[BRIGADE] PJB: It Can't Happen Here
Published: Fri, 07/10/09
by Patrick J. Buchanan
July 10, 2009
So grave was the crisis in western China that President Hu Jintao
canceled a meeting with President Obama, broke off from the G8
summit and flew home.
By official count, 158 are dead, 1,080 injured and a thousand
arrested in ethnic violence between Han Chinese and the Muslim,
Turkic-speaking Uighurs of Xinjiang. That is the huge oil-rich
province that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and several Central
Asian countries that seceded from the Soviet Union.
Uighur sources put the death toll much higher.
The Communist Party chief in Xinjiang has promised to execute those
responsible for the killings.
In 1989, fear that what was happening in Eastern Europe might
happen in Beijing produced Tiananmen Square. The flooding of
Chinese troops into Xinjiang bespeaks a fear that what happened to
the Soviet Union could happen to China. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev,
the Chinese, as they showed in Tibet, will wage civil war to crush
secession.
Already, Beijing has struggled to ensure perpetual possession of
Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet -- half of the national
territory -- by moving in millions of Han Chinese, swamping the
indigenous peoples, as they did in Manchuria.
The larger issue here is the enduring power of ethnonationalism --
the drive of ethnic minorities, embryonic nations, to break free
and create their own countries, where their faith, culture and
language are predominant. The Uighurs are such a people.
Ethnonationalism caused the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, triggered
World War I in Sarajevo, and tore apart the Austro-Hungarian and
Ottoman empires. Ethnonationalism birthed Ireland, Turkey and
Israel.
Ethnonationalism in the 1990s tore apart the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia, and broke up Czechoslovakia, creating two-dozen nations
out of three. Last August, ethnonationalism, with an assist from
the Russian Army, relieved Georgia of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Russia has its own ethnic worries in Chechnya, Dagestan and
Ingushetia, whose Moscow-installed president was nearly blown to
pieces two weeks ago and where a Chechen convoy was ambushed last
week with 10 soldiers killed.
The ethnonationalism that pulled Ireland out of the United Kingdom
in 1921 is pulling Scotland out. It split the Asian subcontinent up
into Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Iran, Iraq and Pakistan are
all threatened.
Persians are a bare majority against the combined numbers of
Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Baluch. Each of those minorities shares a
border with kinfolk -- in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
Turkey has fought for decades against Kurd ethnonationalism.
If one were to wager on new nations, Kurdistan and Baluchistan
would be among the favorites. And Pashtun in Pakistan outnumber
Pashtun in Afghanistan, though in the latter they are the majority.
In Africa, the savage attacks on the Kikiyu by Luo manifest a
resurgent tribalism, as did the horrors of Rwanda, where Tutsi in
the hundreds of thousands were massacred by Hutu.
President Clinton may have apologized to the Africans for not
sending troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda, but if the America
of Obama is into interventionism to protect human rights, Africa in
the 21st century should provide us plenty of opportunity.
Evo Morales in Bolivia, Ollanta Humala in Peru and Venezuela's Hugo
Chavez are stoking the embers, goading the Indian populations, the
indigenous peoples, to take back what the white man took 500 years
ago. They have met with no small success.
The contrast between insouciant America and serious China today is
instructive. China is protectionist; America free trade. China is
nationalist; America globalist. China's economy is export-driven;
America's base is consumption. China saves; America spends. China
uses its foreign exchange to lock up overseas resources; America
uses foreign aid for humanitarian assistance to failed states.
Behaving like ruthlessly purposeful 19th-century Americans, China
grows as America shrinks.
Where Beijing floods its borderlands with Han to reduce indigenous
populations to minorities, and stifles religious, ethnic and
linguistic diversity, America, declaring, "Diversity is our
strength!" invites the whole world to come to America and swamp her
own native-born.
Observing the lightning breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chinese
take ethnonationalism with deadly seriousness. American's elite
regard it an irrelevancy, an obsession only of the politically
retarded.
After all, they tell us, we were never blood-and-soil people,
always a propositional nation, a nation of ideas. Our belief in
democracy, diversity, and equality define us and make us different
from all other nations.
Indeed, we now happily predict the year, 2042, when Americans of
European ancestry become a minority in a country whose Founding
Fathers declared it set aside for "ourselves and our posterity."
Without the assent of her people, America is being converted from a
Christian country, nine in 10 of whose people traced their roots to
Europe as late as the time of JFK, into a multiracial, multiethnic,
multilingual, multicultural Tower of Babel not seen since the late
Roman Empire.
The city farthest along the path is Los Angeles, famous worldwide
for the number, variety, and size of its ethnic and racial street
gangs.
Not to worry. It can't happen here.
SOURCE: http://www.buchanan.org/blog