Another American Century or Another American Civil War?

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.


Americans tend to be skeptical of any criticism of their country coming from Europeans, which understandable given the amount of anti-Americanism spewing out of the European press these days. However, there is some truth in the old maxim that “clarity is gained from a distance.” Just as Americans may sometimes see more clearly than Europeans how Muslim immigration is destroying their continent, perhaps it is possible for a European to notice some developments in the USA, too.

The following account is written by a European who wishes your country well, partly because I like it and partly because I, unlike too many of my countrymen, understand that the USA is still the best insurance we have for a civilized world order. It worries me all the more to see that many of the same negative trends that are threatening to destroy Europe are also present in the US.

In 2006, the total immigrant population of the United States stood at 33 million, or 11% of the entire population, which, according to The Center for Immigration Studies, was significantly higher than at any time in history. With 10.3 million illegals there now, with at least 800,000 more entering every year, in twenty years there will be 26.3 million illegals, plus any children they may have. The National Research Council has estimated that the net fiscal cost of immigration ranges from $11 billion to $22 billion per year. California has estimated that the net cost to the state of providing government services to illegal immigrants approached $3 billion during a single fiscal year. This massive migration has become so ingrained in Mexico that people name their babies Johnny and Leslie, certain that their kids’ future lies in the United States. “Mexico’s economy, society and political system are built around the assumption that migration and amnesties for undocumented migrants will continue – and that the $20 billion they send home every year will keep coming, and almost certainly grow.”

Even mainstream media outlets such as Newsweek magazine have started admitting that this is not without problems:

Being brutally candid means recognizing that the huge and largely uncontrolled inflow of unskilled Latino workers into the United States is increasingly sabotaging the assimilation process.

No society has a boundless capacity to accept newcomers, especially when many are poor and unskilled. A study of Mexican immigrants by Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz shows that Mexicans are now the single largest group of U.S. immigrants, 30 percent of the total in 2000. Indeed, the present Mexican immigration “is historically unprecedented, being both numerically and proportionately larger than any other immigrant influx in the past century,” note Borjas and Katz. In 1920, for example, the two largest immigrant groups – Germans and Italians – totalled only 24 percent of the immigrant population.

Some Americans take comfort in the fact that “at least Mexicans aren’t Muslims, and don’t want to blow up the entire country.” This is true, of course. Islamic immigrants are a special case, with their inherent hostility towards all others. Americans are correct in pointing out the mess Europeans have made for themselves with Muslim immigration. However, they should also remember that this difference in immigration patterns is also partly an accident of geography: When Europe gets immigrants from the third world countries at its southern flank, these immigrants frequently happen to be Muslims. If Mexico had been a Muslim county, the United States would have been in heaps of trouble now.

Still, even though non-Muslim immigrants are always preferable to Muslim ones, that does not necessarily mean that non-Muslim immigration in whatever numbers or form is always beneficial. Indeed, there are more parallels between the behavior of Mexican illegal immigrants in the USA and of Muslims in Europe than many observers appreciate. First of all, you have the aggression towards and disregard for the very country the immigrants want to live in. I have read Mexicans bragging about how little they care about US laws. Soon they will be the majority in the American Southwest and will simply change the laws to suit them, so why should they care what the laws say now? These laws are only temporary, anyway. This view of immigration as a means of demographic conquest of territory is similar to what Muslims are doing in Europe, only without the terrorism.

Second, you have the extreme amounts of hypocrisy, where Mexicans, just like Muslims, make harsh laws in their own countries, but scream “murder” and complain about racism if even a fraction of their laws are applied to themselves. In a paper published by the Center for Security Policy, J. Michael Waller points out that under its constitution Mexico deals harshly not only with illegal but even with legal immigrants “in ways that would, by the standards of those who carp about US immigration policy, have to be called “racist” and “xenophobic.” The Mexican constitution includes restrictions on foreigners in any way participating in the political affairs of the country. Equal employment rights are denied to immigrants, even legal ones. It denies immigrants the right to become federal lawmakers. Foreigners are denied fundamental property rights. Article 11 guarantees federal protection against “undesirable aliens resident in the country.” What is more, private individuals are authorized to make citizen’s arrests. Article 16 states, “In cases of flagrante delicto, any person may arrest the offender and his accomplices, turning them over without delay to the nearest authorities.” In other words, Mexico grants its citizens the right to arrest illegal aliens and hand them over to police for prosecution. The Mexican constitution states that foreigners – not just illegal immigrants – may be expelled for any reason and without due process.

Third, many Mexican immigrants have the same total lack of understanding of the fact that maybe, just maybe, there are some flaws in their own culture that create the problems they are trying to move away from. As long as they won’t admit this, it is quite likely that the same problems will follow them and be recreated in their new home country. Muslims believe that they can “conquer the riches of Europe.” But will they, or will the influx of Islamic culture ensure that Europe will cease being a wealthy continent, and become more like any other Islamic failure? Latin America’s love affair with Socialism, as exemplified by the three Cs – Chavez, Castro and Che Guevara – is even more pathological than Europe’s. Many of these countries, including Mexico, have serious problems with corruption. Will all of this be imported into the USA, too? When California has become majority Mexican, will it still be the economic powerhouse it has been for generations?

Lawrence Auster, in an article in FrontPage Magazine entitled “The Second Mexican War,” describes how the Mexican conquest of the American Southwest is a war by non-violent means:

The Mexican invasion of the United States began decades ago as a spontaneous migration of ordinary Mexicans into the U.S. seeking economic opportunities. It has morphed into a campaign to occupy and gain power over our country – a project encouraged, abetted, and organized by the Mexican state and supported by the leading elements of Mexican society. It is, in other words, war. War does not have to consist of armed conflict. War can consist of any hostile course of action undertaken by one country to weaken, harm, and dominate another country. Mexico is waging war on the U.S. through mass immigration illegal and legal, through the assertion of Mexican national claims over the U.S., and through the subversion of its laws and sovereignty, all having the common end of bringing the southwestern part of the U.S. under the control of the expanding Mexican nation, and of increasing Mexico’s political and cultural influence over the U.S. as a whole.

According to a Zogby poll in 2002, 58 percent of the Mexican people believed the U.S. Southwest belongs to Mexico, and 57 percent believed that Mexicans have the right to enter the United States without U.S. permission. Only small minorities disagreed with these propositions. Similarly, the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska told the Venezuelan journal El Imparcial on July 3rd, 2001:

The people of the poor, the lice-ridden and the cucarachas are advancing in the United States, a country that wants to speak Spanish because 33.4 million Hispanics impose their culture...Mexico is recovering the territories ceded to the United States with migratory tactics...[This phenomenon] fills me with jubilation, because the Hispanics can have a growing force between Patagonia and Alaska.

Auster states that

the Mexican war on America is supported by all segments of the Mexican society, even, apparently, the criminals. The situation is thus analogous to Muslim razzias or raids – irregular attacks short of outright invasion – used to soften a target country in anticipation of full scale military conquest.

Many ordinary Americans lament the fact that US authorities are “asleep at the wheel” on the issue of border controls. This view could find support in some idiotic comments by US political leaders quoted by Diana West of the Washington Times. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, leader of a city that was hit by the worst terror attacks in US history only a few years ago, does not want the USA to protect its borders to make sure unwanted persons do not enter the country. According to him, deporting illegal aliens would wreak havoc on golf courses across America. “You and I both play golf,” Mr. Bloomberg said on the air. “Who takes care of the greens and fairways in your golf course?” Senator Hillary Clinton addressed pro-amnesty marchers as the people who care for our children, our elderly, our hotels, our restaurants, and our lawns. “You are the faces of those who give us a good day’s work and often not for a fair day’s pay,” she said – which has to make you wonder what she pays her gardener. The New York Daily News recently celebrated the illegal-alien economy. “They clean your office while you sleep and comfort your kids while you’re away at work. They prepare your morning coffee, deliver your lunch and clean your plates when you dine out.”

Are the American elites really as clueless as they seem? There is another, and more disturbing possibility: The US political establishment are in no hurry to stop illegal immigration because they have already de facto decided that the United States as a nation state should be dismantled in favor of a union of North America, perhaps later of all of the Americas. They just forgot to inform their own citizens about this. Does this sound like a crazy conspiracy theory?

Well, this is in fact what happened in Europe. Richard North, publisher of the blog EU Referendum and co-author of the book “The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive?”, describes how Jean Monnet for years he had dreamed of building a “United States of Europe.” Although what Monnet really had in mind was the creation of a European entity with all the attributes of a state, an “anodyne phrasing was deliberately chosen with a view to making it difficult to dilute by converting it into just another intergovernmental body. It was also couched in this fashion so that it would not scare off national governments by emphasising that its purpose was to override their sovereignty.”

The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation”. As critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people do not even know of their existence. A federation is of course a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.” The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.”

There is a very similar project proposed for North and South America called the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), or NAFTA in North America. Is this the beginning of the dismantling of the nation states in this region, cloaked and presented to the public as “just a free trade zone?”

Just as in Europe, national symbols are increasingly dismissed as symbols of racism and bigotry. Echoing instances of similar bans of national flags in several European countries because “this could offend immigrants,” schools in California, Colorado, and Arizona will ban the display of American flags and patriotic clothing. School administrators claim that the bans were put into effect to ease tensions between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students during recent immigration protests.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes in his book, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, “the goal of assimilation that was once the standard, if unspoken orthodoxy in our schools and government is now ridiculed as racist and untrue.” At the same time, illegal immigrants were displaying Mexican flags in Los Angeles, and there were proposals of making a Spanish-language version of the U.S. national anthem. According to Multicultural logic, tolerance is always a one-way street where Western countries have to give in.

It is striking to notice how the political establishment on both sides of the spectrum are unwilling to do anything to uphold the territorial integrity of the USA. President Bush “has not pushed for greater enforcement of immigration law (he is the chief law enforcement officer), has mocked the Minutemen as dangerous vigilantes and has done little to discourage the tide of illegal aliens, in spite of the dangers of a porous border in the post-911 world.” While Minuteman civilian patrols are keeping an eye out for illegal border crossers, the U.S. Border Patrol is keeping an eye out for Minutemen – and telling the Mexican government where they are. Chris Simcox, founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. “It’s unbelievable that our own government agency is sending intelligence to another country. TJ Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union representing more than 10,000 Border Patrol agents, said agents have complained for years about the Mexican consulate’s influence over the agency. “It worries me (that the Mexican government) seems to be unduly influencing our enforcement policies. That’s not a legitimate role for any foreign nation.”

As some observers have pointed out: If illegals from Mexico can get across the border, what is to stop al Qaeda terrorists from doing the same thing? US President George W. Bush has agreed with the description of David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the September 11 revolt of passengers against their hijackers on board Flight 93, who in a Wall Street Journal commentary last month called it “our first successful counter-attack in our homeland in this new global war, World War III”.

Mr. Bush said: “I believe that. I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III.” Well, Mr. Bush, if this is a world war, and it likely is, is it acceptable for you country to have borders like a Swiss cheese at a time of proliferation of nuclear weapons to states that call for your destruction? Would WW2 have ended the way it did if Churchill had declared war, and then looked the other way while millions of foreigners, including potential enemies, were entering and leaving Britain more or less at will, draining their economic resources and dividing the nation at the same time? People who enter the country illegally and display a blatant disregard for and hostility towards the laws and the culture of that country should not be called “immigrants,” they should be called something else. What about insurgents? When will American authorities start dealing with the insurgents in California and Texas?

I have earlier criticized Samuel P. Huntington for underestimating, in his “clash of civilizations” thesis, the extent to which Islam is different from all other major cultures and religions on earth. However, he has many valuable insights into the importance of culture and cultural differences. In “Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” he points out that the ongoing Mexican and Hispanic immigration is in many ways radically different from earlier waves of immigration to the USA. “Never before in American history has close to a majority of immigrants spoken a single non-English language. The impact of the predominance of Spanish-speaking immigrants is reinforced by many other factors: the proximity of their countries of origin; their absolute numbers; the improbability of this flow ending or being significantly reduced; their geographical concentration; their home government policies promoting their migration and influence in American society and politics.” Huntington worries that this could create a mental, perhaps even physical fragmentation and disintegration of the USA:

Before September 11, among some educated and elite Americans, national identity seemed at times to have faded from sight. Globalization, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, immigration, subnationalism, and anti-nationalism had battered American consciousness. Ethnic, racial, and gender identities came to the fore. In contrast to their predecessors, many immigrants were ampersands, maintaining dual loyalties and dual citizenships. A massive Hispanic influx raised questions concerning America’s linguistic and cultural unity. Corporate executives, professionals, and Information Age technocrats espoused cosmopolitan over national identities. The teaching of national history gave way to the teaching of ethnic and racial histories. The celebration of diversity replaced emphasis on what Americans had in common. The national unity and sense of national identity created by work and war in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and consolidated in the world wars of the twentieth century seemed to be eroding. By 2000, America was, in many respects, less a nation than it had been for a century.

Huntington points out that “as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.” Few people anticipated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Few Americans now anticipate the dissolution of or even fundamental changes in the United States. However, “the greatest surprise might be if the United States in 2025 were still much the same country it was in 2000 rather than a very different country (or countries) with very different conceptions of itself and its identity than it had a quarter century earlier. No society is immortal. As Rousseau said, “If Sparta and Rome perished, what state can hope to endure forever?” Even the most successful societies are at some point threatened by internal disintegration and decay and by more vigorous and ruthless external “barbarian” forces. In the end, the United States of America will suffer the fate of Sparta, Rome, and other human communities.” According to him, America “could soon evolve into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America. This could resemble the collections of diverse groups that once constituted the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires. These conglomerations were held together by the emperor and his bureaucracy.” What holds the USA together today, not to mention a generation or two from now?

This echoes claims put forward by Robert D. Kaplan, who has stated that the United States may be the first country in history that was “born to die.” “Indeed, it is not clear that the United States will survive the next century in exactly its present form. Because America is a multi-ethnic society, the nation-state has always been more fragile here than it is in more homogeneous societies like Germany and Japan.” Kaplan happened to be in Kosovo, covering a riot between Serbs and Albanians, when the Berlin Wall was falling, in November of 1989. “The future was in Kosovo,” he told himself that night, “not in Berlin.”

Samuel P. Huntington thinks that Americans should “recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions, and values that for three and a half centuries have been embraced by Americans of all races, ethnicities, and religions and that have been the source of their liberty, unity, power, prosperity, and moral leadership as a force for good in the world.” Kaplan’s assertion that “the future is Kosovo” mirrors my own statement that we may be entering a war that will be remembered as the Multicultural World War, with a Balkanization of the West caused by Multicultural insecurity about our own values and runaway immigration without assimilation. This may not be unavoidable yet, but it seems to be the direction in which we are now heading.

If the current Mexican immigration invasion of the USA is allowed to continue, there are several possible futures, all of them which will imply a significant weakening of the US as a nation state, and thus jeopardize its superpower status. French separatism and demands in Canada has for generations weakened that country as a nation. An increasingly bilingual and bicultural America would be faced with the same internal tensions as other bicultural countries such as Canada or Belgium.

Maybe in the future, the border of Latin America will be moved northwards to Vancouver and Montreal, where it will merge with the Islamic Republic of al-Canadistan. A worse scenario is that the USA will physically fall apart. As the Southwest de facto becomes a part of Greater Mexico, as the white majority diminishes and maybe disappears and Americans are told to “celebrate diversity,” they may wake up some day and discover that the country has become so “diverse” that they hardly have anything in common anymore. Such a situation could lead to peaceful separation, but also to civil war.

There is a reason why some of the largest Islamic organizations in the USA came out in support of the rallies in major cities in support of illegal immigrants. Muslims see this as a way of weakening the Great Satan. And they are right. Americans need to understand just how much is at stake here. We are probably, as President Bush himself has hinted at, in the early stages of a world war with Islam. Muslims are working to get nuclear weapons and are openly calling for the physical destruction of the West. Your enemies are watching the way you are handling the illegal situation, and they are not impressed. Do you think the North Koreans or the Iranians are scared of a country that allows itself to be intimidated and held hostage by a bunch of Mexicans who shouldn’t even be in the country in the first place? When you’re a superpower, the line of separation between domestic and foreign policy hardly exists. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was impressed by the way Ronald Reagan handled an attempt of blackmail by the civil air traffic controllers. He simply fired them. This signalled to your enemies abroad that you were not going to give into blackmail anywhere.

What is at stake here is your credibility as a superpower. In the longer run, it could be your physical security from nuclear attacks, perhaps even your very survival as a coherent nation state. DO NOT give in to Mexican intimidation. Build the border fence, and deport the illegals. Yes, ALL of them. No amnesty. We are facing decades of what could potentially become the deadliest war in human history, where the very survival of Western civilization and perhaps human civilization in general hangs in the balance. We cannot win this without you.

You are the indispensable nation, and if you break down, the rest of the planet is in serious trouble. Europe will have to concentrate on just surviving, India has Islamic problems or her own, Russia is neither willing nor able to lead a fight against Islam, and China doesn’t care. It may even prefer a conflict that will eliminate its Western rivals. The major obstacle to the agenda of Islamic world domination is the USA. The issue of illegal immigration is not about your golf courses, your lawns or your nannies, it’s about whether your children and grandchildren will grow up facing another American Century or another American civil war. And by extension, whether large parts of the world will be following sharia law.

Can Americans take back their country from the illegals and their own, appeasing elites? Have they still got the spirit of the Boston Tea Party in them, or have they become too softened by Mom and apple pie? Much depends upon the answer.