What lies ahead

Ed H. writes:

We struggle to imagine what a new country, or even an “ark,” might be like, we vainly think we will be free to pursue choices. But what will happen is that history will choose for us. Forces are at work beyond our comprehension, and American history contains no parallel situation to use as a guide. We have now stepped across a threshold into a space where utterly new and alien forces are coming into play. Never has the mainstream culture of this country—white, European, Christian—been threatened in such an existential manner as it is now. As cultural genocide and dispossession begin to play out, as whites find out what dispossession really means,—poverty, powerlessness, humiliation—a incoherent bitterness and rage beyond bounds will be unleashed. The current black-on-white intifada is perhaps an opening motif. This is an not an encouragement of violence, it is simply a sense of foreboding that does have some world precedent. The vapid slogans of multiculturalism that started the now unfolding catastrophe will be like idealistic naïveté of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité that started the French Revolution but which segued into ten years of riots, massacres, guillotines, and famines, followed in turn by a further fifteen years of Napoleonic wars. Where we are now is the same place Chekhov’s Russian middle class stood a couple of decades before the Revolution. Spoiled, pampered, complacent. How could you describe to them what the next forty years would bring to their world?

Dave T. writes:

I see America as being at the tail-end of a typical life-cycle of a polyglot empire. Its government overextended, its culture decadent, and its political leadership ideologically wooden. So, if history is any guide, it seems to me that we should expect America to break off into various pieces following a period of intense crisis at some point in the near future. Is that not the fate of all polyglot empires?

What makes the life-cycle of America somewhat unique and particularly tragic, is that it started off as a promising nation and morphed into a polyglot empire via immigration. I don’t think that has ever happened before. In the past, polyglot empires were typically formed by the act of conquering diverse peoples, not by inviting them in at the behest of a nation’s political class. So, what’s happened here is both tragic and unnecessary.

LA replies:

I quote, not for the first time, the end of Chapter II of The Path to National Suicide:

So much for America; if other Western nations continue their openness to Third World immigration, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of Western civilization as a whole. And this defeat of the West will have been accomplished, not by the superior strength or civilization of the newcomers, not by the “forces of history,” but simply by the feckless generosity and moral cowardice of the West itself. In the prophetic words of social psychologist William McDougall:

As I watch the American nation speeding gaily, with invincible optimism down the road to destruction, I seem to be contemplating the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind.

However, I would not put it that way now, at least in reference to the post-1965 immigration. It was not unnecessary folly which brought the tragedy about. It was our deepest beliefs, namely our belief in the equal freedom of all human beings (and thus mandatory non-discrimination toward all human beings) as our supreme principle. And therefore the tragedy had to happen.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 20, 2012 09:59 AM | Send