i know there are some individuals on gupshup who admire Samuel Huntington’s work, what to say of armchair pundits in today’s most largest cities. Here is a taste of more of his admirable writings - this time, it is a new target. Before it was the Muslims who would be responsible for the clash of civilizations. Today, it’s Latinos who are ‘over here, over paid, and over sexed’.
On the border of disaster, Dan Glaister, The Guardian, 15 March 2004 [Excerpts only]
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.
