#92: A “democratic” Kulturkampf? A Very Risky Business!
March 1, 2011
European leaders have come out of the politically correct closet
and are stating baldly that “multi-kulti” has failed. This is an awkward time
for defenders of democratic Western civilization because the truth of
multi-kulti’s failure constitutes an opportunity for the cloaked nationalist
statists always lurking around us, just waiting for the chance to surface with
impunity. Some of this has already happened in
The problem is that the legitimate desire to retain one’s culture in the face of aggressive Islamic cultural imperialism is extremely difficult to distinguish from statist nationalism. Consider this, for example. O’Reilly, a very successful television talking head has a segment he calls “the Culture Warriors.” Now, he is not talking necessarily about Islamic imperialism here, but he is talking about “changes” in the culture and whether they are desirable or not. Conservatives of many stripes are constantly bemoaning the erosion of the old values. What is it about this that is interesting and important? It is, I think, only this, that Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“My Battle”) was in his own words “ein Kulturkampf.” Not long ago, a writer also coined the expression “a war of civilizations.”
A “Kulturkampf” is quite literally a “Culture Battle” and that is unfortunately precisely what the “national” in “National Socialism” (Nazism) was all about. The Nazis were taught to believe that they were fighting to defend and preserve their own authentic “national character” by murdering millions of helpless civilians, a huge portion of which were their own citizens.
My point is that the failure of “multi-kulti” lays the groundwork for a new nationalism, the bête noir of the post-WW-II lefties. As I’ve argued before, the identification of Hitler’s nationalism as the source and cause of WW II was a strategic diversion from the real sources and causes of that horror, which were primarily economic and political. Once again, we must distinguish between the motives for a war at the leadership level and the rhetorical rationales that are fed to gullible populations.
The post war lefties were ideologically committed to internationalism, they had inhaled this directly from Marx and Engels and expected at any moment to see the workers of the world rise up against their masters. We know that both Lenin and Stalin fervently believed that would happen (and were shocked to the core when it did not). As part of laying the groundwork for the world-wide workers’ revolution, the useful idiots (as Lenin and his followers called the Western liberals) identified German nationalism as the culprit responsible for the war.
How many of them were aware that there could be and should be a democratic nationalism, I don’t know, but their attack on German nationalism facilely ignored any such possibility and rejected all nationalism as inherently vicious. They were able to do so because it is so difficult to distinguish clearly the democratic from the statist versions of the thing.
We need a healthy nationalism in order to hold back Islamic imperialism, but as we open the door to a healthy nationalism it will be difficult to prevent the noxious green slime of murderous statist nationalism from sliding in behind us on the floor.
We must indeed fight the good Kulturkampf, but making sure to not inadvertently strengthen the perennial forces of darkness waiting only for the historical signal to reveal themselves in the streets.
This is not one of those cases where the enemy of my enemy is friend.
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