbee, the symptoms of dying civilizations are well known: the death of faith, the degeneration of morals, contempt for the old values, collapse of the culture, paralysis of the will. But the two certain signs that a civilization has begun to die are a declining population (birth rates) and foreign invasions no longer resisted.
Europe, having embraced what Pope Paul II called a “culture of death,” is far down the Roman road to ruin. Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birth rate among its native-born that will enable it to survive the century in its present form. Birth rates below replacement levels, approximately 1.38 children per family across the European Union, are dooming Europe to cultural suicide and elimination by Muslim immigrants who in some areas of France are reproducing at a rate of 8 plus children per family. The United States is not far behind.
Michael Reed is Editor of The Standard.
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