Buchanan - Day of reckoning: how hubris, ideology, and greed are tearing America apart

DAY of
RECKONING

Also by Patrick J. Buchanan

State of Emergency

Where the Right Went Wrong

The Death of the West

A Republic, Not an Empire

The Great Betrayal

Right from the Beginning

Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories

The New Majority

How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed
Are Tearing America Apart

* * * * *

Patrick J. Buchanan

Thomas Dunne Books
St. Martins Press
New York

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin's Press.

DAY OF RECKONING. Copyright 2007 by Patrick J. Buchanan. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37696-3
ISBN-10: 0-312-37696-0

First Edition: December 2007

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To Russell Kirk (1918-1994)
Friend and Teacher

A day of reckoning is approaching. It is my hope that the price in blood, treasure, and humiliation America will eventually be forced to pay for the hubris, arrogance, and folly of our reigning foreign policy elites is not, God forbid, war, defeat, and the diminution of the Republicthe fate of every other great nation or empire that set out on the same course.

PATRICK J. BUCHANAN, A Republic, Not an Empire, 1999

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

W. B. YEATS, THE SECOND COMING

Nations pay a severe price for lost wars. So the last century taught us.

The Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires went down to defeat in the Great War. The Romanovs were overthrown and murdered and the czarist empire was torn apart at Brest-Litovsk. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled and Vienna reduced to the capital of a landlocked nation of 6.5 million. The Hapsburgs were sent packing. Germany lost her colonies and navy and an eighth of her territory. The kaiser fled to Holland. Germans and Hungarians in the millions were put under the rule of Belgians, French, Italians, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Romanians, and Lithuanians.

The fall of France in 1940 led to the collapse of the Third Re-public and the end of the French Empire in Indochina, the Maghreb and Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Britain's exhaustion and bankruptcy after 1945 led to the rout of the Tories, the ouster of Winston Churchill, socialism, and the decline and fall of the empire on which the sun was never to set. Defeat in Afghanistan brought the collapse of the Soviet Empire, overthrow of the Communist Party, and the death and decomposition of the Soviet Union.

These were epochal events. But soon after these empires passed into history, which progressives celebrated, the cheering stopped. For something unanticipated began to happen. The once-subject peoples, discontented with life in their liberated homelands, began the greatest mass migration in human history. Northward, they came, in the millions, to the First World countries that had held their ancestors in colonial captivity. And the nations of Eu-rope, no longer imperial, no longer great, began to disintegrate.

Ireland had shown the way early in the century, breaking free of the United Kingdom in 1921, as these Catholic Celts considered themselves a persecuted minority of Protestant England. Every Irish child knew of the icy British indifference to the famine of 45 and the execution of the martyrs of the Easter Rising, when, in Yeats's words, all was changed, changed utterly, and a terrible beauty was born. And with the lifting of the nuclear sword of Damocles that had hung over Europe in the Cold War, the disintegration accelerated. The fault lines upon which the states began to break apart were ethnicity, religion, language, and history.

In 1991, the Soviet Union shattered into fifteen nations. Most had never before existed, or existed only in centuries past. Ukrainians knew from their culture of the Ukraine of history. The Baltic republics had not forgotten czarist rule or the horrors of the 1940 annexations by Stalin. The Armenians, Azeris, and Georgians of the Caucasus are not Russian. The Turkomans, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kirgyz, Kazakhs, all of whom now have their own nations, are Muslims and do not cherish memories of rule by Christian czars and Soviet commissars.

In the Velvet Divorce of January 1,1993, Czechs and Slovaks went their separate ways. Yugoslavia disintegrated into six nations: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro. A seventh, Kosovo, is about to be born. Ethnicity, religion, and history were the reefs on which Yugoslavia was battered and broke apart. Slovenes had belonged to the Hapsburg Empire, not the Ottoman. Muslims are dominant in Bosnia. Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats have horrible memories of mutual slaughter in World War II. Kosovo is to Serbs what Jerusalem is to Jews, but the province is now 90 percent Albanian and Muslim. The Orthodox churches and convents of Kosovo have been vandalized and destroyed.

Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, it is said, were artificial nations created by the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain in 1919. And the Soviet Union was but the Russian Empire reconstituted by the Red Army, the KGB, the Communist Party, and Leninist ideology, not a nation at all. The breakup of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia did not come, however, until after they embraced democracy. Communist rule kept them together. Indeed, it seems a truism. To hold together a multiethnic or multilingual state, either an authoritarian regime or a dominant ethnocultural core is essential.

The sudden disintegration of these three nations into twentysix seemed to substantiate Strobe Talbott's prediction in his 1992 Time essay, The Birth of the Global Nation.

All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.

[W]ithin the next hundred years nationhood as we

Is the time of nations over? Is the nation-state passing away? Are the bonds that hold them together so flimsy? Since Talbott's essay, events have not contradicted him.

In 2007, the Scottish National Party, which seeks to dissolve the Acts of Union of 1707 and break free of England, displaced Labour as first party in the Scottish Parliament. Scots whose grandfathers were proud to be the fighting sons of the British Empire are less desirous of being ruled by Little England. Welsh separatists made gains in the same election. Like the Irish, the other Celts wish to be free of the English, who are themselves setting aside the Union Jack of the United Kingdom for the red Cross of St. George.

Londonistan is not the London of Victoria or Edward VII. With the empire gone, people are less proud to be Britons. In America, one sees a trend of British journalists quietly applying for U.S. citizenship for themselves and their children.

Catalans and Basques seek independence from Spain. Corsi-cans and Bretons want out of France. Belgium, in the fall of 2007, was on the verge of breakup into a Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and a Francophone Wallonia in the south. The Lega Nord hopes to secede from Italy. Turks and Greeks have divided Cyprus. Only immigrants who prefer rule by Ottawa prevent the Quebecois from breaking free of Canada. Russia is bedeviled by new secessionist movements in Dagestan and Chechnya.