The following is the text of Srdja Trifkovic’s prepared remarks as a panelist at ProEnglish’s CPAC panel, “The Failure of Multiculturalism,” Washington, D.C., February 9, 2012. Robert Vandervoort, executive director of ProEnglish, delivered the remarks on Trifkovic’s behalf.
Members of the Western elite class overwhelmingly subscribe to a neoliberal world outlook in general and to the tenets of multiculturalismin particular. In other words, they tend to accept the principle that recognition, positive accommodation,and even celebration, of demands and special political and moral claims of various ethno-racial, religious, or sexual minorities are obligatory through “group-differentiated rights.” The result is an obsessive favoritism of allegedly disadvantaged groupsoften hostile to the European-descended majority of Americans , such as Third World societies and immigrants in general, Muslimsin particular .
These assumptions are culturally and institutionally internalized by the political, academic, and media elite. Behind the veneer of all-embracing diversity, however, we find a carefully calibrated scale of acceptance or rejection of “the Other” — depending on the cultural and political preferences of the members of the elite themselves. They insist that there are many self-validating, closed systems of perception, feeling, thought, and evaluation, each associated with a racially, ethnically, religiously, or sexually defined group. This effectively rejects the legacy of the Western civilization, and specifically its reliance on the standards of reason, evidence, and objectivity and principles of justice and freedom that apply to human beings as such.
The result is an eminently post-modern moral and intellectual relativism. It enables the elite class to pick and choose which group will be approved for the status of sanctified victimhood, and which will be denied the benefit of the doubt, let alone sympathy. The denial is automatic in the case of all members of the extended European family — in the Old Continent, Russia, and North America — who are not ashamed of who they are; doubly so if they are Christian believers.
This multicultural madness has dangerous secondary manifestations that are presently packaged and instituted as “isms” by the elite. These include “tolerance,” millenarian one-worldism, inclusivism, and anti-discriminationism, which not only demand “engagement” abroad, but advocate open-door immigration at home. The elite pick and choose the definition based on their vision. The impulse is neurotic and the justification completely gnostic. It also reflects a collective loss of nerve and faith of a diseased society. It has produced an obsessively self-loathing elite, a phenomenon unprecedented in history.
This monstrosity is built on the arrogant conviction that human reason, reinforced by science and technology, contains the clue to the dilemmas and challenges of human existence. It holds that certain enlightened abstractions — democracy, human rights, free markets — can and should be spread across the world, and are capable of transforming it in a way that will, for example, transform Muslims into secularized global consumers. Both these forms of insanity have a “left,” Wilsonian variant (one-world, postnational, compassionate, multilateralist, therapeutic, Euro-integralist) and a “right,” neoconservative one (democracy-exporting, interventionist, monopolar, boastfully self-aggrandizing). While often differing in their practical manifestations, the overall paradigm is the same, utterly utopian. Their roots are in the legacy of the Enlightenment. Both maintain that Man is inherently virtuous and capable of betterment. These are but two sects of the same Western heresy that has grown out of the Renaissance seed. Its fruits are shaping the Decline of the West, which is becoming terminal.
The common roots of Western Europe and North America are no longer discernible in what they cherish but in what they reject: societies founded on national and cultural commonalities; stable elites and constitutions; and independent economies. They regard all permanent values and institutions with open animosity. They reject the notions of limited government at home and non-intervention abroad. They assert their devotion to “the market” but in fact they promote a form of state capitalism controlled by a network of global financial and regulatory institutions. They insist that countries do not belong to the people who have inhabited them for generations, but to whoever happens to be within their boundaries at any given moment in time. The resulting random melange of mutually disconnected multitudes is not a blessing but a plague.
The dictum that we should not feel a special bond for any particular country, nation, race, or culture, but transfer our preferences on the whole world equally, is not new. Its open assertion by the elite is. By 1999, then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott felt ready to declare that the United States may not exist “in its current form” in the twenty-first century, because the very concept of nationhood — here and throughout the world — will have been rendered obsolete: “All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances…. they are all artificial and temporary.” To the members of his class, nations are transient entities.
We are faced with a global problem that is a synthesis of all others, and goes way beyond Culture Wars. It is the looming end of culture itself. For many millennia people lived in communities in which links were direct, and emotional. Those communities eventually merged into “society” in which relations were measured in terms of objects, and were formalized; but the real human being nevertheless remained the subject of his own activity generated by his emotions and needs as a living, feeling, thinking creature.
But by the mid-twentieth century, when science and technology ushered in the information era and society became a vastly complex socio-technological system, from the subject of activity man was reduced to a mere element of it — the human factor. Yes, all impulses for activity still pass through the individual, but they are dictated by the System. Having been “integrated” into the network of relations as a specific reality, the man has to act in accordance with the system`s procedures. The environment, the real world outside the Beltway (or the M25, or the Boulevard Peripherique), becomes symbolic rather than substantial: the natural is squeezed out, with nature merely providing the building blocks for the artificial and relations with nature assuming a primarily functional character. Most relations between people cease to be regulated by pre- and extra-rational means — by feelings, customs, faith, love, hate, considerations of good and evil, sin and punishment, beauty and ugliness. What the elite class would call “ideology,” and what would be known as spirituality until not too many decades ago, is being substituted by “content,” by information. This is why the survival of culture is uncertain.
Society’s metamorphosis into technos (or post-society, post-history) signifies its death. With the impending revolution in genetic engineering, culture as a means for transmitting values conducive to society’s cohesion will no longer be needed. Money, success (power), and health are the only “values.” The soul, emotional experiences, personal opinions, are but burdens that distract from production or from the precise execution of instructions. Culture as a whole is a relic, too; if it is not already neutered and relegated to heritage, it is automatically designated traditional. The transformation of society into a socio-technological system regulated by “the market” signifies the end of man’s cultural history and may signify the end of mankind as such.
The obvious disharmony between the genuine conservatism of ancient ideals and the ruthlessly new ideology of “democratic capitalism” is lost on the average citizen of a “Western democracy.” So-called democracy in America and Western Europe alike is a corrupt “democratic process” run by an elite class that conspires to make secondary issues important and to treat important issues as irrelevant or illegitimate: One party or politician may be in; another, out; but the regime is in power permanently.
Let me stress in passing that the common ground between the Western elite class and Islam is that they are both programs of globalization that have as their object the destruction of the old nation-state system based on nationhood defined by ethno-linguistic, cultural, and territorial commonalities. The betrayers of the West, for all the outward differences, share with the mullahs and sheikhs and imams the desire for a monistic One World. They both long for Talbott’s Single Global Authority, post-national and seamlessly standardized.
A century ago, Talbott and his class shared social commonalities that could be observed in Monte Carlo, Carlsbad, Biarritz, or Paris, depending on the season. Englishmen, Russians, and Austrians shared the same outlook and sense of propriety, they all spoke French, but they nevertheless remained rooted in their national traditions, the permanent vessels in which Weltanschauung could be translated into Kultur. Today’s West, by contrast, does not create social and civilizational commonalities, except on the basis of wholesale denial of old mores, disdain for inherited values, and an overt rejection of “traditional” culture.
Multiculturalism creates the dreary sameness of predictable, arid monism. If it is allowed to continue its destructive course, by the end of this century there will be no “Europeans” as members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors, and inhabit lands associated with their names. The shrinking native populations will be indoctrinated into believing — or else simply forced into accepting — that the demographic shift in favor of unassimilable and hostile aliens is a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. “No other race subscribes to these moral principles,” Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, “because they are weapons of self-annihilation.” The weapons need to be discarded, and the upholders of those deadly “principles” removed from all positions of power and influence, if we are to survive.
It is in the refusal of the neoliberal elite class to confront the threat to our civilization that Western Europe and North America most tellingly certify that they share the same cultural chromosomes. The same traits of decrepitude are present everywhere, including both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones. Topping the list is elite hostility to all forms of solidarity of the majority population based on shared historical memories, common ancestors, beliefs and culture; the consequences are predictable:
• the loss of a sense of place and history among Europeans and North Americans;
• rapid demographic decline, especially in Europe, unparalleled in history;
• rampant Third World (and in Europe, overwhelmingly Muslim) immigration;
• collapse of private and public manners, morals, and traditional commonalities;
• imposition of “multiculturalism” and criminalization of any opposition to it.
The end-result is the Westerners’ loss of the sense of propriety over their lands. The elite insists on casting aside any idea of a specifically “Western” geographic and cultural space that should be protected from those who do not belong to it and have no rightful claim to it. We face an elite consensus that de facto open immigration as the tangible bedrock of multiculturalism is to be treated as an immutable fact that must not be scrutinized. In addition, a depraved mass culture and multiculturalist indoctrination in state schools and the mainstream media have already largely neutralized the sense of historical and cultural continuity among young West Europeans and North Americans.
The revolutionary character of the multiculturalist project is revealed in the endless mantra of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, the formula now elevated to the status of the post-modern Philosopher’s Stone, the force that moves the linear historical process forward, towards the grand Gleichschaltung of nations, races, and cultures that will mark the end of history. Race, Gender, and Sexuality have replaced the Proletariat as both the oppressed underclass (hence the cult of the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual victimhood), and as the historically preordained agent of revolutionary change.
Classical Marxist political economy found the dynamics of revolution in the inevitable conflict between the owners of the means of production and the proletariat that has nothing to sell but its labor and nothing to lose but its chains. Latter-day Marxist revolutionaries go beyond dialectical materialism, however, by introducing a wholly metaphysical concept of victimhood and an array of associated special-rights claims that have worked such wonders for our enemies all over the Western world. Majority populations of “old” Europe and America, in this insane but all-pervasive paradigm, are guilty of “oppression” by their very existence, and therefore must not protest the migratory deluge, let alone try to oppose it, because that is “racism.”
The fruits are with us already. Gibbon could have had today’s London, Marseilles, or LA in mind when he wrote of Rome in decline, its masses morphing “into a vile and wretched populace.” On present form, within a century the native Western majorities will melt away: “child-free” is a legitimate yuppie lifestyle term, on par with “fat-free” and “drug-free.” But whereas the threat of extinction of an exotic tribal group in Borneo or Amazonia — let alone a species of spotted owl or sperm whale — would cause alarm and prompt activism among neoliberal elites, it is deemed inherently racist to mention the fact that Europeans and their trans-Atlantic cousins are, literally, endangered species.
The facilitators of our destruction must be neutralized if we are to survive. It’s kto-kogo.