Culturist Policies are Needed to Keep England Alive and Well

Today the British Department of Health announced that it would loosen hygiene rules for Muslim and Sikh doctors and nurses. From now on Muslim female staff will not need to wash their hands before procedures as it compromises their modesty. Instead they will have the admittedly less sanitary option of wearing disposable plastic over-sleeves.

Acknowledging the danger of microbes and death, a Department of Health spokesman said, "The guidance is intended to . . . balance infection control measures with cultural beliefs." But, believe it or not, from a culturist perspective, the death of some patients is not the main cause for concern that this policy elicits.

The most dangerous problem is that this policy encodes multiculturalism not culturism. Whereas culturism acknowledges that England has a majority culture to protect and promote, this multiculturalist policy implicitly says that England has no core culture. It says that the nation can be whatever pressure groups decide it is. It, therefore, officially ends the dominance of English culture in England. This is very dangerous.

If you think this hyperbole, consider its potential impact on schools. If we are going to implement policies that recognize and give legal standing to balkanize our culture, we must think it through. This legal precedent may require us to set up schools in which Islamic teachings are taught. If that seems extreme, keep in mind that multiculturalism has currently made it nearly a firing offense to criticize Islam in our schools.

When we encode multiculturalist school policy, we have a recursive loop of disaster. When we cannot criticize Islam, we cannot teach that much of western history has been about fighting Islam. We must erase the concept that our defending Europe against Islamic invasion was a boon for the West that led the way to the Enlightenment and, ultimately, our political freedoms. And when our school children are taught not to value our western culture, they will not feel any sense of pride, have reasons for the civic virtues that make England strong, or a desire to protect their homeland.

Islam has been at war with the West nearly continuously since its inception. Wherever it takes over it imposes a ruthless theocracy that smothers the freedoms we hold dear. We cannot protect the West with policies that say Islam is just as great and English as Christianity and rights. Culture is not metaphysical. It exists in space and people. Everywhere Islam has legal standing and is practiced is a space where English culture does not exist and is not practiced. It means the territory defending western values has shrunk and that believing in Islamic values has grown. The hospitals are now becoming Islamic.

England has a culture. To survive England must set up culturist policy that affirms that this is English land with western practices. We must tell people that our schools will teach the glories of the European defense against Islam and the contribution philosophers such as John Locke made to creating the western concept of rights. Our streets must not become areas where women must conform to Muslim customs. Just as Saudi Arabia has an Islamic culture and protects it, England has a culture and a right to protect it. To survive, England must enact culturist policies, not multiculturalist policies.

www.culturism.us

Conservatism is the New Progressivism

The first chapter of Mr. Ted Honderich’s 2005 book Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? floats several meanings of the term ‘conservatism.’ He proposes each tentatively and then shoots them down. Charmingly conveying his argument in the form of an honest inquiry, Honderich problematizes the concept of conservatism in order that we might become surer of its meaning. This article will use the same method to clarify culturism’s position within the conservative world. And, in doing so it will show that Honderich fails to note convervatism’s being oriented towards the future.

In his very thoughtful inquiry Honderich questions what the mission to conserve traditions implied in the word conservatism entails. One problem concerns how far back the proposed time period conservation seeks to maintain lays. Does conservativism require we reinstall the West’s old distinction between nobles and commoners? Then again, after how long does a feature become a tradition? Fifty years after the implementation of Obama’s health care legislation will it become a tradition conservatives will seek to preserve? Honderich casts about for a method of distinguishing the nature of values beyond their age.

Honderich’s inquiry reviews Edmund Burke’s foundational book Reflections on the Revolution in France. Written while the French revolution was underway, Burke contrasted change and reform. In the age of Obama, it was refreshing to remember Burke’s attack on change. The agenda of change, in Burke’s usage, sweeps away too much of the past in the name of the new, whereas reform conserves much of the past as it improves society. As Burke predicted the French Revolution became a nightmare because it tore up all of the relationships that helped stabilize society.

But the author then honestly interrogates Burke’s concept of reform. He asks if some self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives’ efforts to get rid of government programs constitute change? Casting out programs such as welfare would mean a radical disjunction with present policies. Both Reagan and Thatcher brought on great changes. And, if this, again, constitutes a return to the 1900s, do we not want to acknowledge some progress, some change that has happened since then that is worth adopting? Thus Honderich finds the facile definition of conservative as one who wants to conserve traditions to be inadequate. The culturist answer to his problem would come from noting the future orientation of our past.

The West, ironically, has a long- standing, even ancient, tradition of being progressive. That is our past has traditionally aimed at creating a better tomorrow. Our very history shows a struggle towards ever more progressive values. We have struggled against the odds to reignite Athens’s view that men can self-govern. The West has vindicated the right of men to dissent. We have embraced the goal of women’s rights and the separation of church and state. To support our civilization, to guard it by conserving its cultural and economic foundations, is to protect progressivism in the world. It is to conserve the past in the name of passing “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Being appreciative and protective of our progressive culture requires that we once again adopt the traditional Western civilization narrative wherein America stands as a light unto nations. We must look back with pride upon our progressive history. Conservatives have not fought the textbook wars in order to bring us back to a repressive golden age. They have done so to sustain the only progressive civilization on earth. In a world full of Jihadis, preserving America means preserving progressive values such as the separation of church and state. In a world where China is ascendant, protecting America means allowing freedom in a non-racist state that believes in freedom of speech and individual rights to survive.

Those who recognize that liberty is always under attack know that conservatism is the new progressivism. Multiculturalists look upon the Old World and tradition worshipping cultures with rose-colored glasses. They dream of a world where tradition locks men into their station within a stagnant community. But, worshipping the past blindly, looking with favor on nations that are not increasingly exulting the capacities of individuals, falls outside of our traditions. Western culturists affirm western culture. And they seek to distinguish liberty from license as the Greeks, Romans, Puritans, and Founding Fathers did. But that celebration of the heroic duty-bound past gets embraced with a view to securing our liberties. The West likes the new and improved. We locate our hopes in the future.

www.culturism.us

Rally for Nigerian Christians in NYC – April 7th, 2010

On March 8^th, Muslims in Nigeria killed 500 Christians near the city of Jos and no arrests were made. On April 7^th, approximately 50 of us gathered in NYC to pressure President Obama to bring attention to the worldwide attacks on Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Infidels by Muslims in general, and the attacks in Nigeria in particular.

Bill Donahue of the Catholic League explained that the killings in Nigeria started when a woman walked past a mosque on a Friday when men were praying. The North of Nigeria is ruled by Muslims. The South has a largely Christian population. Jos, where the attacks happened, lays in the middle. The woman’s crime was the trigger, but JIhadi’s desire for Islamic dominance was the fuel.

A Nigerian woman from Jos at the demonstration privately validated this story to me. She said that the Muslims came in the area and were welcomed as they seemed to be just another group. After their numbers were significant the bullying of the Christian population began. She herself had been beaten for crossing the path of prayers. She wouldn’t speak to the crowd because the Muslims in would kill her family back in Nigeria. In the program, the Nigerian Reverend John Okur Okan noted that Catholics do not kill those who disrupt their prayers.

The most obvious characteristic of this gathering was its international make up. The first speaker I saw was Narain Kataria of the Indian American Intellectuals Forum. He told of being hounded out of his part of India when it became Pakistan. Ashraf Ramdah told how the Copts in Egypt were given the choice of paying special taxes, converting or dying. He warned that if we were not rich, we would be in big trouble. A white woman told of how post-911 the Jihad has been infiltrating America. The variety pointed to the fact that the Nigerians were not engaged in an isolated case of sectarian clashes, but part of a 1400 year long jihad against infidels of all stripes.

The crowd’s two chants were “Help Them Now” and “Stop Sharia, Stop it now.” The rally took place in front of the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations. The idea being to get the U.N. to spend as much attention on Nigeria as it does on Israel. Another hope was that Obama would pressure the Nigerian President to prosecute just one person involved with the massacre and provide protection to Nigeria’s Christians. The crowd wanted America to wake up. That would require that we recognize the global nature of Jihad that this rally represented so well. That would require that we all shine the spot light on massacres such as the one that claimed 500 lives in Jos Nigeria.

www.culturism.us

An NYC Anti-Israeli Protest's Culturist Lessons

There was a dinner to support the Israeli Defense Forces at the Waldorf Astoria. Many people showed to protest it. We counter protested their protest!!!

The Armenian Genocide and Culturism

President Obama's refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide and his willingness to apologize to Muslim nations for our transgressions shows his poor grasp of culturist realities.

Armenian Genocide and Obama's lack of Culturist Sensibilities

This week the House of Representatives debated a resolution that would have given official recognition to the attempted genocide of Armenians at the hands of Turks. Speaking through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration said it “strongly opposes” the designation of the massacres as genocide. Obama’s strong opposition tells us a lot about truth claims and Obama’s lack of culturist sensibilities.

President Obama says he does not want to offend Turkey. The fact that he does not care if he offends Armenia lays implicit in this declaration. Thus President Obama is bending truth to accommodate raw power relations. As such he could be said to be making policy based on an objective analysis of the situation.

Unfortunately, the world is made of subjective interpretations. As the controversy suggests, everyone has a side in this debate and the outcomes have political implications. President Obama admitted as much when he went to Egypt and Turkey and apologized for alleged western crimes in the Islamic world.

Being generous, we could accept that President Obama’s hopes lie in mutual revelation of sins leading to forgiveness and international understanding; open dialogue from this view could lead to the end of nations taking sides. However, his unwillingness to discuss Islamic sins and eagerness to discuss western ones, shows an imbalance in this generous narrative. Unfortunately, it shows a willingness to completely buy into the Muslim narrative.

Whether you denounce the American bases in Iraq or Islamic attacks upon India, we can agree that the non-Islamic world and the Islamic world are in competition. When we take a “human rights” perspective and deny sides exist, we end up pouring money into enemy nations, such as Afghanistan, in the name of nation building and supporting Islamic nations, such as Kosovo, in the western sphere. We end up taking the Turk’s side as easily as we take the Armenian’s side.

In foreign policy we should side with our friends and understand that some folks are our foes. Armenia, as a Christian nation, falls within the sphere of western related powers. We should back them. In terms of narrative, it would run against our values to never admit wrong. However, to only admit to our faults and deny Islamic nations’ crimes, feeds into a narrative whereby attacking us is justified and adopting our values is corrupt.

A culturist approach assumes that sides and competition exist. It also recognizes narrative’s great impact on public and international opinion, and the geo-political implications such narratives have. As such a culturist approach would have us singing our virtues overseas and condemning the Armenian genocide in the strongest terms possible.

Geert Wilders Culturist Superhero !

French Make Close Culturist Call on Trains!

French officials put out a warning that Romanians have been stealing bags on trains. Calling it 'racist,' in the apology the French train service said it strives to not make any "distinction based on "origin, social class, or nationality." This event raises some serious culturist issues.

Here a very few are sullying the reputations of many. Romanians may be stealing more than others. If true, do you want to announce this fact? Whenever you make generalizations, you impugn the reputations of some innocent folks. And here the percentage of Romanian thieves may be very small. And, getting your luggage stolen is not a life and death situation. So do you sully the reputation of Romanians for the sake of safe luggage? That is a judgment call.

Whereas there should be a discussion, the French officials are putting out a blanket statement against any and all distinctions. But could "origin," or "nationality" not tell you something about a group's behavior? For example we Americans think it is racist that Latinos drop out of high school at a higher level. Could culture not have something to do with it? Could Latino culture, not American racism, be at fault? When we make a virtue of being blind to all distinctions, as the French have here, we lose the ability to discuss such important issues.

We all distinguish based on origin and nationality. This is rarely racism. It is often culturism. We can statistically determine if Romanians steal disproportionately. If they do and we publicize it, that would be useful information to citizens. It could inform immigration laws and policing measures. On top of that, it would give Romanians cause to discuss morality with their fellows. They could work to mend their reputation by reforming their behavior. Then they could point out improving statistics yearly. Crying racism and intimidating folks who discuss it does no good for them or society.

Since the official who made the offending signs did not do much research, Romanians may be being unfairly blamed. And since being careful of all when traveling likely does just as much good as just looking for Romanians, I think the signs unjustified. But, it is pathological, in the name of fighting racism, to embrace cultural blindness. Sometimes, as in young Muslim men getting on planes, this can be deadly. In such a case we must use culturist profiling. To do so we must be able to distinguish between irrational racism and rational culturism. Our lives and civilization can hang in the balance.

Ron Paul, Pamela Geller, and Culturism at CPAC

At CPAC three positions on Islam were apparent. One was represented by Pamela Geller’s “Freedom Defense Initiative” conference. The second came from the Ron Paul followers. And the third appeared in the conference’s otherwise deafening silence on Islam. Culturism has a lot to say about all three positions.

Ron Paul’s followers believe that Islamic terrorist attacks result from our overbearing presence in the Middle East. Therefore, they recommend pulling our troops out of that region. As a culturist, I agree that we should not be nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a culturist I believe the project of turning these nations into progressive democracies with respect for individual rights will fail because their cultures will not support such changes. And I agree with Ron Paul’s argument for disengagement based on our inability to afford these nation-building enterprises. Western culturists know that if the West is not solvent our values will die globally.

But none of Paul’s followers could explain why the Jihad in Thailand and India exist. Neither nation has military bases outside of their own borders. As multiculturalists do, the followers of Paul fail to appreciate that diversity is real and important. Diversity is not just about food, festivals, and fashion. Some cultures drop out of school early and think teen pregnancy is not so bad. Other cultures think our way of life is a blasphemous affront to God. Diversity is real and important. Overlooking the cultural aspects of Jihad will not safeguard us.

Geller’s event explained domestic Jihad initiatives. Whereas Paul could not believe that an aggressive Islam for Islam’s sake exists, Geller’s speakers clearly showed that it can and does exist. As a culturist, I agreed with their domestic solution. We need culturist profiling at airports. We need to limit Islamic immigration. That is not, by the way, racist - it is culturist. And, we need to recognize that western cultural practices and laws are the norm and standard in western nations. We should not recognize Sharia courts or allow, for example, veils in photo Identification. Unlike multiculturalists, culturists recognize that the West has a culture to protect and promote. Domestically Geller’s group was very culturist.

Culturism and Geller diverge on foreign policy. Culturism believes in national cultural sovereignty. Allen West said we should seek to defeat Islam, not Muslims. I am unclear how the two are to be separated. Quoting Ronald Reagan, he said victory means “we win, they lose.” That statement holds too little nuance for me. We all agree on bombing Iran’s nuclear sites and being aggressive in regions of Afghanistan that harbor terrorist. But culturists do not believe we will convert Islamic nations by the sword. If we want the sovereignty to pursue culturist policies domestically, we must also grant that right to other nations. We are not the world. We are the West. The idea that we will convert Islam nations by the sword is, as Ron Paul says, a dangerous proposition we cannot afford.

At CPAC the third position on Islam, and the largest, was overwhelming silence. Outside of Ron Paul’s “Why real conservatives don’t support the war on terror” meeting and Geller’s event, few deemed Islam worth discussing. Ron Paul at least wants to debate our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Geller schooled the conference on domestic threats. We conservatives, as Americans and as Westerners, need to accept culturist position that our culture is not that of the world. Diversity exists internationally. Furthermore, we must shake off the multicultural position that the West has no core culture to protect. Geller and Paul have done us a great service in making conservatives think about the West’s relationship to Islam.

Jonah Goldberg Attacked!

George Mason University’s History News Network (HNN) (http://www.hnn.us/articles/122469.html) had a special issue in which they responded to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism . This book claims that the left, and not as often assumed, the right, is the ideological predecessor to fascism. And while one respondent added to the website after the special issue dedicated to Liberal Fascism credits the book with some merit; all the writers included in the original HNN special issue were all from the Left and against Goldberg. Their style and bias, ironically, proves that the fascist tendencies in the Left are alive and well.

There is some debate of facts herein. The editor of the special, David Neiwert, does admit that the fascists called themselves “socialists” (hence ‘National Socialism’). But asserts that they quickly shifted to the right. There they attacked the Left and labor unions. Goldberg points out that they attacked the communists to wipe out their competition on the left and that if getting rid of unions I not “leftists , then Lenin, Stalin, Mao, were not leftists either.” Goldberg has been invited to refute the panel with an article. But Neiwert is the only person that even pretends to take Goldberg’s arguments seriously.

Several of the contributors to this issue use collusion between big business and government as proof that the fascists were of the right and not the left. They do not even air Goldberg’s argument that the left’s business regulation ties corporations to the State and strengthens them by making competing start-ups prohibitively expensive. Goldberg makes the case that big business, in fact, prefers collusion with the government to Laissez Faire policies. Indeed, FDR’s desire to meld the State and industry, the visual style of FDR’s ‘Blue Eagle” campaign, his packing of the Supreme Court, and ignoring of the tradition of two Presidential term limits, make Goldberg’s case of government regulation and fascist trappings feasible.

The second essayist, Robert Paxton says that “Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron . . . a fascism that means no harm is a contradiction in terms.” Goldberg provides great evidence to counter these claims. As left-leaning scholars like Matthew Frye Jacobson who never tire of reminding us of our imperialist moment will tell you, Teddy Roosevelt largely wanted War with Spain to strengthen the virility of our nation. Woodrow Wilson created a 250,000 person citizens’ army to spy on dissenters during World War One and outlawed free speech with his sedition laws. The violence of the 1960s Left can be ignored in these neo-hippies rewriting of history, but the Weatherman and current academic Bill Ayers helped launch our left-leaning Presidents run for office. Violence and the American Left are not incompatible.

Roger Griffin, in his HNN essay “An Academic Book - Not,” calls Goldberg’s work “an airbrushed Playboy variant of racist political pornography.” And, he says that “neo-Conservatives and Republican fundamentalists” have an “obsession with restoring Aryan purity and white supremacy.” This obscene diatribe of guilt by association proves one of Goldberg’s main contentions; the left slanders others as fascist at the drop of a hat. Mirroring the group-thing rife in HNN’s collection, Griffin says Liberal Fascism has the “anti-intellectual tenor of Bushite politics” and mentions that he has “no academic credentials.” Then he accuses Goldberg of bias for being anti-Democratic and anti-Clinton. Griffin notes that Goldberg claimed that Stalin and the left loved to call all that disagreed with them “fascist.” Then he immediately uses t-shirts apparently worn by a white supremacist musical group to again call the right “fascist.” We wonder if Griffin has ever heard of the concept of irony.

My doctoral dissertation focused on Frances Kellor, the Progressive head of the Americanization movement that greeted immigrants from 1906 to 1921. I contend that her life’s work specifically attempted to deal with the worry her fellow New Nationalist intellectuals, like Herbert Croly, had about the growth of the State undermining democracy and inaugurating a rule by centralized power. Croly called for a strong populist leader to embody the spirit of the nation and labeled his friend Theodore Roosevelt as the best living example. Randolph Bourne, a famous progressive intellectual, very famously worried that most Progressives like John Dewey thought World War I a great opportunity to centralize power.

Every one of these HNN historians know that mainstream intellectual historians like James Kloppenberg and Kevin Mattson peg the clash between rule by Progressive statist elites and democracy as the central question of the Progressive era. These historians know that Goldberg’s work fits right in with such interpretations and Liberal Fascism discusses Croly’s New Nationalism at length. The next to last author, Matthew Feldman, accuses Goldberg of being “selective of facts.” There is a strain of disingenuous propaganda within each of these HNN writers. Every serious historian knows that facts do not piece themselves together to make objective books. Historians use evidence to make arguments. But these academics, instead, feign outrage that there could be any interpretation that conflates fascist leanings and progressive thought.

The final article, by Chip Berlet, notes that Tea-Party Patriots believe “liberals are pushing America onto a slippery slope towards tyranny that begins with government social planning.” This is presented as total paranoia that no intellectual could stomach. Instead, in the final article, Berlet warns that we see “ultra-right and neofascist ideologues in the U.S. trying to organize the right-wing populist movement towards aggression and violence.” In the next and last paragraph he says we must fight such “demonization and scapegoating.” In explaining that fascism and liberalism have the same roots, Goldberg mostly looks at history. Ironically and characteristically, rather than engaging the argument and admitting some historical truth exists in Goldberg’s argument, this HNN collection ends by slandering its political opponents.