A review of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police in The New Pantagruel brings out the nature of “celebrating diversity” in school textbooks: since almost anything one might assert, suggest or mention would be more favorable to one group or culture than another, the only things that can be asserted, suggested or mentioned are things like elderly marathoners and the personal problems of immigrants. “Diversity” always turns out to mean “sameness and irrelevance.” Since the same problems appear in college textbooks, choice of which normally lies with individual instructors, the issue isn’t formal political pressure so much as the voluntary decision of our whole intellectual class to prefer multiculti to anything intellectual.
The issue of tNP also includes a longish ramble through recent discussions among Christian neocons regarding “participating in the public conversation” and “engaging the culture.” The piece mentions a book by Princeton professor Jeffrey Stout on the place of “religious discourse” in a “secular society” (one in which common religious commitments cannot be assumed) with an overriding commitment to “talking things through.” Here it should be obvious, although the author doesn’t make the point explicitly, that if the only authoritative principle is “talking things through,” then issues can be resolved only if they have already been settled by definitions of rationality, efficiency, human rights and whatnot before the talk even gets going, so the talk in fact functions merely as a placebo. A society ostensibly based on discussion and not authoritative substantive principles is of necessity one in which discussion is irrelevant but everyone pretends otherwise. Why is that kind of “public conversation” worth participating in?
In Canada, why does “diversity” require non-white preferences?
A log entry in The Ambler yesterday leads to the following legitimate question: What is the reason, exactly, for the following in Canada: affirmative action, race preferences, and university and job quotas giving advantages to the non-white population there (other than the Red Indians, who did suffer historically at the hands of the whites)? The Ambler writes:
“Lest anyone accuse me of introducing racialism to Canadian politics, I should point out that racialism was introduced here three decades ago when the Liberals declared Canada ‘multicultural’ and began importing the millions of non-white immigrants that made it a reality. Racial consciousness is not only perfectly acceptable here, it is government funded — so long as your people are non-white. […] Racial discrimination of the ‘reverse’ variety is even protected in our malignant Charter of Rights. Our ‘visible minorities’ are given privileges in mitigation of discrimination they never suffered! [Emphasis added.] In America, Affirmative Action was created to compensate blacks for hundreds of years of prejudice. Until recently, Canada never had any blacks except for a handful of descendants of freed slaves in Nova Scotia. Except for Native Indians, no Canadian visible minorities can claim a history of persecution — because they just got here. And not in slave ships either.”
( http://www.theambler.com/jun16-30_04.htm#vdareharperloses )
One obvious reason (obvious to me, at any rate) for the existence of these anti-white race-discrimination schemes in Canada, in the absence of the pretext which is used here—our history of slavery and of Jim Crow laws—is the self-esteem boost such schemes give to personalityless white Christians who find the feeling of moral-superiority-through-faux-Christian-self-abnegation absolutely intoxicating. They will cling to this feeling for dear life rather than sink back into that abyss of personalityless depression they originally struggled so hard to climb out of. Good luck trying to pry this psychological crutch away from them…
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“They who do wickedly are abominable to the king; for the throne of the realm is made steadfast by rightfulness.”
“Ever an evil man seeketh strifes; forsooth a cruel angel shall be sent against him.”
Proverbs 16:12, 17:11 (Wycliffe)
( http://www.sbible.boom.ru/wyc/pro16.htm , http://www.sbible.boom.ru/wyc/pro17.htm )
Watch as multi-culti plays itself out in what was once France.
The log entry refers to “[…] the voluntary decision of our whole intellectual class to prefer multiculti to anything intellectual”—a decision which leads, naturally, to the following inevitable result:
http://thrasymachus.typepad.com/thras/2004/07/raspail.html
These are Raspail’s latest thoughts, linked here at Thrasy’s site: this brief Raspail piece is a must read (a must read, that is, for those who don’t think “race, nation, and nation-state are dubious concepts”…the others can check out George Bush’s or David Frum’s thoughts on immigration which they’ll find entirely to their taste, no doubt…)
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“Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he who keepeth the law, happy is he.”
Proverbs 29:18 (King James)
Raspail is indeed a Must-Read
It’s an amazing article. What is the self-hate that drives the ruling elites? Do they really think they will survive once Sharia is declared? Fr. Seraphim Rose was right – the end game of liberalism is nothing less than complete nihilism.