Although the concept of “tolerance,” is and has always been an American virtue, the people of this country have been taken advantage of.
By Curt Maynard
I recently came across a college students essay on the Internet and it’s entitled “Multiculturalism: The Subdividing of History.” Originally written in 1991 the essay affords us an opportunity to look back at how this process developed over time.
The author, Julie Ann Kessler, then a senior at Ashland College, a mid sized teaching institution in Ohio, presents her thesis in a typically dry and academic format, but manages to immediately highlight a curious fact about “multiculturalism,” something that was much easier to recognize and admit to fourteen years ago than it is today.
Today many of us are under the erroneous impression that “multiculturalism,” was designed to encourage tolerance by bringing together members of our society through the celebration of diversity – in fact the entire “multicultural movement,” has been divisive from the beginning…
Ms. Kessler acknowledges this fact in her first paragraph:
No debate within higher education is more divisive than the one being waged between self-proclaimed “multiculturalists” and those who could be called traditionalists in the study of Western culture.
You’ll hear many people exclaim today that Jews were the initiators of this divisive agenda, and then you’ll immediately hear these people referred to as anti-Semites for daring to suggest such a ridiculous hypothesis. However, Kessler pointed out in 1991 that Racism and Sexism: An Integrated Study a treatise by the Jewish Paula Rothenberg was described in Newsweek as the “primer,” for multiculturalists. It is so easy for time to wear away the foundation of uncomfortable facts.
Kessler rightly points out that originally there were two schools of thought within the “multiculturalist movement,” one, the “particularist,” tended to emphasiz that “the experiences of one ethnic group can’t have any relevance to members of another,” which is nothing more than Boasian “cultural relativity,” repackaged for modern consumption. According to Kessler, the other school of thought, “pluralism,” “hold[s] to an all-inclusive American history, with an accent on shared experiences.” What Kessler realized at the time was that both paradigms are essentially integral parts of the same puzzle, i.e. multiculturalism, and both challenged the “traditionalist” view.
We see this type of dichotomous argument often in American intellectual thought, an alleged division in ideology, but just under the surface a common agenda. More often than not one of the theories is presented in such a way as to appear to be more acceptable than the other, something Kessler also notes:
Pluralists in essence say, “American culture belongs to all of us,” as opposed to “American culture belongs to us whites.” The particularists, on the other hand have turned this old, exclusive view on end: “American culture does belong to whites; so celebrate your ancestral homeland instead of your present home. Ethnic and racial differences must be accentuated and hatreds fanned.
What we know fourteen years later is that “multiculturalism,” won the “fixed,” debate, the particularist and pluralist views merged and have left us with a singular idea, American culture does not belong to whites and ethnic and racial differences should be accentuated and hatreds fanned, except where and when whites are concerned. This wasn’t an accident; this was the intention all along, something else that Kessler prophetically revealed in her analysis of something that happened at Stanford University in 1988 when the clarion call “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go,” initially went out.
Kessler notes how the very unlikely example of a Guatemalan female Marxist that renounced marriage and motherhood in the pursuit of the Marxist ideal was used to inculcate impressionable young minds, when she cites the fact that Stanford students were encouraged to read I, Rigoberta Menchu a book about exactly that and how that book was supposed to sensitize the students in such a way that they might “understand the perspective of female Marxist Guatemalan peasants of Indian ancestry, not to examine whether the book is valid or contributes to a student’s education.”
Kessler reveals a good bit of skepticism in 1991, which proved to be quite healthy in that after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1992 Rigoberto was exposed by the New York Times as a fraud. In her memoirs she notes that he brother had died of malnutrition, but a Times reporter found him alive and well, and living prosperously in Guatemala. Not unexpectedly, because central to the thesis of multiculturalism is “white oppression,” Rigoberto claims that her impoverished family was subject to intimidation and oppression by “wealthy landowners of European descent.” Unfortunately for Rigoberto, her fellow villagers claimed that the “dispute was really a land feud that pitted Rigoberta’s father against his in-laws. It was a family quarrel that went on for years and years.”
This comes as no surprise to some of us, those who read and embraced I, Rigoberta Menchu in the 1980s however might be somewhat taken aback as the Nobel Prize and her fraudulent memory still stand despite these revelations. Another interesting aspect of this story is that the same people at the Times who initially built up Rigoberto’s image in the 1980s were the same ones that exposed her as a fraud in the 1990s – possibly a matter of reminding a prima donna that what can be built up can also be broken down.
Kessler continues by highlighting some of the more meaningless infighting within the multiculturalist perspective, i.e. the “pluralists” refer to the “particularists,” as “extremists,” and the latter believe the former to be unrealistic. Sensational accusations are passed back and forth as though they have some meaning; in actuality they don’t. As an example one black professor and advocate of the “pluralist perspective,” refers to a Jewish professor of history at Columbia, and “particularist,” Diane Ravitch, as “the ultimate, supreme, sophisticated, debonair racist” and a “Texas Jew.” Ravitch then exposes the entire dichotomous scheme when she “readily admits, pluralism easily can be, and has been, transformed into particularism. In its concern to include everyone in a new common American history, to be nice to everybody and not leave anyone out, pluralism may well give rise to cultural divisiveness where none might otherwise exist.”
Exactly the point, what is indeed rare though is that a senior at Ashland College in 1991 saw through the smoke and mirrors of theoretical multiculturalism, but perspectives like hers were never voiced publicly.
There is no longer any doubt, multiculturalism is a dismal failure as evidenced by the fact that tens of thousands of Americans have signed up voluntarily as part of a popular movement to patrol our nation’s borders because our government refuses to do so. It is also quite clear that American society has reached the point where it will no longer silently serve as liberalisms experimental model; it has reached the point of total saturation.
Interestingly, failed liberal models have been quite common over the last one hundred years. They also tend to be extremely destructive and are almost never exposed to any subsequent scrutiny. The common denominator is that they almost always tend to be Kosher, developed and propagated by Jews. The reason they are never exposed is because Jews have monopolized the massive power and influence of the media, whether that be television, newspapers, news magazines, cinema, or through the equally cornered market of academics, American Universities and the publishing houses that provide these Universities with textbooks. For example one learns through the aforementioned mediums that the Bolshevik’s employed the concept of collectivization on Russian peasantry with disastrous results. We may also learn that the concept and process of collectivization was subsequently exported to China, North Korea, Cambodia and other Asian nations, but we will never hear that the failed process which led to the deaths of more than ten million Christian Russians and Ukrainians, also failed in China, failed in North Korea and failed in Cambodia with similar results, the deaths of tens of millions!
“Multiculturalism,” is nothing more than the newest failed “liberal model,” a modern day “collectivization” scheme, an abortive idea that society can’t seem to rid itself of. There were many Julie Ann Kessler’s fourteen years ago vocally opposing what to them was an obviously flawed system, but they were denounced as racists and/or completely ignored. Today the failure of “multiculturalism,” shines as a beacon in all its inglorious ineptitude leaving us the opportunity, and that is what it is, to make the changes necessary to make our country a better place to live in for our children and grandchildren.
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/kessler-truth