We Have Already Forgotten Them

 Although the date of Remembrance Day, November 11th, is the anniversary of the armistice that brought the First World War to an end, it is the fallen from both World Wars, or World War Parts I and II if one views it as a single conflict with an intermission, whom we remember.   The phrase that traditionally expresses the purpose of the day is "lest we forget".   It is evident from everything that has been happening this year, however, that we have already forgotten.

 

When from 1914 to 1918 and again from 1939 to 1945, young men throughout the Dominion of Canada and the other realms of the British Commonwealth heard and answered the call to take up arms and do their duty for King, Country, and Empire what was it they were fighting for, that they were willing to, and in so many instances did, make the ultimate sacrifice of their very lives for?

 

If we could put that question to the fallen soldiers of both conflicts, those who fought in the First World War would most likely give their answer in the language of the older values of honour and loyalty.   Those who fought in the Second World War would probably be more likely to just give the simple answer of their country.   If pressed as to what they understand by their country, they might provide a fuller answer that includes such things as their home, family, friends, neighbours, traditions and institutions and shared way of life.   If we were to press them even further by asking the follow-up question of what they perceived to be the nature of the threat to their country, chances are the answer we would receive would be that their country’s very freedom was at stake.

In the German speaking lands, the devastation that resulted from both the First World War and punitive measures imposed by the victorious Allies as well as the constitutional vacuum created by the foolish decision, at the insistence of the liberal Democrat American President who wanted the war to be about making the world “safe for democracy”, to drive the reigning Hohenzollern (Prussian) and Hapsburg (Austrian) monarchs from their thrones, had combined to create the conditions whereby the leader of a then-obscure nationalist and socialist party, a bitter veteran of the first war with a mesmerizing, charismatic personality and the command of a private army of street thugs, rose to the chancellorship of the Weimar Republic.    He then manipulated the Reichstag into giving him the emergency powers to govern as a dictator.   His regime, like that which the Bolsheviks had established when they seized control of Russia and created the Soviet Union, was a totalitarian one, that is to say, a regime in which the state demands the full allegiance of those it governs, permits no competition to its claims on their loyalty and obedience whether from parties other than the governing party or from traditional social institutions such as the family and the church, and asserts total control over every aspect of the lives of the governed, recognizing no distinction between private and public.   Like the Soviet regime, Hitler’s governed by fear, employing secret police and tribunals, a snitch culture that encouraged people to inform on their family, friends, and neighbours, and other methods of state terrorism.  

 

As bad as all of this was in itself, it was not it per se which caused people in other countries to fear for their own freedom.   It was the way in which Hitler kept expanding his Third Reich.   Rejecting the restrictions imposed upon Germany at Versailles, he began rebuilding the country’s military machine upon assuming power and made known his intent of bringing back all of the German-speaking peoples in lands stripped from Germany at the end of the first war.   It was clear, however, that he would not be satisfied with restoring Germany to the status quo ante.   In 1938 he achieved the Anschluß (annexation) of his birth country of Austria, which had not been a part of the previous Germany which Bismarck had united under the Prussian monarchy.    Then he laid claim to the Sudetenland, a land populated by Germans which had previously been the Bohemian Kingdom under the Austria-Hungarian Empire but which had become part of Czechoslovakia after World War I.  When Britain and France opposed his expansionism, he agreed to talks and the Munich Agreement was the result, which quickly embarrassed the governments of Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier.  They had agreed to the “return” of the Sudetenland, thinking they had won “peace in our time”, a phrase Chamberlain borrowed from the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer, but Hitler just turned around carried out what had been his intention all along, the conquest of all of Czechoslovakia.    Needless to say, Hitler had no intention of stopping with Czechoslovakia and by the time he was pushing Germany’s quite legitimate claim for the return of Danzig as an obvious means of achieving the end of the conquest of all of Poland, and forging an alliance with his arch-nemesis, Stalin’s rival totalitarian regime in Russia, as a preliminary step for said conquest, it was clear that no sane person could trust his word with regards to limits on his future conquering ambitions.   So it was that when the invasion of Poland led to the renewal of the larger conflict, and the lads of the Commonwealth Realms again took up arms to fight alongside Mother Britain, it was with the conviction that the freedom they so highly valued was in peril.   

 

Although we of the present day have grown up hearing and seeing the words “lest we forget” everywhere around this time of year and reciting the words “we will remember them” or the common variation “we shall remember them” in the Ode to Remembrance taken from the fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” in Remembrance Day services it is quite evident that we have forgotten them.

 

Since March, we have allowed the lying snakes of the print, broadcast, and electronic media to frighten us with a virus, the danger of which they have magnified beyond anything that the facts, even those available at the time the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, certainly those which have since accumulated, support.   Out of that fear, we have allowed our governments to declare states of emergency and award themselves emergency powers, which they have then handed over to their chief public health officers, essentially making them dictators.   We have tolerated them taking away our freedom to worship.  We have tolerated them taking away our freedom to meet with our friends, family, and other loved ones.   We have tolerated them taking away our freedom of speech.   This was a growing problem here in Canada long before the coronavirus, mostly because of left-wing crackpots who have deluded themselves into thinking that by silencing people whose speech expresses ideas that don’t conform to their narrow view of what is acceptable to be thought on matters such as race, sex, and religion they are “fighting Nazis” just as our soldiers did in the Second World War.   Now it has gotten worse as our governments have encouraged the suppression of ideas and information which conflict with those coming from the public health officials in the name of public safety.  

 

The politicians and dictatorial doctors who have trampled all over our basic rights and freedoms have co-opted the language of war and twisted it to their own purposes.   We are fighting a war against the coronavirus, they tell us, and we all need to do our part and make sacrifices for the common effort.   Those who fought in the real World Wars, however, sacrificed their lives as individuals in the common effort to protect the rights and freedoms of everyone else.   What our politicians and doctors are asking us to do, is to sacrifice the rights and freedoms of everyone else – for if you support lockdown measures, social distancing, mask mandates, the closing of churches and synagogues, and the Nazi-like snitch culture that comes with all of these things, it is not just your own rights and freedoms you are sacrificing but all those of your family, friends, neighbours, and countrymen as well – out of our fear of dying from COVID-19.

 

On Tuesday, November 10, our premier in the province of Manitoba, Brian Pallister, and his chief public health officer, Brent Roussin, once again failing to understand that since repeated previous restriction increases coupled with bullying and threats to the public failed to produce the desired result more of the same is not likely to achieve it, announced that they were placing the entire province back into lockdown – clampdown they are calling it now – with the strictest restrictions we have seen yet, except that the schools will stay open this time, beginning on Thursday and lasting for at least four weeks.   They wore poppies as they told us this, impervious to any sense of the irony that they were taking away from us, that for which those whom those poppies represent died.   Red armbands might have been more appropriate for the occasion.

 

We have forgotten those who died for our freedoms.   Worse, we have failed to keep faith with them, and are giving up in irrational fear, everything they thought it worth the ultimate sacrifice to bequeath to us.

 

God Save the Queen

May God have mercy upon us all.

 

The Ascension

Almost two thousand years ago, the Son of God was put to death on a cross on the Passover, the annual celebration of God’s having delivered Israel from physical slavery in Egypt in the days of Moses. On the following Sunday, He rose again from the dead. Through His death, offered up as an expiatory and propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the world, and His triumph over death, He brought deliverance from the slavery to sin and Satan which had held the world captive since the Fall of mankind. For this reason that Sunday has ever since been celebrated by Christ’s Church as the Christian Passover, known as Pascha, Easter, or simply Resurrection Sunday, depending upon where in the world you live, what language you speak, and what branch of the Christian tradition you belong to. Forty days later, He addressed His Apostles assembled on the Mount of Olives, commissioned them to carry His Gospel to the ends of the earth, bestowed a final benediction upon them, and then rose up into the sky and was hidden by the clouds. This is why the Thursday that is the fortieth day after Easter and the tenth before Whitsunday or Pentecost is Ascension Day. This past Thursday was Ascension Day.

In our time Ascension Day is not as widely recognized in the larger cultures of our nominally Christian societies as Christmas or Easter. For that matter, even in the ecclesiastical culture it seems to occupy a smaller space than it did up until a century or so ago. I am not thinking here primarily of those sects that seldom recognize any day on the Christian calendar that has not been heavily commercialized by the secular culture. Even in Churches that in one form or another affirm the Creeds, practice the liturgies, and follow the calendars that have come down to us from the early centuries of the Church, the Ascension has not been emphasized as much as it used to be. When Christendom was still recognizably Christendom, even in the early stages of its decline into the decadence of Modern Western Civilization, Ascension Thursday was a public holiday. Today, it has become a widespread practice, even in many provinces of the Roman Communion in which it is a Holy Day of Obligation, that is, a day on which attendance at mass is mandatory, to move the celebration to the Sunday after the actual day.

Having said that, I would note that prior to this year there was plenty of opportunity in my own Anglican diocese for anyone who wanted to do so to keep the feast. In the days of Christendom a vigil was traditionally held on the eve of all of the great Holy Days. That has regrettably died out for the most part except for the midnight Eucharist on Christmas Eve and the vigil on Holy Saturday which is Easter Eve. The eve of Ascension was no exception (1) and on this eve, the College Chapel of St. John the Evangelist, the Anglican college of the University of Manitoba, up until last year hosted All the King’s Men, the male-voice liturgical choir that sings Choral Evensong there on the first Sunday of every month. On Ascension Eve they would sing a Eucharist – usually William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices for the ordinaries - and the college chaplain, or a parish priest invited to do so if the chaplain were not available, would celebrate the Eucharist. On the following evening, the actual Ascension Day, the parish of St. Michael and All Angels which is the most Anglo-Catholic parish in the diocese, would hold a solemn Mass, just as beautifully sung although usually a different style and era, with all the “smells and bells.” Then three days later it would be Ascension Sunday in all of the other parishes.

How different things are this year!

There was still one service available in the diocese on Ascension Day itself. This was a Choral Evensong offered by the parish of St. George (Crescentwood). It was, of course, only available online where it was livestreamed. This Sunday, the other parishes that offer online services, whether live-streamed or, like my own, pre-recorded, will presumably have an Ascension theme.

The reason for this difference is, of course, that the province has been under a public health order restricting gatherings to ten people and the diocese has been under an episcopal suspension of public services. The provincial gathering limit has been raised to twenty-five people in-doors, fifty outside, but this started the day after Ascension. Meanwhile the suspension of public services and the interdict on the Eucharist has not been lifted in the diocese.

Throughout this pandemic abortion quacks have been allowed to continue their ghastly, life-destroying, profession, even though all sorts of life-saving medical procedures have been delayed due to the virus. The vendors that sell in various forms the mind-destroying toxin taken from the non-industrial kind of hemp have been allowed to remain open, despite the fact that other, far more wholesome and legitimate, businesses have been closed and even driven to near insolvency. The province has been slowly lifting restrictions and allowing public facilities, services, and businesses to re-open. The re-opening of the Churches and other places of worship does not appear to be on the immediate horizon. It is very likely that they will be the very last to receive government approval to re-open.

How anyone can look at all of this and not consider the unreasonable and unprecedented government measures taken to control this virus to be a manifestation of darkness and evil is beyond me.

As I have been pointing out since the beginning of the lockdown these measures have mimicked the conditions that were imposed upon the enslaved nations behind the Iron Curtain by the Soviet Union. They have limited to the point of essentially nullifying all of the most basic rights and freedoms in our British Commonwealth tradition. A mountain of rules against actions which are merely normal, everyday, behaviour have been dumped upon us. Those who have been telling us to “stay home”, to practice “social distancing” and be “alone together” have been conditioning us to fear in-person human contact and interaction which is essential to our very nature and bonum in se. The only word to describe all of this is “evil”. Dr. Bruce Charlton has been very right to argue, as he has all along, that spiritual evil is behind all of this.

This is why the message of the Ascension is so very important at this point in time.

Here is what our Creedal confessions say about the Ascension:

“He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” – Apostles’ Creed

“And ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.” – Nicene Creed

“He ascended into heaven, he sitteth on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty: from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” – Athanasian Creed

Like the Scriptures from which they are derived the Creeds connect the Ascension to both Christ’s present position in Heaven where He sits at the right hand of God (Mark 16:19) and to His Second Coming (Acts 1:11). The right hand of God where He presently sits is the position of ultimate authority. At the Second Coming, He will display that authority in a way visible to all when He pronounces the Final Judgement on the living and dead. Until then, He is invisible on earth except through His Body, the Church, but is still in the position of ultimate authority. The spiritual evil that is behind this lockdown is an evil He defeated once and for all in His death and resurrection. He promised that that evil would never prevail against His Church. (Matt. 16:18).

This is the message we need at this time.

(1) In the Eastern Church which, of course, due to the difference in the liturgical calendars celebrates it a week later than we do, the Ascension vigil is still an important tradition.

Shall Past and Future Generations Rise in the Judgement and Condemn us for our Folly at This Moment?

Suppose that for some reason – let us say that you are looking to graduate with a degree in Mad Science from Evil Genius University and are required to demonstrate that you can practically apply what you have learned in theory - you wanted to create a shortage of essential goods during a crisis. How would you go about doing so?

The simplest way by far would be to get people to panic over the very shortage you wish to create. Start spreading the word that due to the crisis we are facing an impending economic shutdown and that everybody should grab as much as they can while they still can to prepare for the days ahead. The word would spread like wildfire through the masses, who, despite any number of sober, sane voices warning them to keep calm and behaver rationally, can be relied upon to do their part by rushing to the markets, hording everything in sight, and creating the very shortages you have warned them about.

Bada bing, bada boom. You are now able to pick up your degree, rub your hands, cackle maniacally and say “Fools! I’ll destroy them all!” Although you might wish to express that infamous sentiment in the perfect tense.

That the masses can be depended upon to do their part in the above, not so hypothetical, scenario is due to one of the quirks of fallen human nature, the one we normally think of in terms of crowd psychology or, if we wish to use a more pejorative expression, mob mentality. People, when they act together as a crowd, mob or mass, do not act in an informed, rational manner, regardless of how educated or intelligent they may be individually. Every demagogue, that is to say, every would-be tyrant hoping to be swept into power on a wave of popular support, knows this to be true, and seeks to capitalize on it.

There is a saying of Edmund Burke’s that Russell Kirk was fond of quoting that could be taken as a contradiction of this if misunderstood. The saying was “The individual is foolish; but the species is wise.” By “the species”, Burke meant the human race considered collectively, not just at a moment in time, as in the phenomenon of the masses, but over the course of generations. His point, which is a very true one, is that the judgement of such a collective as it has come down to us in folkways and mores, habits and customs, tradition and prescription, is far more trustworthy than the judgement of any individual. It is helpful to consider Burke’s original statement, in its original, unabridged, albeit less pithy, form:

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right. (bold added by myself for emphasis)

What, one hundred, two hundred, or five hundred years down the road, will be the judgement of the species, upon us who are alive today, for how we have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic?

If you have not already figured it out from the question asked in the title of this essay, a paraphrase of Our Lord’s biting judgement on the generation that saw His earthly ministry and rejected Him, I suspect it will not be a favourable one.

Those who will receive the least condemnation from this assize, that of the collective judgement of the human race over the course of human history, will be those who are receiving the largest share of the blame at the moment, namely the hording masses, who have descended like a swarm of locusts upon the shelves that once contained toilet paper, medication, canned goods, and other emergency supplies. It is not in the nature of crowds to behave in an informed, rational, manner, and so they can neither be expected to do so nor held accountable when they fail to do so.

Far greater condemnation will fall upon those who generated the panic in the first place, namely the mainstream media. Ever since they learned, in December of last year, that a new strain of coronavirus was behind an outbreak of respiratory disease in Wuhan and the surrounding region in China, they have bombarded the public with non-stop coverage of the disease, irresponsibly focusing on the unknown rather than what is known – namely, that the majority of people who are infected with this virus experience only mild symptoms similar to a cold or the flu and that those most at risk for experiencing the disease at its worst – severe difficulty in breathing, organ failure, intense pain and death – are the same demographic most at risk of dying from seasonal influenza or, for that matter, any other infectious disease, those over the age of 65, those who have pre-existing medical problems, and most especially those who fall into both categories. The mortality rate for this virus appears to be about ten times higher than for regular strains of the flu but this does not mean that everybody is ten times more likely to die from it than from the flu. Those who belong to the at-risk demographics are more likely to die from this virus than they are from the flu but this does not mean that this is true of everybody else. It also does not mean that those in the at-risk demographics are more likely to die than they are to survive. Even for those in the most-at-risk demographic, the survival rate is still much, much higher than the mortality rate. For people under fifty, the mortality rate is below the one percent that represents the ten times worse than the flu figure. Eighty percent of fatalities have been among people sixty or older, and over ninety percent of fatalities have had other, complicating, medical conditions. Note, that since most who contract the virus experience mild symptoms and many experience no symptoms at all, the total number of people who have been infected is much higher and consequently the true mortality rate much lower, than what is reflected in the official statistics.

These are the sort of things – the facts, what we do know – that the media should have been emphasizing, especially the fact that the vast majority of those who contract this virus experience nothing worse than the average cold or flu. Instead they focused on what we do not know and so, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, they generated a panic. .

The worst condemnation will be reserved for those who are most responsible for behaving in a calm, rational, manner, those who have a duty to set an example for the masses and provide them with leadership, rather than following them into an irrational panic or, worse, exploiting that panic for their own ends. Here I refer to our civil and ecclesiastical leaders.

With regards to our ecclesiastical leadership, allow me to remind them that Our Lord calls us to walk by faith not by fear – except the “fear of God” which is something entirely different from the kind of worldly paranoia we see on display in those Churches that are shutting their doors. Advising those most at risk to stay home is one thing. Cancelling all services in entire dioceses is another thing altogether. There are plenty of other ways to reduce the risk for those attending public worship. I refer you to the recent article “Keep The Churches Open” by R. R. Reno, editor of First Things, for an excellent discussion of this matter. I refer you to A. N. Bethune’s Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Bishop of Toronto, in particular the account of his heroic efforts during the choleric outbreaks of the 1830s for an example of what walking by faith rather than fear in a time of plague looks like.

As for our civil leaders, there are no words strong enough to express my contempt for their exploiting this mass panic to impose what is essentially Communism on us. Here is what a rational response to this pandemic would have been:

A) Quarantine all that we know to be infected for the duration of the period in which they are contagious.
B) Quarantine all who are at special risk.
C) Quarantine anyone coming into the country for two weeks.
D) Advise everybody to take the same special precautions that they are normally advised to do during flu season. Make an extra effort to impress upon people the importance of this. Recommend frequent handwashing, sunlight, fresh air, Vitamins C and D and the like.
E) Otherwise let everybody continue their normal affairs.

The preceding is what a government truly concerned about the health and welfare of the country they are supposed to be leading would do. Instead, they are exploiting the situation to gain a totalitarian level of control over our countries.

Do some research about what life was like in the Soviet Union prior to perestroika, glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You needed the state’s permission to go anywhere. Large meetings, other than the events organized by the Communist Party that you were required to attend, were forbidden. There were shortages of essential goods. You had to wait in line for hours to get a loaf of bread. The state promised everything to everybody but failed to deliver. Churches were closed. Any form of social organization that was not under the control of the omnipotent state was actively discouraged. Friends, neighbours and family members were encouraged to spy on each other and report if the rules were being broken.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease COVID-19, has come and it will go. Will we ever regain the precious freedoms that we are sacrificing in order to fight it? It took seventy years before the Soviet regime loosened its iron grip on the Russian nation and empire.

I do not wish to create a different sort of paranoia. Perhaps, and let us all hope and pray that it turns out this way, the “curve” will be “flattened” as appears to have happened in South Korea and as the Chinese, who are probably lying, say has happened in their Communist hell-hole which begat the whole problem in the first place, and within weeks – a couple of months at the most – the government will loosen its draconian controls, and we can return to some semblance of normalcy. Let us hope that the “months” that Prime Minister Trudeau has been talking about mean “two at the most” and not the “eighteen” as some have been recommending. Let us hope that this is not the beginning of forcing us to live this way on a permanent basis, as is desired by the climate change alarmist lunatics. Let us hope that nobody listens to those bat soup crazy individuals who are already claiming that the government is not being draconian enough.

If however, the aforementioned desired outcome does not occur and we end up living under this kind of totalitarian control for the long haul, past generations looking upon us from beyond shall condemn us for having thrown away the heritage of freedom they bequeathed to us, and future generations shall condemn us for leaving to them nothing but a heritage of Communist slavery.

The Fate of America

Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? By Patrick J. Buchanan, New York, Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, 2011, 488 pp, $27.99US

In the first half of the 20th Century the European powers clashed in two major conflicts that are remembered as World War I and World War II. When the second war ended in 1945, the nations of Europe were in ruins, their empires were lost, and two strong new powers emerged triumphant. The history of the second half of the 20th Century was largely the story of their rivalry. We called these powers the superpowers and they were the United States of America on the one hand and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the other. Both had nuclear arsenals, containing weapons of mass destruction far more powerful than the atomic bomb, the development and use of which had brought WWII to an end. These weapons kept the superpowers from waging a traditional war against each other and so their conflict came to be known as the Cold War.

The Cold War brought out tremendous differences of opinion among people. Some felt that the threat of nuclear holocaust, never before present, meant that peace must be achieved no matter the cost. Others believed that the Soviet tyranny, which already held millions in its clutches, had to be prevented from spreading.

It was at the height of the Cold War that Patrick J. Buchanan began his career in journalism. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, he also worked as a speechwriter and senior advisor to US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. Both as an op/ed writer and a presidential advisor, he worked to promote America’s efforts in her struggle against the Soviet Union.

Then the Cold War ended, shortly after Reagan’s second term as US President. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. The United States was now the sole remaining superpower. The question naturally arose of what America would do with its military might in the absence of the threat of he Soviet Union. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait then-US President George H. W. Bush gave his answer. The United States would lead a coalition of free, democratic countries that would police the world, establishing a new world order and keeping it safe against aggressors like Hussein.

Pat Buchanan had a different idea. Running against Bush, he sought the Republican nomination for the 1992 Presidential election. He opposed the Gulf War and in his campaign he called for America to close its overseas bases and bring her soldiers home. Invoking George Washington’s rhetoric about “entangling alliance” he called upon the United States to return to the older, non-interventionist foreign policy of “America First”.

This was not the only plank in his platform, of course, nor would it be the only time he would run for President. He sought the Republican nomination again in 1996 and in 2000 he ran for President on the Reform Party ticket. Apart from the “America First” foreign policy that was labeled “isolationism” by his opponents, he championed economic nationalism against free trade, an end to liberal immigration, and reversing the moral, cultural, and spiritual decline of America.

Mr. Buchanan’s campaigns were unsuccessful, but his books became bestsellers. In The Great Betrayal he argued for the Hamiltonian “American system” of economic nationalism. In A Republic Not an Empire he made the case for an “America First” policy by tracing the history of American foreign policy. In The Death of the West he discussed the impending demographic crisis of Western society caused by low fertility rates, aging populations and mass immigration. In State of Emergency he took a closer look at the immigration crisis the United States is currently facing.

In his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? he revisits each of these topics in the light of current state of the United States following the economic meltdown, the quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Obama presidency. Although the final chapter offers prescriptions as to how to steer America away from the brink of doom the overall tone of the book reflects the pessimism in its title. The main theme of the book is “we have lost the country we grew up in”.(1)

In a sense that is the theme of all of Mr. Buchanan’s books and that partly explains why so many of them have become best-sellers. As a writer, Pat Buchanan is excellent at articulating what is in the hearts and minds of countless numbers of his countrymen who are unable to or do not wish to express what they are thinking. It is a theme that conservatives and patriots of other countries can sympathize with as well.

Do not be fooled by the subtitle of the book into thinking that something huge is supposed to happen in the year 2025. The subtitle is an allusion to an essay by a Russian dissident who in 1970 predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. The predicted event which looms large in this book is actually scheduled for the year 2041. That is the year when, according to the most recent census bureau extrapolations, white Americans will become a minority in the United States.

The bulk of the book, from chapter four “The End of White America” to chapter nine “’The White Party’”, examines the question of what this will mean for America. The titles of both those chapters are quotations by the way, although only the second one uses quotation marks. The first borrows its title from an essay by Vassar professor Hua Hsu and the second from a gaffe by Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean. They seem to have been chosen to deliberately provoke the ire of the sort of people who think that emotional accusations of “racism” are a more appropriate response to people who do not consider multiculturalism and diversity to be unqualified positives than actually answering their questions and arguments.

The idea that a great deal of diversity and the absence of an ethnic core make for a stronger society is one of the sacred cows of the post-WWII, post-Civil Rights Movement, post-European colonialism/imperialism, post-apartheid South Africa world. There are no rational reasons to believe it and there is a great deal of evidence which contradicts it. When someone points out the lack of correlation between the idea and the real world that person is like the child in Hans Christian Andersons’ fairy tale who points out the obvious fact denied by everybody else that the emperor is running around buck naked.

This is what Mr. Buchanan does in Suicide of a Superpower. The attempt to transform a country from a country founded by and for a particular people with a particular language, culture, and religion into a country for all peoples of all languages, cultures, and religions, while remaining a stable, united, society with just laws protecting its citizens’ rights and liberties, is an experiment that has never been attempted before. There is little evidence to suggest the experiment will succeed and much to indicate that it is doomed to fail.

The impending demographic doom of white America has been brought upon by a combination of low fertility and high immigration. The decline in fertility resulting in rapidly aging populations that are not reproducing themselves is not strictly an American phenomenon and in chapter five we learn about how it is affecting other countries such as Russia, the UK, Germany, Israel, Japan and South Korea. Some of these have opted for high immigration like the United States. Others, like Japan and South Korea “appear prepared to accept their fate, a dying population and declining nation, rather than adopt the American solution: replacement of her departing native born with millions of immigrants.” (p. 169)

The American solution is no solution at all. In chapter nine, entitled “The Triumph of Tribalism”, Mr. Buchanan begins by borrowing a thesis from a 2008 Foreign Affairs article by Jerry Muller which challenged the conventional belief that the history of the 20th Century was one of nationalism being superceded by transnationalism after it led to the devastation of the two World Wars. The peaceful coexistence of the European powers after WWII, Muller argue, was not the result of the eclipse of nationalism but of its goals having been fulfilled. Ethnonationalism has actually been on the rise throughout the 20th Century.

Mr. Buchanan then walks us through the history of the 20th Century showing how this has been the case. From the ethnic conflict in the Balkans which ignited the first World War and started up again the moment the Communist regime in Yugoslavia fell, through World War II and the crisis in the Middle East, the renewed tribalism and nationalism in Africa and Asia after the end of European colonialism, to the nationalist movements that brought down the Soviet Empire, ethnonationalism has been a consistent factor in the history of the world in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

What this suggests is that the large-scale importation of immigrants from ethnic backgrounds widely different from both your own and from each other with no program whereby to assimilate them into a common national identity such as was signified by the “melting pot” metaphor in earlier waves of American immigration will not have the result of producing a stronger nation but of balkanizing your country. The tribal nature of mankind is the final unanswerable refutation of the idea that “diversity is our strength”, which Mr. Buchanan had ably debunked in the preceding chapter “The Diversity Cult”.

Mr. Buchanan does not just debunk the diversity myth though. He asks the question we are forbidden to ask:

Is ethnonationalism a genetic disease of mankind that all good men should quarantine wherever it breaks out? Or is this drive of awakened peoples to create nations of their own where there own kind come first a force of nature that must be accommodated if we are ever to know peace? (p. 327)

He reminds us that while ethnonationalism produced horrors “from Nanking to Auschwitz to Rwanda” it also “liberated the captive nations and brought down the ‘evil empire’”. It “was behind the pogroms of Europe but created the nation of Israel” (contrary to the lies Mr. Buchanan’s opponents constantly throw at him he clearly does not intend the former to be the good and the latter the bad in this juxtaposition).

Within all of this there lies another question, asked indirectly here, but which more and more people have come to ask in the last couple of decades. If ethnonationalism is tolerated among other peoples – and it is - why should it be forbidden to white ethnic groups?

Whatever the answer may be, Mr. Buchanan is surely correct in writing:

We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. (p. 328)

In today’s climate in which the leftist orthodoxy on cultural and ethnic matters that is known as “political correctness” is rigidly enforced, this is not the safe way to write a book about the impending perils which face your country. Suicide of a Superpower is about more than just ethnicity, immigration, and race. It is also about the economic crisis, the ultra-expensive military fiascos in the Middle East, and the moral and spiritual decline of America. There is even a chapter about the problems the Roman Catholic Church is facing worldwide.

The demographic crisis of America is the ongoing theme of six of the books eleven chapters however. While it may not be a safe topic it is a necessary one. Countries can survive huge military disasters. Countries can survive economic collapses. They cannot survive the loss of a central ethnic identity. A country is more than just a set of laws written on a piece of paper. Its political and legal institutions rest upon the foundation of a people with a shared history and identity which binds them together as a community and a society. When that is gone those political and legal institutions cannot stand.

(1) Variations of this phrase occur at a number of spots in this book. Although I have placed it in quotations it is not intended to be an exact quote of any one of them but an approximation of all of them.