Posted on 07/09/2004 1:41:51 AM PDT by rmlew
Some years ago the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer declared that "we are all multiculturalists now." One's initial response to such an unwanted announcement is to say: "What do you mean, 'we'?" Yet, even if "we" do not subscribe to that sentiment, it cannot be denied that over the last twenty years multiculturalism has become the ruling idea of America, incarnated in every area of society ranging from educational curricula to the quasi-official establishment of foreign languages, to mandated racial proportionality schemes in private employment and university admissions, to the constant invocations by our political, business, and intellectual elites of "diversity" as the highest American value. How, so quickly and effortlessly, did this alien belief system take over our country?
It follows from this that the main goal of multiculturalism is inclusion. Multiculturalists argue that minority and non-Western cultures have been unjustly excluded in the past from full participation in our culture, and that in order to correct this historic wrong we must now include them on an equal basis. In other words, these minority cultures must be regarded as having the same public importance as America's historic majority culture. Moreover, we are told, this equal and public inclusion of different cultures does not threaten our culture, but "enriches" it. By this reasoning, if we became (say) an officially bilingual society, with Spanish appearing alongside English on every cereal box and street sign in the land (as is done with the two languages of Canada), our culture would not be harmed in the slightest. We would only be including something we once excluded. We would have become something more, not less. What could be more positive? How could any decent person object?
To begin to answer that question, let us imagine a scenario in which a Western cultural group—say a large population of Italian Catholics—moved en masse into a Moslem country and demanded that the host society drop all public observance of its majority religion and redefine itself as a multicultural state. When the Moslems react in fear and outrage, the Catholics answer: "What are you so uptight about, brothers? In challenging Islam's past exclusionary practices, we're not threatening your religion and way of life, we're enriching them." Of course, as even the multiculturalists would admit, such "enrichment" would change Islam into something totally unacceptable to the Moslem majority. By the same logic, if the U.S. Congress were required to conduct all its proceedings in Chinese or Spanish alongside English, that would obviously not "enrich" America's political tradition, but radically disrupt and change it. To say that a majority culture must "include" alien traditions on an equal basis in order to prove its own moral legitimacy is to say that the majority culture, as a majority culture, is not legitimate and has no right to exist.
Since multiculturalism claims to stand for the sanctity and worth of each culture, the discovery that its real tendency is to dismantle the existing European-based culture of the United States should have instantly discredited it. Yet it has not—not even among conservatives. A leading reason for this failure is that modern conservatives are themselves ethnicity-blind, democratic universalists. Their conservatism consists in seeing multiculturalism as an attack on their universalist tenets. They fail to understand multiculturalism as an attack on a particular culture and people, namely their own, because as universalists they either have no allegiance to that particular culture and people or their allegiance is defensive and weak. Thus the typical conservative today will say that multiculturalism is bad because "it divides us into different groups"—which is of course true. But he rarely says that multiculturalism is bad because "it is destroying ourculture"—America's historic culture and civilization—since that would imply that he was defending a particular culture rather than a universalist idea. Because conservatives are unwilling to defend the very thing that multiculturalism is seeking to destroy, they are unable to identify the nature of multiculturalism and to oppose it effectively.
Several caveats are in order before proceeding with a discussion, which will inevitably incite the multicultural left and invite its characteristically unscrupulous attacks. When I speak of America's "dominant Western culture," or of its "majority culture and people," these are not intended as code words for whites. Individuals of non-European ancestry are and can be full members of America's majority Western culture. At the same time, it is a historical fact that America’s defining political culture is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in origin and character. A Japanese-American can become an American by embracing this culture—this culture shaped by Anglo-Saxon and Protestant traditions—as his own. (And I write this as a non-Anglo-Saxon Jew.) The same is true for individuals of any ethnic or racial group.
In this article I refer occasionally to whites as well as to generic conservatives, mainly because whites, as the American majority population and the historic ethnic core of the dominant culture, are the particular targets of multicultural propaganda. Whites as a group are never spoken of today except in negative terms. This is the case even as liberal white elites worship at the altar of blacks as a group, of Moslems as a group, of Mexicans as a group, and so on. Many whites have so absorbed today's anti-white attitudes that they consider it "racist" even to think of themselves as whites or to speak of whites as a category at all. Not only does this represent a malignant double standard, in which nonwhites are empowered in their anti-white racism while their white targets are silenced, it doesn't even make sense. How can we speak intelligently about the fateful issues of multiculturalism and national identity if we are not even allowed to mention one of the main parties (though most of its members decline to think of themselves as a party) to those controversies?
My occasional use of the present tense to portray the respective sides of the diversity debate should not be taken to suggest that any meaningful debate on that topic is still going on, at least in mainstream venues. As has been increasingly evident since the mid-1990s, the multiculturalists have pretty well won their war against America's former dominant culture, in the sense of supplanting it as the prevailing national idea. Multiculturalist agendas and the rhetoric of diversity inform the key institutions and official expressions of American society. It is now an unquestioned credo both in the schools and among the elites that the central purpose of our society is the inclusion of other peoples and cultures, rather than the preservation, flourishing, and enhancement of our own people and culture. Multiculturalism is embraced in the highest precincts of the establishment right as well as the left. Thus George W. Bush, casting aside Ronald Reagan's belief in immigration with assimilation, has celebrated the growth of unassimilated foreign languages and cultures in this country, while his closest aide, Condoleezza Rice, who ten years ago told radio host Bob Grant that she was a Republican because Republicans treated her as an individual instead of as a black, now supports minority racial preferences in college admissions and throws around diversity rhetoric with the best of them.
The victory of multiculturalism does not mean that all is lost. The country can be won back from the dominant multicultural ideology, but only if we recognize that it is, in fact, the dominant ideology. Could Reagan have liberated Eastern Europe from Communism if he had imagined—as did the hapless Gerald Ford—that Communism did not actually control Eastern Europe? My purpose, then, is not to warn readers against a future multicultural takeover of American institutions and politics, since it has already substantially occurred. My purpose is to show how the takeover occurred, and, equally important, how the intellectual failures of conservatives allowed it to occur. Only by exploring those intellectual errors to their root, and reversing them in our own minds, do we have any hope of reversing the multiculturalist ascendancy over our country, and, ultimately, of winning back what we have lost.
In the paragraphs that follow, several examples will help illustrate the real direction of the multiculturalist ideology and the blindness of conservatives—particularly of white conservatives—to its agendas.
Example 1.Multiculturalists charge that the Western literary tradition is too "narrow" because it doesn't include voices of Third-World peoples of color. The implication is that the Western tradition as it has existed up to the present moment is not legitimate, and that it can only become legitimate by including other traditions.
Two realities are ignored here, both by the multiculturalists and by their targets. The first reality is that the Western tradition is a tradition. The second reality is that it is our tradition—the "our" referring to all those who are, or who aspire to be, whatever their ethnic and racial background, heirs and members of that tradition. When multiculturalists object to the word "our," claiming it is exclusive, they are really saying that they don't consider the Western tradition to be theirs. They are saying that they want to take it over and change it into something else. They are saying that they don't want the Western tradition to exist any more. And when Americans quickly agree that we shouldn't say "our" tradition, because the Western tradition is universal and belongs to the whole world, and when we further strive mightily to demonstrate how universal Western culture really is, without the slightest tincture of cultural particularity about it, we have tacitly conceded the multiculturalists' point that the Western tradition has no right to exist.
Example 2.Black studies professor Henry Louis Gates writes that the universities should adopt a curriculum that reflects all the world's cultures, not merely Western culture. Such a world culture, Gates continues, "situates the West as one of a community of civilizations. After all, culture is always a conversation among different voices."
That last comment is a snare for the gullible. It is one thing to say that the Western conversation consists of such different voices as (for example) Christianity, Judaism, Greek philosophy, and modern science. It is quite a different thing to say that the Western conversation consists of Shi'ite Islam, Animism, Voodoo, and Rastifarianism. Clearly, to include every voice as an equal participant in the Western conversation would mean the end of the Western conversation. Gates tacitly admits this is his purpose when he remarks: "To insist that we 'master our own culture' before learning others ... only defers the vexed question: What gets to count as 'our' culture? What has passed as 'common culture' has been an Anglo-American regional culture, masking itself as universal."(2) In other words, the Anglo-American or Western culture should not be transmitted as our primary culture because it is not really "ours," and it is not really "ours" because it doesn't include all cultures, meaning non-Western cultures and those who belong to them.
Leaving aside the complex question of whether and under what conditions Western culture includes non-Westerners, the more immediate concern to us here is that Western culture is the culture of Westerners. Gates wants to include other cultures within Western culture so that the resulting hodgepodge will belong equally to everyone in the world. But—and this is the point overlooked both by the multiculturalists and their conservative universalist opponents—that means taking Western culture away from Westerners. The debate becomes a debate between the global multiculturalists on the left, and the global universalists on the so-called right, with no one standing up for the historical Western culture.
Example3. In a widely-publicized incident at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, an administrator sharply criticized an undergraduate on a diversity planning committee for writing of her "deep regard for the individual." "This is a RED FLAG phrase today," the administrator wrote back, "which is considered by many to be RACIST. Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privilege the 'individuals' belonging to the largest or dominant group."(3) For the multiculturalists, Western individuality is nothing but a mask of illegitimate dominance, which must be stripped away. But for Westerners, Western individuality is an integral aspect of their being. Therefore to get rid of Western individuality (so as to include non-individualistic, non-Western cultures) is to destroy the very essence of Western people. Conservative critics of multiculturalism never grasp this fact, because, as universalists, the notion of a particularist Western essence is alien to them.
Example 4. The celebrated black novelist Toni Morrison writes that the American ideals of liberty and the rights of man are "permanently allied with ... the hierarchy of race."(4) [Emphasis added]. Morrison may be more correct than she realizes. The ideals of liberty that she despises—whether they be secretly "hierarchic" or not—are historically white Western ideals (though, as I've said, people of any background can aspire to them), and it's clear to anyone with eyes that race-avenging blacks such as Morrison will quickly destroy the rights and institutions based on those ideals as soon as they are in a position to do so. If the majority of blacks believe that liberty is only a white ideal, then the political ascendancy of blacks with their contrasting black ideals (i.e. ideals of black racial consciousness and black racial power) must mean the end of liberty. Meanwhile, the conservative universalists see Morrison's ideas as only a threat to a universal order in which blacks and whites could live together as one. They fail to see these ideas for what they really are: an attempt to destroy our historic Western culture of liberty and individualism.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
The problem with multiculturalism is in this assumption. Some cultures are just plain not compatable with American culture as it currently has evolved. Secondly, there are subsets of all cultures, some of which are not compatable with American culture.
In order for a culture to successfully blend with the American culture, it must allow for a secular government allowing freedom of (not from) religion. Islamic culture fails this test while Hispanic and most Asian cultures pass. The Marxist varient of Western culture failes and does the Maoist fusion of Asian and Western culture and the MECHA varient of Hispanic culture.
It is a complex and difficult subject and does not lend itself to simplification. The "Clash of Civilzations" overlooks both too many cultural similarities and divisions within cultures. For instance, although most forms of Islamic culture would not seem to be compatable with Western culture, there is always the "Turkish" experience which values and allows a secular and therefore tolerant government.
There's a fundamentally evil viewpoint if I've ever seen one.
Right now Multi-culturalism is greased by the notion that whites are allowed the role of Messiah or Jesus to the benighted and so conflict is avoided between the majority and the minority. If all goes well for the Left then numbers will preclude CWII and we will end up like South Africa whereas the once dominant group is now little but tax slaves for the new class of ruling parasites. Speaking the platitudes of "Diversity" must be a raptorous experience for people like Bush so never underestimate the willingness of people being sold out by their "leaders." DeClerk became a demigod with a Nobel Prize for his foolish handover of the productive to the Communists of the ANC.
The Mexican American Legal Defense Fund has advised mexicans, particular illegal ones, to move inland, and uncork the pressure cooker that often exists in the border region. I have lived in TX and CA. And in largely hispanic regions.
The key to the issue is that the yonger generation wants to succeed and learn, but cultural mores in the mexican community resist this with a high drop-out rate to work in the family business. If this is what they want out of life, its ok with me, but too often all that is sought is day labor jobs.
Where multiculturalism lets us down is when the minority groups demand social help, afirmative action jobs, and equal support in their language. South TX is bilingual from San Antonio south, you may as well not apply for a job if you cannot handle both languages. There is no need for english, and I don't know if headway is being made. I suspect the same for southern CA as well.
If you're trying to impress us with a smattering of your German, you should know that "Rindvieh" is not of the feminine gender. You're showing your ignorance.
Of course the article does not claim this at all and only refers to unnassimilated immigrants.
The problem with Multiculturalism is that it encourages immigrants not to assimilate. It promotes and champions the values of every culture alien to the U.S. but denigrates and denies the very existence of the American culture.
Multiculturalism is nothing but moral relativism. It is an oxymoron. Liberals teach the rest of the world that America is a racist evil empire. Immigrants who hear this message are not grateful for an opportunity to succeed in America, because they have been taught that the racist American empire stole everything we have in the first place. Foreign nations are not grateful for the billions of dollars of foreign aid we send them, because the liberals have convinced them that we owe them reparations, and that we should share our wealth with them to avoid having them hate us.
Multiculturalism is cultural leftism. It is all about dismissing American exceptionalism.
We conservatives have no desire to champion the barbaric cultures of bloodthirsty jihadists, animist tribesmen, and socialist vermin. We champion our own culture.
Just a short comment addressing a variety of points presented here by several posters. What no one has explicitly mentioned in this thread is the time-factor and the resulting perspective this gives us.
For example, a poster made mention of the ethnic enclaves that came to life, and that represent the vibrant immigrant communities which are a part of Americana; Little Italy, Chinatown, Spanish Harlem, etc...
What wasn't mentioned is that these communities represented the first wave of immigrants arriving to our shores and whose occupants worked hard and long while establishing roots in their new home, literally becoming Americans. They kept their native languages and customs alive while learning new ones. It was their children who became more Americanized because of attending our schools where they were more deeply immersed in the fabric of America (and learned side-by-side with kids from other cultures more or less in the same boat). These kids, the 1st generation as it were, completed the assimilation process begun by their parents... but the assimilation process would have been stillborn if their parents hadn't come here to become Americans in the first place. That is what is happening today, and that is why multiculturalism is such an insidious and weakening factor.
I mentioned time factor and perspective before. The above took place over 2 generations, and those kids were also taught American History as we know it (I dare say I was probably among the last generation of children taught about America, and I'm 45) and not this claptrap that passes for history today. What happens now that we've an entire generation who've fallen sway and prey to Dewey's socialist (consequently anti-American, anti-Western Civ, anti-individual, anti-merit based and pro-group...) imprint upon our education? We have to steel ourselves to a long fight if we want to return to the excellence inherent in the American way of life. And we must recognize this, there is no other way around it. We can't blithely assume that just because we know something is true, or better, that our knowing it will magically wipe away the ingrained brainwashing of 30 years worth of junk in our kids (now adults, and voting ones at that...) brains. There is no way around this, brothers... it will not happen just because we want it to... we must fight and stand strong and determined, and like prayer, do it on a daily basis.
We must also resolve to identify and know the tenets of collective logic and PC thought that form the opposition worldview, and which are daily spoken and affirmed in lukewarm and sweet tones that first lull us for their cozy ease in acceptance whilst simultaneously defining any contrary opinion as being "the other" and condemning it for being so "out of the mainstream". We must know these things, know that everytime we choose not to confront this worldview (instead retreating in exasperation...) we allow the proponent of the multicultural worldview to smugly and confidently look back to the listening audience (...for that is where the battleground for ideas is fought, not between we who believe in America, individualism and merit against those who hold contrary beliefs; we two opposing forces are already convinced of our way... the battle is being decided in the minds of the great many who have not given this issue any thought and are indeed listening and learning from our every words and actions) with another victorious bout against "us right-wing radicals".
For all posters here - indeed, for anyone who believes that America cannot withstand this sugared balkanization of our values AND that wants to do something about it - I STRONGLY, STRONGLY, EMPHATICALLY INSIST (!!!!) that we arm ourselves with knowledge necessary to fight this fight. One tremendously valuable treasure that I recommend is Thomas Sowell's "VISION OF THE ANOINTED"; Mr. Sowell is, in my not-so-humble opinion, one of America's Treasures. Very few modern day Americans can more clearly and eloquently express these issues than he. There are others; Victor Davis Hanson, the columns of Charles Krauthammer to mention a couple, but Sowell is a great place to start. Read him, and you will not be sandbagged by the utopian veneer that the leftist clothes his platitudes in when you encounter it. And be prepared to be ostracized for your position - read "BACK TO BASICS FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY" by Michael Zak. Mr. Zak reminded me of what the modern day standards of American History tried to get me to forget; that the Republican Party - the conservative American - has a history of fighting against injustice and for equal rights for all men to be proud of.
It is a long fight brothers; bluntly stated, the problems that have been brewing for over 2 generations will not be defeated with our commisserating amongst each other in common outrage here on the Freep. We'll need to live this fight for freedom every day for the rest of our lives, and we will know victory is ours (as I pray we will be) when we see our children and grandchildren take up the banner from our hands. It can be no other way.
CGVet58
"California"
"Now"
Yes, but Goobenor Arnold can play the Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) character in a real life drama. He like other "conservatives" will sell everything of value down the river for that one moment that the Left will allow where he is the savior of the benighted. After that he goes back to being just another white racist in their opinion.
I think very few would disagree that America was founded on the principle of equality.
Political equality for citizens within our polity was a founding principle along with tradition. Read the entire Declaration of Independence.
Our tradition is that of LIBERTY,not equality. We are not the French who have neither.
However, we certainly did not treat outsiders as equals as evidenced by our Manifest Destiny to conquer from sea to sea and dominate North America.
At first that equlity only meant white, landed males, but as our "culture" changed the definition changed with it.
Sufferage and equality are not the same thing. Children are equal to other citizens under the law, yet they lack the privelege of voting. Sufferage is not an inherent right, as it can be lost.
This is the nature of "cutlure". It is not stagnant, but fluid.
That cultures adapt does not negate the existance of a single culture.
The only "culture" that does not constantly change and adapt are those that are dead like Greek, Roman or French.
The Greek and French are quite alive.
When settlers in America were primarily British, the influx of Europeans with different cultures invariably altered theirs. acutally the history of people constantly pushing east to west even in Europe altered cultures there too). There is a reason we call Brits Anglo-Saxons and not Celts.
1. You confuse invasions with invited immigrants. Immigrants to America were invited for the most part. It is our historical pattern to alternate between generations of high and low immigration.
2. Not all migrations have been east to west in Europe. Look up the historical conquests and migrations of the Slavs, Ostragoths, Varangians/Rus, and the Russians. 3.The British are not Anglo-Saxon, only the English are. The Scots, Irish, and Welsh are Celtic. Moreover, even among the English much Celtic traces remain. The first major national myth of the English is Celtic, that of King Arthur.
4. Conquest through migration is not inevitable.
Therefore, to claim that the influence that immigrants have on American society is a negative one, is a load of crap that just allows lefties to label conservatives as racists.
Are you denying the existance of an American society in denying a common culture? Otherwise, your argument is leftist tripe lacking support.
Where the heck do you live to believe that immigration cannot damage a culture? (You brought up the Angl-Saxon-Jute immivasion, claiming that it DESTROYED Celtic culture in Britain. Thus you admitt in your previous arguement that migration can damage a host culture. You are left screaming that the left will call us racist. Get a clue. The left will use any and all tools to tar those in their way. Surrending our common culture only means that they will call other things racist or reactionary.
Heck,read the freaking article. Mr. Auster made this clear.You disgree with the article, while exhibiting the behaviour of the "moderate" multiculturalist to a "t".
Lastly, on the issue of language, we are also talking about a fluid and ever changing medium. The only languages that don't change are dead languages (again, ancient Greek, Latin, French). Listen to how other languages are spoken by educated persons and you will here a suprising amount of English. This is what Latin did to native languages 2000 years ago.
Latin is not dead, although it is limited. French is spoken by over 100 million people. (Si la lange francaise est most, toutes les langue que la Russienne, la Japonaise, l'Anglaise, et la Chinoise sont morte. Tonne position n'a pas une semblance de verite. Je suis desole, mais il y a quatorze ans que j'etudias la lange Latin, et j'obliais presque tout.)
Of course languages develop. However, words have meaning. To lose English is to lose the ability to properly understand our political heritage. Go read 1984. What also seems to be forgotten here is that a multilingual soceity tends to create individuals who can speak both languages not one or the other. This has been proven time and again in Europe and elsewhere.
Highly educated people can read mutliple languages. However most show prefference to either their mother tongue or their national language. Moreover, these elites in Europe, who so readily change languages are presently erasing borders and their nation-states without the approval of their citizenship. You may approve of a treasonous governing class, but I do not.
Otherwise you are falling into a logic trap that allows you to condone the type of attitudes that the left succesfully pins on the right to win elections (with only minor amounts of voting fraud.)
What is it to win an eletion if the long term cost is ones nation. I for one will not sell my progeny's birthright for temporary gain.
You have too much time and no sense of humour, based on your need to comment that the French culture is still alive. Are you John Kerry?
Anyway lots of Spanish speakers in this country are not really of Spanish European origin but from Central or South American Indian stock. In many cases the native languages of their ancestors were forced into extinction by Spanish imperialism.
This only makes them all themosre non-Western, which makes them more useful in the attack on the cultureal bourgousie, the West.
Living in NYC, I am well aware of the number of immigrants who speak spanish as a secondary langague. (On the L-train, listening to a few from the Mexican hinterland today, I was quite pleased that they are nominally Catholic and did not have obsidian blades or stepped pyramids.)
Of course the Spanish isn't even the native language of the European population of Spain. During the time of the Roman Empire, Spain was home to germanic tribes like the Goths and Vandals who spoke germanic lanquages. It was the Romans who conquered Spain who introduced Latin there. Over the centuries the Spanish language evolved from Latin. Of course even before the germanic tribes moved into Spain there were pre-existing populations of unknown origins who spoke languages that are not of Indo-European origin. Among these are the Basques.
The Vandals invaded Hispania in the 4th century. When the Romans conquered Spain from the Carthaginians (Phoenecio-Canaanite language), Greek colonists, Celts, and Andorrans and Basques.
So anyway, if all cultures are of equal value, why just have a few Indo-European imperialist languages on the labels?
Parodying the left is pointless. Wait a generation and they will make this arguement, once they win the current cultural battle.
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