Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  Upon what ground do democratists stand to tell Morales he cannot use democracy to dispossess the European minority and empower his own race? What does the future hold for the West when people of European descent become a minority in nations they created, and people of color decide to vote themselves proportionate or larger shares of the national wealth?

  In 2009, Morales was reelected in a landslide. Nor is Bolivia alone among nations where ethnicity and democracy are coming together to overturn the verdicts of free markets.

  “WORLD ON FIRE”

  Our situation may be about to become even more grim.

  How much more is told in World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Amy Chua’s book is about those “ethnic minorities who … tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the ‘indigenous’ majorities around them.”115

  Examples are the overseas Chinese, the Indians of East Africa, whites in south Africa, and Europeans in the Andean countries. Chua, whose aunt was a Chinese national whose throat was cut by a Filipino chauffeur resentful of her wealth, argues that while free markets often concentrate a nation’s wealth among ethnic minorities, democracy gives power to impoverished ethnic majorities. This has proven a combustible and lethal cocktail.

  In these circumstances, the pursuit of free-market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting a frustrated “indigenous” majority, easily aroused by opportunistic vote-seeking politicians, against a resented wealthy ethnic minority. This confrontation is playing out in country after country, from Indonesia to Sierra Leone, from Zimbabwe to Venezuela, from Russia to the Middle East.116

  * * *

  In 1965, as recounted in the Mel Gibson film The Year of Living Dangerously, Indonesian mobs massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese, the market-dominant minority. Chua describes what happened in 1998, when Suharto, Sukarno’s successor, who had protected the 3 percent of Chinese who controlled much of the nation’s wealth, was in turn ousted:

  Indonesians were euphoric. After the words “free and fair elections” hit the U.S. headlines, Americans were euphoric. Democratic elections, it was thought, would finally bring to Indonesia the kind of peace and legitimacy perfect for sustaining free markets.…

  That’s not what happened in Indonesia. The fall of Suharto’s autocracy was accompanied by an eruption of ferocious anti-Chinese violence in which delirious, mass-supported Muslim mobs burned, looted and killed anything Chinese, ultimately leaving two thousand people dead.117

  Across the Malacca Strait a similar script was played out.

  In May 1969, riots in Malaysia brought death to hundreds of Chinese, the rape of their women, suspension of parliament and erection of a system of race preferences. As Malays, bumiputra, sons of the soil, were 62 percent of the population but had only 2 percent of the wealth, the government “adopted sweeping ethnic quotas on corporate equity ownership, university admissions, government licensing, and commercial employment.… It also initiated large scale purchases of corporate assets on behalf of the Malay majority.”118

  Chinese companies were forced to set aside 30 percent of equity for Malays, but given no choice as to who their new partners would be. Firms seeking to list on the stock exchange were required to have 30 percent bumiputra ownership. Not until 2009 did Malaysia’s ruling coalition, facing recession, rising Chinese and Indian protests, and competition for foreign investment, relent and roll back the 30 percent rule.119

  Third World nationalizations in the postcolonial era, writes Chua, by and large did not seek to abolish private property but to transfer it from the market-dominant minority to the largest and most powerful tribe or ethnic group:

  In Uganda … the politically dominant groups of the north have repeatedly subjected the economically powerful Baganda of the south to bloody purges. In Nigeria in 1966, tens of thousands of Ibo were slaughtered indiscriminately by furious mobs. In Ethiopia, the relatively prosperous Eritreans were recently expelled en masse.… [I]n Rwanda, the genocidal massacre of the Tutsi minority is inextricably connected with their historic economic dominance.120

  In 1972, Idi Amin gave the 75,000 Indians who ran small businesses ninety days to get out of Uganda. Their property was confiscated and turned over to Africans.

  At “liberation” in 1979, the whites of Zimbabwe controlled most of the wealth. In three decades they have been picked clean. In a 2010 essay on “The White Tribes,” Joshua Hammer writes, “But nowhere was white flight more dramatic than in Zimbabwe, where the white population dropped from a peak of around 296,000 in 1975 (five percent of the population) to 120,000 in 1999 to just 30,000 today.”121

  Mugabe has now gone after the last four thousand white-owned farms that account for almost all of Zimbabwe’s exports—to hand them to loyalists. Zimbabwe is now a basket case, its starving people fleeing to a South Africa that has started down the same path.

  On April 3, 2010, Eugène Terre’Blanche, a white nationalist and last-ditch defender of apartheid, was hacked to death by two black employees on his farm. The murder came, wrote the Financial Times, as “Julius Malema, the demagogic leader of the ruling African National Congress’s powerful youth wing, has been touring the country calling for nationalization of private businesses and singing the Apartheid-era song containing the lyrics ‘Kill the Boer.’”122 Since the end of apartheid, agricultural unions claim three thousand white farmers have been killed.123 Half the white population has left the country.

  Though a South African court declared “Kill the Boer” hate speech, Malema continued to sing it and traveled to Zimbabwe to hail Mugabe for his violent seizures of white-owned farms. The FT urged President Jacob Zuma to steal the thunder of his ANC youth leader with a more rapid redistribution of white-owned land to black South Africans. Since the end of apartheid, fifteen million acres of farmland have been transferred to black owners.124

  South Africa’s regime, writes Robert Guest of the Economist, wants “about 25% of most industries to be in black hands by 2010. The new black capitalists are supposed to pay a ‘market’ price for their acquisitions, but they don’t have the money, so they don’t.”

  Instead, the focus is on redistribution. And not the conventional sort, from rich to poor, but from white to black, which is not the same. South Africa has embarked on probably the most extreme affirmative action program anywhere. Private companies above a certain size are obliged to try to make their workforces “demographically representative” (75 percent black, 50 percent female, etc.) from factory floor to boardroom.125

  Under the Employment Equity Act and Black Economic Empowerment Act, companies are required to discriminate in hiring against white males in favor of white women, persons of color, people with disabilities, and those from rural areas. The government employment act establishes a quota of 80% of all new jobs for blacks.126

  A racial-ethnic spoils system may be the future in the Third World, leading, as in Africa, to dispossession and departure of whites and Indians whose ancestors were brought there by the British to help run the empire, and were abandoned when the British departed. In Australia, an open-borders policy that has brought millions in from Asia, writes ethologist Frank Salter, has begun to threaten social cohesion and national unity:

  Ethnic stratification is taking place.… Anglo Australians … are presently being displaced disproportionately in the professions and in senior managerial positions by Asian immigrants and their children. The situation is dramatic at selective schools which are the high road to university and the professions. Ethnocentrism is not a White disorder and evidence is emerging that immigrant communities harbour invidious attitudes towards Anglo Australians, disparaging their culture and the legitimacy of their central place in national identity.127

  Nor are Americans strangers to race violence over who has what.

  Korean grocers are a visible presence in black communities and the Korean aptitude for entreprene
urship is legendary. A 2002 census report found 95,000 black-owned businesses in America to 57,000 Korean-owned businesses, though blacks outnumber Korean Americans twenty-five to one.128 Thus, a Korean American is fifteen times as likely to own a business with employees as an African American. Of all Asian ethnic groups, Koreans have the highest rate of business ownership. Nor has this gone unnoticed. In his 1991 rap song, Ice Cube reminded Korean shopkeepers who was boss in the ’hood.

  So pay respect to the black fist

  or we’ll burn your store, right down to a crisp.…

  Cause you can’t turn the ghetto—into Black Korea.129

  The following April, in the worst race violence in twentieth-century America, mobs poured out of South Central to attack Koreatown.

  Three years later, after protests at Jewish-owned Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem featuring chants of “Burn down the Jew store,” a berserk African American burst in and shot four employees, then set fire to the store, killing seven in all.

  How deep does the resentment run?

  In 2006, Andrew Young, former UN ambassador and former Atlanta mayor, was asked if he thought it right that Walmart, whose spokesman he was, was killing mom-and-pop stores in the African American community. An agitated Young fired back.

  Well, I think they should; they ran the “mom-and-pop” stores out of my neighborhood.… But you see those are the people who have been overcharging us—selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans, now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.130

  The Korean presence in the black community seems ever on the mind, especially the Korean monopoly of the “black hair” market.

  “Whether you’re in the suburbs of Houston or on MLK Boulevard in Anytown, USA,” writes R. Asmerom, in the Atlanta Post, “that image of the few Koreans in the neighborhoods only existing behind the cash register of liquor, beauty supply and other retail shops is still perplexing.” Asmerom reported that in September 2010, “[T]here are over 9,000 Korean-owned beauty supply stores serving a billion dollar market for Black hair.” The Korean “concentration in these businesses promoted a shroud of secrecy and protectiveness” that “fueled part of the tension between Korean business owners and the urban African-American community which famously erupted during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.”131

  Asians and whites are America’s market-dominant majority. In half a century, they will become the minority. Already, they are shrinking minorities in major cities. By Chua’s thesis, racial and ethnic majorities will use electoral power to elevate politicians to expropriate the wealth of the minority as is happening with ever-heavier taxes on the upper middle class and wealthy, Asian and white, in California.

  The Obama Democrats, who campaigned for abolishing “tax cuts for the rich,” individuals earning $200,000 and families earning $250,000, may be a harbinger of what is to come with the rise of Third World America.

  “WHITE PEOPLE WITH BLUE EYES”

  Chua exposes a fatal flaw of democracy in multiethnic nations.

  Free markets concentrate wealth in the hands of a market-capable ethnic minority. Democracy empowers the ethnic majority. When the latter begin to demand a larger share of the wealth, demagogues arise to meet those demands. Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Ollanta Humala, Daniel Ortega all profess to speak for the indigenous Indians they claim were robbed by the Portuguese, Spanish, and other Europeans who came after Columbus.

  In the United States, MEChA, the “Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán,” or “Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán,” which is present on hundreds of campuses and in the barrios of the Southwest, is a replica of these indigenous peoples’ movements in Latin America. In World on Fire, Chua writes of how Hugo Chavez vaulted to power in one of the wealthiest nations of South America.

  Chavez swept to his landslide victory on a wave of explicit ethnically based populism. Demanding “a social revolution,” Chavez aroused to impassioned political consciousness Venezuela’s brown-skinned pardos, who make up 80 percent of the population, who are largely destitute, and, who, like “The Indian from Barinas”—as Chavez refers to himself—have “thick mouths” and “Chinese-looking eyes.” “He is one of us,” wept cheering, growth-stunted washerwomen, maids, and peasants. “We’ve never had another president like that before.”132

  Two hundred years after Spanish America broke free of Madrid, a deep division between the Spanish and white and the Indian and African, on the lines of race, class, and income, endures. In Colombia that division is on display every November in rival beauty contests.

  At the Naval Museum in Cartagena in 2010, writes the New York Times, “light-skinned daughters of prominent families” competed for the title of Miss Colombia and “sashayed about flashing perfect smiles and impossibly high cheekbones.”133

  A few miles away in a slum called Boston, another beauty contest was being held to crown Miss Independence, queen of the slums. As Colombia has the largest black population of any Spanish-speaking nation, the new Miss Independence was the dark-skinned daughter of a maid who earned six dollars a day cleaning houses of the Cartagena rich. Only once in the seventy-six-year history of the Miss Colombia pageant has an Afro-Colombian candidate won.134

  Clashes along these same dividing lines—race, class, income—may decide the future of all of Latin America, and not only Latin America.

  During the financial crisis, President Lula da Silva, speaking at a press conference with Gordon Brown, stoked the racial resentment of black and brown against the market-dominant minority of the Global Economy:

  This crisis was caused by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing.… I do not know any black or indigenous bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind which is victimized more than any other should pay for the crisis.135

  When riots broke out in Jamaica in May 2010, Orlando Patterson wrote, echoing Chua, “The violence tearing apart Jamaica, a democratic state, raises serious questions … [about] the link between violence and democracy itself.”136

  In diverse democracies, the temptation of leaders to exploit ethnic identity for political ends is an all too frequent source of major conflict, sometimes culminating in oppression of minorities and even genocide. We saw this happen in Rwanda in 1994 and the former Yugoslav states in the 1990s. Dennis Austin, who has studied political strife in India and Sri Lanka, has concluded that in such societies, “democracy is itself a spur to violence,” adding “depth to the sense of division.”137

  In the spring 2010 violence in Kyrgyzstan that toppled the president and triggered the ethnic cleansing and killing of Uzbeks, Kyrgyz set out to pillage a Chinese-owned mall. “Armed with iron bars and clubs,” reported the Washington Post, “the mob stormed into the Guoying center in the middle of the night, looting, smashing and then burning the best-known emblem of China’s economic presence here in the capital.”138

  Ethnonationalism and populism seem everywhere on the rise, with animosity toward “overseas Chinese” spreading across the Third World where they have settled and succeeded. “It is getting very difficult to be Chinese here,” said the leader of a trade group in Bishkek.139 Race resentment and ethnic envy have produced many horrors of our world, but only a fool will deny their power or try to define them out of existence. They are real and we must live with them.

  What Amy Chua implies in World on Fire bears repeating.

  America’s crusade for global democracy may, if successful, ensure endless ethnic warfare. For free markets enrich the economically able, the winners in society—Chinese, Indians, Ibo, Tutsis, whites—while democracy empowers the ethnic majority, the losers. Rulers, dependent on the majority, like Mugabe on his Shona, will then use the law or vigilante justice to reward the people on whom they depend for power, by stripping the mi
nority of its wealth and condoning the humiliation of and violence against that minority. Again and again and again it has happened.

  Consider Chua’s law on a global scale. The market dominant minority for five hundred years has been Europeans, now down to a sixth of the world’s population and fated to be a tenth or less in 2060. The world’s majority will be African, Arab, Latin, Asian. Yet, these billions of people have only a fraction of the world’s wealth. Is it not inevitable that there will arise an irresistible worldwide clamor that the few who have so much transfer more of what they have to those who have so little?

  Why would Western nations further empower, though transnational institutions, a world majority that believes we are rich because they are poor? Chávez is the hero type of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. As Chua writes, “Like Bolivia’s Amerindian rebel leader Mallku and Ecuador’s Villavicencio, Chavez generated mass support by attacking Venezuela’s ‘rotten’ white elites.”140 Is Hugo Chavez a harbinger of what is to come?

  An alarmed Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, thinks so, and has implored the white nations to unite or fall one by one:

  There is an enormous distance between Europe and the Third World. There is a new civilization emerging in the Third World that thinks that the white, northern hemisphere has always oppressed it and must therefore fall at its feet now. This is very serious. If the northern civilization wants to protect itself, it must be united: America, the European Union, and Russia. If they are not together they will be defeated one by one.141

  CURSE OR BLESSING

  Is ethnonationalism a genetic disease of mankind that all good men should quarantine wherever it breaks out? Or is this drive of awakened peoples to create nations of their own where their own kind come first a force of nature that must be accommodated if we are ever to know peace? To many who lived through the twentieth century, the poisonous fruit of ethnonationalism, the horrors it produced from Nanking to Auschwitz to Rwanda, answer the question with finality: ethnonationalism is a beast that must be chained. Yet ethnonationalism liberated the captive nations and brought down the “evil empire.” And with the rise of Solidarity and its crushing by General Wojciech Jaruzelski on Moscow’s orders, America’s cry was “Let Poland be Poland!” Ethnonationalism gave birth to scores of African and Asian nations that came out of the old European empires. Many are prosperous and peaceful.