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.
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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Sir;.... What, really, is your concern??? So what if America begins to resemble the world if the world begins to resemble us???.It was once said that the sun never set on the British Empire...Now it does, at least on the expensive part, or English adminstered colonies... But as a legacy the world speaks English, and the former colonies most resemble England in their institutions and laws...The problem for them, and for us is that the riff raft of failed empire follow us home... I love the the Vietnamese, their culture, their cooking, the attitudes, their hard work, and their ready smiles... Yet, we would not know them but for the failure to understand them, and their country's need for an independent nation...And you can repeat this story endlessly, how our support of Israel, for example has resulted in so many Arabs here, or how our meddling and crimes in Persia has brought the Persians to our shore...When we fail, our friends and supporters fail, and we bring them home to America...Here they serve another purpose, of helping to divide us...But upon what basis can we be united??? We call ourselves a nation and have never been one people with a common mother, so we often use the word incorrectly, as a place rather than a people... We need unity, but at what price????We suffer the very division we sow around the world to have power...Now that we are here together; what have we in common???You think that because we nearly all once came from Europe that we were not always divided... What the government seeks, and should achieve it cannot reach because the economy has always sought our division just as the need to make profits on foreign shores has divided others, first, the living from the dead, the blessed from the damned, and finally the rich from the poor, the owners from the slaves... As our markets contract in the face of global expansion of capital, and competion, we find, that to have our rich we must suffer more and more the division we have forced upon others... We are not one nation, but many.... Some people come here never expecting to fit in, but to make a killing, and go home to be wealthy amid want...The answer to our problem is in our oath... We have all pledged ourselves to the republic, one nation, indivisable, with liberty and justice for all... The people in China need justice no less than we...The people in Afghanistan and Irag need justice just as we...The people of the world need justice just as we need justice, and this goal is impossible without equality...Yet, our economy is based upon inequality, in the destruction of social and economic and political equality...What we say we accept, and pledge ourselves to, we almost all as soon as our voices grow silent set about denying and negating... We have only one common mother, which is the mother of all nations, and it is justice... We say liberty and justice for all, and this equality we swear to cannot be denied if we will have one nation, and one united nation of people on this earth... If Capitalism must die so we can live in peace, then hasten the day...We should go our sepparate ways, each person to his nation until we can learn to put aside our differences upon the common need of all people for liberty and justice... We are all equal in this regard, and though many people and peoples would put themselves first, they are no more entitled than any others to the common fruits of our existence...You sound as though you would have us united... You have broken the dam, and now swim against the flood...We need unity to have strength, but we cannot achieve unity without a common purpose... What is your common purpose???You cheer the cause, but curse the effect...Which all the better proves my point... Thanks...Sweeney
Comment: #1
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Fri Jul 10, 2009 9:14 AM
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Re: James A, Sweeney. I think he's right about this, Mr Sweeney, although I suspect you and I would part company with him on solutions. It CAN happen here. Just as Americans look with disgust at Nazi Germany and think, it can't happen here, I say it sure can. But we have a chance in this country, thanks to being born on third base when it comes to location, wealth, natural resources, space, and a single national language, to discover a different way to deal with diversity than we see just about everywhere else in the world, but we may well be blowing it. One thing we lack is a culture that truly favors peaceful and adult solutions to differences of opinion or orientation rather than war, fighting, name-calling, and scapegoating. Another thing we lack increasingly and disturbingly is education. Like it or not, also we need to control the uncontrolled swelling of our population by people pouring across our borders. I'm sure Mr. Buchanan will go for that one. For my money, the combination of our withering educational infrastructure and our unbridled immigrant-fed population growth, which is openly encouraged by businesses looking for cheap labor and by just about every model out there being offered for economic growth, including those favored by the righteous Paul Krugman, are the two greatest forces propelling us toward either the Kosovo syndrome or just plain burning up the planet.
Comment: #2
Posted by: Masako
Fri Jul 10, 2009 10:16 AM
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Dear Pat Buchanan: Your column “Dumbing down of the U. S. Navy” Was very offensive to me. I am a Commander and Blue and Gold Officer in the Navy interviewing students from three High Schools in my area, that have made an application to enter the Naval Academy. I have been performing this duty for the past fifteen years, and have volunteered countless hours toward providing the Naval Academy with the most qualified candidates that will be superior Naval Officers. The Naval Academy Admissions Office evaluates a vast amount of documentation of physical, medical and academics for some ten thousand applicants each year to select the best qualified. However, by policy those selected must be interviewed, face to face, by a Glue and Gold Officer. A report with recommendation of the Blue and Gold Officer must be submitted to the Admissions Office before that candidate's folder is sent to the Selection Board for final selection. Because of your lack of information you have seriously offended myself and all other Blue and Gold Officers across the nation.
Comment: #3
Posted by: John Conant
Sat Jul 11, 2009 11:12 AM
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