From Dr. Thomas Fleming,
Editor of Chronicles Magazine, a founder of the League of the South and Southern
Partisan Magazine:
The great mistake made by
black and white nationalists alike - the mistake that ensures their failure -
is to confuse the categories of race and nation. A race is more or less a
subspecies, a set of genetically determined characteristics. A nation, on
the other hand, is defined by language, culture, and shared experience. A
man will fight and die for a nation, 'for the ashes of his fathers and the
temples of his gods,' but for a race, the most he will do is to subscribe to a
newsletter that makes him feel less like a loser. Some national conflicts
are also race wars, but a Slav defending his village against the Huns was
protecting his wife and children; he was not protecting the purity of his gene
pool.
--From an article "White Like
Me," that appeared in the November 1997 issue of Chronicles.
PRESERVING
WESTERN CIVILIZATION
From Victor Davis Hanson,
author, on the USA's modern fight against terrorism:
Our visionaries must be far
clearer and more eloquent about the nature of our struggle. In their
understandable efforts to say what we are not doing -- fighting Islam or
provoking Arab peoples -- they have failed utterly to voice what we are
doing: preserving Western civilization and its uniquely tolerant and
humane traditions of freedom, consensual government, disinterested inquiry, and
religious and political tolerance. In this regard, we must especially
distinguish, in the manner of Roosevelt and Churchill, the historic ties
between Great Britain and America -- something either ridiculed or
forgotten in the current fashions of multiculturalism.
--From an article "War On All
Fronts," that appeared in the October 2001 online magazine, National
Review Online.
From Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, September 2001:
We should be conscious of the
superiority of our [Western] civilization, which consists of a value system
that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it,
and guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does
not exist in the Islamic countries.
--As quoted in the National Press
From Dr. Muqtedar
Khan, Director of International Studies at Adrian College in Michigan:
Muslims love to live in the U.S. but also love to hate it. Many openly
claim that the U.S. is a terrorist state but they continue to
live in it. Their decision to live here is testimony that they would rather
live here than anywhere else. As an Indian Muslim, I know for sure that nowhere
on earth, including India, will I get the same sense of dignity and
respect that I have received in the U.S. No Muslim country will treat me as well
as the U.S. has. If what happened on Sept. 11 had
happened in India, the biggest democracy, thousands of
Muslims would have been slaughtered in riots on mere suspicion and there would
be another slaughter after confirmation. But in the U.S., bigotry and xenophobia has been kept in
check by media and leaders ...
It is time that we acknowledge
that the freedoms we enjoy in the U.S. are more desirable to us than superficial
solidarity with the Muslim World. If you disagree, then prove it by packing
your bags and going to whichever Muslim country you identify with. If you do
not leave and do not acknowledge that you would rather live here than anywhere
else, know that you are being hypocritical.
It is time that we faced these
hypocritical practices and struggled to transcend them. It is time that
American Muslim leaders fought to purify their own lot.
--As quoted in an article entitled
"Memo To American Muslims," on Dr. Khan's website
at http://www.ijtihad.org/memo.htm
From V.S. Naipaul,
Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature:
Because my movement within
this [Western] civilization has been from the periphery to the center, I may
have seen or felt certain things more freshly than people to whom those things
were everyday. One such thing was my discovery, as a child, a child worried
about pain and cruelty, my discovery of the Christian precept, Do unto
others as you would have others do unto you. There was no such human
consolation in the Hinduism I grew up with, and though I have never had any
religious faith—the simple idea was, and is, dazzling to me, perfect as a guide
to human behavior.
A later realization—I suppose
I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only
during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the
pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for
granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is
at the heart of the attractiveness of the [Western] civilization to so many
outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an
extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part
of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic
idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of
awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's parents would have been able to
understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual,
responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the
idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human
idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism.
But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the
end blow away.
--From a Speech at the Manhattan
Institute, New
York, October 30,
1990
MULTICULTURALISM
AND DIVERSITY
From Linda Chavez, director of
the U.S. commission on civil rights (1983-85) and
White House director of public liaison (1985):
We've been indoctrinated with
the cult of multiculturalism for the past three decades in our public schools,
in our colleges and universities, in the popular culture and news media, even
from our public officials and political leaders. We've been told to abandon the
myth of the melting pot and embrace the metaphor of the salad bowl, where each
of us in our separate groups co-exist side by side, maintaining our ancestral
identities and affinities intact. We've elevated "diversity" to a
kind of civic virtue, ignoring that diversity can be good or bad. It is what we
do with our diversity that matters.
For the moment, at least, we
seem willing to put this nonsense aside. We are not a multicultural nation. We
are one nation, indivisible. We are one people, regardless of our color or
creed, how long our families have been here or where they came from. And in
that, we are unique in the annals of human history.
--From an article "We Are
Americans," September 25, 2001