THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

In New York City recently, eighteen Klansmen got a permit to demonstrate, and nine thousand New Yorkers turned out to protest it. The Klansmen were denied the right to use a loudspeaker so the demonstration consisted of their standing there silent while the crowd raged.

One woman in the crowd pointed to the Klansmen and said, "They're American citizens, let them speak!" She was immediately attacked by the mob, many of whom were carrying American flags, and beaten seriously.

If those eighteen Klansmen had been, instead, Communists carrying red flags, everyone in the crowd would have agreed with the woman. They would have protested the lack of loudspeakers. Liberal freedom of speech means freedom of speech for leftists only.

The September 4, 1999 article, "Only Nationalism Can Allow Freedom of Thought," explained why.

A union based on nothing but words cannot tolerate any serious diversity of opinion. A union, by definition, must be united by

something. It can be united by common ancestry as stated in the Preamble to the United States Constitution: "To Secure the Blessing of Liberty TO OURSELVES AND OUR POSTERITY."

Or a union can be based entirely on "principles." The problem is, "principles" are OPINIONS. All principles are opinions. A union that is based entirely on "principles" is based entirely on OPINION.

It is absolutely impossible for a union that is based entirely on common opinions to allow any real FREEDOM of opinion. You can only be a citizen of such a country if you have the right opinions. Eventually, that means that if you don't think right, you are a traitor.

A natural nation, based on a common heritage, is going to have principles in common. They will flow from the common heritage and they will dominate naturally. But such a natural set of common ideas can tolerate dissent, even extreme dissent. It does not have to constantly force people to "talk right" and "think right." This is because the union of such a people does not depend on their having the same opinions.

Such a nation is like a family. Since they are all members of the same family, they have more in common than some opinions. So even if you disagree, you're still part of the family. But if all you have in common are some "principles," no differences of opinion can be allowed.

It is not accidental that the Civil War was fought under a new president who said that America was based, not on the preamble to the Constitution, but on the words, "All men are created equal." If "all men are created equal" are the words America was founded on, isn't it odd that the Founding Fathers neglected to put any mention of "all men are created equal" in the Constitution?

Actually, "All men are created equal" was part of the propaganda document called the Declaration of Independence, and it was an appeal to the French liberals for support. It expresses their kind of thinking, the kind of French liberal thinking that led to the French Revolution and the Terror and Napoleon.

As for our own Founding Fathers, anyone who suggested a piece of nonsense like "All men are created equal" be put into our Constitution would have been LAUGHED out of public affairs!

Think about it. Can you imagine any delegate to the serious 1787 constitutional convention getting up and saying "All men are created equal" should be in a document under which we would actually be GOVERNED?

Lincoln's position on "all men are created equal" is also the doctrine of official respectable conservatives. In its bicentennial edition, National Review's official historian, Henry Jaffe, declared that the Founding Fathers conception of America was based entirely on "All men are created equal."

So the establishment position is that America is not a nation dedicated to "Ourselves and Our Posterity." America, according to the official doctrine, is a melting pot based on the words "all men are created equal."

Those who say that America's Founders were multicultural depend entirely on the ignorance of their listeners. America was not only founded on a specifically English governmental system, but the Founders were in every case people who came from the common Western European culture. It was a culture in which, only a short time before, all literate people wrote in a common Latin language. There was, in reality, very little multiculturalism among the Founders, even those who came from different countries in Western Europe. The result was a Constitution voluntarily arrived at among all the different states with their widely different interests.

The result was also a union that could tolerate a huge diversity of opinions, because that union was not based on a single, centrally enforced set of opinions (See May 15, 1999 article, "Wordism").

When Lincoln substituted "all men are created equal" for the Preamble to our actual Constitution, it was the beginning of the end of a nation based on a common culture that could allow diversity of opinion. With Lincoln, French liberalism began to replace the ideas of the Founding Fathers of this country.

As I pointed out last week in "Europe Gets Two Hundred Years of Constitutional 'Progress' in One Fell Swoop," the Lincoln philosophy has been adopted in Europe. So now the European Union enforces the same "principles" on every European nation. They cannot allow some countries to permit parents to spank, because that would violate a "principle" of nonviolence. They cannot allow Britain to keep homosexuals out of its armed forces, because that violates the universal principle of inclusion. Women must be allowed into the German armed forces, because you cannot allow different countries to have different versions of the universal principles of sexual equality.

In a society which is based entirely on opinion, any difference of opinion is treason.

The Clinton-McCain policy of enforcing multiculturalism and multiracialism in Europe is in line with the same doctrine. The many different European nationalities must be crushed, snuffed, made nonexistent.

European nations are based on bloodlines and culture, things people are born into. They are a threat to the only allowable kind of union, that based on common "principles," which, in English, means common opinions.

From this, we can formulate Whitaker's Law On Multiculturalism: "A true multiculturalism can only be united by a universally-held opinion. A truly multicultural state must therefore be constantly rooting out heresy."

This rooting out of heresy is what we call Political Correctness. Multiculturalism cannot exist without Political Correctness.

A union based on what the Founding Fathers would have called "natural" factors does not need to be constantly enforced. But a union where a difference of opinion is treason requires constant monitoring and constant enforcement.

Clinton and McCain stand ready to commit America to this constant monitoring and enforcement, both here and in Europe.