Books - The Death of the West

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	Books - The Death of the West

The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Threaten Our Culture and Civilization is a 2001 book by paleoconservative politician Pat Buchanan.

The thesis of The Death of the West is that the developed world (called the "West" throughout but also including Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) is dying because its women are not producing enough babies to replace the present generation. Buchanan, using population projections made by the UN and other demographic organizations, claims that fertility rates in most wealthy countries are indeed well below the level necessary to replace the population, with the result that populations in Europe and Japan are likely not only to decline catastrophically, but also age to the point that they are likely to be overtaken through immigration by other cultures, primarily African and Muslim. This immigration, Buchanan claims, will be necessary to obtain a workforce that can pay for the indebted pension systems that exist today in Europe and Japan.

Buchanan argues that the decline in birthrates has been driven primarily by a collapse of traditional religion through the influence of the Frankfurt School. The Death of the West argues that Marxists had failed to overthrow capitalism during and after World War I so that Marxists of the Frankfurt School came to the conclusion that Christianity had immunised the West to socialism, so that building socialism would first require the destruction of Christianity and other traditional values through a process called "Critical Theory".

Buchanan argues that the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse have created a humanist culture (epitomised by the 1973 Humanist Manifesto) in which human life is not sacred and sexual morals restricting sexual activity to marriage have been destroyed. He believes that strict sexual morals and strong faith are a prerequisite for civilization and that if sexual morals are loosened, civilizations inevitably collapse. Buchanan also believes that nature has endowed men and women with roles that they cannot change without serious social consequences, and that modern feminism has triumphed over such a balanced view of sexual roles. Using John Unwin's study of third-century Rome, Buchanan shows that the collapse of the former pagan religion occurred through mass abortion and infanticide, and that because they were forbidden as Christians to murder, Christians had far more children than pagans and thus were able to become a majority in Rome. He argues the same thing is happening in Europe today where Muslim immigrants are having children and nominal Christian natives are not, so that Europe is poised for an Islamic takeover.

Buchanan argues that the ideals of free love and freedom from responsibility were highly appealing to those of the baby boom years of the 1950s because they had never known sacrifice in depression of war. He suggests that their acceptance on college campuses around 1964 marked the arrival of the first baby boomers, and believes that ever since universities have tried to taint or erase the heroes who built Western civilization. The Death of the West argues that rewriting of history to taint the colonialism, militarism and imperialism of the West amounts in practice to nothing except nihilism.

In the last part of The Death of the West, Buchanan argues that a "cultural counterrevolution" will be needed for the West to survive in the long term because, again with excellent statistics from fertility rates in different populations throughout the United States, he shows that only strong religious faith can maintain a birth rate high enough to prevent eventual population decline. Thus, he praises homeschooling and sees its growth among conservative Catholics along with fundamentalist Baptist schools as a healthy sign. Buchanan advocates a "National History Bee" to revive the importance of American and European history to young people, plus secession from what he sees as a toxic cultural wasteland, as the Amish and Hutterites did before the Industrial Revolution and Orthodox Jews have done more recently.

Buchanan believes there is - at least in the United States - potential for a religious revival because, as he shows, support for Al Gore was so concentrated geographically in the Northeast and Pacific Coast. In Buchanan's view, the heartland of America is overwhelmingly in favour of a cultural counter revolution, and he believes there is strong hope for the West's survival if there is the focus on achieving the counterrevolution to overthrow the humanist "culture of death".

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