Ten years after the article "The Clash of Civilizations", in which he warned against fundamentalist Islam, Prof. Samuel Huntington marks another goal. In his new book, he states that immigrants from Latin America endanger the identity of the United States
Dan Glaister Guardian
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In 1993, Samuel Huntington, a researcher at Harvard University and former member of the National Security Council of the United States, published an article entitled "The Clash of Civilizations". In his article he claimed that in the world created after the end of the Cold War, "the source of the basic conflict will not be mainly ideological or economic. The great disputes between the members of the human race and the main source of conflict will be on a cultural background." Huntington also claimed that Islam, which due to its rapid population growth is spreading throughout the world, would be the most likely source of conflict.
The article caused an uproar in the academic world and in the media. In 1996, Huntington published a book of the same name, which, following the terrorist attack of September 11, jumped to first place on the New York Times bestseller list.
Now Prof. Huntington has another theory. His new book, “America's National Identity Who Are We? The Challenges to". It is absolutely clear who the "we" in the title are: Americans, especially white Americans, those who are proud of the US flag and believe in the supremacy of white and Protestant culture.
Huntington has a surprise for them: the Latinos are coming. In fact, the Latinos are already here, "washing your dishes, taking care of your children", and stripping a country that used to be proud and united of everything that stood at the foundation of its unity. "Will the United States continue to be a country whose inhabitants speak one language and whose cultural base is Anglo-Protestant?" He asked in the article "The Hispanic Challenge", published in the journal "Foreign Policy". "By ignoring this wish, the Americans agree to their eventual transformation into two nations with two cultures and two languages."
"The most immediate and serious challenge facing America's traditional identity stems from the large and ongoing immigration from Latin America, in particular from Mexico, and the birth rates of those immigrants compared to the white and black residents," he writes. "There is little chance that the current stream of immigrants coming from Latin America will be able to reproduce the assimilation successes of the past."
The book comes out at an excellent time for him. Nine months before the US presidential election, the candidates are wooing seven million Hispanic voters, most of whom are supporters of the Democratic Party. The candidates brush up on their knowledge of the Spanish language - George Bush's election broadcast, which includes images from the attack on the World Trade Center, was also broadcast in Spanish - and last week, Bush hosted his Mexican colleague Vicente Fox at his ranch.
Huntington cites Fox's claim that he is the president of 123 million Mexicans – 100 million in Mexico and 23 million in the US – as proof that the reconquest is underway. According to Huntington, Latinos, and Mexicans in particular, have no intention of assimilating. They are a fifth brother-in-law, determined to break up the nation.
The fact that upsets him the most is that the Spanish-speaking immigrants are in no hurry to learn English. "It can be assumed", he wrote, "that due to the rapid growth rate of the Mexican immigrant community, the immigrants will not strive to learn English and use it regularly as happened in the seventies". From this the path to the conclusion is short that the white Americans "will not be able to find jobs, or receive the salary they receive today, because they will be able to speak with the rest of the country's residents only in English".
The spread of the Spanish language, according to Huntington, "could in time cause fateful results in politics and government - those who aspire to be elected in the elections will be forced to be fluent in both languages... The use of both languages may become acceptable in congressional hearings..." These things, in Huntington's eyes, symbolize the approaching end of culture. He goes so far as to imagine what would have happened if the conquerors of America had not been white Anglo-Protestants, but French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics. "This was not the USA; It was Quebec, Mexico or Brazil," he concludes.
According to Huntington, Hispanic immigrants do not feel an obligation to the United States. But this claim is inconsistent with their willingness to serve in the American army. The proportion of Latinos in the military exceeds their number in the population. The commander of American forces in Iraq, Ricardo Sanchez, is Hispanic.
In addition to this, despite Huntington's claims that Hispanics are not interested in becoming "Americans", in the English sense of the word, many Latinos, from local politicians to store owners, want more than anything else to integrate into society and rise in the melting pot.
The summary of the book may not indicate the whole. Perhaps this is Huntington's way of expelling his demons, airing out the strangest and most ridiculous theories in a concise and attention-grabbing essay and leaving the rest of the boring material to the book. Huntington warned the world about the hordes coming from the East (he riffed on Islam and the Chinese in his 1996 bestseller). Now he warns against the masses of the south. Why would a professor from Harvard, the chairman of the Academy of International and Regional Studies, take an apocalyptic and inciting position that seems completely wrong?
It seems he didn't bother to re-read his previous book before launching into his latest operation. In his previous book he wrote, "the cultural distance between Mexico and the USA is much smaller than that between Turkey and Europe"; And "Mexico tried to differentiate itself from Latin America and create a North American identity for itself." Either many things have changed in Huntington's opinion in the last eight years or in his search for a new subject he chose not to pay too much attention to details.
Yedan in the wake of September 11
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