“America is becoming a microcosm of a world on fire,” writes Pat Buchanan in his latest column, “The Brazil of North America“:
[A]s we continue our descent to Third World status, perhaps we should explore more deeply the “diversity” that has of late come to be regarded as America’s most treasured attribute.
In 1960, we were not nearly so diverse. Nine in 10 Americans professed a Christian faith. Nine in 10 Americans traced their ancestry back to Europe. E Pluribus Unum. We were one nation and one people.
Since then, we have become the Brazil of North America, a multiracial, multilingual, multiethnic, multicultural “universal nation” unlike any that has existed in the history of the West.
And if we look abroad at those Western nations traveling along this perilous path with us, we can see clearly now our future.
Before the 1960s, Europe never knew mass immigration. And after the terrible ethnic cleansing of Germans after World War II, most of Europe’s nations were ethnically homogeneous.
Several were not. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the USSR. At the end of the Cold War, with freedom, all three came apart. Where we had three nations, suddenly we had 24 and such sub-nations as South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria.
Now Scots are seeking to break away from England, Catalans from Spain, Corsicans from France, Venetians from Italy and Flemish from Belgium, though these peoples have lived together for centuries.
Crimeans have gone back to Russia, while Chechens and other peoples of the Caucasus are fighting to break free of Russia.
The roots of these secessionist movements may be traced to economics, ethnicity, history, religion, language, culture and borders…
Disintegration, separatism and secessionism, for racial, religious, and cultural causes, are a phenomenon common now to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Are we somehow immune?
