A Frightening Future If We Do Not Change

Review of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? by Patrick J. Buchanan, Thomas Dunne Books, 2011

This 428 page book, containing copious notes in the end note section (1104 of them to be exact), is so jam-packed with historic and current information that any review truly cannot do it justice. One can only pick and choose a few topics within it and comment on those, leaving them as a sort of appetizer to encourage the reader to tackle the entire work.

It is worth noting at the beginning that Pat Buchanan seems to have been either fired or suspended indefinitely from his appearances on MSNBC – a very liberal network – because of some of the purportedly racist comments in the book. The most recent comment I found on the Internet, from January 9, 2012, quotes the network boss as saying that he is suspended. Given that the title of one of the chapters is “The End of White America” one can imagine the liberals going bonkers at some of the opinions he expresses in this chapter. The thing is, though, that he backs up these opinions with statistics. More on that later.

 

Hot Topics

Buchanan is certainly not shy about tackling hot topics; in fact, he revels in wading chest-deep into what one would call extremely politically incorrect waters. His topics include the debauching of the currency via extreme inflation, creeping socialism through incremental governmental regulations, the “religions” of globalism, environmentalism, and “diversity” replacing the traditional Christianity of the American people. The “system failure” has happened: Avarice, ambition, greed and stupidity have undone what John Adams warned of in the early days of the Republic regarding our Constitution – that it “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Buchanan decries the “death of Christian America” in one chapter, giving irrefutable evidence of this breakdown, and in the next chapter excoriates the Catholic Church for its almost record-breaking implosion from the 1950’s, when Monsignor Fulton Sheen drew bigger TV audiences than Uncle Miltie, to the desolate decades after Vatican II during which time she was nearly completely wasted and emasculated by forces not only without but within the Church. What better proof do we have of that than the President’s recent in-your-face ruling regarding Catholic institutions being forced to provide contraceptive and abortifacient drugs in required health insurance plans?

In the aforementioned chapter “The End of White America,” Buchanan cites that it is now “uncool” to be white, especially to be a white male. This is opinion, but he certainly has enough quotes to back up this opinion, from establishment talking heads like Tom Brokaw to the statistics that tell the tale. Eventually, whites will become the minority, not just in the USA, but all over the globe. It is undeniable that this country and Europe are undergoing dramatic demographic changes that will alter them forever. It’s easy to figure out, for example, that Europeans who have been contracepting and aborting themselves out of existence for years are now facing rising populations from Muslim lands. Not only are these Muslims and Hindus emigrating to formerly all-Christian Europe, their birth rate is much higher than the native Europeans. Unless Christendom rallies through penance and heroic fortitude, it won’t be long before the Catholic soul of Europe will be reduced to dhimmitude under the rule of the infidel.

 

Tribalism and “Ethnonationalism”

To this reader, the most interesting chapter is that entitled “The Triumph of Tribalism.” In it, Buchanan digresses from speaking of the situation in our own country to cover what is going on before our eyes around the world, from South America to Africa, the former Soviet Union, China, India, and, particularly, Europe. It should be obvious to Americans in the past few years, since the breakup of the Soviet Union into multiple nations, the tribalism we see in Iraq and particularly in Afghanistan, and the inability of the Israelis and Palestinians to come to a solution in that troubled area, that loyalties are to the “home” – the family, the tribe, the folks who are just like you.

Our author also treats of the unmitigated horror of the Rwandan genocide (see my review of Left to Tell byImmaculee Ilibagiza on this website). Too, at this moment there is the genocide ongoing in Sudan – black Muslims murdering black Christians and animists. The Balkans have been fighting since time immemorial; the Russians are subduing and murdering the Muslims of Chechnya who are trying to break away and form their own nation; China is displacing Tibetans in their homeland with native Chinese; Turks who decimated Armenians for religious reasons in the early part of the century are still occupying part of the territory they stole; Germans “ethnically cleansed” the Fatherland of Jews, Gypsies, Catholics and other inferior minorities. The list, as the saying goes, is endless. Just take a look at all the new “stan” countries that have been formed in the past generation: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, for example. The conclusion is that it is only natural for humankind to want to associate with those with whom we are most comfortable – those who are “just like us.” This is the tendency he terms “ethnonationalism.”

 

We Cannot Be Both “Equal” and “Free”

I will close this review with a bit of history and a most troubling prediction. Nowhere in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers does the word equality appear. When Jefferson wrote the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” in the Declaration of Independence, the intention was that men are all equal before the Law of the land (Negro slaves and Catholics excepted). That God did not make us equal is quite evident merely through personal experience and common sense. The Constitution does not, nor does any law, require equality of outcome. If men are free to pursue their dreams, ambitions, and talents, the outcome is naturally going to be different for each person. Skewing the law (as in affirmative action) makes us unequal before the law in an attempt to produce equality of outcome. Silly, isn’t it?

Buchanan predicts that if we do not return to our basic principles the problems that beset us will destroy us – “culture wars, race divisions, record deficits, non payable debts, waves of uncontrolled immigration, legal and illegal, gridlock in the capital and possible defeat in war may prove too much for our country to cope with. They surely will, if we do not act now.”