James P. Pinkerton: Keep America American
By James P. Pinkerton -
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, March 30, 2007



The same bad idea that is ruining Europe threatens to ruin the United States, too. Indeed, the news that Uncle Sam can't find more than 600,000 of what the government calls "fugitive aliens," those who have been ordered out of the country but slipped past the enforcement system, reminds us, yet again, that border enforcement and maintenance of sovereignty are low priorities for Washington.

The bad idea threatening both America and Europe is this: Borders don't matter. Why not? Because patriotism is deemed some sort of infantile disease to be grown out of. Therefore, a conglomerated government is the only way to assure docility and passivity for the masses -- oops, make that peace and prosperity.

This multinational view has been held by elites for a long time.

Karl Marx, still a hero to many policy-minded intellectuals, was an early prophet of a borderless world. But don't take my word for it: Here's Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, praising Marx in his 2005 best-seller "The World is Flat": "Reading 'The Communist Manifesto' today, I am in awe at how incisively Marx detailed the forces that were flattening the world during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and how much he foreshadowed the way these same forces would keep flattening the world right up to the present."

Isn't that neat? Friedman surely thinks so; he reprints more than a page of Marx's purple prose.

Friedman is no Communist. But he is a globalist. And so, if Marx's motto was "Workers of the world, unite," Friedman's seems to be "Globalists of the world, unite." And, in the end, the effect is similar: Nations, and national traditions, are plowed under.

In the past, some have dreamed that the League of Nations, or the United Nations, could foster a kind of world federalism. But that dream cracked up on the hard rocks of national reality -- not everyone wants to share a fate with Russia, Iran or Zimbabwe. So the flatteners and federalizers downsized, at least for a while; only continents would be unified.

Hence the European Union, stretching now from Ireland to Bulgaria, includes some 500 million people. That all sounds great -- for an empire. Indeed, Brussels, capital of the European Union, has become an imperial city; its palaces, bulging with Eurocrats, issue foggy declarations about the "Idea of Europe." But here's a sharp truth: Europe is not an idea; it's a place, a place for Europeans.

These folks have a shared history and a shared religious tradition, Judeo-Christianity -- or at least they did until the European Idealists, eager to flatten their own local customs in the name of politico-economic unification, opened the border to millions of Muslim immigrants.

Unfortunately, the globalizing plan hasn't produced harmonious odes to joy. Instead, big cities have been scarily divided into ethnic and religious combat zones. Muslims were happy to cross flattened frontiers into Europe, but they never had any intention of flattening their own adherence to rigid Sharia law. No wonder, then, that 56 percent of Europeans, finally waking up to the change that's been foisted upon them, believe that the Union "does not represent ordinary people." Now back to America, where our elites maintain the same faith in continent-flattening. "Visionaries," Democratic and Republican alike, have long advocated a "free trade zone" to include all of North America, and then all of South America. And along with free trade, of course, comes the free movement of peoples.

So of course 623,292 noncitizens facing deportation orders couldn't be found in the United States as of last year -- a 16 percent increase over the previous year -- according to a recent report from the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security.

Can this erosion of sovereignty be reversed? It might be too late to save Europe from Brussels-ization, followed by Islamicization. But surely it's not too late to save America -- if we can all agree, despite our other divisions, to keep being uniquely American.

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/146456.html