Patrick J. Buchanan is an American author, political commentator, and former senior political advisor. He served in the administrations of US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. He also ran for the US presidency three times during the 1990s and 2000s.
Buchanan wrote The Death of the West: Why Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilisation more than 24 years ago.
Remarkably, everything he predicted in that book has proven to be incredibly prophetic. Indeed, one can now say that, along with the late Harvard political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, Buchanan was a prophet and a voice crying in the wilderness about the imminent collapse of Western Civilisation.
The title of Buchanan’s book, The Death of the West seemed rather dramatic at the time he wrote it. But how right he was when arguing that the West was about to collapse due to catastrophic drops in birth rates and unprecedented non-Western immigration. He predicted everything that is happening right in front of our eyes, including that the declining Western populations would create a demographic and cultural vacuum that would lead to the loss of traditional values and national sovereignty.
‘The West is dying … and though our culture war has divided us, mass immigration risks the balkanisation of America and the West,’ Buchanan wrote. ‘As Western peoples have begun to die,’ he prophetically predicted:
The vacant rooms in the House of the West will not long remain vacant. In America, the places prepared for forty million unborn lost since Roe v. Wade have been filled by grateful poor of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As Europeans forgo children, the places prepared for them, too, will be occupied by strangers.
Buchanan argued that Europeans were so uninterested in self-preservation that they refused to have enough children to keep their nations alive.
They were, in their vast majority, no more than pitiful self-seeking hedonists who had no respect for their ancestors or future generations. They were solely in search of hedonism and willing to sacrifice their own children at the altar of self-seeking pleasure, leaving behind them no more than a legacy of destruction that seems almost impossible to reverse.
Buchanan then provided this rhetorical question followed by a prophetic answer:
Why should Americans defend Europe – and perhaps die for Europe? So they can live the high life and until flame-out. Europe has embraced her destiny, perhaps not consciously as a people, but collectively as a people. Europeans do not plan to continue as a great vital race. What then are we defending? Christianity? That is dead in Europe. Western Civilisation? But, by their decisions not to have children, Europeans have already accepted a twenty-second-century end to their civilisation.
Above all, Buchanan was entirely (and prophetically) convinced that Europe, as we once knew, would inevitably cease to exist. He explained:
Europe appears unable to stop these millions from coming and taking the jobs opening up as the war generation passes away … and as the millions pour into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East, they will bring their Arab and Islamic culture, traditions and loyalties, and faith, and create replicas of their homelands in the heartland of the West. Will they assimilate, or will they endure as indigestible parts of Africa and Arabia in the base camp of what was once Christendom?
Hence his sobering conclusion:
The day of Europe is over. The coming mass immigration from the Islamic world will so change the ethnic composition of the Old Continent that Europeans will be too paralysed by a threat of [Islamic] terrorism … as their populations become more Arabic and Islamic, paralysis will set in.
This was not the only book by Buchanan that proved somewhat prophetic. In 2011, he wrote another important best-selling book, Suicide of a Superpower, Will America Survive to 2025? There, Buchanan contended that the United States was gradually disintegrating as a world superpower and could cease to exist as such due to ongoing cultural, demographic, and political crises. Buchanan then criticised in that book the American government for failing miserably in its fundamental duties, which it claimed included failing to secure borders, balance budgets, avoid ‘unpayable debts’, and wage wars irresponsibly and unable to win them.
Buchanan’s central arguments in that book focused on the decline of traditional Christianity and the advent of a multiculturalist America. He explicitly warned of falling birth rates among people of European descent, arguing that mass immigration from Latin America and other regions, especially the Middle East, was diluting the country’s traditional cultural identity.
‘Historians will look back in stupefaction at … 21st Century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the third world,’ Buchanan wrote.
Consequently, he continued, ‘Socially, culturally, morally, America has taken on the aspect of a decadent society and a declining nation.’ Despite all this, Buchanan pointed out:
Americans who seek stricter immigration control have been charged with many social sins: racism, xenophobia, nativism. Yet none has sought to expel my fellow American based on colour or creed. We have only sought to preserve the country we grew up in. Do not people everywhere do that, without being reviled? What motives people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide until the European majority has disappeared?
Similarly, the ruling classes of Europe are openly advancing a more accelerated process of ‘collective suicide’, and certainly even more so than in the United States.
Douglas Murray, in his bestseller The Strange Death of Europe provides a personal account of a subcontinent caught in the act of suicide. Europe, he argues, is basically committing suicide, or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. This book amounts to a dramatic account of post-Christian Europeans who no longer believe in anything and are increasingly devoid of a sense of where they came from, where they are going, or why. Murray explores a Europe defined by its condition of collective masochism and empty hedonism, where a population constantly feels the need to apologise for its past, failing to accept that other places have also done dreadful things in the past.
In his book, Murray also describes and analyses the effects of the inexorable increase in primarily Muslim immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, and countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, particularly since 2015. His book provides a sober analysis of demographics and political realities, but also an account of a civilisation in self-destructive mode. Consequently, throughout Western Europe no one is being allowed to express the slightest criticism of the customs of immigrant populations. Sceptics and critics of this veritable cultural suicide are invariably accused of being ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic’. They are likely to be discharged from their jobs and even sent to prison for their ‘crimes of opinion’.
Murray notes the terrible role of the political and cultural left in promoting groupthink that closes minds and suppresses freedom of expression. He also notes the remarkable case of a young woman raped by a newly arrived migrant who lamented his imprisonment because it would undermine the effort to welcome refugees. He then provides the remarkable example of the 10-year delay in jail for Muslim gangs in the United Kingdom who for many years raped and tortured native English teenagers.
The same phenomenon is also happening in other European countries, including Germany on a massive scale, but also such cases are dramatically rising in France. In migrant-dominant areas of France, according to the official statistics, the number of rapes rose by an annual 15 to 20 per cent throughout the first decade of the 21st Century. One of the victims of routine rape published an autobiography called Dans l’enfer des tournantes – ‘In the hell of the take-your-turns’.
This is, therefore, not just a British issue; it is a serious warning for America and for the rest of the Western world, Australia included.
Returning to Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: this fascinating and timely book is primarily about Western Europe, not Eastern Europe. Eastern European countries, previously under Soviet rule and influence, tend to be more conservative and assert their Christian heritage and national identity. Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and Russia, among others, have largely defied the dictates of the Western ruling classes. The emergence of a half-century experience of communist rule and its historical encounters with Islam made these Eastern Europeans far much more resilient and confident than Western Europeans in their Christian and conservative identities, consisting in the development of more prosperous and healthy societies.
In one of his most recent books, The War on the West (2022), Murray argues that Western societies are undergoing a destructive cultural revolution driven by enemies within; that is, internal activists who deliberately want to deconstruct Western history, culture, and values. As a result, he maintains that everything that comes from the West is unfairly demonised, while non-Western cultures are thoughtlessly idealised. He further contends that Western nations are unfairly analysed, even though the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women have happened because of the propagation of Western ideas and action.
Nevertheless, Murray notes that aiming to deconstruct Western institutions, the West’s internal enemies take delight in demonising white people and treat this racial majority as intrinsically linked to past historical injustices. Finally, he describes a phenomenon he calls ‘Western anti-Westernism’ where Western institutions – including academia, schools, and the media – repeatedly apologise and denigrate their own heritage. ‘Everything connected with the Western Tradition is being jettisoned,’ he writes. Murray then soberly concludes:
Today the West faces challenges without and threats within. But no greater threat exists than that which comes from people inside the West intent on pulling apart the fabric of our societies, piece by piece. By assaulting the majority populations in these countries. By saying that our histories are entirely reprehensible and have nothing good to be said about them. By claiming that everything in our past that has led up to our present is irremediably riddled with sin and that while these same sins have best every society in history, the debtor should knock at only one door. And most importantly by those who pretend that a civilisation that has given more to the world in knowledge, understanding, and culture than any other in history somehow has nothing whatsoever to be said for it.
The ruling classes of Western nations have a notorious and profound disregard for traditional values and beliefs, especially those that brought about the rule of law, liberal democracy, and the protection of individual rights. Instead, these authoritarian oligarchs have imposed on the unwary population a deep cultural pessimism and, indeed, a sense of complete alienation and hopelessness. In this way, most Westerners now generally see their countries as oppressive, evil, and unworthy of any love and loyalty. The ‘mainstream media’ actively contributes to the malaise by engaging in a jihad against brave individuals who insist on upholding traditional Christian values.
Westerners have thus decided that they can abandon their Christian heritage without caring about its deleterious consequences. Traditional values have experienced significant shifts, with new cultural influences increasingly being embraced. However, the new hedonism that emerges from this process seems unable to give the native population any compelling reason to promote, and respect, a ‘culture of life’.
Indeed, the decline in traditional values and beliefs is the main cause of low birth rates, hopelessness, and Wokeism among the native population. The culture that once produced Western Civilisation, as traditionally understood, is in its death throes and a new ‘multicultural’, morally bankrupt West has become the dominant one.
With all this, within this spiritual vacuum caused by the abandonment of Christian morality and religion, the gradual Islamic domination of the West arises inexorably.
Augusto Zimmermann is foundation dean and professor of law at Alphacrucis University College. He served as associate dean at Murdoch University. He is also a former commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia.
Gabriël A. Moens AM is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Queensland where he served as Garrick Professor of Law and served as pro vice-chancellor and dean at Murdoch University.
Moens & Zimmermann are the authors of ‘The Legal Right to Disobey Law’ (Sidestream Press, 2026). This book can be purchased from Oxford Printery here.
