10/29/2002
Americans have a wide choice of worries to worry about. We can worry about terrorists, war in the Middle East, snipers, job security, teen shooting sprees, the stock market, political leadership, badly educated kids, political correctness, civil liberties, disease carrying mosquitoes, environmental degradation, sexually active preteens, sexism, racism, reverse discrimination, lawsuits. Just name it. Probably it is a recognized worry.
The above are worries we know about. Graver worries remain unknown to the vast majority. Authors write books to inform us so that we are not taken unawares. In a current national bestseller, Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips warns against machinations of interest groups and the rich that produce unacceptably large disparities of income and wealth from which, Phillips promises, untoward consequences will follow.
Blaming the rich was a New Deal technique. Paul Gottfried finds a new and original worry: The U.S. government has transmogrified from an accountable government into an intrusive therapeutic administrative state with many Orwellian overtones.
Gottfried’s new book, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, is a speculative work. It posits the advent of a secular theocracy preoccupied with controlling thought and expression and with modifying social behavior in order to ameliorate injustices inflicted on victims (Third World peoples, women, homosexuals and the disabled) by victimizers (white Christian men).
Gottfried’s book is chilling, because the author is a learned and well-read scholar who is on top of political, legal, and ideological developments in the U.S. and Europe. The well documented and referenced analysis that Gottfried provides conveys a comprehensive understanding of the intellectual atmosphere now regnant in the West and why this intellectual outlook is dangerous to liberty.
Just as in Oceania in Orwell’s 1984, Western Europe has enacted laws against "crimes of opinion." Gottfried reports that every year many German journalists and scholars are tried by the government in courts for "inciting the public." This charge is subjective and includes expressing unprogressive and insensitive opinions. Gottfried says that more Germans are languishing in prison for this Orwellian infraction than were in East German prisons before the fall of communism.
To propose immigration restrictions is evidence of xenophobia, which is in the process of being criminalized in the European Union. As well, it is prohibited to question details of the Holocaust and to deprecate Islam.
Recently, when Austrian politician Jorg Haider rallied Austrians to control immigration, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia quickly set up in Vienna to report on Haider’s "assault on democracy." Austria was boycotted by the European Union until Haider resigned.
In the name of protecting racial minorities, the British government has clamped controls on speech and behavior of the native-born population. Political elites in the U.K. consider the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights less important than compelling Britons to acquiesce to the presence and ways of Third World immigrants.
In the United States, environments, behaviors, and expressions deemed to be offensive to racial minorities, feminists and homosexuals are repressed by law or administrative action. Public officials and school teachers have been fired or disciplined for using the word, "niggardly," because poorly educated and over-sensitized blacks mistook this fine old English word for a racial slur. A recent court case in Idaho treated a verbal assault against a "protected minority" more seriously than it treated that minority’s physical assault against a white woman.
Gottfried believes that a Protestant sense of guilt is blameworthy in creating public pliancy with government policies that disadvantage whites and diminish liberties in order to make restitution to "oppressed minorities." He describes "the fusion of a victim-centered feminism with the Protestant framework of sin and redemption."
Gottfried believes that the intrusive therapeutic administrative state has already begun the process of breaking down the inherited identities of Germans, British, French and Americans in order to reconstruct society as a multicultural heaven-on-earth where prejudice is forbidden.
Mass immigration from the Third World is a useful instrument of change employed by the therapeutic administrative state to deconstruct the character and history of a majority population. Throughout the once confident West, a political situation has been created in which only native-born whites — victimizers — can be legally discriminated against.
Gottfried believes that the days are gone when democracy meant self-rule. Today democracy means "regime change" — in the sense of government reconstructing our values and identities in order to achieve a culture of inclusiveness and diversity regardless of the desires of the majority population.
This agenda gives government powers that consign freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of association, the Constitution, the English Bill of Rights, national sovereignty, and facts themselves to the trash can of history.
Paul Craig Roberts is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
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