The Death of the West

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  A CHILD’S LOVE of its mother grows naturally, but love of country must be taught. Only by learning can a child know of the people and nation to which he or she belongs. For those born before World War II, love of country came easily. Radio, movies, newspapers, comic books, and conversations conveyed the same message: We were a good and trusting people, attacked without warning at Pearl Harbor. Many brave Americans had died there, others were bayoneted on a Death March in a place called Bataan. Now we were paying Japan back.

  There was a spirit of solidarity and unity then unlike any we have known since. We were truly one nation indivisible and one people. But the war was not unquestioned. Nightly, one heard arguments over the “blackout,” whether the Germans could bomb Washington, the wisdom of aiding Stalin, the merits of Eisenhower versus those of MacArthur, the “sellout” of Poland, and who was responsible for our being caught unprepared at Pearl Harbor. Today “the Good War” is among the few events in history that retains its luster, still a bright shining moment. Whatever the wisdom of the decisions, our enemies were the incarnation of evil, and we were on God’s side.

  Korea was different, a divisive war in a divided nation, Truman’s America. But, unlike Vietnam, no patriot suggested that the North Koreans or Chinese Communists were right and America was wrong. The dissent was General Bradley’s dissent: Korea was “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.”4

  With Eisenhower came an end to Korea and the savage arguments over the “sellout at Yalta” and “Who lost China?” and the beginning of a new Era of Good Feelings, which lasted until November 22, 1963. But after the assassination of President Kennedy, an adversary culture arose that set about dynamiting America’s legends, demythologizing her history, and demolishing her heroes. With its media collaborators, this counterculture has left scarcely an institution unscarred or a hero unsullied. We grew up in an era of belief. We grow old in an era of disbelief, feebly fending off the relentless pounding of the artillery of an adversary culture that accepts no armistice.

  THE OLD HISTORY

  Not long ago, every American child knew the names of all the great explorers—Magellan, da Gama, de Soto, Cortes, Henry Hudson—but the greatest of all was Columbus, for he had discovered America in one of the greatest events of world history. Our history books began here. In the Catholic schools, stories of the French and Spanish explorers and of the North American martyrs like Fr. Isaac Joques, the Apostle to the Iroquois tomahawked to death near Albany, were accented. But we, too, got around to John Smith and Jamestown and the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock.

  From there, our histories leapt 150 years to the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Bunker Hill, the Declaration of Independence, Valley Forge, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” Benedict Arnold, Saratoga, and Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.

  From triumph to triumph, American history marched. The British burned the White House, but Dolley Madison saved the paintings. Our men held “through the night” of the bombardment of Fort Mc-Henry, and Andy Jackson paid the British back at New Orleans. The Alamo came quickly, where Crockett and the Texas heroes refused to surrender and died to a man on Mexican bayonets. No one suggested America stole anything. After the Alamo the Mexicans had it coming. In the 1950s, a Davy Crockett craze swept America, with a movie, a TV show, and even a bestselling record about the “King of the Wild Frontier.” Davy made actor Fess Parker famous. There were so many kids walking around in coonskin caps that the raccoon population took a serious hit. Rock star Johnny Horton recorded Jimmy Driftwood’s “Battle of New Orleans”: “In 1814 we took a little trip / Along with Colonel Jackson / Down the mighty Mississip / And we took a little bacon / And we took a little beans / And we caught the bloody British / In a town called New Orleans.”5

  In our Civil War histories, Lee and Jackson were great soldiers and men of nobility. Sherman’s March to the Sea was a black page in history. Reconstruction was cruel. Southerners were, after all, fellow Americans who had fought bravely and should have been treated with honor. “Dixie” was more popular than “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But Lincoln was the great hero, with a holiday in his honor. He had saved the Union and freed the slaves, only to be assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in one of the great tragedies of American history, for Honest Abe would never have allowed Reconstruction. So we were taught.

  After the Civil War came the Winning of the West. Pioneers—men, women, and children alike—crossed the Great Plains, braving the terrible weather and constant threat of Indian massacres. General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were heroic in our history books. They Died with Their Boots On, starring Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan, told us so. This was also the time of the Robber Barons, who had grabbed the railroads and banks until they met their match in the great “trust-buster” Teddy Roosevelt. The hero of San Juan Hill also built the Panama Canal, a marvel of American engineering genius. Those were the days of Edison, the Wright Brothers, and Alexander Graham Bell, when we Americans had invented pretty much everything worth inventing.

  Then came World World I, when President Wilson sent our soldiers off to “make the world safe for democracy.” Led by General Pershing, with Sergeant York as the hero of the war, we defeated Germany, which had started the war by torpedoing our ships. Soon after, Japan treacherously attacked us at Pearl Harbor. So we had to go back again and finish the job, destroying Mussolini and Hitler, although in Catholic schools Stalin was every bit as monstrous. There was no Popular Front at the Blessed Sacrament school the author attended. Now we had to save the world from “atheistic Communism.” At the end of the daily mass, we recited a Prayer for the Conversion of Russia—later dropped for the more détentist “Prayer for Peace.”

  NOW THE ABOVE is not a nuanced rendering of American history. Yet at its core is this truth: We Americans have a glorious history, the richest and greatest of any modern people or nation, or of any republic that went before us. Were wrongs committed and crimes covered up? Surely. That is true of every nation. But none had triumphed in as many endeavors as America had, and there is no need for eight-year-olds to debate Fort Pillow or the trysts of Warren Harding or John F. Kennedy.

  We established public schools in America to create good citizens and patriots who will protect and preserve their country. These schools should lead children through courses that will teach them to love America. As a child reads the biographies, histories, stories, and poems, and hears the songs and sees the paintings that tell of a glorious national past, patriotism takes root. With a growing love of country comes a growing desire to be forever a part of this people, and a willingness to sacrifice, even to die, to defend this people, as one would defend one’s family.

  In the New Testament, Christ holds out a hellish punishment for any who would destroy the belief of “these little ones”: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”6 Yet, American children are today being robbed of their heritage, cheated of their right to know the magnificent history of their country. In The Disuniting of America, Arthur Schlesinger cites a character out of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

  The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.7

  Another character adds, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”8 This is the struggle of the old America against the cultural revolution. Yet, look at what our Ministry of Truth has already done to our heroes and our history.

  GOOD-BYE, COLUMBUS

  On the three-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, 1792, New York’s King’s College was renamed Columbia, and the U.S. capital was named the District of Columbia. In 1882
, to honor “a prophet … an instrument of Divine Providence,” Irish Catholics organized the Knights of Columbus.9 The Admiral of the Ocean Sea was the Columbus we grew up with; but, as columnist Garry Wills chortled in the New York Review of Books:

  A funny thing happened on the way to the quincentennial observation of America’s Discovery … . Columbus got mugged. This time the Indians were waiting for him. He comes now with an apologetic air—but not, for some, sufficiently apologetic … . He comes to be dishonored.10

  Kirkpatrick Sale’s Conquest of Paradise and Jan Carew’s Columbus: The Rape of Paradise accused the explorer of having “introduced slavery to the West and set off a legacy of shame and racism that continues to this day.”11 The UN canceled its Columbus celebration, and the National Council of Churches urged that the five-hundredth anniversary of his voyage be set aside as a time for penitence for the “genocide, slavery, ecocide and exploitation” the Italian explorer introduced to the Americas.12 Writes columnist George Szamuely of the New York Press:

  In 1992, the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’ transatlantic journey came and went with scarcely any national celebration; only rote condemnation of the cruelty, greed and savagery of the continent’s European conquerors punctured the embarrassed national silence.13

  When Italian Americans sought to carry a banner of Columbus in their October 2000 parade in Denver, radicals of the American Indian Movement threatened violence. AIM’s veteran troublemaker Russell Means said that Columbus “makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.” 14 Marching in step with the forces of progress, the University of California at Berkeley hastily changed Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples Day.15

  The diabolization of the great Spanish explorers and conquistadors as irredeemable racist murderers is almost complete. America, it is said, was not “discovered,” but invaded by disease-ridden Europeans who burned out native cultures as they razed native villages. Cortes’s burning of his ships and march inland with a handful of soldiers to conquer and convert the Aztecs is now cultural genocide against a peace-loving people. That the Aztecs were themselves conquerors who made slaves of defeated enemies and offered human blood sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli, their god of sun and war, is ignored. And what is meant by “cultural genocide”? When the Europeans arrived in the Americas, some indigenous tribes were still practicing cannibalism—and not one had invented the wheel.

  THE FOUNDING FATHERS

  Now comes the turn of the Founding Fathers. Five of our first seven presidents, excepting only the Adamses, owned slaves. Jefferson was a hypocrite whose “all men are created equal” clause in the Declaration of Independence is contradicted by his lifelong ownership of slaves. His sexual exploitation of Sally Hemings, whose mulatto children he cowardly refused to recognize, was disgraceful. Washington, too, was a slave owner and a participant in the greatest evil in U.S. history. Madison was yet another. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was right to call the Constitution Madison wrote “an agreement with death and a covenant with hell.”16 By the corrupt bargain that sealed the success of that constitutional convention, slaves counted as only three-fifths of a person. As for Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory was, in the judgment of commentator-author Robert Novak, “a murderer, a demagogue, a brute, a racist, and corrupt to boot”—and guilty of genocidal massacres in his Indian wars.17

  HOW SUCCESSFUL HAS our Ministry of Truth been in shaping the view of Americans toward their country’s past? When our parents were young, 89 percent of American men and 94 percent of American women thought this was the greatest country on earth.18 Today, only 58 percent of American men identify the United States as “the best country in the world,” and only 51 percent of American women agree.19

  Dr. David Yeagley, a columnist with FrontPage Magazine, tells a story of how the new antihistory is killing love of country in the souls of the young. Himself a descendant of Comanches, Yeagley was leading his class in social psychology at Oklahoma State in a spirited discussion of patriotism and what it means to be an American when a beautiful young white girl jolted the class with these remarks:

  Look, Dr. Yeagley, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing … . Look at your culture. Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing … . I’m not proud of how America came about.20

  “On one level I wasn’t surprised,” said Dr. Yeagley. “I knew the head of our American History department at Oklahoma State … and I recognized his hackneyed liberal jargon … . She had taken one of his courses with predictable results.”21 Still, Yeagley was stunned by the timidity and silence of the rest of the class, as this woman denounced her own people and nation as well as theirs. No Indian woman would have dared say such a thing in the presence of Indian men.

  The rewrite men of America’s past have done their work well.

  CONSIDER THE REACTION to one of the most popular movies of 2000, The Patriot.

  The film stars Mel Gibson as Benjamin Martin, an American hero of the French and Indian War and a father of seven who wants to stay out of the Revolution. Martin is drawn into the fighting when his teenage son is murdered before his eyes by a brutal British officer and his eldest boy, a rebel, is taken away to be executed. The story is set in South Carolina, and Martin is based on Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” and Daniel Morgan, the famed guerrilla. The British antagonist is based upon the legendarily ruthless Col. Banastre Tarlton.

  Two powerful and memorable scenes enraged critics. The first is when Martin, having witnessed his son’s cold-blooded killing, instructs his two younger boys, aged thirteen and ten, to grab muskets and follow him. They ambush the British patrol, which is shot to pieces, with Martin finishing the last British soldier off with his hatchet. Father and sons have avenged an atrocity and rescued a son and brother about to be lynched. The second scene has the British officer taking his revenge. Corralling dozens of civilians from Martin’s village in a church, he orders the doors locked and the church burned.

  On seeing Patriot, some movie reviewers went more berserk than Martin had on seeing his son executed. “Don’t mistake “The Patriot’ for history,” wrote James Verniere in the Boston Herald. “It’s a sales pitch for America.”22 And what would be wrong with that?

  “Overblown sanctimony and sentimentalism,” wrote Ann Hornaday in the Baltimore Sun, “as corny as the Fourth of July”; indeed, “much more dishonest and damaging than anything that’s sprung from Oliver Stone’s imagination.”23 But damaging to whom? Stone had implied that the CIA, the U.S. military, and Lyndon Johnson conspired in the murder of John F. Kennedy.

  Film director Spike Lee emerged from the movie apoplectic, choking with rage. His letter to the Hollywood Reporter deserves quotation at length. For it mirrors the mind-set of our new cultural elite.

  I along with millions of other Americans went to see “The Patriot.” We both came out of the theater fuming … “The Patriot” is pure, blatant … propaganda. A complete whitewashing of history, revisionist history … .

  For almost three hours, “The Patriot” dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery … .

  America was built upon the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African people. To say otherwise is criminal … .24

  In his enraged epistle, Lee confessed that he had to hold himself back from shouting at the screen. He attacked screenwriter Robert Rodat for not making the Gibson character a slave owner and not putting at least some Indians into the Revolutionary War film: “Where were they? Did the two Johns—Ford and Wayne—wipe them out already?” Incensed by the final scene in which Benjamin Martin holds aloft a thirteen-star American flag and heroically charges the British lines, Lee castigated it as “laughable.”

  What comes out of Lee’s letter is virulent anti-Americanism—i.e., our country was built on “genocide” and “enslavement”—and his settled conviction that anyone who rejects this vie
w of U.S. history is “criminal.” Only a sick or criminal mind, Lee is saying, could paint the American Revolution as heroic, honorable, and moral, and not deal with slaughtered Indians. And to portray any blacks in America as free, happy, or loyal is “propaganda,” an outrage; it cannot be true.

  In Salon.com, Jonathan Foreman explores for the roots of this evil film and finds them where you might expect: “The savage soldiers in ‘The Patriot’ act more like the Waffen SS than actual English troops. Does The Patriot’ have an ulterior motive?”25

  You could actually argue … that “The Patriot” is as fascist a film (and I use the term in its literal sense, not as a synonym for “bad”) as anything made in decades … . “The Patriot” presents a deeply sentimental cult of the family, as it casts unusually Aryan-looking heroes … .

  In one scene tow-headed preteens are armed by their father and turned into the equivalent of the Werewolf boy-soldiers that the Third Reich was thought to have recruited for the Hitler Youth to carry out guerrilla attacks against the invading allies.