Posted on 12/11/2001 6:05:28 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
YES: A fragmented culture subverts national identity, purpose and the will to fight enemies.
By William S. Lind
The purpose of the ideology known commonly as "multiculturalism" is to destroy America. In the 21st-century world of fourth-generation warfare, it is likely to succeed. To understand why we first must understand both phenomena.
Fourth-generation warfare is the fourth major change in warfare since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the event that marks the beginning of modern war. The reason that treaty, which ended the Thirty Years War, marks the beginning of the modern period is that it established a state monopoly on war. After 1648, at least in Europe, war was between states; it was fought by state armies and navies fighting other institutions very much like themselves. Indeed, our whole picture of war, armies and navies — formal battles, uniforms, flags, saluting, etc. — is a picture of war between states. Few people in the defense establishments of today's states can imagine it being any other way.
But through most of history, it was another way. Many different entities fought wars: Families fought wars, clans fought wars, tribes fought wars, races and ethnic groups fought wars, religions fought wars, business enterprises fought wars. They fought using many implements, not just armies and navies: bribery, assassination, piracy, massacres, slave raids, mercenaries and tribal levies. In many of these conflicts the "army" was composed of any males physically able to wield a weapon, and the "navy" any available ship. The object was not "politics by other means," but simply to rejoice in the slaughter of an enemy, the noble deaths in battle of one's own champions, the seizure of the enemy's land, the rape of his women and the selling of his children into slavery. The Old Testament is full of it, as is the Koran.
In the fourth generation of modern war, which also marks the end of the modern period, past is prologue. The state is losing its monopoly on war, and states everywhere find themselves fighting nonstate opponents — and usually losing, despite all the technology, special training and vast resources of state armed forces. War is fought at three levels: physical, mental and moral. The state is losing at the moral level, which is the highest and most decisive.
Around the world the state has begotten the bureaucratic state, and the bureaucratic state has begotten the New Class, or the ruling elite. That New Class has three characteristics: It can't make things work; it uses its power and position to exempt itself from the consequences of things not working (in the United States, it has ruined the public schools while sending its own children to private schools); and it really cares about only one thing — remaining the New Class. Not surprisingly, people who are not members of the New Class find fighting for the state it dominates a less than entrancing prospect.
On the contrary, many citizens are giving their primary loyalty to entities other than the state — religions, races, ideologies — and are willing, even eager, to fight against the state on behalf of something they can believe in. It is not simply from fear of U.S. bombers that Osama bin Laden, a man of great wealth, chooses to live in a cave.
As war between states fades away, one of the older forms of conflict returning is war between cultures. With the death of state loyalties and identities, identification and loyalty to a culture is coming back strongly. Cultural differences are one of history's main reasons for war. Human nature being what it is, when cultures rub up against each other, the resulting friction often leads to fire.
Perhaps primary among the returning cultural loyalties is loyalty to Islam. After three centuries on the strategic defensive, Islam has during the last 50 or so years resumed the strategic offensive, expanding outward in every direction. As historian Russell Kirk wrote, culture comes from the cult, and the cult at the center of Islamic culture — Islam itself — is very much alive (unlike Christianity in much of Christendom).
Neither the state nor secular law is legitimate from an Islamic perspective. Legitimacy adheres only to the Ummah, the international Islamic community, and to Shariah, Islamic law. Islam divides the world into the Dar al-Islam, the world of Islam, and the Dar al-Harb, the world of war; with and in the latter, there can be no peace. War against the unbeliever, the kaffir, is an Islamic duty, carrying with it the promise of martyrdom and a bevy of whores (the word is from the Arabic houri) in heaven. While there are lax Islamics, there is no such thing as tolerant or peaceful Islam.
The basic message of "multiculturalism" is that all cultures are equally good and beneficent — except Western culture, which is violent and oppressive. That message is, of course, a lie. In reality, Western culture is one of only two cultures that has been successful over time in terms of the quality of life it provided to its adherents (the other success is Chinese culture). To see real violence and oppression, one need only look at the life of non-Muslims in Islamic majority countries. The purpose of multiculturalism is to disarm the West psychologically, to make it impossible for Western men even to consider fighting in defense of the Western, Judeo-Christian way of life; to do so, as the multiculturalists preach, is to become "another Adolf Hitler" (who was, ironically, no fan of Judeo-Christian culture himself.)
Disarmament through psychological conditioning takes place endlessly in America's public schools, colleges and universities and, most powerfully, in the products of the entertainment industry, which now is the dominant force in American culture. The result is evident: While many average Americans recognize American Muslims as a dangerous fifth column, the multiculturalist elite demands a "tolerance of diversity" that Islam itself does not know. A Republican administration invites mullahs to the White House to celebrate Islamic holidays.
That multiculturalism preaches the suicide of the West is no surprise to those who know its historic origins. Multiculturalism, also known as "political correctness," is in fact Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms, in an effort that goes back not to the 1960s but to World War I.
Before 1914, Marxist ideology had predicted that if war broke out in Europe the working class in every state would rise up in revolt, overthrow the bourgeois warmongers and create international communism. When, in August 1914, war did come to Europe, that scenario didn't happen. On the contrary, the workers in every belligerent state flocked to the colors and went off to slaughter each other by the millions.
What went wrong? In the immediate aftermath of the war, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukács in Hungary, came up with the same answer. Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist, class interests that communism was impossible in the West until both had been destroyed. Asking, "Who will save us from Western civilization?," Lukács, as deputy commissar for culture in Hungary's short-lived Bolshevik regime, in 1919 introduced sex education into the Hungarian schools. He knew that if traditional sexual morals could be undermined, Western culture would suffer.
In 1923, a think tank was established at Frankfurt University in Germany that would pick up on Lukács' work. Named the Institute of Social Research and known informally as the Frankfurt School, this institution would create a new, heretical Marxism that saw culture not simply as a function of the ownership of the means of production, but as an independent and important factor on its own. In 1930, when Max Horkheimer became its director, it began the intellectually difficult task of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms. The key was crossing Karl Marx with Sigmund Freud.
In 1933, the institute left Germany and moved to New York City. With it came a new member, Herbert Marcuse. In the 1950s, Marcuse would take the institute's abstruse intellectual work and package it for American students in works such as Eros and Civilization.
During the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief guru of the New Left, and he injected the institute's cultural Marxism into the baby-boom generation. Its central theme, now as then, was "negation": undermining, with constant criticism and psychological manipulation, all the beliefs and institutions of Western society until Western culture itself was destroyed.
Thus we complete the circle. In a fourth-generation world of war between cultures, the ideology of "multiculturalism," which now dominates the American elite, has as its goal and objective the destruction of Western culture. The West is assailed not only from without by Islam, but from within as well, as the dying snake that is Marxism pumps its last poison into America. That poison is designed precisely to make the West unable, psychologically and morally, to defend itself at the very time that self-defense is most vital. Multiculturalism is, quite simply, cultural treason.
President George W. Bush has presented the "war on terrorism" as a clash between good and evil. He is correct, although there is more to fourth-generation warfare than the technique of terror. What confronts the remnants of Christian civilization today is not one evil, but two, and they are on a collision course.
On the one side are the forces of fourth-generation war, led by Islam. Arrayed against them are the final dregs of the modern age, sometimes called the New World Order but more accurately named Brave New World. The latter combines the anti-Western ideology of cultural Marxism with manipulative technologies: the virtual realities of the video screen, mind-altering drugs (Ritalin is soma for kids) and, most dangerous of all, genetic engineering. While each of these contenders is bitterly hostile to the other, they agree on one thing: Western culture's got to go. The 21st century promises to be an interesting time.
NO: Our diverse population is useful both for national defense and as a model for international peace.
By Daniel Smith
Sept. 11 has rekindled in some Americans prejudices, suspicions and a wariness of "them" as opposed to "us." Many who now look askance at certain ethnic or religious groups confess that their reactions are almost involuntary, knee-jerk responses to descriptions of the perpetrators of the attacks.
We are witnessing the effects of a primordial animal emotion: fear. But the insecurity gripping the nation today does not result in fight or flight so much as it does finger-pointing. Compounding the problem is the fact that the Bush administration has sent mixed messages about "them," which in turn has rekindled an old fear: that a different culture is a threat to national security.
To his credit President George W. Bush has been determined to dissociate the religion of the 19 perpetrators as a motivating force for their actions by branding their interpretation of Islam as extremist. Conversely, most of the individuals questioned or being held by the Justice Department are of "Middle Eastern" origin, and most of the financial assets the administration wants to freeze are of organizations and individuals based in that region.
In a country that was created from and has thrived on the contributions of many cultures, fear of "them" is highly corrosive. It induces hate crimes and breeds distrust; it can lead to a diminution of rights and civil liberties as insecure citizens demand their government take action in the name of national security. In such an atmosphere, "multiculturalism" takes a beating. But it deserves better. For all its potential pitfalls, multiculturalism actually strengthens U.S. national security.
Before going further, it might be helpful to describe what is meant by "culture." At root, culture is a type of shared experience, "a distinct complex of tradition of a racial, religious or social group" that includes "knowledge, belief, morals, law, customs, opinions, religion, superstition and art," all of which are susceptible to being transmitted from generation to generation through language, artifact and example.
More importantly, culture is malleable. Like any message transmitted among a number of people, culture changes over time. It is affected by discoveries, education, innovations and contacts with other cultures. And where two or more cultures meet, the ensuing relationship either can be a blending that creates a hybrid (as in the United States) or a clash (as in Samuel Huntington's phrase, "the clash of civilizations") in which each seeks to dominate the other(s).
For most of human history, the blending of distinctly different peoples has lost out to conflict. The fear of losing control over one's future kept "we" and "them" at swords' point. Modern political clashes have amplified the divisive effects of multiculturalism; these fissures have provoked jeremiads from cultural purists urging a return to the golden age — usually a mythic period in which "their" culture dominated.
While the 1648 Peace of Westphalia laid the foundation for the modern European system of nation-states, it could be argued that the conscious cultivation of nationalism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was the emotional engine that powered the drive for greater uniformity within states. In this emotionally charged context, each regime's worst fear was of a religious or ethnic "fifth column" intent on betraying the state to its enemies. Ethnic minorities became most suspect, particularly if in a neighboring country they were a majority.
Even the great émigré destinations of Australia, Canada and the United States did not fully escape this mind-set. But their expansive territory and social mobility tended to mitigate the effects of intolerance. Moreover, each succeeding wave of immigrants, regardless of their origin, shared similar hopes, fears, expectations and experiences with those who had arrived before them. Most significantly, the motivation of émigrés — to find freedom to choose their own way in the world, to be in control of their destinies and thus be secure — bound them to an idea that transcended all cultures. They understood that their individual security was linked to the national security of their adopted country. Indeed, belief in democracy and human rights for all became the American culture.
Those who indict multiculturalism as a threat to national security seem to equate culture with faction, as James Madison understood the term. In Federalist No. 10, Madison defined faction as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens [emphasis added], or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." He then says one way to remove the causes of faction is "by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions and the same interests."
It is true that cultural enclaves developed in big cities and defined rural areas, many of which persist to this day. But in holding to their customs and lifestyles, the members of these communities do not attempt to deny the rights and freedoms of others. They treasure these rights and freedoms, demonstrating every day "the same passions and the same interests" as their fellow citizens.
In fact, during the 20th century it was the majority, not scattered cultural minorities, that became an impassioned faction. In World War I, those of German ancestry came under suspicion, so much so that many Anglicized their surnames. In World War II, those of Japanese ancestry, even U.S. citizens, were subject to detention and internment. Now, at the start of the 21st century, this pattern is re-emerging. But as in the 20th century, it remains shortsighted.
The logic of ensuring national security in a multicultural world demands a multicultural approach. Who better can understand an enemy's motivations and psychology than a person who has shared the same cultural experiences? Who better to act as an interpreter or to interrogate prisoners of war, defectors or line-crossers than a native speaker who understands idioms and linguistic innuendos? During international discussions affecting national security, who better to advise negotiators than one whose life experiences are rooted in the culture of the other side?
The U.S. military history of World War II illustrates the contributions of multiculturalism to our nation's security. One of the most famous U.S. Army units in the European theater arguably was the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT). It was composed entirely of Nisei, citizens of Japanese-American descent. In 20 months and eight major campaigns, the regiment won seven Presidential Unit Citations and more than 18,100 personal decorations, and came to be regarded as the best U.S. assault troops in the theater.
The unstinting performance of the 442nd's members was particularly remarkable because they had an additional burden to that of other soldiers. Many of their families were in internment camps and, in light of their heritage, their loyalty was suspect and their liberties under a cloud. But they were solidly "Americans first."
In the Pacific, American Indians known as the Navaho Code Talkers participated in every assault landing by U.S. Marines from 1942 to the war's end. They were in all major Marine units transmitting messages by telephone and radio in their native language — a code that the Japanese never broke. Their native tongue, a unique cultural "artifact," was the perfect encryption system because no Japanese understood the Navaho language. (Actually, American Indian languages had been used on a less-expansive scale in World War I to encrypt messages before transmission.)
Perhaps more surprising, given the war's internment policies, was the presence of some 6,000 ethnic Japanese in the Pacific theater in various military-intelligence organizations. They, like the Code Talkers, saw action as linguists in every campaign from New Guinea to Okinawa.
But World War II was a "traditional" or conventional war, with defined battle lines and armies that contested along fronts stretching in some cases for thousands of kilometers. What about wars where there are no continuous front lines, where "the front" is a 360-degree circle that marks a unit's perimeter? What about "fourth-generation warfare," where the front appears and disappears as forces rapidly mass, attack and then disperse? Or the ultimate in modern unconventional warfare: a small group of determined fanatics, supported by cells woven into society's fabric, that unexpectedly strikes using unanticipated means (the Sept. 11 scenario)?
The problems and failures are not with multiculturalism. They are in not deploying the resources that multiculturalism affords. The warning signs for Sept. 11 were evident a decade ago when Algerian terrorists hijacked an Air France jet, intending to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. Failure to anti-cipate what one's enemies might do reveals a lack of understanding of their psychology. Even under the best of circumstances, a foreign psychology is difficult to fathom; it can be nearly impossible for those who merely have studied a culture or had cursory experience of it.
If there is a weakness to be corrected, it is the screening and evaluation of individuals — but not as cultural "representatives" — as they seek to enter the country. Again, for those concerned with national security a multicultural society, if it properly employs this diversity, provides the best defense against the entry of those wishing to destroy, not build, society.
The diversity of the United States is its greatest strength; it produces a synthesis that is more than the sum of its parts. The "clash of civilizations" through the give-and-take of ideas, produces innovations that are prized in a myriad of professions such as business and finance (both aspects of national security), as well as the military. It also produces respect for the rights of all.
Our internal and diplomatic history demonstrates that security for one faction, group or nation is impossible if it means insecurity for others. In the 21st century, as transnational forces become stronger and as communications and travel become more rapid, it is more imperative for governments to recognize that national security now is a function of international security. In such a world, multiculturalism is our first line of offense and defense.
It had demonstrated quite opposite: the value of assimilation of varous cultural/ethnic groups into common mainstream.
"But World War II was a "traditional" or conventional war."
This is another big miss. If we are speaking about war in the East it was actually the first tribal war of modern times. It became traditional one only in 1945 and only due to D-day success.
It seems to me that the author of the second article is a certified moron.
Also, it seems relevant to bring my own experience: I am a pretty recent (1990) immigrant/naturalized citizen and hear, hear my wife and me do not bother ourselves with speakng English at home. However, English is the first language of our kids and it will be a complete disaster if we would impose our language and cultural preference on the rest of the society.
It seems to me that the tradition formed in the United Stated strikes nearly perfect balance between assimilating various immigrant groups into united mainstream and enriching this mainstream with best of cultural/intellectual/working traditions brought from abroad. The multiculturalism puts the mere existence of this common cultural mainstream into a grave danger.
Perhaps the culture's 'spoon-feeding' of our citizens/immigrants is a cause. Accountability and responsibility for one's own actions are no longer held in high esteem.
The melting pot analogy is no longer acceptable as Je$$e Jackson and those of his ilk now set forth a 'tossed salad' society.
IF the Christians to take charge and participate in this so called democracy, nothing will happen.
You need to constantly be alert and active in your community. Write letters to the editor, and to Congress!!!
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