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BOOK REVIEW-THE DEATH OF THE WEST
by Patrick J. Buchanan, 308 pages
$38.95 Cdn.,St. Martin's Press, 2002

In this hard-hitting book, US conservative journalist, Pat Buchanan, confronts issues which many fear to approach. He outlines the threats to western civilization with brutal honesty. Not for the squeamish, the book addresses the roots and methods of the cultural revolution taking place in the West, the demographic crisis characterized by "more coffins than cradles," global socialism and its elimination of the need for families, and the de-Christianizing of the West.

Never shrinking from controversy, taboo topics are fearlessly probed: He identifies the media as evangelists of the revolution - TV, theatre, magazines, music. He accuses business of luring women out of the home and keeping them "out of the maternity ward" since that makes them "no good to the company."

He notes the end of the family wage (enough to support women and children at home) and how trade unions were formerly opposed to the employment of women. He calls the pill "the suicide tablet of the West." Buchanan states: "Is it not a remarkable coincidence how global capitalism's view of women - as units of production, liberated from husbands, home, and family - conforms so precisely to the view of the fathers of global communism?"

Feminist Conformity

Shocking, revealing quotations are woven throughout the book. Along with other anti-West movements, raw feminism is exposed. American, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, is quoted: "The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is kill it."

Radical feminist, Andrea Dworkin: Marriage is "an institution [that] developed from rape as a practice", "the nuclear family must be destroyed."

Radical feminist, Catherine McKinnon, legal advisor to Canadian feminists on the rape shield law in 1992: "Feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage and sexual harassment."

According to Babette Francis, "an immediate consequence of feminism is what appears to be an irreversible decline in the birth rate. Nations pursue feminist policies at their peril," she said.

War on Religion

In the chapter "Catechism of a Revolution," Mr. Buchanan outlines the new faith of the revolution, its intolerant "militant spirit," and its two major commandments: all lifestyles are equal, and thou shalt not be judgmental. Defiance of the new orthodoxy is hate speech. Hate crime is a new moral crime. Buchanan chronicles the "dethronement of God" in American society through aggressive litigation "according to the dictates of courts imposing the agendas of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Humanist Manifesto." He traces the origins of the therapeutic state, where children are conditioned to "reject their parents' social and moral beliefs as racist, sexist and homophobic, and conditioned to embrace the new morality." Obscene art is "but another front of the cultural revolution's relentless war on Christianity," he writes.

In the chapter "The Coming Great Migrations" he forecasts huge shifts in populations as a result of collapsing birth rates in the West, due to the triumph of secularism. He reminds us that "the culture war is a religious war" and "when religion dies, so does culture."

A Wake-up Call

Buchanan claims that core constituencies of the left understand culture war, while many conservatives are "blissfully unaware there is even a war." He notes: "The hearts of many on the Right are in cutting marginal tax rates and eliminating the capital gains tax." Trotsky is quoted: "You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you."

Buchanan uses colorful language to describe the crisis in the West: a society steeped in pornography, a polluted culture, the intimidated majority, the war against the past, racial racketeering, and the imperial judiciary. He quotes historians and poets who grasp the essence of historical movements and tyrannies. Buchanan lists recommendations for families who have the will to resist the new order and its "cultural wasteland."

With abundant references, web site locations, case histories, statistics and quotations from historians, philosophers, religious leaders, revolutionaries and tyrants, The Death of the West is worth reading. The focus is on the United States, but Canadians will find much that is informative and applicable to our situation in this eye-opening book, since the culture war is global.

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