The Big Squeeze

By Michael Masters
Volume 7, Number 4 (Summer 1997)
Issue theme: "The abuse of asylum and refuge"

Behind the scenes and quietly, a social, political, economic and cultural struggle is taking place for the future of America, and indeed of all the West. This clash will define what kind of world we live in, who will rule over it, and even who will inhabit it. As others have observed - notably Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West), James Burnham (The Suicide of the West), Garrett Hardin (The Limits of Altruism), and Jean Raspail (The Camp of The Saints) - it will ultimately determine the future of Western civilization and its founding people.

The conflict is largely hidden from view, primarily because the actors on one side - anti-nationalist in their outlook - do not particularly wish their goals known to the other side the great majority of ordinary middle and working class Western people. Deprived of vital information, most Americans are largely unaware of this "culture war" - and are unprepared to wage it.

No one has more accurately depicted the nature of this struggle than author and syndicated columnist, Dr. Samuel Francis. Francis, who borrowed the term "managerial elite" from James Burnham to characterize this globalist group, paid a heavy price for violating the taboos surrounding the struggle dismissal from the supposedly "conser-vative" newspaper, The Washington Times.

Michael W. Masters writes on issues of sociobiology and its relation to politics. His situation validates a point he makes in his new book, Revolution from the Middle, namely the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have lost their meaning. Indeed, leaders of the so-called conservative movement - both those who focus on economic issues ("neo-conservatives") and those who focus on social issues (e.g. the "religious right") - have fully embraced the universalist premise that undergirds the political left's mega-state and its legal and social apparatus. Significantly, it was Francis' exposure of the Southern Baptist Convention's universalist activities that first brought retaliation by The Washington Times, and it was his explicit defense of America as a predominantly European nation that provoked his involuntary departure.

Immigration is a potent weapon for imposing universalist dogma, as Francis notes:

Mass immigration is also perhaps the most useful instrument by which the very idea of nationality can be liquidated, and it thus fits well with the forces of economic and political globalism and with the interests of the emerging transnational elite, into which our own technocrats are fusing. As national populations and the cultures they carry become interchangeable through migration, the concrete

meaning of citizenship, political loyalty, sovereignty, and other elements of nationality will yield to a new supranational regime over which the emergent elite presides.

The assault on the historic community of European peoples, united by centuries-old ties of shared culture (a community Francis forthrightly identifies as "white"), has levied a heavy toll:

The absence of shock from whites themselves at their imminent demographic demotion is perhaps not all that surprising. [S]o permeated are our minds with the fantasy that all cultures, races, and ethnic groups are the same, that a member of one group can as easily doff his culture and put on a new one as he can strip off a T-shirt, that most Americans who were aware of the impending demographic revolution probably didn't see why it made much difference.

Nevertheless, it does make a difference - probably more difference than any of the various political, economic, and social changes the United States has ever experienced. The principal cause of the demographic revolution is immigration and the differential in birth rates between non-white immigrants and white natives of the United States. The main thing Americans must do to preserve their civilization and the ethnic base on which it is founded is to stop immigration, especially from countries that do not share the ethnic and cultural heritage of the historic core of the nation.

Francis repudiates those who preach "diversity" without pausing to examine the examples already before us or to consider the implications of that diversity on the future our children will inherit.

The loss of political power by what the Census Bureau calls "non-Hispanic whites" as they dwindle from a majority to a minority is only the most apparent such change, and it is hardly unreasonable to expect that what will follow from the transfer of power will be the outright dispossession and political and legal persecution of the white minority by a non- white and non-Western majority that has  little love for whites or the West. Indeed, we already see the beginnings of that dispossession in affirmative action programs, hate crime laws, multiculturalist curricula, calculated insults to and vituperation of whites, and the proliferation of racially motivated atrocities against them.

Americans will ultimately pay a heavy price for listening to the siren song of universalism:

Yet while the demotion and dispossession of the groups that created, ruled and sustained American civilization may effectively decapitate the civilization, the importation of non-Western habits of thought and behavior will very likely simply kill it outright. Indeed, the very term "nation," derived from the Latin word for being born, will become meaningless when tens of millions are not born within the country's borders.

Jean Raspail's surreal vision of a too- compas-sionate West overrun by the Third World is nearing reality, albeit for reasons altogether more sinister than the excess of kindness Raspail envisioned. Although America's leaders control the levers of a military machine the might of which has not been seen since Rome, they seem, in George Kennan's words, "unable to defend [America's] southwestern border from illegal immigration by large numbers of people armed with nothing more formidable than a strong desire to get across it."

Francis explains the contradiction: the elite are not indifferent to this situation - they are its proximate cause:

The mega-state will not preserve a civilization or a nation whose founding demographic core is facing a slow extinction and whose leaders have forgotten what civilization means and have come to regard their own nation as a barrier to be broken down and discarded.

The elites' ambition is often cloaked in self- serving humanitarian attire. Thus one finds Donald Fites, CEO of Caterpillar, Inc., piously betraying his own workers: "There is a narrowing of the gap between the average American's income and that of the Mexicans. As a human being, I think what is going on is positive. I don't think it is realistic for 250 million Americans to control so much of the world's G.N.P." The failure of Mr. Fites' workers to storm the ramparts of his golden Bastille reflects the deadening impact of decades of universalist dogma.

The secret of the elites' hold on power is their use of the underclass - a Marxist proletariat constantly swelled by Third World immigration - as a cat's paw to dominate and exploit the middle class: "[A] vast amount of money, energy and attention is devoted to the underclass, not to Middle Americans, who nevertheless are expected to pay for the underclass as well as for the elite and the programs that support it. The mega-state, then, as it is present-ly structured, is an apparatus that largely serves the interest of the elite and its underclass ally, at the expense, material and cultural, of the middle class."

Relentlessly squeezed from above and below, what is needed is a "Revolution from the Middle":

The first thing we have to learn about fighting a culture war is that we are not fighting to 'conserve' something; we are fighting to overthrow something. . .We must understand clearly and firmly that the dominant authorities in the United States not only do nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional way of life but actually seek its destruction or are indifferent to its survival. If our culture is going to be conserved, then, we need to dethrone the dominant authorities that threaten it.