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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.
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