WhatFinger


Multiculturalism, balkanization

Barack Obama; the Man without a Country



When I was in college (back in the mid '80's) the catch phrase was "multiculturalism" and it was heavily promoted by the humanities and social science departments at the university (Saint Louis University). I hadn't really given the subject much thought until I was forced to write a paper on cultural diversity for an anthropology class I was taking (run by a truly radical Greek woman). This particular professor was fanatical on the subject. I outsmarted her; my paper - and oral presentation - was a work I had written for a Russian history class, and it got me an A with no work. I was careful to avoid giving my true opinion of multiculturalism.
I was shocked when I learned exactly what was meant by multiculturalism. I had naively assumed (I was still in my teens, after all) that this simply meant celebrating other cultures and being open to them r- like wearing a "kiss me I'm Irish" button on St. Patrick’s Day and drinking green beer. What the Progressives meant by multiculturalism was something quite different. They meant the creation of completely independent cultures inside of one nation. These crazy liberals actually believed that a country could and should exist with two or more nations coexisting inside the same space. Like the Balkans. It was their notion that America could stop being a melting pot and become a salad, with a whole bunch of different, diverse groups existing as they saw fit. They wanted to turn America from a nation into an EMPIRE. History had taught these fools nothing.

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Or it had taught them plenty. Empires collapse; it's what they do. When times are good they manage, but the friction between the different peoples is ever present and festers. When some sort of crisis arises - and it often arises from those very frictions as in the Austro-Hungarian empire when Serbian nationalists assassinated the Crown Prince - there is nothing to hold the peoples together. Some may ally against a common threat, but they will be just as quick to turn on each-other. There is no cohesion, no sense of shared identity that makes the populace stand together. During the Second World War American soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder and bled and died for each-other. Now, these Americans may have been white, black, Hispanic, native American. They may have been Jewish, Christian, Hindu, even Muslim or atheist. They may have been from disparate places and had accents strange to their friends. But they were first and foremost Americans, with shared American experiences, a shared history, shared cultural values. Each and every one of them believed in America, in the Constitution, in faith and in family. Most believed in the free market and in the ballot box. The differences between them were cosmetic, a kind of # that made the soup more tasty. They did not identify themselves as separate groups. But that is the goal of multiculturalism; to turn our soup to salad. The multiculturalists believe that the individual groups should be separate, distinct, defined, and independent. They should be NATIONS, separate but equal, inside of a country. Look how well that has worked historically. Where is the Austro-Hungarian Empire? The Russian Empire, or it's successor, the Soviet Union? What happened to Rome? The Mongol empire? The Caliphate? Why did Cortez conquer Mexico so easily? Why did Pizzaro take down the Incans? These were all empires, forced associations of disparate and not especially friendly peoples. When the winds blew they fell, because those peoples would not stand together. It's why India fell to the British. We see this today. A casual look at Africa should suffice to disabuse one of the notion of multiculturalism; most African nations are hell-holes, and their problems are because they are artificial constructs with different tribes forced into a political union. It is why Iraq was so difficult to rebuild, why Afghanistan is still a hot war zone. Granted, there are nations that defy this objection. Switzerland has three languages, Belgium two, Canada two. But Switzerland has a shared history and common culture, Belgium likewise. Canada has been terribly hard to hold together, with the French-speaking Quebec forever threatening to break the union. And none of these nations are great powers, because too much energy is expended on holding them together. So multiculturalism is a loser, a concept designed (knowingly or otherwise) to weaken and dismantle a nation. Which is why I found this interesting. (Hat tip; James Lewis at American Thinker. ) Seems that African immigrants to Britain are practicing witchcraft and torturing - and murdering - children. This should surprise nobody; many African religious traditions involve witchcraft, and so why should they not practice their traditions in jolly old England? Isn't that the whole point of multiculturalism? Assimilation is not only unnecessary in the multiculturalism paradigm but actually a bad thing. What right has a multicultural society to impose their moral constraints on an immigrant people? Europe has seen the rise of Islamic ghettos, and Sharia is being practiced in those ghettos, trumping the national law. Who is to say they can't cut off the hand of a thief? Stone a blasphemer? Cut off the head of an adulteress? It's THEIR law, their custom, and if we are to be true to the principles of multiculturalism we must accept these actions. Who are we to JUDGE! The fallacious assumption is that all cultures are valid, and equal. This is clearly not the case; a cannibal tribe is morally, culturally, and socially inferior to, say, an Amish settlement. There are objective criteria that may be applied. Yes, those criteria come to us from our own culture, but that hardly invalidates them, as our own culture developed those norms over time through an arduous process of stamping out bad practice, and from natural law and revealed religion. Eating people - bad. Shrinking heads - bad. Slavery - bad. Torture - bad. We did all of those things in the past, and have learned to abhor them as despicable. Many cultures have not developed such maturity. The Islamic world still cuts off body parts or stones women who are raped. We have every right, nay a duty, to denounce that sort of thing. Which makes our culture superior. If our culture is superior, do we not have a right to expect those who wish to join us, who wish to live among us, enjoy the benefits our culture has produced, to adopt that culture? It was a given in bygone days, but is now open for debate - especially among the pointy-headed intellectual class. (Intellectuals would debate the need to use the toilet if the topic came up; nothing is ever obvious to many of them.) It's time for a little more uniculturalism. I propose we begin a new campaign, one designed to reverse the last thirty years and celebrate unilateralism, celebrate the beauty of one nation UNDER GOD. It's time we revive our Judeo-Christian heritage, our sense of cultural and national homogeneity. The experiment in multiculturalism has failed. It has failed in Africa, in Asia, in Europe, and is now failing here. Barack Obama was, perhaps, a symbol of the triumph of multicultural thinking. The man had a multicultural ethnic heritage, a multicultural upbringing, and has ridden the wave of multiculturalism from one cushy job to another, culminating in his becoming President. He was never qualified for anything he did, but he was pushed along as part of the wave of multicultural thinking. His election showed that the public had bought into this nonsense, and his Presidency has been the disaster many of us predicted from the start. We knew this would be the case, because the entire Obama phenomenon was based on a lie. Obama was not and is not an American; he is a man who has lived in America, but America has never lived in him. He was raised as an alien inside of the United States. The matter of his birth certificate is ultimately a technicality; he may or may not have been born here, and it matters for his eligibility to hold office, but the man's whole life was outside of his erstwhile country. He was a multicultural icon. And he has performed a valuable service to America by showing the utter bankruptcy of multiculturalism. We stand at a crossroads; do we want to continue down the path to Imperium, to a land held together by force of arms courtesy of the central government, or do we return our country to a nation, a brotherhood of like-minded men and women, different but together? Are we to be a family again, or a group of mutual strangers? The Democrats offer that path, the path of group identity, of group rights, of celebration for diversity (code for division)? Family members are all individuals but part of the whole, while what the Left offers are group relationships divorced from the whole. Which will it be? The Left cannot even stand each-other; the Bolsheviks fought the Mensheviks and the S.R.'s in pre-revolutionary Russia. Leon Trotsky finished his life with an ice pick in his head in Mexico, where he had fled for sanctuary. Communists fought Fascists to the death. This sort of infighting is where group rights and group-think lead. Why should we expect different results in America?


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Timothy Birdnow -- Bio and Archives

Timothy Birdnow is a conservative writer and blogger and lives in St. Louis Missouri. His work has appeared in many popular conservative publications including but not limited to The American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Intellectual Conservative and Orthodoxy Today. Tim is a featured contributor to American Daily Reviewand has appeared as a Guest Host on the Heading Right Radio Network. Tim’s website is tbirdnow.mee.nu.


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