The Empire of Japan quietly annexed Korea in 1910. At the time, the Korean Peninsula was a dusty backwater hovel, several hundred years behind the rest of the world, and so not too many world leaders sat up in their chairs upon hearing news of this. Japan needed Korea’s land as a stepping stone to Manchuria and to harvest desperately needed resources that were lacking on the Japanese mainland. It was not exactly an invasion at first. Japan brought railroads, electricity, plumbing, and industry to the gob-smacked Koreans. The problem, however, was an old one: human nature demands that the giver sneer at the taker as much as the taker resents the giver. As tensions flared and bitterness was aired, Japan tried to slowly squeeze the life out of its subject state of Korea.

By 1938, Japan decided to reverse several decades of a benign indifference to the Korean language when they discovered that many of the most loyal Koreans had assimilated early into Japanese culture by speaking the Japanese language. The tactic was to smuggle away the baby’s native tongue before it could even speak. The aim was a slow and systematic death of Korean identity. It was a clever tactic. Speaking Japanese turned Korean boys away from their own hanboks and Confucian proverbs and instead had them goose-stepping in polished boots on behalf of the emperor.

If the Pacific War had not come to an abrupt and explosive end for the Japanese, it is highly probable that they would have succeeded in extinguishing the lights of Korean culture. Hong Saik, an ethnic Korean, had risen to the rank of lieutenant general in the Japanese army. The crown prince of Korea, Yi Eun, was a ceremonial member of the Japanese armed forces. Dozens of prominent South Korean statesmen and military leaders, such as Park Chunghee and Paik Sunyup, had all stood at attention in the tan and red uniforms of Japan. Although modern Koreans would be loath to admit it, Korea came perilously close to total assimilation. In its post-war soul searching period, Korea discovered one of the bitterest truths a nation can learn: take away the language and you will have taken away the nation.

In America, we have no invading empire to thank for the slow recession of the English language—we have Congress to thank for that. Years of conspiracy and collusion have led Congress to open the gates of the nation and embrace immigrants in such numbers that they not only refuse to learn English, but so that they can be better accommodated, they expect Americans to learn every language except English. Across the country they demand schools, legal proceedings, and not too surprisingly, welfare services in tongues alien to our own.

At this point, the same tired objection gets raised by dead-end objectionists. “But,” they say, “America is a nation of immigrants!” This objection is made only by those who can glibly overlook two centuries of American history. Immigration had once been constrained by several safeguards.

First, we Americans traditionally accepted our immigrants from like-minded, European nations. There were heavy limits applied to Asia, Africa, and any nation that may be inclined to use immigration to subvert our most cherished institutions. Congress axed that policy back in 1965, and since then it has been our own politicians to hold open the door for millions of not-so-like-minded Latin Americans.

Second, no single nation was allowed to send over immigrants in such numbers that they could politically conquer whole states. California is America’s most populous state, and accordingly has the most electoral votes, yet the majority of the state is now Hispanic, primarily of Mexican heritage. Most of the time, in the stifling atmosphere of identity politics, those fifty-five electoral votes go to the candidate who promises to lavish the most favors on Mexico. The welfare of the United States is, at best, a mere secondary consideration for them; the welfare that goes into the pockets of the Hispanic voter is of prime importance. Over half of Hispanic households receive government cash.

But this oppressive vacuum that is sucking out the wealth of middle-class Americans is not nearly as damaging as the cultural coup d’état which begins with the promotion of Spanish. The United States now has more Spanish speakers living in its borders than Spain. Only Mexico has more Spanish speakers than we do, and if our current rates of immigration hold steady, we may soon have more Mexicans living in the United States than in Mexico.

To begin, let’s start with your average American who turns on his radio as he drives to work in the morning. There are currently over one thousand Spanish-speaking radio stations in America, and Spanish language advertising has become a multi-billion dollar industry. If he happens to live in California, our average joe will have to deal with roughly half of his radio stations being broadcast in Spanish and all of the corresponding advertisements being blasted at him in Spanish, too. The Spanish language market is the fastest growing market in FM radio. Our average man may wonder: is assimilation working for him, or is he the one being assimilated?

Now, let’s suppose that this average man of ours comes home from work and wants to relax by kicking up his feet and watching some TV. The Spanish-language channel Univision reaches half of all American households, over 150 million people, and it has over half a dozen sister stations in its network. The most popular shows among the 18-34 viewer demographic, the most coveted viewer-base in television, are no longer broadcast in English. Shows such as Fuego en la Sangre and Cuidado Con el Angel are what appeal to the “American youth” of today. In Los Angeles, Spanish-language news shows such as KMEX now get higher viewership ratings than their English counterparts. English is being completely edged out. Our average man may wonder: is assimilation working for him or is he the one being assimilated?

This nightmare has not yet reached its end. Now let us suppose that our average man wakes up the next morning and decides to send his young children to kindergarten. He may be shocked to discover that his local school district does not teach classes in English. Ten percent of all public school children in America are currently learning English as a second language. In California, this statistic climbs to as high as twenty-three percent. In these schools, not only is the main language of instruction Spanish, thanks to the great cult of multiculturalism, the culture of the classroom leans more toward the heroic revolutionaries of Mexico and less toward our own founding fathers. When this man’s children come home asking him to donate to La Raza, he is going to wonder: is assimilation working for him, or is he the one being assimilated?

To those who say that these are exaggerations, I would tell them to take a stroll through large parts of Miami, El Paso, or Los Angeles. That is, take a stroll until you realize what danger you are in. Take note of the Spanish billboards, the Spanish storefronts, the Spanish-speaking drug dealers and whores. Take note of how apologetically the English language has to assert itself whenever a non-Spanish speaking gringo has the audacity to speak his own language in his own nation.

The critics claim that America is just an idea. America is not a sovereign nation with laws—it’s more like a song in our hearts, or so they say. America is a melting-pot with a veritable stew of values. These claims snidely overlook the fact that many values are irreconcilable, which is what originally led to the partition of nation states all over the globe. Mexico has a strong culture of crime that had not previously existed in the United States. Already half of Californian prisons are comprised of Spanish-speaking illegals. Our nation of vague ideas has become a nation of hard crimes.

What these critics overlook is that ideas comprise only one part of our American identity: the other part stems from a core set of shared experiences. To this end, language is a shared experience par excellence; it is the mold from which all national identities are stamped. To understand just how important language is for a nation’s identity, consider what happens when we remove traditional language altogether.

Imagine a Chinese family sitting around the dinner table speaking French with one another. Now consider that this Chinese family has no knowledge of Chinese whatsoever, and their only language is French. The people of their neighborhood, their village, and their nation all speak Chinese, and yet, this family is so clueless about the Chinese language that they can only think and speak in French. Setting aside the momentous tear in the space-time continuum that mysteriously allowed a Chinese family to speak French, the difficulties are apparent. Without the Chinese language, this family cannot properly partake in the shared experience of being Chinese; they have no window into the common thoughts or prevailing attitudes of China. It is safe to say that when the Chinese stop speaking Chinese in their own homes, to their own families, they are not truly Chinese any longer. They have transformed into something similar, but still different. They are like a pick-up truck without a bed in the back: the truck is still a truck, but without its bed, it cannot truly function as a truck. The truck, to be a truck, needs a bed while the Chinese, to be Chinese, need their own proud and ancient tongue.

When we apply this same logic to African or Asian nations, leftists seem to have no qualms about encouraging the growth of traditional languages. The leftists would proudly tell the Filipino street cleaner to drop Spanish for Tagalog. They would gladly endorse Zulu over Afrikaans for various tribes. They would unanimously prescribe Hindi over English for the New Delhi math professor. So why must we, as Americans, be apologetic for seeking to preserve the English language? Our cultural heritage is British. English thrived on the American continent long before the existence of the United States government, and as such, it is one of the few staples of the culture that is non-negotiable: America lives or dies by the English language. Take away the language and you will have taken away the nation.

Spanish cannot thrive peacefully alongside English. One language must dominate. And the triumph of Spanish would mean the death of America in all those places where Spanish has become the common tongue. Men cannot live in harmony if they cannot first speak to one another. Cultures cannot cohere when they have no means to make their words coherent.

Now let me paint two distinct pictures. Both of these scenarios have their basis in history, but while one is a picture-perfect model of how to implement multiculturalism, the other is a model for how to succumb to a virulent form of cultural cancer.

Our success story is none other than the European Renaissance. During the Renaissance, we find a sweeping return to the Classics that, on the surface, should silence my claim of language determining the starkly defined borders of culture. Europeans re-embraced the marbled man with tight abs, a mathematical obsession with symmetry, and started to ponder God’s relation to both man and reason. Although this paradigm simmered in the European imagination for centuries and spanned thousands of miles across the European continent, it was not a truly shared cultural paradigm shift. It was shared only indirectly, like a set of office memos rather than codified laws. Each nation, each culture had to digest these ideas in its own way: Michelangelo in Italy did not paint identically to the Dutchman, Bosch; nor did Shakespeare write much in the style of Erasmus.

The glory of the Renaissance was not that its ideals made each nation identical, but rather that each nation had an honest crack at its ideals. Hamlet may have strummed the heartstrings of its French readers, but the French were never so moved that they decided to bend their knees to an English king; the French instead plucked ideas and techniques from Shakespeare and then used them to write plays in the French language, in French fashion, which in turn kindled the imaginations of English readers. Likewise, whatever respect that the Bavarians might have held for Cervantes, they never decided that importing a million Spaniards into Bavaria was a sensible idea. Each nation, each culture remained distinct but open to foreign influence.

Our contrasting tale is a tale of head-hanging failure from Canada. If you want to see a flirtatious disaster with bilingualism, Americans only need to look as far as their neighbor to the north. On paper, Canada is bilingual. In theory, little Canucks should finish school with the effortless ability to wag their tongues in either French or English as the situation demands. Canada’s constitution says that French and English have “equality of status and equal rights and privileges.” Meanwhile, reality itself cannot help but laugh at the claims of the Canadian constitution. In Canada, the English-speaking majority always find themselves playing second fiddle to the French-speaking minority from Quebec.

Road signs must be written in both French and English everywhere in Canada—except in Quebec. Only French is used there. Government services must be offered in both French and English—except in Quebec. English services are highly limited there. Advertisements such as billboards, posters, and store signs must be in both French and English—except in Quebec. Signs there can be written solely in French and, even if there is English, according to Quebec law, the French words must be twice as large as the English words. The absurdities never end in Quebec. French-speaking Quebecers cannot send their French-speaking children to English-speaking public schools. They claim that French is an endangered language. Quebec voted to declare that “the people of Quebec form a nation,” but that has not stopped them from taking money from a federal government that is mostly funded by the English-speaking majority. When one considers how little enthusiasm Quebecers have toward being Canadian, and that their secession is inevitable, as it stands now, Quebec is a cancer growing steadily in the heart of Canada.

America must be prepared for this dark and quarrelsome scenario happening in its own borders. The Spanish speakers of America will soon look to surround their culture with a ring of legislative spikes. Soon they will shove English into a quiet corner while blaring Spanish from a megaphone—and we will have no means to stop them. Double-standards will become the norm and it will always be English on the losing end of these arrangements. In the end, Spanish-speaking states will start demanding referendums. Expect total independence to start cropping up among these demands.

English in America will have to fight furiously to survive the coming decades. Americans must be prepared to face a very bitter truth, one that Quebec and Korea know all too well: take away the language and you will have taken away the nation.