The US must be a melting pot – not a salad bowl.................................bears repeating-—endlessly!
You can’t write any article for any major publication and maintain any credibility unless you find some way to excoriate President Bush and at least one of his policies, no matter how incongruent it is to the topic of the article.
Bttt.
Or an egg crate.
I recommend “The Return of the Primitive” by Ayn Rand and Peter Schwartz. Published after Rand died, Schwartz uses her speeches and writings to make a scathing critique of multiculturalism.
Yes, they were really off the mark.
Only leftist flakes believe this nonsense.
And they can be convinced otherwise quite easily.
Just let them go live in some of these "equally good" cultures and see how quickly they want to get back to the USA.
A country that loses its culture is doomed and headed for war and instability. Our culture is based on the Common Law, Christian charity, individual rights and protection of property/capitalism. Lose any of these, and the United States will cease to exist.
btt
[Our commitment to democracy is also tested in the Middle East,
which is my focus today, and must be a focus of American policy for
decades to come. In many nations of the Middle East — countries of
great strategic importance — democracy has not yet taken root. And
the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow
beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and
children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are
they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in
the matter? I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person
has the ability and the right to be free.
Some skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are
inhospitable to the representative government. This “cultural
condescension,” as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert
asserted that democracy in that former empire would “never work.”
Another observer declared the prospects for democracy in post-Hitler
Germany are, and I quote, “most uncertain at best” — he made that
claim in 1957. Seventy-four years ago, The Sunday London Times
declared nine-tenths of the population of India to be “illiterates
not caring a fig for politics.” Yet when Indian democracy was
imperiled in the 1970s, the Indian people showed their commitment to
liberty in a national referendum that saved their form of
government.
Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or
that people, or this group, are “ready” for democracy — as if
freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards
of progress. In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path
of progress. It teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, and
the peaceful resolution of differences. As men and women are
showing, from Bangladesh to Botswana, to Mongolia, it is the
practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy, and
every nation can start on this path.]- George W. Bush 2003
[While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must
not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete
actions to move toward them. We must be staunch in our conviction
that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the
inalienable and universal right of all human beings. So states the
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, among
other things, guarantees free elections.
The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the
infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions,
political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose
their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own
differences through peaceful means.
This is not cultural imperialism; it is providing the means for
genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy
already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and
historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or
worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy. Who
would voluntarily choose not to have the right to vote, decide to
purchase government propaganda handouts instead of independent
newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt for
land to be owned by the state instead of those who till it, want
government repression of religious liberty, a single political party
instead of a free choice, a rigid cultural orthodoxy instead of
democratic tolerance and diversity.]- Ronald Reagan 1982
Actually, all those things are intertwined, but I'll cut the guy some slack because he wouldn't have gotten printed if he'd been too forthright.
I’ve been saying this for years.
ping
I recall getting called a racist many times by so-called "conservatives" whenever I pointed out that trying to democratize an Islamic Arab country was going to be much more difficult, if not impossible.
I still don't think we're going to leave Iraq a democracy.
And it has worked. People would rather poke pins in their eyeballs than be thought of and/or called a 'racist'.
Oh,so we are to ignore the comments on Iraq because we’re all Bushbots now? What, Iraq is a “great success of the Bush presidency”? NO, the article, in its entirety is right on target! No,one except Bushbots think of Iraq as a success. Not even William F. Buckley (RIP.) Biut you’re right, the essence of the article rests elsewhere, and it is quite bold and un-PC to be printed in the CSM. Immigration affects the culture. Well, D’uh, dude!