Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Celebrate Diversity! Even if it Kills You

A friend has sent me a link to Andrew Bostom’s Blog with the story on the reinstatement of Major Stephen Coughlin’s reinstatement. Bostom includes a link to Coughlin’s seminal and compendious Thesis on Jihad- all 329 pages of it!

I have to confess, I don’t have the will power, or the spare time to read it all now; but I’ve dipped into it enough to see that this is a very important document. Of course, I flipped directly to the last chapter (this is why I never enjoyed reading mysteries). I was charmed to see that the title of that “pay-off” chapter “Disarmed in the War of Ideas” is very similar to a my phrase “Unilateral Cultural Disarmament”. I’ll be reading and ransacking this one for a very long time.

Colleague Lazar at Augean Stables has a very good initial pass at it here.

I won’t spoil all the fun for you “grinders” who will read it cover to cover and in order but I have to point out this elegant and telling observation from page 230. Coughlin is writing about how the Caliphate threat in continuing to sneak up on us.

“Under the Current Approach, this entire line of inquiry has been effectively shut
down by objections that do not extend beyond surface assertions that “Islam does not
stand for this” or “there are a thousand different interpretations of Islamic law” (so what’s
the point in looking?).”

Has anyone here not read Mark Steyn’s America Alone? (If not, you can just scroll down a little and click on the Amazon book icon for it on the left hand margin of this screen to order) I was immediately taken by how similar the above sentence is to one of the quotes that I remember best from Steyn’s book.

“…contemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them. After all, if it's grossly judgmental to say one culture's better than another, why bother learning about the differences? "Celebrate diversity" with a uniformity of ignorance.”

And its not just celebrating diversity. It is the imbecilic prejudice against their own culture that come along with it that is more astounding and perilous. Both of these quotes point directly at the Achilles Heel of civilization. This is the very same mechanism by which people who call themselves feminists delude themselves that abstract concepts like “the glass ceiling in Corporate America” should be a greater concern for western women than the savage brutalization of women under Shari’a law. It is embodied too in the morally bankrupt blindness that calls Israel an apartheid pariah and attempts to degrade her ability to survive in the face of regimes that really do practice apartheid and murder.

This is yet another example of how Multiculturalism is actually a very subtle but corrosive form of racism. No liberal or progressive would be caught dead saying that “All those (choose one: Black people, Asians, Indians, etc…) look alike to me. So why is it ok to say that, "It makes no difference what they think or do, we love all those other cultures without discrimination, even though we can't really tell one from another and we will only criticize ours?"

It is a relatively new idea, fostered by historical revisionists, that the ascendance of Western Civilization was a product of colonialism, imperialism and cultural xenophobia. It’s a guilty reaction in which only the coddled, directionless, morally deficient grandchildren of real achievers and visionaries can afford to indulge. Their lives, rendered too safe and too comfortable, spend all of their time and energy finding fault with the system that has given them those comforts and that protection while, at the same time, they remain too lazy, self-absorbed and spiritually flaccid to even notice the faults that doomed the other less-successful cultures that western civilization superceded; much less contemplate the threats posed by the rising challenge of Caliphate Islam.

5 comments:

Pastorius said...

Multiculturalism, as embodied in the "celebrate diversity" ethic, certainly is racism. It is "the soft racism of lowered expectations."

I remember reading a review of a book in the LA Times Book Review about five or six years ago (unfortunately, this was before I began blogging), and one of the ideas the book put forth was that the Western numerical system was just one of many, no better or worse than any other. As an example of another numerical system which was asserted to be just as good as that of the West, was one which was based on twenties, because that's how many fingers and toes a normal person has.

I kid you not.

I wondered out loud to my wife if the numerical system of said tribe might also be broken into two;

1) a female numerical system based on twenty,

and

2) a male numerical system based on the number 23, after all, we also have a penis and two testicles which we can easily use to count.

My wife pointed out that that would be considered patriarchal, and would thus be relegated to the trash heap.

;-)

Nancy Coppock said...

One world, one culture, one party always comes at the expense of the better idea, those seeking spiritual righteousness, and the culturally significant. Talk about defining deviancy down....we're defining EVERYTHING down.

Anonymous said...

Yaacov,
A little off topic, but have you read this:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3459646.html

I think you would find it very interesting, with lots to agree with and probably a bit to disagree with as well.

Grey Fox

Beaman said...

I've only recently discovered the writing of Steyn. When time permits I'll read his book. Have you heard of his British equivalent, Douglas Murray?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMe7R83RSdE

Yaacov Ben Moshe said...

Beaman, Yes, I am familiar with Murray, he is a very fine speaker and has a crystalline mind. The panel discussion video was very interesting. Thanks for the link.


Grey Fox,
The link to the Lee Harris paper was a real find (the comment form seems to have cut off the "h" in "html" which are last four letters of the url- for anyone who wants to go read it). He is a formidable thinker and his book is a very important work.

Thank you both!
YBM