British Multiculturalism & Its Arbitrators

This is a good research from Mark Steyn's new book, America Alone:

"In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" - the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.  General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows.  Very well.  We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them.  Build your funeral pyre; beside it my carpenters will build a gallows.  You may follow your custom.  And then we will follow ours."

"India today is better off without suttee.  If you don't agree with that, if you think that's just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine.  But I don't think you really do believe that.  Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis.  After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society.  Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society.  It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.  But if you think you genuinely believe that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too.  Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb."

"The rest of us - the ones who think you can make judgments about competing cultures on liberty, religious freedom, the rule of law - need to recover the cultural cool that General Napier demonstrated." (193-194)

"'Minority rights doctrine,' wrote British author Melanie Phillips, 'has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behavior are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority....It is impossible to overstate the importance - not just to Britain but to the global struggle against Islamist extremism - of properly understanding and publicly challinging this moral, intellectual, and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa." (199)

"As French philosopher Jean-Francios Revel wrote, 'Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." (200-201)

"At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally "valid."  To accept that proposition means denying reality - the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, and global population movement.  Multiculturalism is not the first ideology founded on the denial of truth."

"At the core of multiculturalism is an assumption that a non-Western culture is somehow primal and immutable but that an advanced nation is no more than the sum of its consitutent parts.  It's a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome - a desperation to identify with anything that comes along other than your own.  The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malaysia, who cares?  That's the stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on.  But multiculturalism just involves feeling warm and fluffy about everyone, making bliss out of ignorance.  If the guy's rich vibrant cultural tradition involves standing over you with a scimitar shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" well, you can't complain you're not getting your share of cultural diversity." (203-204)

"...Western man demonstrates his cultural sensitivity by pre-emptively surrendering..." (204)

"Britain exported its language, law, and institutions around the world to the point where today there are dozens of countries whose political and legal cultures derive principally from London.  On islands from the Caribbean to the south Pacific, you can find miniature Westminsters proudly displaying their maces and Hansards.  But if England is the mother of parliaments, America's a wealthy spinster with no urge to start dating.  Of all the new nations that have come to independence since 1945 not one has adopted the American system of republican decentralized federalism..." (172)

"...Americans are deeply suspicious of the notion that you can swan around the world "giving" freedom to people.  They have to want it....While this might be philosophically admirable, the practical drawback is that power abhors a vacuum.  If America won't export its values - self-reliance, decentralization - others will export theirs....The danger right now is of imperial understretch - of a hyperpower reluctant to sell its indisputably successful inheritance to the rest of the world."