William Lind explains how to defend against an invasion

Larry Kummer, Editor

7 years ago

Summary: William Lind explains what might be necessary to defend America’s borders against the coming flow of migrants. The next section explains why such extreme measures might be necessary. Few will accept this today. File it for future reference, when the obvious surprises us by happening.

Question:..“What nation poses the greatest threat to the sovereignty of the US?”
Answer:……“Mexico.”
— Briefing circa 1994 by Martin van Creveld to the CIA. They were incredulous then; today they probably understand.

Invasion

By William S. Lind.

From Traditional Right • 14 November 2018.

Posted with his generous permission.

The column or caravan of Central Americans slowly moving north through Mexico with the intention of crossing into the U.S. is a classic Fourth Generation war invasion. An invasion by immigrants is more, not less, dangerous than an invasion by a hostile army because the army eventually goes home while immigrants stay, permanently altering the cultural landscape. In this case, they would not alter it for the better.

If this country is to survive in a 4GW world, we recognize that this invasion threat is just the flea sitting on the top of the penguin sitting on top of the iceberg. If this invasion is successful, the next caravan will be larger. The one after that will be larger still. A combination of state failure, economic ruin, climate change, and population pressures means millions, tens of millions, ultimately hundreds of millions of people around the world will be trying to move from south to north. If we don’t stop them, our societies, those north of the equator, will be turned into their societies, which is to say the places they are fleeing because they don’t work. That may not be their intention (in the case of Islamics, it is their intention), but it will be the result because it is all they know. Their numbers will be such that they cannot be acculturated by their new societies before those societies are engulfed, overwhelmed, and snuffed out.

President Trump is right that we cannot allow these people to enter the U.S. and apply for asylum or refugee status. In the time it will take for their cases to be evaluated, they will simply disappear among the millions of illegal immigrants already here. They must be stopped at the border or before the border. Again, this is true not just for the current caravan but for the millions who will be following them. The question is how to do it.

An old practice, one that was almost universal up to World War II, would help: requiring visas. To cross a border required not just a passport, which is issued by the country of the person’s origin, but also a visa, which is issued by the country they want to enter. No visa, no crossing the border. Some countries still require visas for entry. Sometimes they can be obtained at the point and time of entry, but more often a would-be border crosser must obtain a visa well beforehand. Crying “refugee” or “asylum” makes no difference: you still have to have a visa.

Visas would help, but as the 21st century unrolls, the numbers of migrants will be such that the borders will still be overwhelmed. When ten million people are all heading for your border at once, only one thing will stop them: deadly force. Again, at least up until World War II, anyone attempting an illegal border crossing was at a substantial risk of getting shot. Border guards everywhere had standing “shoot to kill” orders. Snipers were posted to shoot swimmers. Unless borders are defended by force, they don’t really exist.

Here we quickly run into one of the most confounding aspects of Fourth Generation war, the power of weakness. At the moral level, having border guards shoot down women and children is a disaster. The moral level is more powerful than the physical level, which means states will have great difficulty overcoming public pressure not to shoot. But if they don’t shoot, they will be invaded and, both as states and as cultures, wiped out.

There are at least a couple of partial answers to this problem. The first is to make border defenses automatic. In most cases this should be feasible on land borders. Defend the borders wherever possible not with men, but with automatic machine guns and the like. The power of weakness is diminished because the invaders, knowingly walking into deadly threats, look stupid. Instead of reacting with horror, people will say, “how dumb can you get?”

A second answer is to make the necessary violence invisible. If invaders come by sea, a la The Camp of the Saints {Wikipedia}, automatic defenses are less visible. But if their ships are torpedoed by submarines and spurlos gesenkt {sunk without a trace}, the moral blowback will be less than if the evening news shows a destroyer pumping shells into a ship as desperate people swim for their lives – and are not rescued.

The feminized culture of sentiment that now rules in Western countries makes any defense difficult. The strategic key to the West’s defense is to replace that culture with a more masculine culture that wants to fight. That will happen. Whether it happens in time is the question.

—————————————-

Lind discusses how to stop them. Here is why we need to do so.

All defenses have weaknesses that can be exploited to overcome them. For all our power and wealth, we have no ability to withstand mass migrations. Our bureaucratic systems to process them are easily overwhelmed. Our process to identify people deserving asylum are easily fooled. The systems that forced rapid assimilation in the early 20th century have been dismantled, declared politically incorrect. Welfare gives women an alternative to assimilation (Choose: open borders or the welfare State?). Worse, we are internally divided – with large numbers of influential Americans wanting the borders opened and the nation flooded with migrants from failing or failed states.

Now for the very bad news. America assimilated large numbers of migrants in 1880-1930. We had more rapid per capita economic growth and used coercive measures to assimilate the migrants and their children. None of that is true for us today. We have slow growth: 1.5% per year in real per capita GDP during the past 8 years. Our policy is multiculturalism, giving migrants no reason to assimilate. In sufficiently large numbers, assimilation slows or even stops (America has no magic pixie dust to change people’s values or behavior). Tino Sanandaji explains why (a Kurdish-Swedish economist; Wikipedia).

“At a theoretical level there is an idea proposed by Professor Edward Lazear from the Stanford Business School where integration is a function of group size {e.g., see this paper from 1999. If you have small immigration most people around the new arrivals are going to be natives, and so finding your place in society is just a gradual social process: interacting with your neighbors, working with other people, absorbing their values and learning the language. Once that group becomes very large then you have an issue of critical mass where if you don’t want to integrate you can just live in the immigrant community, working and interacting mostly with other immigrants, not having to learn the language and so on. And you don’t integrate as easily.”

There is much research on this. See this 1999 paper by Lazear and this 2012 paper about migrants in Germany. There is no need to guess about this. The assimilation machinery has broken down in much of America’s southwest, overwhelmed – producing the effects predicted by Lazear two decades ago.

Now Sanadaji gives us even worse news. He is speaking about Sweden, but our high rates of immigration make this true of us as well.

“We are going to have an ethnic class society to some extent. That’s inevitable. I hope somebody solves it but it’s extremely unlikely and to my knowledge when this poverty problem established itself no country has been able to eradicate it.”

We cannot cope with our current underclass, and exacerbate both it and our racial and ethnic divisions. It is a potentially existential threat. Lind’s proposals seem extreme today. They won’t seem so when it is too late for them to be useful.

About the author

William S. Lind’s director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation. He has a Master’s Degree in History from Princeton University in 1971. He worked as a legislative aide for armed services for Senator Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio from 1973 to 1976 and held a similar position with Senator Gary Hart of Colorado from 1977 to 1986. See his bio at Wikipedia.

Mr. Lind is author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook (1985), co-author with Gary Hart of America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform (1986), and co-author with William H. Marshner of Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda (1987).

He’s perhaps best known for his articles about the long war, now published as On War: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009. See his other articles about a broad range of subjects…

His posts at TraditionalRight.
His articles about geopolitics at The American Conservative.
His articles about transportation at The American Conservative.

For More Information

See George Friedman’s (founder of Stratfor) prescient predictions about the American southwest in his 2009 book The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. He describes where we’re going, facts too disturbing for most experts to say in public. This is a useful feature of such writing: since it is just guessing, we allow statements about the obvious that are politically or socially unacceptable (just as are, in a different way, statements by a court jester).

Ideas! For shopping ideas see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

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