Thanks again to The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!
Here’s an interesting response to the recent outbreak of Islamic nutbaggery from the always-worth-reading Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. Have a read of Multicultural Suicide. Excerpt:
Fueling the Western paralysis in dealing with radical Islam is the late 20th century doctrine of multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism is one of those buzzwords that does not mean what it should. The ancient and generic Western study of many cultures is not multiculturalism. Rather, the trendy term promotes non-Western cultures to a status equal with or superior to Western culture largely to fulfill contemporary political agendas.
On college campuses, multiculturalism not so much manifests itself in the worthy interest in Chinese literature, Persian history, or hieroglyphics, but rather has become more a therapeutic exercise of exaggerating Western sins while ignoring non-Western pathologies to attract those who see themselves in some way as not part of the dominant culture.
It is a deductive ideology that starts with a premise of Western fault and then makes evidence fit the paradigm. It is ironic that only Western culture is self-critical and since antiquity far more interested than other civilizations in empirically investigating the culture of the other. It is no accident that Europeans and Americans take on their own racism, sexism, and tribalism in a way that is not true of China, Nigeria or Mexico. Parody, satire, and caricature are not Chinese, African, or Arab words.
America has traditionally been referred to as a melting pot, but that era may well be past; we are instead becoming a salad bowl. People used to come here because they wanted to be Americans; now they come here because they want to have what America offers but not to give up the culture, language and practices of the lands they leave behind, no matter how barbaric, self-destructive or poisonous those practices are.
How long will it be before we have no-go enclaves like Sweden? We already have the genesis of these zones; Dearborn, Michigan, the self-segregated Somali immigrant communities in Minneapolis, and more.
Dr. Hanson concludes: If the Western establishment were truly moral, it would reject multiculturalism as a deductive, anti-empirical, and illiberal creed. It would demand that critics abroad first put their own house in order before blaming others for their own failures, and remind Western elites that their multicultural fantasies are cheap nostrums designed to deal with their own neuroses.
Finally, it would also not welcome in newcomers who seek to destroy the very institutions that make the West so unlike the homelands they have voted with their feet to utterly abandon.
And yet that’s precisely what’s happening.
