The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization Paperback – October 15, 2002

After ploughing through 336 customer reviews, I find myself deeply saddened. The proof is right here that at least one of Buchanan's theses is correct. We are two nations. It was obvious to some of us when we saw the results of the 2000 election. America is split down the middle, and Pat Buchanan represents one half, Bill Clinton the other half. There can be no middle ground, precisely for the reasons he gives. We are in the midst of a civil war, a cold war; it has been called "the culture war." It has also been said that it is a war for the soul of America. Nowhere have I seen that thesis born out as much as in these reviews.I am a retired teacher of history and have been a researcher all of my adult life. It was interesting to me that the positive reviews all claimed that Buchanan was telling the truth, and his documentation was superb. The negative reviews contained either a claim that it was badly written and inaccurate (no examples were provided) or simply expressed feelings of disgust and anger. One person called attention to Santayana's paraphrase of Thucydides, "Those who refuse to learn from History are condemned to repeat it." The positive reviewers often suggested that the negatives were ignorant and probably had not read the book. I disagree.They are not ignorant. They are miseducated. They did read the book but did not understand it. Piles of books have been written about the "dumbing down" of America during the past half century and particularly about revisionist history, which I did not notice anyone mentioning. I am 80 years old and attended college in the forties. For ten years I worked as a journalist. When I went into teaching in 1955, I was appalled at how much education had changed since the war of "The Greatest Generation." We weren't the greatest generation. We were only the last generation which came of age in a moral world. Writers today contrast our world with that of the fifies. It is because they are so young. In the fifties we were already heading for disaster, but I was acquainted with no one who saw it except myself. I had available only Brave New World and 1984 to justify my view. When I predicted the amoral world of today I was told I was an "alarmist", that I was making a mountain out of a molehill.The key to Buchanan's book is in the title, as it should be. It seemed to me that few of the reviewers, positive or negative, saw the big picture. They were either concerned with immigration or "white supremacy" or contemporary Christians. Only a few mentioned the "culture war." But that is what it is all about, the death of a civilization the like of which this earth has never known before or elsewhere. Buchanan has the disadvantage of having run for office, so on the surface it appears that he is making a political point. This is not so.The negative reviewers all agree with Jesse Jackson leading his followers across the Stanford campus, chanting, "Hey,hey, ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go!" That's what the war is about.Back in the sixties I read Stephen Benet's short story, "Last of the Legions" to my classes. It was about a legionaire in Britain in the last days of the Roman Empire. It is a deeply moving story, and most of the students were moved. We talked about it in comparison with what was happening to our own civilization. Most were concerned, but three girls agreed that they didn't care because "We won't be around anyway."Here is the difference between our culture today and the civilization which started on the downward path in 1939. Before the second half of the twentieth century, everyone thought of "posterity." Hardly anyone does today, even among those who cherish our civilization. And therefore women are not having children.One final note. In the fifties I was sure there was a conspiracy to make ignoramuses of our children, but I had no idea who were the conspirators. I am grateful to Mr. Buchanan for supplying the names. At that time I was a fan of Erich Fromm because of his book, "The Art of Love," which, it appears, was a great scam. It is all very dismaying. Only a miracle can save our beloved heritage. That makes me think about the disintegration of the Soviet Union. After thirty-five years in which a man known as Brother Andrew smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain, just before the fall he was invited to a conference in which there were Russion delegates. He met a Russian official who told him that his book, God's Smuggler, had been read by every official in Moscow and that they all owned Bibles. Unbelievable? Christians would answer that nothing is impossible to God.

This book should be essential reading. Mr. Buchanan appears to have a crystal ball (this book was published in 2002) in predicting a lot of our current issues in the world. Whether you agree with his ideas or not, it compels debate, which is something that is not looked upon well in our current climate. Must read.

Pat reminds conservatives of many things. Our traditional ethno culture is at risk, but definitely worth fighting for.Have more White Christian Babies - work to preserve ourselves and for a posterity.

Unlike the majority of political books, this one reads well. Many political books are difficult to get through and often become repetitive after the first 20 pages. Once in a while, a political book transcends the genre. This book may be one of those.First of all, it is a conservative book that uses a tone of all-out-warfare against the Marxist and Socialist left. It is actually refreshing to have a political author say what he means and mean what he says. While those on the left of the political spectrum will find the underlying tone of the book offensive, it is still worth while to read just for the statistics on immigration and also the history of the left's "long march" through western cultural institutions. To a conservative, this book will be disquieting because it suggests that in spite of any political tactic, the sheer demographics of the current immigrants will overwhelm their cherished way of life.Secondly, the most original aspects of this book are the compilation of statistics and trends of immigration, and the history of the marxist, socialist attack on western culture. His immigration statistics and projections of trends are must reading for anyone, left or right, who wishes to ponder the future of the West.Buchanan's chapter "Four who made a revolution" summarizes succinctly the authors of the left's strategy for taking over the cultural institutions of the West. Hungarian George Lukacs who realizes that the traditional family must be destroyed via sexual licentiousness and corruption of the children.Italian Antonio Gramsci who realized that the bulwark of the West was Christianity and that only through assault on religion as well as taking over the arts, cinema, theater, journalism, and education would socialism ever succeed in the West. Gramsci coined the term "long march" (an allusion to Mao tse-Tung's retreat from Chiang Kai Shek in the 1930's) to describe how the Left would subvert Western Culture.Renegade Marxist and admirer of the Marquis de Sade, Max Horkheimer and music critic Thodor Adorno were instrumental in the Frankfurt School, a collection of radical misfits who introduced "Critical Theory" to society - the idea that any element of Western Culture must be subjected to continual "destructive criticism". The attack politics of the Left is a natural outgrowth of this idea. Adorno is best known for labelling anything middle-class or anti-socialist as incipiently fascist, even though fascism is, after all, a type of socialism. The Frankfurt school influenced multiple teacher's colleges, starting with Columbia University and the public school system and the radical teacher's unions are the fruit of this "tree of knowledge".And lastly, Herbert Marcuse, who realized that socialism would never recruit enough believers from the mainstream and realized that the Left needed to turn feminists, radical youth, those who practice homosexual behavior,black militants, criminals and other malcontents into the new average citizen.In no other single source can I find this synthesis of information.Buchanan also lists a few ways to combat what he says is the coming doom. I find this part of the book the weakest part (and the shortest).In summary, this book may well join the pantheon of conservative classics like Whittaker Chamber's "Witness", Horowitz's "Radical Son", and the writings of Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke.

The one aspect that cought my attention and surprise is that this book was written 23 years ago; what the author pointed out then, it has come to pass today. One can only analyze today's political race to the White House in order to understand the differences in beliefs between the Republican vs the Democrat Parties regarding issues such as the economy, immigration, religion, culture, history, education and abortion. A shift in population growth and proportionality has shifted American politics towards government control, corruption of governmental institutions, intimidation of SCOTUS judges, wokeness, vote fraud (unwillingness on voting reform requiring proof of citizenship), naive foreign policy. And something that most people ignore (including myself before reading this book), is how the marxist ideology has patiently set foot on the WesternEuropean and American politics and current state of affairs.