[T]he weakening of families, the erosion of communities, the inversion of sexual morality, and all the other chants of the litany of decline.… are symptoms of the decadence of traditional culture … but they are also signs of the triumph of the dominant culture, which regards them at worst as insignificant irritants or at best as indications of impending liberation from traditional restraints, and the defeat of its adversary, traditional culture.108
Francis quotes Nietzsche: “The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership,” adding, “What Nietzsche grasped and what most modern conservatives, who dislike Nietzsche almost as much as Karl Marx and Hillary Clinton, don’t grasp is that what looks like decline, decadence and decay to conservatives appears to the champions of such trends as progress and the birth of a new civilization.”109 In short, this is no accident, comrade.
A decade ago, in Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, columnist William McGowan concluded that “diversity is the new religion.”110 Reviewing McGowan’s latest book, historian H. A. Scott Trask wrote that he had understated the case. Diversity, wrote Trask, is a “state religion, the new faith of the clerical class and a means of social control of the plutocracy.”111 To disparage diversity is punishable heresy.
DIVERSITY’S DEADLY SIDE
Nidal Malik Hasan was two men. One was the proud army major who wore battle fatigues to mosque; the other, the proud Arab American who wore Muslim garb in civilian life. What brought Hasan’s two identities into conflict was his conviction that Iraq and Afghanistan were immoral wars and his shock that he was to be deployed to serve in the Afghan war against fellow Muslims, a sin against Allah. Hasan was torn. Which was his higher loyalty? Which, in Michael Vlahos’s phrase, was his “fighting identity”?
Hasan told friends he was “a Muslim first and an American second.” On November 5, 2009, when he told his neighbor, “I am going to do good work for God” and gave her his Koran, the call of jihad had prevailed over his oath of loyalty as an army officer.112
Reportedly shouting “Allahu Akbar!” as he fired, Hasan killed thirteen and wounded twenty-nine U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas.113 An Internet posting over the name “Nidal Hasan” had equated suicide bombers with Medal of Honor winners who fall on grenades to save fellow soldiers.
Although this was an act of wartime treason and terrorism, Hasan saw himself as a hero-martyr who had put God and faith above his allegiance to a nation waging immoral wars against Muslim peoples.
Such conflicts of loyalties are not uncommon in war.
President Woodrow Wilson feared that if he took America into the European war on the side of Britain, Irish Americans would rise in protest and German Americans march on Washington. FDR was so fearful that the blood ties of resident Japanese would trump any loyalty to the United States, he ordered 110,000 transferred out of California to detention camps.
Among American Muslims, Hasan is atypical, but not alone. Other Muslims have been apprehended plotting terror attacks. In Arkansas in 2008, a Muslim shot two soldiers at a recruitment center. In Kuwait, before the invasion of Iraq, a Muslim sergeant threw a grenade and fired into the tent of his commanding officer, killing two and wounding fourteen.
Why didn’t the army discharge Hasan, whose extreme views were known? “Army specialists were warned about the radicalization of Major Nidal Malik Hasan years before [the massacre],” says the Boston Globe, “but did not act in part because they valued the rare diversity of having a Muslim psychiatrist, military investigators wrote in previously undisclosed reports.” The reports concluded that “because the Army had attracted only one other Muslim psychiatrist in addition to Hasan since 2001, ‘it is possible some were afraid’ of losing such diversity ‘and thus were willing to overlook Hasan’s deficiencies as an officer.’”114
Our diversity cult may have been responsible for the worst massacre on a U.S. military base in memory.
“It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy,” said President Obama.115 But why? To John Derbyshire, the rationale was clear.
[I do not] find Hasan’s logic twisted or hard to comprehend. His loyalty was to Islam; he believed America to be making war on Islam; therefore his loyalty commanded him to kill Americans. Seems perfectly logical to me—a darn sight more logical than the Army continuing to promote him long after they knew what was in his head.116
Major Hasan’s massacre should rivet our attention on the issue of dual loyalties in the hearts of men in a country wedded to the idea that the greater our religious, racial, and ethnic diversity, the more moral a people we become.
What Hasan saw as a higher loyalty to Islam moved him to murder fellow soldiers. What Alger Hiss saw as a higher loyalty to his political faith, Communism, moved him to transfer America’s secrets to Soviet agents in Stalin’s time. What Jonathan Pollard saw as his sacred identity as a Jew moved him to betray his oath, loot America’s vital secrets, and transfer them to an Israeli agent.
Homegrown Americans have been responsible for the massacres of fellow Americans from Oklahoma City to Columbine to Tucson, where six were killed and thirteen wounded, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. But unassimilated immigrants have also been responsible for mass murder.
The 1993 Long Island railroad massacre where six died and nineteen were wounded was the work of Jamaican Colin Ferguson, who hated whites. The Virginia Tech slaughter where thirty-two died and twenty-five were wounded was carried out by a Korean student. The massacre at the Binghamton immigration center in 2009, where thirteen people were shot to death, was the work of Jiverly Wong, a Chinese man from Vietnam. Asked by a fellow worker if he liked the New York Yankees, Wong replied, “No. I don’t like that team. I don’t like America. America sucks.”117
No longer are we one nation and one people. Tens of millions have arrived, and more are coming, whose loyalties remain to the countries they left behind and the faiths they carry in their hearts. And if, in our “Long War” against “Islamofascism,” we are perceived as trampling upon their true nations, faiths, or kinfolk, they will see us, as Hasan came to see us, as the enemy of their sacred identity, the enemy of what they hold most dear.
Years ago, the concept of America as melting pot was rejected by an Establishment that now rhapsodizes about the most multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural country on earth. Yet, such societies contain within the seeds of their own destruction, the ever-present peril of disintegration.
Writes Vlahos:
[M]ultiethnic and multireligious societies have big identity problems. The bigger and more complex they are … the more these cultures are vulnerable to the tug and pull of identities between culture and subculture. This can be a creative and enriching tension. Yet so often it also creates contradictions within and competition over who owns the sacred identity—big identity.118
Major Hasan faced just such contradictions and competition. Forced to choose, he chose his sacred identity. Today, those same contradictions, that same competition of identities grows stronger, as the nation grows ever more diverse—racially, ethnically, religiously, culturally, ideologically, and politically.
Why, then, are we surprised by ethnic espionage, the cursing of our country in U.S. mosques, news that Somali immigrants are going home to fight our Somali allies, Pakistani American boys departing to train in al-Qaeda camps, and illegal immigrants marching under Mexican flags?
Eisenhower’s America was a nation of 160 million with a European-Christian core and culture all its own. We were a people then. And when, in 2050, we have become a stew of 435 million, of every creed, culture, and color, from every country on earth, what will hold us together?
Pressed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos as to the motivation of Major Hasan in killing and wounding forty-two fellow soldiers, Army Chief of Staff General Bernard Casey declined to speculate, but volunteered his deeper concern:
“This terrible event would be an even
greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.”119
8
THE TRIUMPH OF TRIBALISM
Wars between nations have given way to wars within nations.1
—BARACK OBAMA, 2009
Nobel Prize Address
Ethnic … rivalry is as old as sin, and as inextinguishable.2
—SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER, 2008
British Diplomat
Ethnic and racial conflict, it seems evident, will now replace the conflict of ideologies as the explosive issue of our times.3
—ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, 1991
[N]ationalism is not resurgent; it never died. Neither did racism. They are the most powerful movements in the world today.4
—ISAIAH BERLIN, 1991
A 2008 cover article in Foreign Affairs by Jerry Z. Muller, “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism,” argues that the relentless tug of tribal ties of blood and kinship will imperil the unity and survival of all of the multiethnic nations in the twenty-first century.
Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But … it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.5
Muller maintains that the drive of ethnic groups to separate and create nation-states in which their own unique culture, language, and faith are predominant and their own kind rule is among the most powerful drives of man. Remorseless and often irresistible, ethnonationalism caused the world wars and tore apart the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, he argues. And the wisest policy for the United States may be to get out of its way.
The West, Muller contends, has misread and mistaught itself its own history. A familiar and influential narrative of twentieth-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and abandoned it. In the postwar era, Western Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of transnational institutions, culminating in the European Union.6
This is not how it happened, writes Muller:
The creation of ethnonational states across Europe, a consequence of two world wars and ethnic cleansing, was a precondition of stability, unity and peace. With no ethnic rivals inside their national homes, European peoples had what they had fought for, and were now prepared to live in peace with their neighbors.
As a result of this massive process of ethnic unmixing, the ethnonationalist ideal was largely realized: for the most part, each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was made up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality. During the Cold War, the few exceptions to this rule included Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. But these countries’ subsequent fate only demonstrated the ongoing vitality of ethnonationalism.7
Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia were dictatorships, held together by monolithic Communist parties. Had they not been police states, all would have disintegrated long before they did.
Muller holds that what happened in Europe in the twentieth century, the breakup of empires and nations into their ethnic components, is happening in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The will to secede and establish one’s own national home, like the will of a son to leave his father’s house and start his own family, is more powerful than any ideology, be it communism, socialism, fascism—or democracy.
[E]thnonationalism has played a more profound role in modern history than is commonly understood, and the processes that led to the dominance of the ethnonational state and the separation of ethnic groups in Europe are likely to reoccur elsewhere. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.8
The ethnic violence rampant in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa is a reenactment of what Europe went through, a sorting out of tribes.
Muller’s contention that ethnonationalism is embedded in human nature and ethnic homogeneity may be a precondition of liberal democracy and peace echoes Robert Putnam. And if these men are right, the more multiethnic and multiracial we make America, the closer we advance to the bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all. In Pandaemonium, published in 1993, Senator Moynihan noted the remarkable blindness of foreign policy scholars to the power of ethnonationalism in our time:
There are today just eight states on earth which both existed in 1914 and have not had their form of government changed by violence since then. These are the United Kingdom, four present or former members of the Commonwealth, the United States, Sweden and Switzerland. Of the remaining 170 or so contemporary states, some are too recently created to have known much recent turmoil, but for the greater number that have gone, by far the most frequent factor involved has been ethnic conflict.9
“Yet it is possible,” Moynihan marveled, “to have studied international relations through the whole of the twentieth century and hardly to have noticed this.”10 Since Pandaemonium appeared, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, and Switzerland have been torn by racial or religious divisions. And a look back to the last century confirms Muller’s thesis.
THE BALKAN WARS
The twentieth century opened during the longest European war since Napoleon. It was fought in Africa, where the Dutch-speaking Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were fighting to maintain their identity and independence. Not until Lord Kitchener set up his concentration camps for Boer women and children, to deprive Louis Botha’s guerrillas of the support of their people, did the Boers yield in 1902.
Three years later, Norway, which had been detached from Denmark and ceded to Sweden when the Danes chose the wrong side in Napoleon’s wars, broke free. The Norwegians were prepared to fight for independence, as were some Swedes to deny it to them. But statesmanship prevailed and the Norwegians departed to establish their own ethnonational home.
What happened in the Balkans, however, was anything but peaceful.
In the 1820s, the Greeks had broken free of the Ottoman Turks in a war of liberation to establish a nation of, by, and for Greeks alone. Of that struggle, Lord Byron, who perished in it, wrote:
The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.11
By the twentieth century, Serbia, too, had her independence.
But the Balkans, which Bismarck dismissed as “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier,” were a boiling cauldron of ethnic discontent and conflict between The Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires. They were the “powder-keg” of Europe. Indeed, Bismarck had warned that when the Great War came, it would likely come “out of some damn fool thing in the Balkans.”
In 1908, with Emperor Franz Josef in the sixtieth year of his reign, Austria annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina in violation of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. With Russia reeling from her defeat by Japan and the revolution of 1905, Czar Nicholas II did nothing. For Vienna had the backing of the mightiest power in Europe, the Second Reich of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
By 1912, however, under Russian auspices, a Balkan League had been formed that included Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro. Its goal: tear Macedonia away from an Ottoman Empire preoccupied by a war with Italy over what is today Libya.
On October 8, Montenegro declared war and was joined, ten days later, by her allies. With the league marshaling 750,000 soldiers, the Turks were routed on every front. The Bulgarians crushed them in Thrace and drove to the outskirts of Constantinople. Serbs and Montenegrins seized Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. Greeks occupied Thessalonika. Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace, the three European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, had been
lost. On December 3, the Turks agreed to an armistice.
On January 13, 1913, however, after “The Young Turks” effected a coup in Constantinople, war resumed. Again, the Balkan League triumphed. On May 30, 1913, at the London Conference, Albania was declared independent at the insistence of the Great Powers, but Macedonia was divided among the victorious Balkan allies.
The First Balkan War was an ethnonational war of race, tribe, and religion. Christian Slavs had united to expel Muslim Turks from a peninsula whose peoples detested them for their centuries of harsh rule.
In mid-1913, the Second Balkan War erupted over Macedonia. The Bulgarians felt cheated of their fair share and laid claim to Salonika. Greece and Serbia, forced to yield their shares of Albania at the London Conference, formed an alliance. The Second Balkan War lasted from June 16 to July 18.
The Bulgarians were routed, as Romanians and Turks joined Greece and Serbia to strip Sofia of all her gains in the First Balkan War. Bulgaria lost Southern Dobruja to Romania, Eastern Thrace to the Turks. Greece and Serbia divided Macedonia, creating an ethnonational quarrel that endures and bedevils NATO. Athens refuses to recognize Macedonia, except as FYROM, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. To Greeks the name and land of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great belong exclusively to Greece.
SARAJEVO, 1914
After her victories in the First and Second Balkan Wars, Serbia was aflame with nationalism, determined to bring all Serbs into a national home, including those living under Austrian rule in Bosnia-Hercegovina. This was impossible—without a war with the Habsburg Empire. On June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, dispatched from Belgrade by elements in the security services, shot and killed the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife. That act of ethnonational terror eliminated a reformer who had meant to redress the grievances of his Slav subjects when he took the throne of Franz Josef, now in the sixty-sixth year of his reign. Ferdinand had intended to grant the Slavs autonomy and equality with Austrians and Hungarians. His assassination succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the secret Black Hand society plotters in Belgrade.
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