The Exception That Tests the Rule
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For anyone who still denies either the rightness or existence of “American exceptionalism,” consider this appalling story:
Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders sat in the defendant’s dock Wednesday, nodding his head as prosecutors read aloud a hundred remarks he has made condemning Islam, Muslims and immigrants — notably one comparing the Quran to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
Wilders’ criminal trial for allegedly inciting hate against Muslims has resonance across Europe: He is one of a dozen right-wing politicians on the continent who are testing the limits of freedom of speech while voicing voters’ concerns at the growth of Islam.
For the tendentious phrasing, “the growth of Islam,” read the more accurate “the growth of Islamism.” If Moslems were coming to the Netherlands and assimilating, as they do for the most part in the United States, I honestly doubt Geert Wilders would have such a problem with them. But because of the liberal socialism of Western Europe, a member of the Dutch parliament is now on trial for properly representing his own constituents.
Here is the philosophical sequence:
- Liberal socialism (”Stalinism lite”) has infected Western Europe for many decades. (One could make a good argument that Otto Eduard Leopold prince von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” of Prussia, invented it in the latter half of the nineteenth century.) Note, this is not liberal fascism; it’s the internationalist version. Hence the European Union, the first step on the liberal-socialist (lib-soc) road to global government.
- A primary element of liberal socialism is atheism; lib-soc governments persecute Judeo-Christian religions and to a lesser extent frown upon all other religions: Their religion is “secular humanism” — that is, the First Church of Fundamentalist Materialism, as Robert Anton Wilson used to put it.
- A secondary effect of official and widespread Fundamentalist Materialism is a dramatic and frightening drop in the regional fertility rate. We can explore the “whys” in more depth another time if folks find the connection puzzling; suffice to say that Western Europe is not replacing its population, hence must import truly staggering levels of immigrant labor.
- Since Europe must draw from those cultures that have a high fertility rate for their foreign labor pool, they tend to draw disproportionately from Moslem populations in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Turkey, and Morocco. For example, in the Netherlands, six percent of the labor pool are Moslems from the latter two countries. (If the same ratio applied in the United States, we would have 9.25 million Moslem immigrants in the civilian labor pool, or about eight to ten times the level we actually have.)
- Another primary element of lib-soc is authoritarianism; socialist states are authoritatian by definition.
- One secondary effect of authoritarianism is that the government not only does not encourage immigrants to assimilate, it typically doesn’t allow them to. Instead, immigrants are shunted into enclaves and ghettos and generally treated as “the help,” rather than as full citizens… even those who were actually born in the “host” country. Generation after generation can be born in some European countries, but none is considered a full citizen.
- Such “apartness” leads inevitably to a great many immigrants seeing themselves as transients and foreigners in the land of their birth; they often turn against the “host” with a vengeance, rioting and looting, sealing off areas and declaring them “liberated” from the host and instead under the laws — or the imagined laws — of the rioters’ ancestral countries. For the most obvious example, Moslem “immigrants” may seal off the Moslem enclaves and declare them under sharia law, instead of French, Dutch, or Spanish law. (The same dynamic of separation from the rest of society leads to criminal behavior among native-born full citizens.)
- Yet another aspect of authoritarianism is that, for all their high-minded hectoring of the rest of the world, socialist countries do not actually protect freedom of speech. (This claim should not even be controversial.)
- Ergo, put everything together, and we have the situation in the Netherlands, which applies in a great many other European countries as well: The country has a real, serious, and growing problem with estranged and disaffected Moslem youths; but hate-speech codes make it a criminal offense to discus the disastrous failure of the government’s social policy, even by members of parliament.
It’s a prescription for catastophe. It could never happen in Ronald Reagan’s or George W. Bush’s America because of individualism, assimilation, and community; I fear it may be all too plausible in Barack H. Obama’s America.
The solution to this terrible dilemma is quite beyond the capacity of any socialist country; but it’s the essence, the very core, of American exceptionalism (or simple Americanism):
- Allow immigrants to assimilate;
- Encourage, urge, and demand that they assimilate;
- Require that they be assimilable before letting them immigrate in the first place;
- And treat them exactly like every other American citizen when they do assimilate and naturalize themselves.
This is the ideal, however imperfectly it can be applied in the real world. Alas that we have an immigration system biased against assimilation; and we have two prevailing ideologies, neither of which is geared towards assimilation for different reasons: The Left doesn’t want aliens to assimilate because lib-socs tend to dislike America and all it stands for; while the Right doesn’t want aliens to come here at all, by and large, because they understand assimilation is a two-way street.
Like the Borg, when we assimilate an immigrant, we add his cultural “memes” to American culture. That’s one reason we’re such a powerful and irresistable force for social change throughout the world… and it’s a positive characteristic, not a necessary evil.
But I think I fight a lonely war on this issue.
Cross-posted on Hot Air’s rogues’ gallery…
