Paris burning: How empires end.

Pat Buchanan ruminates on the death of the West.

Like the urban riots in America in the 1960s, which the Kerner Commission blamed on "white racism," Paris' riots are being blamed on France's failure to bring Islamic immigrants into the social and economic mainstream. Solutions being offered range from voting rights for non-citizens to affirmative action in hiring the children of Third World immigrants.

To understand why this is unlikely to solve France's crisis, consider how America succeeded, and often failed, in solving her own racial crisis.
While, as late as the 1950s, black Americans were not integrated fully into our economy or society, they had been assimilated into American culture. They worshipped the same God, spoke the same language, had endured the same Depression and war, listened to the same music and radio, watched the same TV shows, laughed at the same comedians, went to the same movies, ate the same foods, read the same books, magazines and newspapers, and went to schools where, even when they were segregated, they learned the same history.

Is this the case now?

We were divided, but we were also one nation and one people. Black folks were as American as apple pie, having lived in our common land longer than almost every other ethnic group save Native Americans. And America had a history of having assimilated immigrants in the tens of millions from Europe.

But no European nation has ever assimilated a large body of immigrant peoples, let alone people of color. Moreover, the African and Islamic peoples pouring into Europe – there are 20 million there now – are, unlike black Americans, strangers in a new land, and millions wish to remain proud Algerians, Muslims, Moroccans.

These newcomers worship a different God and practice a faith historically hostile to Christianity, a traditionalist faith that is rising again and recoils violently from a secular culture saturated in sex.

Yep.

Severed from the civilization and cultures of their parents, these Arab and Muslim youth may hold French citizenship and carry French passports, but they are no more French than Americans who live in Paris. Searching for a community to which they can truly belong, they gravitate to mosques where the imams, many themselves immigrants, teach and preach that the West is not their true home, but a civilization alien to their values and historically hostile to their nations and Islam.

In any "war of civilizations," the soaring Muslim population is a potential Fifth Column inside Europe.

Nevertheless, their numbers must grow. For not only do they have a higher birthrate than the native-born Europeans, no European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate (2.1 births per woman) that will enable it to endure for many more generations. The West is aging, shrinking and dying.

If you don't buy the Natural Law argument against fornication, contraception, abortion, and divorce, how about this one?

Yet, to keep Europe's economy growing and taxes coming in to fund the health and pension programs of Europe's rising numbers of retired and elderly, Europe needs scores of millions of new workers. And Europe can only find them in the Third World.

Yep.

Nor should Americans take comfort in France's distress. By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics in the United States – half of them of Mexican ancestry – heavily concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans still believe by right belongs to them.

Which is why we have to help these people remain orthodox Catholics. The moral relativism of protestantism and americanism are a grave threat to individual souls and our nation.

Colonization of the mother countries by subject peoples is the last chapter in the history of empires – and the next chapter in the history of the West, which is now coming to a close.

The bottom line? We've been living off the principal left by our forefathers since the Civil War. Interest is no longer accruing (if it ever did) and that principal is almost gone.