Unity through Diversity Equals Cultural Death

Guest post by Olivia Pierson

Cultural pluralism is as old as the hills – or at least as old as the Babylonian Empire on whose riverbank shores even the captive Jews were tolerated to sit and weep. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is a 20^th Century bastardisation of tolerance, which the United Nations invented to socially engineer Western democracies to cope with overwhelming immigration, mostly from Third World slave-pens. The pious and politically correct preachers of “diversity” and “equality” raised multiculturalism in the West to the status of a new religion, as if the world needed yet another one of those.

With the truth emerging after murderous events in Paris, can there still be any doubt that multiculturalism has epically failed in the West? In the last five years Angela Merkel has admitted its failure; so have Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron.

But how has it failed so?

Multiculturalism is a modern liberal tenet which states that all cultures are equal regardless of the diverse practices of each culture. This should not be confused with cultural pluralism which holds that all citizens, no matter what culture they hail from, are equal before the laws of the land –the one host culture. The host culture is necessarily dominant, hence being the yearly recipient of hundreds of thousands of immigrants bidding farewell to their homelands.

Europe threw open its gates to open immigration back in the late 1960s. By 1974 trade between East and West was an imperative-- it was oil of course; rich, dark, copious oil, a feature of life-enhancing benefit to the West. The reciprocal of this bargain, aside from money, was immigration, a feature of life-enhancing benefit to the East. Thus began the Euro-Arab dialogue adopted throughout member States of the new European Union - only multiculturalism did not require that those immigrants assimilate into European life and parallel communities with their own laws (Sharia) were allowed to rise: non-Muslim no-go zones. The liberal policy-makers left themselves no moral room to assert the rightful dominance of the central ideas that their own civilizations were built on – namely, their emancipated women and sexual freedoms, their protection of individual rights, their freedom of speech and of the press, their commitment to scientific inquiry and their separation of religion and state.

Multiculturalism’s emphasis on ‘diversity’ is itself a preoccupation with ethnic difference and therefore an insidiously accepted form of patronisation along racial lines. As one commentator once put it: multiculturalism’s unspoken legacy is Have-a-Nice-Day Racism.

America, the founding democratic nation of the Free World, was always populated by immigrants – “We, the People” came from every corner of the globe, lured by the protective nature of the famous Constitution overseeing a magnificent mass of available land. They built their own towns; they followed their own religions. From Judaism to Mormonism creed became irrelevant as trade became paramount. By the time the 1860 administration of Abraham Lincoln was elected, America was a prosperous, culturally plural nation except for the disgraceful stain of black slavery - but even this heinous wrong was to be put right. Lincoln’s one and only stated purpose throughout the Civil War was to uphold the Union by putting down the Southern rebellion, which threatened to “diversify” America into two totally separate Federations; the result of his desire to keep national integrity was the end of the feudal South and the beginning of black autonomy. As a statesman, Lincoln’s great conviction held that the country’s immense strength lay in its unity not its diversity; after all, diversity had been a given all along.

The modern catchphrase “Unity through Diversity” is fatuous in every respect that it is used. People from different cultures do not unite over their differences and shouldn’t be expected to – that’s called Freedom. They unite over their commonalities such as trade, earning a living, their children’s friendships, similar recreational hobbies or a common purpose. These things bring people into contact with one another on the basis of shared values. Immigrants in host nations also unify through adopting one national identity and being equal before the law – the law of the new country.

It is time for leaders to stop talking mindless multicultie nonsense in the face of disgraceful Muslim atrocities. Western civilization has upheld the best ideas for human flourishing the world has ever seen, and we ought to be proud of them; they’ve been hard won by our forefathers. This means not tolerating microstates and parallel communities where wife-bashing, rape, honour killing, genital mutilation and violent jihad are practiced every day with impunity. These are the diversities of a culture incompatible with our own, and if we can’t get our heads around that fact the ignoble legacy to be bestowed upon our children and grandchildren is cultural death.

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Olivia Pierson is an Auckland writer. 

Follow her commentary at SOLOPassion.Com.