Symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 31, 2001 | by William S. Lind, | Daniel Smith

Q: Is multiculturalism a threat to the national security of the United States?

YES: A fragmented culture subverts national identity, purpose and the will to fight enemies.

The purpose of the ideology known commonly as "multiculturalism" is to destroy America. In the 21st-century world of fourth-generation warfare, it is likely to succeed. To understand why we first must understand both phenomena.

Fourth-generation warfare is the fourth major change in warfare since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the event that marks the beginning of modern war. The reason that treaty, Which ended the Thirty Years War, marks the beginning of the modern period is that it established a state monopoly on war. After 1648, at least in Europe, war was between states; it was fought by state armies and navies fighting other institutions very much like themselves. Indeed, our whole picture of war, armies and navies -- formal battles, uniforms, flags, saluting, etc. -- is a picture of war between states. Few people in the defense establishments of today's states can imagine it being any other way.

But through most of history, it was another way. Many different entities fought wars: Families fought wars, clans fought wars, tribes fought wars, races and ethnic groups fought wars, religions fought wars, business enterprises fought wars. They fought using many implements, not just armies and navies: bribery, assassination, piracy, massacres, slave raids, mercenaries and tribal levies. In many of these conflicts the "army" was composed of any males physically able to wield a weapon, and the "navy" any available ship. The object was not "politics by other means," but simply to rejoice in the slaughter of an enemy, the noble deaths in battle of one's own champions, the seizure of the enemy's land, the rape of his women and the selling of his children into slavery. The Old Testament is full of it, as is the Koran.

In the fourth generation of modern war, which also marks the end of the modern period, past is prologue. The state is losing its monopoly on war, and states everywhere find themselves fighting nonstate opponents -- and usually losing, despite all the technology, special training and vast resources of state armed forces. War is fought at three levels: physical, mental and moral. The state is losing at the moral level, which is the highest and most decisive.

Around the world the state has begotten the bureaucratic state, and the bureaucratic state has begotten the New Class, or the ruling elite. That New Class has three characteristics: It can't make things work; it uses its power and position to exempt itself from the consequences of things not working (in the United States, it has ruined the public schools while sending its own children to private schools); and it really cares about only one thing -- remaining the New Class. Not surprisingly, people who are not members of the New Class find fighting for the state it dominates a less than entrancing prospect.

On the contrary, many citizens are giving their primary loyalty to entities other than the state -- religions, races, ideologies -- and are willing, even eager, to fight against the state on behalf of something they can believe in. It is not simply from fear of U.S. bombers that Osama bin Laden, a man of great wealth, chooses to live in a cave.

As war between states fades away, one of the older forms of conflict returning is war between cultures. With the death of state loyalties and identities, identification and loyalty to a culture is coming back strongly. Cultural differences are one of history's main reasons for war. Human nature being what it is, when cultures rub up against each other, the resulting friction often leads to fire.

Perhaps primary among the returning cultural loyalties is loyalty to Islam. After three centuries on the strategic defensive, Islam has during the last 50 or so years resumed the strategic offensive, expanding outward in every direction. As historian Russell Kirk wrote, culture comes from the cult, and the cult at the center of Islamic culture -- Islam itself -- is very much alive (unlike Christianity in much of Christendom).

Neither the state nor secular law is legitimate from an Islamic perspective. Legitimacy adheres only to the Ummah, the international Islamic community, and to Shariah, Islamic law. Islam divides the world into the Dar al-Islam, the world of Islam, and the Dar al-Harb, the world of war; with and in the latter, there can be no peace. War against the unbeliever, the kaffir, is an Islamic duty, carrying with it the promise of martyrdom and a bevy of whores (the word is from the Arabic houri) in heaven. While there are lax Islamics, there is no such thing as tolerant or peaceful Islam.

The basic message of"multiculturalism" is that all cultures are equally good and beneficent -- except Western culture, which is violent and oppressive. That message is, of course, a lie. In reality, Western culture is one of only two cultures that has been successful over time in terms of the quality of life it provided to its adherents (the other success is Chinese culture). To see real violence and oppression, one need only look at the life of non-Muslims in Islamic majority countries. The purpose of multiculturalism is to disarm the West psychologically, to make it impossible for Western men even to consider fighting in defense of the Western, Judeo-Christian way of life; to do so, as the multiculturalists preach, is to become "another Adolf Hitler" (who was, ironically, no fan of Judeo-Christian culture himself.)