GODDAMMIT, RAY!!! YOU SILLY YANKS WERE ALL BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE!!! Forget about Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and whatnot... Forget about Islamic terrorism! The real, only, deadly threat to America is... YOUR WETBACK NEXT DOOR!
Your Harvard luminary Samuel Nuttington has just made it out --remember Pr Nuttington? He's the geopolitical pundit who coined the clash-of-civilizations catchall:
On the border of disaster?
In 1993, Harvard academic Samuel Huntington controversially identified Islam as the biggest danger to global stability. Now he is arguing that Latino immigration into the US is destroying the American way of life.
Dan Glaister reports
Monday March 15, 2004
The Guardian
Samuel Huntington is a man with a history. In 1993, the Harvard academic and one-time member of the US national security council published an essay entitled The Clash of Civilisations. In it, he reasoned that in the new post-cold war world, the "fundamental source of conflict will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." He identified Islam, with its population bulge and transnational appeal, as the most likely source of this conflict.
The world, helpfully, stood up and took notice. An academic storm brewed, which became a media storm. In 1996, Professor Huntington wrote a book with the same title and, with the World Trade Centre attacks of September 11 2001, he had his own personal perfect storm: the book was in the New York Times bestseller list five years after it was published.
A decade on, and Professor Huntington has another theory. In May his new book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, is published. It is clear who the "We" of the title are: Americans, principally white Americans, the dominant majority, glorying in Old Glory, basking in the heritage of the Founding Fathers and the superiority of white, Protestant culture.
But Huntington has a shock for them: the Latinos are coming. In fact, the Latinos are already here, "washing your dishes, looking after your children" and denuding a once proud, unified country of everything that held it together. "Will the US remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture?" he asks in an essay entitled The Hispanic Challenge, published in the journal Foreign Policy. "By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures and two languages." Welcome to Amexica.
"The single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white natives," he writes. "The assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America." The Latinos, to borrow a phrase, are over here, oversexed and will soon be overpaid as well.
"Racists in America must be having a field day," shrieked the Miami Herald last week. "At long last they have found a world-renowned intellectual to rationalise their resentment against America's rapidly growing Hispanic community." The New York Times was rather more circumspect: "Frankly," it noted, "something's a little off in Huntington's use of the term 'Anglo-Protestant' to describe American culture."
Since the appearance of the extract, Huntington has kept something of a low profile. "It's only a small part of this book, you know," says a member of his Harvard staff. "I wish he wouldn't do this. He writes these things then goes off and leaves me to answer the calls."
Huntington's book benefits from propitious timing. With the presidential election due in November, the US political establishment is undergoing its ritual four-yearly bout of awareness that it has a Hispanic population. Pundits have been busy examining the likely impact of the seven million largely Democratic Hispanic voters, the candidates have been brushing up on their Spanish - George Bush's attention-grabbing campaign ad featuring images of the WTC also aired in a Spanish-language version - and the president last weekend welcomed his Mexican counterpart Vicente Fox to his Crawford ranch.
Huntington quotes Fox's claim, presumably not repeated in Texas at the weekend, that he is the president of 123 million Mexicans - 100 million in Mexico and 23 million in the US - as proof that the reconquista is well under way; that the Latinos, and in particular the Mexicans, have no intention of assimilating but instead represent a mass fifth column, intent on dismantling the nation.
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guardian.co.uk |
