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  ver the last few months we have heard a litany of
politically correct lamentations: The orcs were too predictably dark
in Lord of the Rings, fiction which employed a "good" North
and West against an "evil" East and South. The Somalians of Black
Hawk Down were all black, their American opponents nearly all
white. The photo of the three white firemen at Ground Zero should be
transmogrified, through sculpture, into representations of people of
color. A new word — "Islamophobia" — is needed to capture a
spreading hatred toward those of Middle Eastern descent. And on and
on.
Footage of the
burning Twin Towers became increasingly rare on our television
screens — lest it inflame Americans. And perhaps it was also deemed
unwise in that regard to show too often the pictures of the 19
terrorists, lest someone derive that they were all male Middle
Easterners, or surmise that their comrades in Cuba were not really
POWs. Yet after September 11, such cosmetic efforts at political
correctness have been both recognized and jeered at by the general
public. Conventional wisdom suggests that the present conflict will
not affect much the underlying and entrenched ideas beneath this
daily Orwellian assault. But I am not so sure.
World War II
destroyed fascism and Nazism as dynamic world creeds. The final
victory at the Berlin Wall ensured Communism was ruined forever as a
practical institution. So, too, the last five months have turned
ideology upside down, as these calamitous events tested our most
cherished contemporary assumptions as had nothing in recent memory.
Many of those assumptions are now blowing away with this war.
The main tenet
of multiculturalism — that there is no absolute standard for
measuring the respective worth of any given culture — has been
shattered by 9/11. It too will enter into American folklore, along
with such other false knowledge from past ages as phrenology,
séances, periodic enemas, and dream analysis. After the liberation
of Kabul, we saw that the most oppressed under the Taliban really
did like the universal freedom of the West to watch movies, wear
their hair the way they like, and listen to female radio announcers.
Street vendors at risk in Afghanistan — like those now protesting in
Teheran, and the Chinese students who once bravely sculpted the
goddess Liberty — seemed to think that Americans are much more
decent than do many of our own safe and comfortable journalists,
academicians, and public intellectuals.
Regimes that
are autocratic and theocratic — whether Syria's, Libya's, Iran's, or
the Taliban — are not merely different, but murderous. Reform-minded
cultures that have kicked out Americans and rejected the West — as
in Iran, Afghanistan, and Libya — made their people worse, not
better, off. The only safe sanctuary for Muslim scholars to
reexamine their religion is in the Christian West. Indeed, Christian
countries treat activist and politically aware exiled Muslims far
better than do most of their own (Islamic) native countries. Why
else are reformist mullahs to be found in New York and Boston,
rather than proselytizing in Mecca, Kabul, or Teheran?
A chief
corollary of multiculturalism is that Americans have wrongly
embraced a belief in the innate humanity of the West largely out of
ethnocentric ignorance. But surely the opposite has been proved true
— the more Americans learn about the world of the madrassas;
the six or seven varieties of Islamic female coverings; and the
murderous gangs in Somalia, the Congo, and Rwanda — the more,
not less, they are appalled by societies that are
anti-Western. Indeed, we now know that advocacy for multiculturalism
depends upon romance, ignorance, and isolation — studying about
Islamic fundamentalism in tree-lined Marin County rather than in
Pakistan or Saudi Arabia; role-playing in costumes at safe and
upscale suburban schools rather than avoiding the lash under
burqas in Kabul; or lecturing about religious diversity on
ivied campuses rather than witnessing Buddhas blown up in
Afghanistan.
The more
Americans find out more about Wahhabism, the Saudi royal family, the
Dickensian Pakistani street, the Iranian mullahs, what Mr. Arafat
really says in Arabic, Afghani warlords, the public parades of
future Hamas murderers in Lebanon, and the Pravda-like nature of
al Jazeera — the more they are shocked to learn that the
multiculturalists, not the traditionalists in our schools,
were the great deceivers. How ironic that multiculturalism demanded
romance — not reason, parochialism — not inquisitiveness, and
prejudice — not impartiality.
The rejection
of a multiracial society united by a common adherence to Western
values has formed the canon of our educational system for the last
two decades. We were to embrace a "mosaic" of unassimilated
special-interest groups rather than the blend of the melting pot.
But throughout this war we have seen the horrific wages of nations
that are not really nations at all, but simply tribes of competing
ethnicities, religions, and races whose traditions promote private
agendas, rather than freedom and tolerance.
If we didn't
learn from the horror in Bosnia and Kosovo, then at least we should
have seen in Afghanistan, Somalia, the Congo, and elsewhere these
last few years that wherever people give allegiance to skin color,
religion, language, and tribe first, and the common culture
second — corpses pile up. The same logic used to defend
racial enclaves in the United States leads elsewhere to Uzbek and
Pashtun warlords, Indian Muslims against Indian Hindus, and Shiites
versus Sunnis. Bilingual education, Al Sharpton's antics,
reparations, separate graduation ceremonies and ethnic dorms, La
Raza, the shake-down industry of Jesse Jackson, racial quotas, and
unassimilated and illegal immigration all lead not to promised
utopias, but to Kosovo, Kandahar, and Mogadishu.
The civilized
work of creating a multiracial society under the aegis of one nation
and culture is difficult, while the disintegration into
multiculturalism is easy. The former requires men and women of
genius and humanity, the latter little more than provocateurs and
the half-educated. If this war has taught us anything, it is that
there are valuable and enriching diversities — of food, literature,
music, fashion, and art — that are quite different from the
murderous and core diversities, such as the rejection of nationhood,
a common language, and such shared political and intellectual
traditions of the West as democracy, personal freedom, and secular
rationalism. Mr. Karzai needs something like the U.S. Constitution
and an Abraham Lincoln a lot more than he needs $15
billion.
Prevailing
anti-Americanism here and abroad held that Americans were largely a
materialist and culturally backward people — isolationist,
jingoistic, and parochial. We were thought to be an especially
dangerous culture because our ignorance and selfishness were coupled
with a grasping capitalist system, ample resources, and a large and
growing population. That scary calculus made us as powerful as we
were immoral nativists. Like some raging bull in the china shop of
the world, America possessed a great potential for damage — should
it break loose from the halters and reins of the sophisticated
Europeans and internationalists. They alone knew how to channel our
naiveté into the properly constructive enterprises that were to take
root at Durban, Kyoto, and other U.N. conferences.
But we suspect
that should the United States withdraw from Afghanistan and leave
Europeans to deal with motley Taliban leftovers, all their
peacekeepers would leave Kabul tomorrow. We — not the U.N., the EU,
NATO, or any other alphabet-soup collective — fought al Qaeda and
will soon rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Moderates in the region
(and Europeans) would rather trade with, than free, Iraq. The
pre-September 11 dogma argued that well-meaning and often valuable
international groups like the Red Cross, the United Nations, Amnesty
International, and a host of other organizations headquartered in
Brussels, the Hague, Geneva, or London were both intellectually
superior to, and far more moral than, almost any American
institution — whether it be the U.S. Congress or the Peace Corps.
But what we have seen instead from most of them is either inaction
at best or abject hypocrisy at worst.
The United
Nations did nothing after September 11 to prevent future attacks.
NATO has proved a charade. The Red Cross worries about the mittens,
hoods, and nutritional content of breakfast cereal for killers in
Guantanamo — but says little about real torture and murder outside
the gates, in Havana itself. They all talk tough to educated and
decent American officers about triviality involving a few hundred —
but are not so brave or effective about matters of life and death
for starving millions in Africa, when confronted by 15-year old
psychopaths with Kalishnikovs. Had any of these international relief
and rights organizations, or our supposed allies in Europe,
possessed the moral fiber of the U.S. Army, then they would have
exited Cuba and sent their entire staff to the Congo, where millions
have been butchered in silence in the last few years — more dead
than the entire population of the West Bank, and a sequel to the
prior holocaust in Rwanda. We know that our enemies are strong and
evil, but it is disappointing to keep learning each day that our
allies, though they sometimes mean well, remain continually
weak.
Fire — not
conferences — is the touchstone of any purported metal, and
separates glitter from gold. And so this war has shown many of the
creeds of the past to be mostly slag and dross. What, then, will
replace the present bankrupt and amoral assumptions and ideologies?
Let us hope perhaps that we can return to the honesty and realism of
classical 19th-century Western liberalism, which, for all its
naiveté and self-centeredness, still did not cause a fraction of the
carnage as did the utopian promises of our most murderous 20th
century. |
