The Fraud of Multiculturalism

[Introduction: I have posted on another site on this topic, but as I believe it has a strong message for all, I would like to transfer most of it to this site.]

To those still enthralled with Multiculturalism let me introduce you to an article I have just come across that should be essential reading. It is long, but I will post a few extracts here:

Quote:

How Multiculturalism Took Over America
By: Lawrence Auster
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, July 09, 2004

Some years ago the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer declared that “we are all multiculturalists now.” One’s initial response to such an unwanted announcement is to say: “What do you mean, ‘we’?” Yet, even if “we” do not subscribe to that sentiment, it cannot be denied that over the last twenty years multiculturalism has become the ruling idea of America, incarnated in every area of society ranging from educational curricula to the quasi-official establishment of foreign languages, to mandated racial proportionality schemes in private employment and university admissions, to the constant invocations by our political, business, and intellectual elites of “diversity” as the highest American value. How, so quickly and effortlessly, did this alien belief system take over our country? In this article, I look at multiculturalism as an ideology that has advanced itself by means of a set of propositions. My intent is to examine the false arguments of the multiculturalists themselves, and to see how they have used these arguments to fool an all-too-willing American majority to go along with them.
The Fraud of Inclusion

The first principle of multiculturalism is the equality of all cultures. According to its proponents, America is an assemblage of racially or ethnically defined subcultures, all of which have equal value and none of which can claim a privileged position.

It follows from this that the main goal of multiculturalism is inclusion. Multiculturalists argue that minority and non-Western cultures have been unjustly excluded in the past from full participation in our culture, and that in order to correct this historic wrong we must now include them on an equal basis. In other words, these minority cultures must be regarded as having the same public importance as America’s historic majority culture. Moreover, we are told, this equal and public inclusion of different cultures does not threaten our culture, but “enriches” it. By this reasoning, if we became (say) an officially bilingual society, with Spanish appearing alongside English on every cereal box and street sign in the land (as is done with the two languages of Canada), our culture would not be harmed in the slightest. We would only be including something we once excluded. We would have become something more, not less. What could be more positive? How could any decent person object?>>>>>>>>>>>

Subscribing to the liberal idea that our primary political value is the advancement of equal freedom for all human persons rather than the preservation and flourishing of our particular nation and culture (for an eloquent evocation of the latter view of America, see the linked passage from Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address), conservatives automatically said yes to America’s post-1965 policy of admitting an ongoing mass influx of immigrants from all the nations of the earth. Their embrace of this unprecedented scheme proceeded from the liberal belief in the equal individual worth of all human beings and their equal assimilability into America’s democratic culture. But when the belief in equal individual freedom for all Americans morphed into the demand for equal cultural and ethnic entitlements for minority groups, including recent immigrants, it became difficult for many conservatives to oppose this agenda in any forceful and consistent way, since they themselves had already given up their primary attachment to our historical culture when they made the equal freedom of all persons in the world the overarching purpose and justification of our society. Having lost the will to defend our culture, conservatives lost the will to defend the universalist creed itself.

And so, under the leadership of the ascendant Cultural Left, the American creed has been progressively changed from the principle of individual rights to the principle of group rights, from the faith in common standards founded in reason, to a cult of slavish acquiescence to the will and demands of unassimilated minority groups, and from a broad, shared American identity based on our Judeo-Christian, Anglo-Saxon, and Enlightenment heritage, to the multicultural redefinition of America as an “equal” collection of mostly non-Western cultures.

If we are successfully to fight back against the multicultural and group-rights revolution that has taken the high ground in American society, we must rediscover the roots of the American and Western culture that we have lost, including its original liberalism, which was not an absolute liberalism, but a liberalism constrained by and mediated through the Anglo-Protestant culture of which it was an expression. A practical test of such a moderate liberalism is that it would not expand the principle of equality so far as to destroy the very culture that had produced it. This moderate liberalism might, for example, have extended equal membership to Protestants, Catholics, and Jews (groups that had lived peacefully together sharing a common British-American culture in this country at the time of the Founding), while balking at the mass importation of peoples whose cultures are radically incompatible with ours, and, in the case of devout Moslems, religiously obligated to seek its overthrow. It would at least have insisted on the cultural assimilation of people immigrating from these lands.

If conservatives are to conserve our civilization, they must become conservative in fact as well as in name, meaning that their primary devotion must be to the preservation of our underlying moral, cultural, and political order, rather than to its transformation and dissolution through the ever more radical project of global equality and inclusion. Liberalism, in the sense of the rule of law obeyed and enjoyed equally by all, is central to what we are. But if liberalism is not to become the path to Western suicide, it must operate within a social and moral order that is not itself liberal.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He runs the website View from the Right.

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