GABlog

Michael Novak writes:

In the current culture wars on campus, an explicit indictment of these perversions may be useful.

(1) Anti-Americanism. Since it regards the West (at least its white males) as imperialistic, and America as the most advanced face of the West, multiculturalism expresses hostility to American traditions and institutions, while glorifying non-Western cultures, especially those inimical to America.

(2) Victimology. Multiculturalism tends to divide the world into a privileged set of victims and their alleged oppressors, through the lens of a loose and vulgar Marxism. This Marxism is cultural rather than economic.

(3) Ego-boosting. The aim of multiculturalism is to boost “self-esteem� at the expense, if necessary, of facts.

(4) Evasion. The assumption of multiculturalism is that its selected favorites cannot meet universal standards because of the evil actions of others; therefore, multiculturalism regards honest inquiry as pointless. It further pretends that its privileged groups are innocent. Having no awareness of “original sin,� it is merciless toward others.

(5) Tactical Relativism. Multiculturalism pretends to be “nonjudgmental,� hiding behind the myth of moral equivalence, while it is in fact based upon harsh judgments about good and evil (and the oppressed and their oppressors).

(6) Censorship. Since it regards inquiry as useless, criticism as malevolent, intellect as impotent, and reason as nothing more than a servant of power, multiculturalism protects its wishes through speech codes, the banning of books, and the shouting down of opposing voices.

(7) Groupthink. Blind to the complex relations of individuals to the communities that nurture them, multiculturalism approaches people only as members of groups and, afraid of the creativity of dissenting individuals, imposes thought control by humiliating dissidents in public, and encourages its partisans to look to each other before speaking out.

(8) Egalityranny. In the name of “equality� wrongly understood, multiculturalism focuses on groups, group outcomes, and group statistical profiles—in ways destructive of individual aspiration and achievement. Equality falsely construed (as uniformity) can scarcely be imposed upon the blooming, buzzing abundance of individual vitality—except through despotic methods.

(9) Double standards. Multiculturalism is constituted by double standards. Multiculturalism basks in the supposition that there are no universal standards by which individuals and cultures may be judged.

Spengler has some amusing reflections on pop music and the stupidity that attends the culture of resentment:

No other nation rejects the notion of a high culture with such vehemence, or celebrates the mediocre with such giddiness. Americans prefer to identify with what is like them, rather than emulate what is better than them. The epitome of its popular culture is a national contest to choose from among random entrants a new singing star, the “American Idol”.

Three or four generations ago, US popular culture shared a porous boundary with classical culture. The most successful musical comedy of the 1920s, Jerome Kern’s Showboat, contained classical elements requiring operatic voices. George Gershwin, the 1930s’ most popular tunesmith, prided himself on an opera, Porgy and Bess. Benny Goodman, the decade’s top jazz musician, recorded Mozart. The most successful singer of the 1930s, Bing Crosby, had a voice of classical quality. Never mind that what he sang was insipid; his listeners knew very well that they could not sing like Bing Crosby.

Americans of earlier generations, in short, listened to music that they admired but could not hope to imitate, because they looked up to a higher plane of culture and technique. Today Americans favor performers with whom they can identify precisely because they have no more technique or culture than the average drunk bellowing into a karaoke machine.

-CSM

Nelson Ascher says unanimity isn’t required:

We all have spent too much time talking about the widespread anti-Semitism in the Muslim world and discovering, to our surprise, that many in the West actually share this feeling, while many more couldn’t really care less. This is a mistaken approach.

Instead of trying to understand “why they hate us� and why they (and many others) hate the Jews (something I hope we’ll be discussing for several generations), what we have to understand right now is: what is anti-Semitism good for? What are the uses of anti-Semitism?

Whether those who manipulate anti-Semitism are themselves anti-Semites (or anti-Zionists or whatever), whether they personally share the hatred, all that is irrelevant right now. The historical roots of the hatred, its psychology and so on are not questions we have the time to analyse, dissect, discuss endlessly nowadays. (And we’re still debating the Holocaust, how and why it happened etc., 62 years after the end of WW2, without having reached anything resembling consensual answers.)

We are spending precious time getting surprised or scared, wondering about the hatred itself, its depth and extension. That’s important, but not what’s most important right now. What we need to understand is that this hatred is being once again used cynically to obtain certain results.

Besides being anti-Semitic themselves, the Nazis used anti-Semitism brilliantly to subvert other countries and societies. Though Nazism was (among other things) a form of German expansionism, wherever there were anti-Semites the Germans would also find collaborators. Anti-Semitism was used by the Germans to undermine from the inside countries, societies and armies that could or would stand up to them.

The Nazis managed to convince millions and millions of Frenchmen and Poles, Belgians, Norwegians etc. and, yes, Brits and Americans that, since they were fighting a common enemy, the Jews, they weren’t really the mortal enemies of France and Poland and Belgium and Norway and England and the US. Untold millions were eager to believe that Germany wasn’t really threatening them and their countries, that the Germans didn’t really want to conquer, exploit and kill them. Why? Because they either thought that they could make a common cause with the Nazis against the Jews, or remained indifferent, neutral and defenseless because, being indifferent to the fate of the Jews, they believed it was none of their problem. Many of them even turned against those in their own countries who wanted to fight the Nazis and blamed them for putting everyone else in danger just to “protect the Jews�.

In short: if the Jews were used in the beginning as scapegoats, their main use throughout the war was as a tool to “divide and conquer�. Thanks to their sincere or opportunistic ant-Semitism the Germans were able to paralyse important forces in the countries and societies they wanted to defeat and submit.

That’s just what is happening once again before our very eyes. Though the Jihadists have their own clear, even megalomaniac goals, and while they kill thousands in the US or fight for Shari’a in Europe, while they complain about East Timor or fight for Kashmir, it is enough for them to involve the Jews, particularly Israel, in their struggle or their declared agenda to get the active support or at least the indifference of those in Europe, the US and elsewhere who would like to believe that their complaints, grievances and goals are restricted to or only motivated by Israel. Of course, they also declare they’re fighting against America, but then, for those who hate America anyway (and often the Jews and/or Israel too), the same logic works perfectly.

The Jihadists have shown us how brilliantly they can manipulate for their own purposes something as irrelevant as half-a-dozen cartoons in a Danish newspaper. Thus, it is rather unimportant whether Israel’s destruction is or isn’t their main goal (it isn’t). They seem to have discovered through trial and error that the hatred of Jews is alive and well in the West and, as the Nazis did before, they are using it not only to further their own different goals, but to recruit collaborators and to paralyze whole countries and societies as well. It goes without saying how terrible this is for the Jews themselves, but it is at least as dangerous to the rest of the West that is allowing anti-Semitism to be used against itself. Hatred of the Jews and of Israel is the loaded weapon the Jihadis are putting in the hands of a civilization that’s willing (again) to commit suicide.

The latest Chronicle of Love & Resentment, entitled “The Final Conflict,” is now available.

-eric gans

This textbook example of scapegoating deserves to be front page news:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22107

That it is not speaks volumes about the sick, contagious way in which all too many people think, speak, and act.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22107_A_Death_Cult_Party_in_Jenin&only

I think he passes a little too quickly over some of our present difficulties, but here is a powerful, unconflicted defense of the Bush Doctrine from the godfather of the neo-conservative movement.

 

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/files/podhoretz_0906.htm

 

Scenic Politics

As a vacation from the Middle East, this sample of Europe’s historical self-hatred is taken from an interview conducted by the leftish French weekly Le nouvel observateur with novelist and world traveler J.M.G. Le Clézio. See if you can detect what is missing in this picture (hint: obsidian knife):

N.O. - At the time of the conquest of Mexico, in what areas were the Amerindian civilizations ahead of Europe?

JL - Except for the practice of total war (firearms, cavalry, but above all the practice of terror: burned villages, women and children sold into slavery or massacred, the use of bacteriological weapons), the Amerindian civilizations were ahead of Europe in just about all areas: hydraulic agriculture, exact sciences, astronomy, medicine, zoology, anatomy. It is difficult to evaluate the domain of Aztec and Inca philosophy, but the first Spanish chroniclers, who arrived when almost everything had been destroyed, speak with admiration of the moral discourses, literary contests, and metaphysical discussions that enlivened these societies, of which the testimony of the few survivors (the final battle of Mexico-Tenochtitlan left 260,000 dead, most of whom belonged to the city’s elite) gives only an approximate idea.
Le nouvel observateur July 13, 2006 p. 51

-eric gans

Because university students are recruited for terror plots, it’s worth noticing that homegrown terrorists are nourished by some of the West’s dumbest ideas:

We wonder why Muslims in Europe won’t contain their grievances and settle down to live within the ordinary routines of European society. I imagine that the tacit motto of most British politicians is “Just give assimilation a chance.� And yet that same society supports and idealizes an entire class of perpetual protestors (Greenpeace, anti-globalization groups, animal rights activists, and so on) whose waking lives are spent hurtling themselves against society. May I be forgiven for thinking that mode of modern European existence has been well assimilated by the arrested terrorists?

Moreover, the linkage of supposedly idealistic protest with violence and aggression is also very much a part our modern Western political aesthetic. The French Revolution sanctified mob violence and ritualized public executions as noble expressions of liberty. The revolutionary remains a heroic type with a gun slung across his shoulder. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote about gratuitous crimes as acts of existential purity. Norman Mailer romanticized murderers, and the Marquis de Sade ascends to canonical status in our universities.

I’m not an expert in Islamic history or theology, so I cannot assess its contribution to the European predicament of homegrown Islamic terrorism. But I do know something about the antinomian theologies of modern Western culture. We have a strong tradition of idealized political violence, and we have a closely related tradition that celebrates the imagined courage to transcend mere bourgeois morality to become the master of life and death. These are traditions taught and transmitted with pride and public subsidy. Educators and other representatives of culture vigorously defend these traditions against any criticisms by what remains of the older Western culture of civility, order, and restraint.

Maybe the arrested British Muslim men are not so alienated from the West after all.

-CSM

Steyn opines:

Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the average Ivy League college, you’ll get a big shrug: Modern multicultural man disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on being un citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it’s mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World basket-case and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set have no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It’s a quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but they don’t act on it.

The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing “We Are The World,” they mean it. And we’re being very complacent if we think they only take over the husks of “failed states” like Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon. The Islamists are very good at using the principal features of the modern multicultural democracy — legalisms, victimology — to their own advantage. The United Kingdom is, relatively speaking, a non-failed state, but at a certain level Her Majesty’s government shares the same problem as their opposite numbers in Beirut: They don’t quite dare to move against the pan-Islamists and they have no idea what possible strategy would enable them to do so.

So instead they tackle the symptoms. Excellent investigative work by MI-5 and Scotland Yard foiled this plot, and may foil the next one, and the one after that, and the 10 after that, and the 100 after those. And in the meantime, a thousand incremental inconveniences fall upon the citizen. If you had told an Englishman on Sept. 10, 2001, that within five years all hand luggage would be banned on flights from Britain, he’d have thought you were a kook. If you’d told an Englishwoman that all liquids would be banned except milk for newborn babies that could only be taken on board if the adult accompanying the child drinks from the bottle in front of a security guard, she’d have scoffed and said no one would ever put up with such a ludicrous imposition. But now it’s here. What other changes will the Islamists have wrought in another five years?

Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we’re about to witness the unraveling of the world.