Is the U.S. romp through Afghanistan the last hurrah of a culturally hollowed out superpower? It is difficult to believe otherwise after considering the facts laid out by Patrick J. Buchanan in his new book, The Death of the West.

Buchanan has strong opinions, but his opinions are based in facts, unlike his equally opinionated opponents, who have bought into the multiculturalist dogma of the evils of western civilization or taken refuge in neoconservative wishful thinking.

Buchanan rests his case on demography and immigration and on the multicultural attack led by Cultural Marxists on western history, values and institutions.

Demography is destiny. In 1960 people of European stock comprised one-quarter of the world population. Today white people make up one-sixth of the world population. By 2050 people of European descent will comprise only one-tenth of the world population.

Whites are shrinking into a minority even within their own countries. Massive uncontrolled legal and illegal immigration, together with collapsing fertility rates of whites everywhere, foretell a vanishing race.

In the U.S. whites are no longer a majority in California. Many are now leaving the state looking for a place to live that bears some resemblance to the country they grew up in. Before a lifetime passes, there will be no place. In 1998 President Clinton boasted to a cheering Portland State University audience that by 2050 whites would be a minority in America. "No other nation in history," he said, "has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time."

A changing racial composition would not mean the death of the West if immigrants from Third World countries were assimilating. But the "melting pot" no longer exists. Discarded as racist and hegemonic, the "melting pot" has been replaced by the multicultural "salad bowl." As Jacques Barzun wrote in his recent history of western civilization, From Dawn to Decadence, not even native born whites are being assimilated to their culture.

Americans are largely unaware, but Cultural Marxism reigns in our universities and public schools. The old Marxists blamed capitalists and the economic system for oppression and exploitation. The new Marxists blame the white race and western civilization itself. As Susan Sontag (among many) puts it, "The white race is the cancer of human history."

Ms. Sontag is highly respected by American intellectuals. A survey found her to be the most respected intellectual of our time. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Had she said anything good about "the white race," she would be as demonized as Pat Buchanan.

Cultural Marxists assault not only our history but also the family, the chastity of women and Christianity, important pillars of our civilization. Cultural Marxists use education, entertainment and the media to create a new people that shares their values.

Buchanan thinks that the Cultural Marxist revolution will succeed but be short-lived, like Soviet Communism, because it is based in lies and the disregard of reality. Buchanan's optimism seems contrary to his facts and, perhaps, is an expression of his fighting spirit. The test is whether people respond. Does anyone care, or is the future too scary to be acknowledged?

A case can be made that the situation is worse than Buchanan says. In the U.S. native-born whites already are second-class citizens in their own country. Unconstitutional group privileges have arisen based on race, gender, and disability. White males no longer have equal rights. As the current chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission says, "Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them."

The protections in our legal system that make law a shield of the people, not a weapon in the hands of government, have largely been eroded.

But the most fearsome fact is that the demonization of white people in the universities today is more extreme than the demonization of the Jews that was a prominent feature of German university life for 60 years prior to the rise of National Socialism.

Demonization of whites is the weapon used by multiculturalists to breakup western civilization. But teaching hatred has other consequences. Demonization has already demoralized some whites, making them ashamed and fearful of their skin color.

By the time whites become political minorities, decades of demonization will have prepared the ground for legislation prohibiting their propagation and, perhaps, assigning them to the gulag as a final solution to "the cancer of human history."

None of this is ordained. Faculties could replace multicultural propagandists with real scholars, and legislation could halt or reduce immigration to assimilable numbers. Is western civilization worth the effort? Does anyone any longer know what western civilization is? 

Paul Craig Roberts is the author (with Lawrence M. Stratton) of The New Color Line : How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy

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