In Crisis Magazine today I discuss the foremost enabler of the advance of Islamic supremacism in the West: the dogma of multiculturalism.
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him. — Saul Bellow
In asking about the Papuan Proust, novelist Saul Bellow summed up the core problem with the twin idols of our age, Multiculturalism and Diversity. For the ideology of Multiculturalism””now dominant on most college campuses””posits as a dictum that there is a Tolstoy of the Zulus, and a Proust of the Papuans, and that it is only white racism and Western Judeo-Christian chauvinism that has prevented these unheralded geniuses from receiving their due recognition.
And so high school and university textbooks now feature these putative literary lights cheek-by-jowl with Shakespeare, Dickens, and Faulkner, and if anyone dares point out that the nonwhite, non-Christian literary emperors are naked indeed, the charges of “bigotry” and “racism” will rain down.
After Strange Gods
And literature is the least of it. The hegemony of the multiculturalist idea is universal and complete. Today, no one questions the idea that one culture is as good as another. No one even whispers the possibility that the achievements of one group in a given area (for instance, medieval Christians) might actually surpass those of another group. No one even dares to think that there might be better indicators of the quality of an endeavor than the number of different ethnicities of the people involved.
Multiculturalism is one of the most successful heresies in history: it is as dominant in America and Western Europe today as Calvinism ever was in Geneva, or Anglicanism in Elizabethan London. Multiculturalism is the entrenched ruling dogma of the United States of America. The victory of the multiculturalist idea is so complete that those in thrall to its dogma do not even seem to notice the grotesqueries in which it involves them.
On November 5, 2009, Army Major Nidal Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas, murdering thirteen people and wounding thirty others. A flood of details quickly emerged that established not only that Hasan was an America-hating Islamic jihadist, but that his Army superiors had known this for several years and yet continued promoting him out of fear that if they did not do so, they would offend against the multiculturalist ethos that prevails in the U.S. military and society at large.
And it’s true: if anyone had reported Hasan, American Muslim advocacy groups would have immediately risen up in protest, and the mainstream media would have carried worried “exposes” about “bigotry” in the American Armed Forces. The person who filed the report would have faced nationwide scorn and ridicule, and maybe even disciplinary action. No one who sins against the gods of Multiculturalism and Diversity can expect to get off lightly. And so even General George Casey, the U.S. Army chief of staff, paid homage to these reigning idols when, just days after the massacre, he worried about the possibility of “a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers–”which never materialized””and declared: “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”
Excuse me? The loss of “diversity” is worse than the wanton murder of thirteen people? We really are dealing with a new religion here, one willing to sacrifice innocents to its gods. Casey”s appalling comment marked the apotheosis of the multiculturalist ethic, heralding its absolute triumph in American public life.