The Death of the West - why our sun is setting Derek Turner talks to US journalist and politician Patrick Buchanan about his powerful new book "Death of the West" Derek Turner, 37 year old journalist and editor of ..... http://www.right-now.org An independent, London-based magazine of politics, ideas and culture set up to articulate unfashionable and politically incorrect ideas of all kinds.
Derek Turner		Pat Buchanan

Can you sum up your thesis in Death of the West?

According to my research, there is not a single Western nation that has a birthrate today that will enable it to stay alive in its present form after the middle of this century. Between now and 2050, Europe alone will lose about 128 million people. In 2050, the median age of Europeans will be about 50, and 60 million Europeans - a tenth of the population - will be over 80. As Europeans begin to die out - losing the equivalent of the entire populations of Norway, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and Germany - the Third World will explode, increasing by three or four billion people - the equivalent of 30-40 Mexicos. Great migrations to fill the West's empty spaces have already begun. Even now the Chinese are moving into Russia, which is dying faster than almost any other country. The Islamic peoples of North Africa and the Middle East are moving in the hundreds of thousands into Europe every year. One-fifth of Mexico's population is now within America's borders.

But is it as bad as you fear? In Peter Brimelow's Washington Times review of Death of the West, he says that your discussion of demographics could be qualified - that "while the West's share of the world's population is falling, this is only after a tremendous growth surge that dramatically expanded its share". Isn't it possible that the present retreat is only a retreat to more defensible cultural, ethnic and psychological borders?

No, I don't think so. In 1960, for example, Western people were 25% of the world's population, and in the middle of the greatest baby boom in history. They are now down to 16%, and by 2050, they will be just 10%. Every single Western nation is dying. The European base of the American nation, which used to be 90%, is now down to 70%. On present trends, European-descended peoples will be a minority in the United States by mid-century. I can't see how Western civilisation can be preserved if the people who carry it in their hearts, minds and souls are dying out.

But in absolute terms, the West's population when we were at our height was far smaller than it is today. A few thousand Englishmen ran India for over 200 years. Whites ran South Africa for more than three centuries, and so on. Population quality is clearly more important than quantity. You have said yourself that "the correlation between power and population is not absolute". Isn't this a possible source of comfort?

I quite agree that Europeans and Americans will be well-to-do, but if you take a look at what is happening inside these countries already, clearly European nations are not what they used to be. For example, some European countries used to have million-man armies when their populations were far smaller than they are today. Now, the European Union is having the devil's time of it fielding a Rapid Reaction Force of 60,000 men! The British used to be able to get that many across the Channel in the first couple of weeks. I don't believe that this can be turned around. I think the West is dying. The birth-rate peaked in the 1960s, and it has been declining ever since, right through the state of zero population growth, and it looks like it will continue declining to the stage of zero population.
An important point is that the correlation between the death of religious faith and the death of peoples and civilisation is absolute. I believe that the death of Christianity in the soul of Western man, and its replacement by a more materialistic, hedonistic, individualistic, la dolce vita belief, and the embrace of the sexual revolution combined, mean that Western man has consumed a carcinogenic that is killing him. Peoples that no longer believe in the cult out of which their culture and civilisation came will not sustain that civilisation. And as TS Eliot said: "If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes". The Christian faith and belief in which Western man was marinaded for 2,000 years was fundamentally the immune system of the West, which warded off all manner of psychic infections. But Christianity has died, and been replaced by a new faith of secular humanism, which is having an effect on the West comparable to that of the HIV virus on a person. Eventually, it will kill us.

In The Death of the West, you have bemoaned the present lack of civilizatory self-confidence in the West. But doesn't the decisive and ruthless American response to the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon demonstrate that there is still some degree of self-preservation and even self-assertiveness within the West?

There is no doubt that the United States is still a very tough country. Americans rallied behind the President after September 11, and the government managed to finish off the Taliban. But at the same time the government lacks the moral authority to stop illegal immigration into this country cold - even though that is the plain desire of the American people - in order that we can get our melting pot working again, and attempt to Americanise those who have come here since 1965.
On taking office, Dwight Eisenhower found that there were one million illegal immigrants in the country. He set up what he called Operation Wetback, and ordered them out of the country - and they went. If President Bush were to get up today, and say "We're going to conduct Operation Wetback II", and seek to expel eight to 11 million illegal aliens, the American establishment would literally go berserk. [Editor's note: the US House of Congress has just voted by 245 votes to 138 to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.] I don't think he could do it; there would be a horrible reaction, even within his own party. Human Events [Editor's note: a leading conservative newspaper, based in Washington, DC] asked 17 US congressmen and senators a single question that required a Yes or No answer: "If someone has broken into the country illegally, should they be deported and sent home?" Only two congressmen or senators said Yes.

In the wake of September 11, have you detected a greater willingness to talk about immigration?

There is a tremendous willingness to talk about the issue. Led by Peter Brimelow and others (I came much later to the issue), we have convinced the American people, or they have persuaded them-selves, that they want legal immigration rolled back to more reasonable levels and illegal immigration halted cold. But we live in a virtual democracy, where the people's will is not translated into policy. Both party elites are very much beholden to the corporations and the unions, and they are politically intimidated. Both the corporations and the unions want an endless supply of new citizens and cheap labour. The corporations want to keep wages down, and the unions want an amnesty, so that they can organise all these illegals and get them paying union dues, so that they can maintain their existing lifestyles.

You have said that it is "a remarkable coincidence how global capitalism's view of women conforms so precisely to the view of the fathers of global communism". Can you explain what you mean by this?