Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [106]
Bill O’Reilly defended anti-immigrant repression by repeating myths about immigrant violence: “Arizona had to do something. In the capital city Phoenix, crime is totally out of control. . . . The recent murder of an Arizona rancher by a suspected illegal alien and the shooting of a deputy sheriff by alleged alien drug dealers have made the situation almost desperate.” 42 Later, the story of the wounded deputy, like Brewer’s decapitation claims, started to fall apart. Forensic pathologists noted powder burns on the sheriff’s skin, indicating that the muzzle of the gun was in contact with his body when it fired and not twenty-five yards away as he claimed.43
Even Chris Mathews, while debating Amy Goodman, suggested, “Cultural change is not something any society accepts easily, or even with any kind of positive feelings about.”44 Mathews also promoted Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. Fittingly, this book’s title refers, however cryptically, to the Nazi-justifying legal theory of Carl Schmitt. As the title implies, the book posits that immigration is destroying America.45 Here, trimming only slightly, is the broad scope of history as seen through the narrow confines of Buchanan’s mind:
From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the West wrote the history of the world. Out of the Christian countries of Europe came the explorers, the missionaries, the conquerors, the colonizers, who, by the twentieth century, ruled virtually the entire world. But the passing of the West had begun.
Spain’s empire was the first to fall. . . . By 1918 the German Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires collapsed. World War II bled and broke the British and French. One by one, after war’s end, the strategic outposts of empire—Suez, the Canal Zone, Rhodesia, South Africa, Hong Kong—began to fall. Within three decades, Europe’s headlong retreat from Asia and Africa was complete.
From 1989–1991, the Soviet Union Empire fell and the Soviet Union split into fifteen pieces, half a dozen of them Muslim nations that have never before existed. Now, the African, Asian, Islamic and Hispanic peoples that the West once ruled are coming to repopulate the mother countries. . . . The crisis of Western civilization consists of three imminent and mortal perils: dying populations, disintegrating cultures and invasions unresisted . . . as Rome passed away, so, the West is passing away, from the same causes in much the same way. What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilization no longer defended.46
Elsewhere, the book oozes with more of the same: “We are witnessing how nations perish. We are entered upon the final act of our civilization. The last scene is the deconstruction of the nations. The penultimate scene, now well underway, is the invasion unresisted.” And, “Chicano chauvinists and Mexican agents have made clear their intent to take back through demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war. . . . We are in the midst of a savage culture war in which traditionalist values have been losing ground for two generations.”47
Buchanan is not of the lunatic fringe. Rather, he is a major figure in American life, aide to presidents, force in the Republican Party, and political analyst for MSNBC. His politics are mainstream.
The Paranoid Style and Its Rational Uses
Welcome to the new American Volksstaat. Here, hate wears a smile and operates in the name of fairness and freedom. The war on immigrants is very much a war of ideas. Richard