An America Without Americans

America Balkanized, by Brent Nelson, American Immigration Control Foundation, 1994, 148 pp.

America Balkanized is one of the best volumes on the subject now available and is a worthy successor to Lawrence Auster’s The Path to National Suicide, published by AICF in 1990.

Dr. Nelson calls his book an essay on “the problems of governance in the multi-ethnic state which will arise in the United States if immigration is not curtailed.” Drawing on examples from history, current events, and even sociobiology, he argues that America’s immigration policy cannot help but create conflicts “of such dimensions as to be insoluble within the traditional limits of American governance.” Many people have pointed out that massive non-white immigration could destroy the United States. Dr. Nelson’s contribution is in articulating the principles that make destruction inevitable — if current policies continue — and in exploring some of the ways American elites deceive themselves into thinking that all is well.

North American Mammals

What could be called the leitmotif of the book comes from a surprising but persuasive source: The Mammals of North America, written by a professor of biology at the University of Kansas named Raymond Hall. This volume, which Dr. Nelson tells us is the definitive work in the field, arrives at one conclusion so emphatically that Prof. Hall italicizes in the original: Two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area. Similar strains of squirrel or fox do not occupy the same ecological niche for long. Very occasionally they interbreed and produce a new subspecies, but usually one will destroy or simply displace the other.

Prof. Hall applies this rule to the human mammals of North America. “To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.”

It is very unusual to find such a categorical dismissal of attempts to create multiethnic societies. To a thoughtful biologist, however, sustained non-white immigration into the United States is a fatal violation of Nature’s balance. Much of the conflict we see not only in the United States but around the world is the reassertion of the mammalian nature of man in the face of repeated attempts to deny it.

Dr. Nelson points out that it is not just the recent cheer-leaders for the “end of history” who have been tempted to ignore biology, but every classical sociological theorist from Marx and Spencer to Weber and Durkheim: “The underground survival of the ethnic factor in Eastern Europe (and elsewhere) and its sudden explosive re-emergence in separatism, irredentism, rioting, and civil war has confounded all the classical theories of sociology.”

Moreover, unlike animals, human beings do not need anything so obvious as biology in order to assert group distinctions. Populations that are racially identical can fragment murderously because of religion or language.

Of all the world’s peoples, it is probably only whites who ever believed that the “ethnic factor” could be made not to matter. Americans, in particular, seem to believe that heterogeneity is not the slightest obstacle to national unity, and that a nation’s spirit can expand infinitely to accommodate all comers. Dr. Nelson quotes Jeane Kirkpatrick as follows: “Only those who do not understand America believe that families that have been here for 10 generations are more American than the tens of thousands of new citizens naturalized last year.” In other words, anyone can instantly become completely American.

Many of those tens of thousands of naturalized citizens have no such illusions. They know they bring immutable characteristics that may not affect the legal American state but that permanently change the American nation. “What color is to blacks, language is to Hispanics,” explains Maurice Ferre, former mayor of Miami. “We could come back in 100 years and the Latinos will not have assimilated in the classic sense,” says the head of the Chicano [Mexican-American] Studies Research Center at UCLA.

Some immigrants are openly contemptuous of the culture and history to which Mrs. Kirkpatrick seems to think they will smoothly assimilate. Ricardo Chavira, who writes for Time magazine, says: “Imagine the ludicrousness of an elementary school teacher telling a room full of Chicanos that George Washington and company were our Founding Fathers. Obviously, those guys in matching white wigs were no fathers of mine.”

Many Chicanos intend to follow the logic of anti-assimilation to its obvious conclusion; they fully expect steady Hispanic immigration to push whites out of the Southwest and to bring complete Hispanic domination. Although it is not clear whether the Southwest would then reattach itself to Mexico or become an independent nation, Chicanos already have a name for their nation: Aztlan, which means “the bronze continent.”

Dr. Nelson quotes a 1982 article in Excelsior, Mexico’s leading daily, that anticipates the same victory:

The territory lost in the XIX century . . . seems to be restoring itself through humble people who go on settling various zones that once were ours on the old maps.
Land, under any concept of possession, ends up in the hands of those who deserve it.

White Americans are not even putting up a token resistance to reconquest; they have granted to illegal aliens all the social benefits of citizens. Dr. Nelson reports further that when the Texas legislature passed a Buy American-Buy Texan law, it treated Mexico as part of the United States. Likewise, it voted to let Mexican nationals pay in-state tuition at five Texas state universities near the border, thus establishing the principal of treating aliens better than American citizens from other states.

Dr. Nelson explains that as long ago as the 1960s, Chicanos realized that conquest would not require desperate measures because whites were willing partners in their own dispossession. Activists have instead opted for what they call “the long march through the institutions,” that is, establishment of Chicano Studies Departments, naturalization, seizure of majorities on school boards, and massive voter support for co-racialists.

Their confidence is based not just on sheer numbers but on how those numbers are distributed. In Houston, Texas, for example, Hispanics were only one fifth of the population in 1985. However, they accounted for one third of the children in the Houston School District, and more than half of the first-graders. Hispanics need only wait for the Southwest to fall into their hands. Before long, vast regions of the country will reflect what is now only a local phenomenon: Those who are to be “assimilated” outnumber those who are presumably to do the assimilating.

This demographic transformation has been greatly assisted by proponents — mostly white — of “multiculturalism.” In Dr. Nelson’s view, former Marxists have simply rechanneled their hatred of capitalism into hatred of Western Civilization, and with equally destructive intent:

After the transformation of America which they advocate has been effected, American civilization will no longer have its formerly European character. American civilization will have been effectively abolished.

Multiculturalism is promoted with a tremendous propaganda effort meant to convince whites that the displacement of their culture is either inevitable or is appropriate punishment for their sins.

‘America is Unique’

Dr. Nelson devotes a considerable part of his book to the question of what defines a nation. He quotes John Jay, writing in 1787 in The Federalist Papers: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. . . .”

Jay recognized that these are the ties that bind nations together. Today, whites have begun to realize that America can no longer lay claim to any of the old ties. So-called conservatives, who do not share the multiculturalists zeal for the destruction of Western Civilization, find themselves in the absurd position of claiming that a third-world population can still, somehow, be “American.”

Rather than admit that the disappearance of Jay’s common bonds means the dissolution of America, they claim that the country is uniquely exempt from the need for common bonds. What then makes America American? Dr. Nelson cites the economist Robert J. Samuelson: “Prosperity is what binds us together.”

It would be hard to think of a more threadbare basis for national unity. No nation enjoys eternal prosperity. Its true test is adversity. By Mr. Samuelson’s definition, the United States could not survive another depression or protracted war. It may not even survive mild recession. In Mr. Samuelson’s terms, the United States is strictly a business interest; if it stops being profitable, it can be liquidated. Whether he knows it or not, Mr. Samuelson is admitting that America is no longer a nation.

The thesis of American uniqueness, to which scholars and politicians cling with increasing desperation, does have some basis in history. America did manage to blend Europeans into a cohesive nation, despite the conflicts that continued to wrack Europe. However, as Dr. Nelson points out, this blending took place under ideal circumstances. The new Americans were of the same race (or subspecies, to use Prof. Hall’s terminology) and the Western frontier served as a safety valve for ethnic friction. Today’s newcomers are not only racially — and therefore permanently — different, they are pouring into a nation that is increasingly crowded and exhausted.

The promise of American uniqueness is false. One of the signs of approaching dissolution is the extent to which the role of government has become mediation between hostile groups. The reigning theory of the last several decades has been that “tolerance,” “sensitivity,” and “openness” can bring a permanent solution to racial conflict. There is, of course, no sign of permanent solution. Dr. Nelson points out that races are “political conflict groups” that are “already pre-organized by Nature.” Racial friction is therefore an abiding addition to the normal political disagreements found even in homogeneous nations.

It is not as though the mainstream media are unaware of this. For example, they duly report that during one 18-month period in the town of Long Beach, California, there were 55 drive-by shootings as part of a feud between Cambodian and Hispanic gangs. Long Beach was once so overwhelmingly white it was called Iowa by the Sea. The astonishing thing is that the degeneration of a homogeneous, prosperous white city into a racial battleground for aliens does not provoke calls for the restoration of homogeneity. Instead, government takes on the increasingly futile task of papering over racial antagonisms. This is the cost of pretending that humans are not mammals.

“Government in a multi-ethnic state must grow ever more intrusive, ever larger, and ever more costly, simply in order to preserve the political integrity of the state,” writes Dr. Nelson. Every act of government becomes a racial juggling act, a distribution of spoils to each group according to mathematical formulae.

To the extent that multi-ethnic states work at all, they require the indulgence of the majority. Dr. Nelson quotes historian Hans Kohn: “Fundamental for the solution of problems of duo- or polyethnic states is not primarily the attitude of the minority or minorities but that of the majority. The weaker groups in the population must receive a greater consideration than would be proportional to their numerical strength.” Dr. Nelson notes that this is true in Switzerland, Belgium, and Canada, as well as the United States.

Here, the game of exploiting the majority has become so attractive that groups other than races now play it. Homosexuals, feminists, and handicapped people have all copied blacks and Hispanics and now demand special favors in the name of “victimhood.”

America Without Americans

Where will it end? Dr. Nelson predicts that as their numbers dwindle, whites will eventually demand from their leaders the racial aggressiveness typical of non-whites. It is only the nostalgic attachment of the white majority for the idea of a united America, the illusion that it is still possible to have a government that speaks for Americans of all races, that gives the country even the appearance of unity. These nostalgic illusions will be torn away by the ruthless consolidation of power by non-whites:

When . . . European Americans begin to think of themselves as such and demand ethnically conscious European American leaders, then America will have become America Balkanized, a nation without Americans, just as Yugoslavia, in the early 1990s, became a nation without Yugoslavs; i.e. no longer a viable nation.

Awakened white consciousness may not come for several decades. Because America — with its forms, its trappings of government, its national symbols and slogans — derives almost exclusively from European sources, whites will be the last to abjure the realm and abandon the current notion of what America is supposed to be. They will cling to the image of an “inclusive,” “tolerant,” all-absorbing America — but only at their peril. No one else plays by those rules. As Prof. Hall reminds us, any attempt by two human subspecies to live side by side “leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.”