[rmlew]

This is both the most far reaching and depressing piece I have read inquite some time.

The self-proclaimed defenders of our culture no longer seem willing to define it, much less promote it. Having defined America as an idea, they fail to see the heritage and framework of that idea.

[Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit]

This is a big load of crap.

For instance it states

Multiculturalists argue that minority and non-Western cultures have been unjustly excluded in the past from full participation in our culture The final word should actually be society not culture. There is no single American culture and there never was. And it totally ignored the course of events in American history.

I think very few would disagree that America was founded on the principle of equality. At first that equlity only meant white, landed males, but as our "culture" changed the definition changed with it. This is the nature of "cutlure". It is not stagnant, but fluid. The only "culture" that does not constantly change and adapt are those that are dead like Greek, Roman or French.

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.

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.

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.

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. The only valid point is that new immigrants to the US should be given every incentive to learn English because a common language is the basis of (relative) harmony andunderstanding in American civic life.

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.)

[RWR8189]

Quite an article.

Thanks for posting it.

[AnimalLover]

Ping

[NutCrackerBoy]

Conservatives ... must become conservative in fact as well as in name, meaning that their primary devotion must be to the preservation of our underlying moral, cultural, and political order, rather than to its transformation and dissolution through the ever more radical project of global equality and inclusion. Liberalism, in the sense of the rule of law obeyed and enjoyed equally by all, is central to what we are. But if liberalism is not to become the path to Western suicide, it must operate within a social and moral order that is not itself liberal. -Lawrence Auster

Very long, but quite a good read. It set parts of my brain arguing with other parts of it. It was impossible for me not to feel annoyed that the author was being reactionary. Yet he is saying exactly what I myself believe, and applying those insights to the commonplaces around us.

[tm22721]

How, so quickly and effortlessly, did this alien belief system take over our country?

With this question posed at the end of the first paragraph, was I rightly expecting that there should be a cogent history of multiculturalism presented ?

Instead we have a potpourri of disjointed ideas that stand on their own merits but don't answer the original intriguing question.

BUMP

[Paleo Conservative]

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?

But if all cultures are equal, why just have labels in Spanish and English? Why not French, German, Russian, Hindi, etc.? 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. 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. But before any of the modern human populations were in Spain there were Neanderthals there. Apparently there is no indication that the Neanderthals left any decendants in the modern populations of Europe including Spain. So anyway, if all cultures are of equal value, why just have a few Indo-European imperialist languages on the labels?

[Paleo Conservative]

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.

[Skooz]

bump for later after the coffee kicks in.

[Paleo Conservative]

Unable to grasp the radical essence of his own ideas, the moderate liberal always ends up believing that he can eat his civilization and have it.

[Mr. Jeeves]

"...Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privilege the 'individuals' belonging to the largest or dominant group."

There's a fundamentally evil viewpoint if I've ever seen one.