Multiculturalism is a sedative

Salim Mansur:

Perhaps the most apt manner to describe multiculturalism as an ideology and government policy in western liberal democracies would be what the incomparable English writer, journalist and non-conformist, Malcolm Muggeridge, wrote in his 1970 essay, The Great Liberal Death Wish.

Perhaps also no contemporary of Muggeridge (1903-90), nor anyone after him, made as incisive a dissection of the deepening liberal malaise in the 20th century as he provided. He also exposed apologists of liberalism and their untiring efforts to discredit and dissolve the West as a uniquely gifted civilization.

In every culture there are to be found some dissidents or skeptics questioning its legitimacy and moral authority as those in the former Soviet Union -- Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others not as well known -- did. They exposed the lies of a system that rationalized the organized effort of tyranny to extinguish freedom, and their sacrifice eventually contributed to its demise.

But the oddity about skeptics in the West, as Muggeridge wrote about them and their liberalism, is the death wish to undo a culture where freedom, having sunk deep roots, thrives. They would replace this culture with a pale shadow of one negating all that is noble, life affirming, uplifting and founded on the values celebrated by the Christian church.

This is the great liberal death wish, a twisted psychology of that intellectual class which willingly goes out to buy the lies of a culture that entombs freedom, as was done in the Soviet Union -- and continues in places such as China and Saudi Arabia -- and fashion these lies as a cure for manufactured ills in the West, with the purpose of undermining it.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 28, 2008 12:00 AM
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