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Grendel
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WHY NOT?
AGAINST YOUR MORONIC BELIEFS FD?
The Tragedy of Multiculturalism
Augusto Zimmermann, July 2004
Multiculturalism, an idea that started out in the sixties and early seventies, initially had the reasonable goal of including minority groups in Western societies. Nowadays, however, it is difficult to talk candidly about the idea, since the multicultural project has become nothing but an aggressive ideology against the religious and moral values of Western societies. Multiculturalism is not just the fair understanding of other cultures, but also an ideological project for the deconstruction of Western civilization.
When cultural relativists demand the utilization of public money to indoctrinate homosexuality as a morally acceptable behaviour, the hidden truth about multiculturalism is automatically revealed. According to Irving Kristal, multi-culturalism is currently “propagated on college campuses by a coalition of nationalist-racist blacks, radical feminists, gays and lesbians, and a handful of aspiring demagogues who claim to represent various ethnic minorities. This coalition’s multi-culturalism is an ideology whose educational program is subordinated to a political program, that is, above all, anti-American and Anti-Western. What these radicals blandly call multiculturalism is as much ‘a war against the West’ as Nazism and Stalinism ever were”.1
Rather than a fair debate on the merits of different cultures, radical multiculturalists falsely sustain the completely absurd premise that all cultures are equal in value. In practice, such relativism of values has generated not only the increase of criminal behaviour and pornography in the West, but also a form of apartheid that causes nations to fragment into enclaves of ethnicity.
According to Roger Scruton, people gain nothing from the amorphous atmosphere of multiculturalism “save bewilderment and the loss of any sense of cultural identity. If they come from immigrant backgrounds that preserve the memory of a religious law, they will often revert to a religious experience of membership, and define themselves in opposition to the territorial jurisdiction by which they are ostensibly governed”.2
The pretence of tolerance that is postulated by multiculturalists has existed only for multiculturalists themselves. After all, they are the first to support the suppression of any criticism of culture and moral values. A paradox of multiculturalism is precisely that such tolerance towards different cultures and moral behaviour has completely polluted the democratic environment of Western societies with racial suspicion and ideological closed-mindedness. To be ‘tolerant’ in a so-called ‘multicultural society’ is basically to support anti-democratic legislation against freedom of speech. And so, any serious debate on moral values is automatically censored out of public debate, for the one who does not agree with cultural (and moral) relativism is brought to the judicial system and cowardly accused of ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, and so on.
Multiculturalists who demand respect for all cultures tend to exhibit a blatant disrespect for the Western one. Above all, most multiculturalists are moral relativists who do not admit that culture and religion produce either a democratic society or oppression against minority groups in non-democratic ones; for democracy is as much a cultural achievement as it is a legal one. In brief, democracy cannot be legally imposed; it depends on cultural values transmitted to citizens from generation to generation.
If popular elections were held in certain countries, they could even facilitate the coming to power of fanatical groups appealing to indigenous ethnic and religious loyalties that would be likely be against the rights of women and minority groups.3 To a greater extent, democracy is nothing but a matter of culture, since it depends on certain values of freedom and equality that may be intolerable to peoples living under cultures that are not able to accept them.
Ultimately, democracy rests on the capacity of a certain culture to recognize basic rights of human beings. In explaining why democracy is not just a matter of legal design, the great liberal John Stuart Mill observed that certain cultures might be incompatible with democracy. As he put it, it would be unrealistic to believe that all cultures agree with democratic values, or that societies might not decide to create ‘insurmountable obstacles’ for the realization of democratic government.4
Generally speaking, legal-democratic frameworks do not produce forbearance when cultural patterns of behaviour are too violent to accept the moral implications of democracy. As Lord Bryce commented, “not less than any other form of government does democracy need to cherish individual liberty. It is like oxygen in the air, a life-giving spirit. Political liberty will have seen one of its fairest fruits wither on the bough if that spirit should decline”.5 For instance, democracy flourished in the West because the Judeo-Christian culture accepts freedom of choice and allows the legal system to reflect the equality of souls in the eyes of God.6 Yet even in the West, democracy may not persist if the culture and religion that gave birth to it are abandoned.
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