The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization by Patrick J. Buchanan. Paperback: 320 pages. (New York, NY: St. Martin's, 2002).

Review by Ryan Setliff

Pat Buchanan’s 2004 book, The Death of the West, is a clarion call to save the West — in its European cradle, as well as its abodes in America and Australasia — because IT'S DYING!!! The West is dying avows Patrick Buchanan and with boldness and clarity. Buchanan has taken to the task of writing a bleak and startling prognosis for Western Civilization. European populations in the First World are aging and colossal immigrant invasions imperil their survival. The demographic change will rapidly transform the culture, politics and nature of entire nations, and the trend may be irreversible if no action is taken soon.

The birth control pill has arguably become the suicide pill of the West. Birth rates have steadily made huge declines among First World nations. More alarming, the traditional family as an institution is disappearing. Since the 1960s, women have been forced into the labor market to pay the family's share of taxes.

The nefarious influence of feminism has arguably trampled the dignity of motherhood. The zeal for material affluence and the lethargy at having children has led to a serious measured decline in legitimate birth rates amongst Westerners. Many Westerners are irreligious, narcissistic and mammon-driven yuppies. Not surprisingly, children are seen as less of an asset and more of an undesired liability and burden. Some couples opt never to have children. The culture war is at the heart of the matter!

Consider the following:

• Not a single European nation except Muslim Albania has a birthrate that will enable it to survive in its present form past 2050.

• By 2050, less than 10 percent of the world's population will be of white European descent; and it will be an aging population on top of that, with a median age of fifty.

• There are 30 million foreign born people in the United States, and of that one-third are illegal aliens.

• America is losing the culture war. Relativism, cultural Marxism, and paganism have attacked the traditional Christian faith of millions.

Buchanan's prognosis is obviously a clarion call to avert the disaster soon to befall the West. The title is ominous enough, but Buchanan is not overtaken with a spirit of resignation. Buchanan is not trying to be a pessimist as he does offers solutions to avert this crisis. This book is cogent and very well reasoned. The nations of the West, including the United States must take action to avert its declining population, by restricting immigration and reemphasizing the need for strong, healthy families. We may have won the Cold War, notes Pat, but we are failing at the Cultural War. Gramsci's "long march through the institutions" has wrought unassailable damage to Western culture, as cultural Marxism, relativism, and nihilism as become the culture of millions. With a trenchant pen, Buchanan launches a broadside against the cadre of Marxist intellectuals and Sixties radicals who have attacked our faith, our history and heritage in academia while brainwashing our children into an enmity against the West. The embrace of permissive sex and the drug culture has taken root-this must be broken. Pat offers some solutions for staving off the crisis, but makes it clear something must be done.

Those that take issue with Buchanan are often themselves antipathetic to the West. Many Westerners have refused to take an anti-immigrant stance and are ready to acquiesce in the suicide of the West: these folks have a self-imposed guilt complex owing to revisionist propaganda assailing the West as a bastion of imperialism, elitism and oppression. At the behest of the Frankfurt School and other Neo-Marxist pseudo-intellectuals, this assault on our culture has browbeaten millions into submission, apathy and indeed antipathy against their own culture. Buchanan is bold and gives moral clarity on a prickly issue, but he is emboldened enough to state the obvious: Western Civilization will collapse or be radically transformed into a wholly different civilization if its disappearing progenitors — white Europeans — become a minority in their own homelands. Europe itself is poised to fall over a precipice and transform into an Islamic Caliphite if no action is taken to avert the immigrant invasion from North Africa and the Middle East.

It takes courage these days to state the obvious: the proliferation and numerical preponderance of white Europeans in their cradle and colonial abodes is vitally requisite to the survival of Western Civilization. The underlying crisis, however, is spiritual more so than cultural. The torch of Christendom is seemingly being passed from the West to the Far East, and the increasingly irreligious secular Europeans and Americans are simply not reproducing to sustain their numbers.