Posted on 01/16/2003 5:15:52 PM PST by Remedy
The multiculturalists are right in saying that in a just society, people of all races and cultures should be equal in the eyes of the law. But their argument borders on idiocy when they argue that one culture cannot be judged superior to another and to do so is Eurocentrism. For them, different cultural values are morally equivalent. That's unbridled nonsense. Ask your multiculturalist friends: Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Under Islamic law, in some countries, women adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves face the punishment of having their hand severed. Are these cultural values morally equivalent, superior or inferior to ours?
Western values are superior to all others. Why? The indispensable achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights. It's the idea that individuals have certain inalienable rights and individuals do not exist to serve government, but governments exist to protect these inalienable rights. It took until the 17th century for that idea to arrive on the scene and mostly through the works of English philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume.
While Western values are superior to all others, one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values. It's no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person. There's an indisputable positive relationship between liberty and standards of living.
Western values are by no means secure. They're under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. These people want to replace personal liberty with government control; they want to replace equality with entitlement; they want to halt progress in the name of protecting the environment. As such, they pose a much greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist or rogue nation. Multiculturalism and diversity are a cancer on our society, and, ironically, with our tax dollars and charitable donations, we're feeding it.
-- Walter Williams, syndicated columnist and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. He is author of The State Against Blacks, (McGraw-Hill), and several anthologies of his syndicated columns, which include: Do The Right Thing: The People's Economist Speaks (Hoover), All It Takes Is Guts: A Minority View (Regnery), and More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well (Hoover). (Creators Syndicate)
Far more significant than economics and demography are problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West. Oft-pointed-to manifestations of moral decline include:
Western Culture is challenged by groups within Western societies. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and culture of their home societies. This phenomenon is most notable among Muslims in Europe, who are, however, small minority. It is also manifest, in lesser degree, among Hispanics in the United States, who area large minority. If assimilation fails in this case, the United States will become a cleft country with all the potential for strife and disunion that entails.
...Historically American national identity has defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property. In the late 20th century, both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism, they have attacked the identification of he United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. They have denounced, in the words of one of their reports, "systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives," in education and "the dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective." The multiculturalists are, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has said, "very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in Western heritage other than Western crimes." Their "mood is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures."
...The Founding Fathers saw diversity as a reality and as a problem: hence the national motto: e pluribus unum, chosen by a committee of he Continental Congress consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Later political leaders who also were fearful of the dangers of racial, sectional, economic, and cultural diversity (which indeed, produced the largest war of the century between 1815 and 1914), responded to the call of "bring us together," and made the promotion of national unity their central responsibility. "The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of of its continuing as a nation at all," warned Theodore Roosevelt, "would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." In the 1990s, however, leaders of he United States have not only permitted that but assiduously promoted the diversity rather than the unity of the people they govern.
A multicivilizational United states will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.
The multiculturalists also challenged a central element of the American Creed, by substituting for he rights of individuals the rights groups, defined largely in terms of race, ethnicity, sex and sexual preference....What happens then to the United States if hat ideology is disavowed by a significant portion of its citizens?
...The futures of the United States and of the West depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. Û
As I've said before - you can't keep what you don't understand, and you can't defend what you can't define. Most outcome-based education kids don't even know where they are, much less have a clue about what freedom is really all about.
When I turn on my TV, there are still nothing but ratchet-jawed mental and moral midgets spewing and leering and sneering their contempt of folks just like you and me on every lamestream media channel. Noumenon Û
SYMPOSIUM Q: Is Multiculturalism a Threat to the National Security of the United States?
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. NO: Our diverse population is useful both for national defense and as a model for international peace.
...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.
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.
It seems to me that the author of the second article is a certified moron. alex
The Multicultural Theocracy: An Interview With Paul Gottfried
Multiethnic societies have been recurrent political phenomena and involve the coexistence of more than one ethnos, that is, national community, living in the same jurisdiction. Such an arrangement has usually come about because of conquest or dynastic inheritance and until now has never required a celebration of diversity. Multiethnic societies have almost always been empires because of the way they have been formed and because of their lack of cohesion beyond the fact of what Thomas Hobbes called "acquired sovereignty." Moreover, unlike multicultural regimes, multiethnic ones do not celebrate sexual exotica or the nonrecognition of separate gender identities. Multicultural regimes are inherently subversive of traditional social relations.
What are some examples of those behemoths invading civic and family life?
Examples of PC enforcement by the state are the use of Title Nine to impose verbal and behavioral conformity on male academics and workers; the various hate speech laws that exist in Canada and Europe and are applied almost exclusively against white Christian European; and the delegitimation of the historical heritage of victimizing groups: e.g., the war against Southern symbols and iconography waged, in among other areas in the US, public education [e.g., dress codes prohibiting attire with a Confederate flag].
The BBC recently had a headline, "Hate crime police raid 150 homes," about an operation in London administered by a "Diversity Directorate." Sweden recently passed a law criminalizing the "disrespecting" of homosexuals.
This attempt to muzzle traditional Christians is perfectly consistent with both the multicultural values of the therapeutic state and the thrust of liberal Christianity. In fact what is happening in England and Sweden is the disciplining by the government of Christians who have not accepted the Protestant deformation. A by now transformed Christianity, which is as grotesque in its own way as Hitler's Nazified Evangelical Church, has allied itself to the state that is suppressing Christians who will not go along with PC indoctrination.
What are the prospects for containing or rolling back the multicultural theocracy?
Note I do not think these battles will solve long-term problems; unless Western peoples start having families again, the social unit and population base needed for a civilization will be lacking.
While societies can assimilate, there are three presuppositions that must obtain: a core population that carries a distinctive culture that it hopes to preserve; a minority that is accepted on the condition that it eagerly embraces that majority culture; and a sufficiently controlled immigration so that assimilation is possible.
TFB, maybe you can get your president to threaten to bomb something in retaliation?
My President. MY President. My PRESIDENT!
Wow, I really like the sound of that! He is MY President and a fine one at that! When we had the Impeached Treasonous Rapist in the White House, he wasn't my President. But GW Bush is joyously MY President and will be for another 6 years.
Thanks for the great reminder. I really owe you!
Having developed my own cultural paradigm, I think Bush should bomb the multiculturalists as an expression of postmodern power politics.
It would suit them, and they would have no reason to complain.
"Western values are...under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America.In fact, they are the enablers of terrorists and rogue nations."These people want to replace personal liberty with government control;
they want to replace equality with entitlement;
they want to halt progress in the name of protecting the environment.""they pose a much greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist or rogue nation."
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