How Buchanan Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Third World

Here is Patrick Buchanan’s latest call for accommodating ourselves to Muslims and to their tyrannical notions of blasphemy. Fifteen years ago, Buchanan wrote a column quoting at length from my booklet, The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, and affirming the need for the West to protect itself from unassimilable Third-World cultures. Buchanan has now become an apologist for the über Third-World culture, The Mother of All Third-World Cultures, and passionately denounces the slightest attempt by the West to resist its encroachments.

And how did this amazing switch in Buchanan’s thinking come about? It came about through his discovery that the neocons are the source of all evil in the world, and particularly that the neocons, for their own sinister purposes, created the wholly unnecessary conflict between the West and Islam, and are now driving the cartoon controversy. As Buchanan points out, the State Department initially attacked the Muhammad cartoons, calling them “unacceptable.” While this shocked most conservatives, who saw it as appeasement to Islam, Buchanan thought it was just the right thing to say. But, according to Buchanan, solely under neocon pressure, President Bush and Secretary of State Rice have changed their anti-cartoon message and have begun criticizing the Muslim anti-cartoon violence. The fact that the majority of conservatives wanted America to defend the right of the newspapers to publish the cartoons doesn’t enter Buchanan’s fervid imagination. No. It’s solely the neocons who are behind the administration’s criticisms of Muslim violence. And since the neocons are the ultimate enemy, Buchanan sides with their supposed enemies, the Muslims. He ignores the fact that the neocons, as much as he himself, believe in the chimera of Islamic reform (the neocons call it “democratization,” Buchanan, incredibly, calls it “winning hearts and minds”), and have, as much as he himself, stoutly refused to face the real nature of Islam, as a belief system that is inherently incompatible with and mortally dangerous to the West. Buchanan cannot see his similarities to the neocons on this issue, because his entire thought process is rooted in the conviction that the neocons are the root of all evil.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 11, 2006 02:37 PM | Send