WHY POWER HUNGRY ELITES WANT "MULTICULTURALISM" | 1999-05-08
If a country is made up of one people with one culture, that people obviously knows more about its own culture than anybody else.
Social experts and ideologues have very little excuse to claim that they know more about what a homogeneous people wants than the people themselves.
About twenty years ago, I saw an advertisement for a program on a major network that made me sit up and take notice. The network had searched the world for the city where things went most smoothly and people were most content. They found that, back then, that city was Copenhagen. They had found that Copenhagen was a major city with all the advantage of a small town. This was because it was homogeneous. There was little conflict, and little crime.
This is no shock to a rational person. A society which is racially and culturally homogeneous is going to have less conflict than a
jumble of races and groups like New York.
But I was amazed that the liberal censors had let that piece of heresy get on the air! Nobody is allowed to SAY that a homogeneous society has less conflict than "multiculturalism."
Well, that program never materialized. The censors DID finally get to it.
As I pointed out in this space on April 17, the only sane policy in the Balkans is to separate the ethnic groups (See Balkan Peace: The Case for Segregation").
This point is rather obvious: if two people are trying to kill each other, you separate them. But if you make this obvious point, you are charged with supporting "apartheid," "ethnic cleansing," and, as always, of being anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. As always, the real leftist objection has nothing to do with any of this.
What leftists, and therefore respectable conservatives, cannot stand about ethnic separation is that it gives them no excuse whatsoever to interfere in the affairs of the ethnically homogeneous countries.
This situation changes in many ways as soon as we get a "multicultural" society. If a society is made up of many different peoples with many different values and many different outlooks, any social expert can claim to know what the people want. He can claim to be the only "objective" expert, and he can point out the fact that none of these different people can claim to speak for each other any more than he can.
That is not the case when a society is homogeneous. If you want to know what a culturally homogeneous people want, you just ask them.
But if a society is nice and diverse, who can say what "they" want? There is no "they." In our diverse America, who can honestly say that he speaks for "us?" There is no "us."
But smaller, more homogeneous countries can laugh at attempts by social experts and ideologues who claim to speak for them. Who needs "social experts" to speak for Liechtenstein or Iceland?
There is another advantage for liberals in making sure a society is as multiracial and as multiethnic and as multicultural as possible.
If you are an ideologue or a social expert, you can tell everybody what to do, and get paid for it, all in the name of "protecting minorities." There is nothing new about this. Modern leftists claim any power they want by saying they are just helping the oppressed smaller groups, but Hitler did exactly the same thing when he claimed he was protecting the German minority in the Seudetenland.
Outsiders always have a standing excuse to interfere in the affairs of a "diverse" country. If you want proof of that, look at the six billion dollar request for funds Mr. Clinton has just made to Congress to take care of the minority problems in tiny Kosovo.
If there is a minority in any country, all liberals have to do is to claim they are supporting the weaker group and move in. A homogeneous society is a country which can remain free from the power of liberals and social experts. As I pointed out before, the first rule of leftism is that there can be no escapees. No one can be allowed to determine his own affairs, away from leftist rule.
This is the reason leftists cannot allow any white majority country to avoid substantial third world immigration.
Despite all the earlier talk about a "melting pot," it was only after the massive third world immigration of the last generation that America became the kind of country that the social expert could control absolutely.
Only a completely unsophisticated person could refer to America until very recently as any kind of a "multicultural"
society.
For its first two centuries of existence, the population of the United States came from a very limited and homogeneous part of the world. Its identity, its religion, and its moral values all came from a relatively tiny area in Northern and central Europe, with some southern Europeans added in later. They were all from a part of Europe which, throughout the Middle Ages, recognized Latin as its common scholarly and legal and cultural language.
There was nothing "multi" about this culture.
The one serious minority in minority in America, black people, had been used by the 1960s to overturn major portions of the constitution. The right of free association, all limitations on federal power under the interstate commerce clause, local control of education, all limitations on federal power to select employees, and many other critical limitations on bureaucratic power had been simply crushed in the name of the rights of one minority. In the name of protecting blacks, lawyers, social planners, and bureaucrats took over unheard-of authority and money in America. More minorities to "protect" will make that power unlimited.
The actual cultural difference between a German Catholic and an English Protestant is very small and, in cultural terms, very recent. All the talk about how America was made up of so many really different religious and cultural groups at the turn of the century is, for someone who is familiar with the true differences in the world in general, a reflection of a very limited outlook.
This lack of real racial and cultural diversity in America has been a serious problem for ideologues on both the left and the right.
All through our history, there has been a generally agreed-upon set of outlooks and values that defied and frustrated the "intellectuals" and other people who wanted to revolutionize us.
Now, at last, our homogeneity is REALLY dying out, and a REAL multiculturalism is taking over. The fight for multiculturalism, multiethnicity, and multiracialism is at the very heart of the struggle of social "experts," planners, and ideologues for power. In a truly diverse society, people can vote all they want to, but it cannot be democracy.
How can "the people" rule when there is no "people"?
In a diverse society, there is a great deal of voting, but it is not allowed to influence the really big issues. After all, in such a society, a majority vote means very little. What is important is not just the numbers, but how those numbers represent each group. Above all, the majority must not be allowed to use its majority to "persecute minorities."
So, when California voters overwhelmingly decided not to give taxpayer financed benefits to illegal aliens, the courts simply knocked it down.
So who can protect the minorities? Obviously, it cannot be the people in general. It is the people in general the minorities must be protected AGAINST.
This leaves us no choice: in a diverse society, final authority cannot reside in the people. It must be vested in professionals: judges, bureaucrats, and self-styled "intellectuals" must have the final say where there is multiracialism or multiculturalism.