To illustrate an example of the intellectual and moral health of a mind free of politically correct multiculturalism (PC MC), one cannot do better than a famous quote by Sir Charles Napier.
The quote is ensconced in an age when PC MC was not dominant and mainstream, as it is now throughout the West. Sir Charles Napier (1782-1853), a British general and administrator of colonial India, wrote of his Western confrontation with the regressive cultural practice of Hindu widow-burning:
You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.
There is in this sentiment by Napier a formulation of cultural superiority ingeniously framed in an apparent cultural relativism. In fact, what guides Napier’s sentiment are two sage principles: one is the unsentimental realism that other cultures, which in varying degrees contravene the morals of our culture, exist, will continue to exist indefinitely on this imperfect earth, and will not vanish under the progressive influence of Western messianism; the other is that we Westerners should follow, support and if need be, enforce the morals of our own culture, particularly when our culture encounters a situation where it clashes with the morals of another culture.
Only between the lines of Napier’s sentiment can one detect the sense of awareness of Western superiority—in this specific case, that the Western abhorrence of widow-burning is born of a culture superior to the culture that promotes widow-burning.
This awareness, of the superiority of Western culture, in Napier’s time was probably still sufficiently self-evident that it required no anxious apologetic—as it would in our own era diseased as it has become with the mainstream dominance of PC MC. Granted, Napier flourished in the hectic sociopolitical climate of Revolutionary Europe—the Revolutions being, of course, the American and French ones and the more amorphous spirit of political Revolution that imbued the century following and that would wrack the century after that with major convulsions in the Russian Revolution and the rise of various movements of Fascism. Napier’s epoch of the course of the 19th century marks the beginning of the breakdown of cultural health in the West, and the consequent beginning of the slow rise to mainstream dominance of PC MC. This long slow process, however, would take another century to begin to fully establish itself sociopolitically after the middle of the 20th century; and so a major, influential and laureate official like Napier could be so unabashed in his assertion of Western superiority, he need not have felt obliged to explicitly advert to it, for it was regnantly assumed.
In our time, we find ourselves increasingly confronted with a global revival of Islam, with tentacles and talons reaching deep into the West, showing no signs of abating, only of further insinuation and invasion. Along with this unprecedented external challenge to our culture, we—or at least a few of us—find ourselves crippled internally by a most peculiar intellectual pathology, PC MC, which deals with the anti-liberal and violently inimical global revival of Islam in a most perverse manner: out of a morbidly excessive self-criticism of our own culture and out of an irrational romanticization of the non-Western Noble Savage, our culture in myriad ways bends over backwards to accomodate the most hostile and anti-Western culture in all history: Islam.
Were the various regions of Western culture (the Americas, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and New Zealand) to apply the rule of Napier to the Muslims among us whenever and wheresoever they contravened the letter and spirit of our laws (with, naturally, swift and pertinent punishment for any resistance to our application of said rule) it would perforce bring the whole issue to a most salutary boil—for as in medicine so in the health of the Body Politic, the boil’s best cure is through coaxing inflammation, suppuration, and finally lancing: Either Muslims, finding themselves in the midst of a culture increasingly hostile to their ways, would leave the West en masse, or they would rebel and increasingly attack us. In the latter case, to the extent that we were cured of the disease of PC MC, we would deftly and in a timely manner rouse ourselves to the more radical measures of temporary internment followed by total deportation, all unfolding in an ongoing context of ruthless self-defense as rationally necessary.
Caveat lector: Alas, I see no reason to believe our future will proceed in the fairly rational manner described above. More likely, our eventually successful defense of our culture against Islam will have to navigate perilously rocky waters in a half-blind stumble, resulting in tragic and unnecessary losses to our lives and materiel before we manage to shake off our collective disease of PC MC sufficiently.
Incidentally, reading even a brief summary of Sir Napier’s politico-military career is like taking a crash course in the history of Revolutionary Europe, of which I will only sketch here the barest of bones: in 1794, at the age of 14, he began military service against Irish rebels in England; he fought against the new nation of the U.S.A. in the famous War of 1812; after Napoleon escaped from Elba, he joined forces to definitively mop up the Napoleonic aftermath of the French Revolution; he supported the Greek revolution along with his friend the poet Byron and in the 1820s served as administrator of Cephalonia, one of the Ionian islands in the Greek orbit; and, of course, from the 1840s, he spent the rest of his career in northern India in both a military and political capacity, often in terms of the British Empire’s persistent conflicts with regional Muslim rulers—which, by the time British colonialism was winding down after the Second World War a century after Napier’s death, became increasingly compromised by policies showing signs of the deepening rot of PC MC, policies ignorant of the unique menace of Islam, policies which still cripple us today.
4 comments:
One more very major difference between Napier's situation and that of today's law enforcers: Napier was implementing British norms in India. He wasn't faced with a situation where Hindus were wanting to export the practice of widow burning to London, Manchester or any other places in the British empire. Yet, he boldly went ahead and cracked down on the practice. (Not to detract from his efforts, but he was aided by a reform movement within Hinduism that sought to abolish the practice: contrast that with Muslim resistance to any proposals to reform their practices, be it polygamy, stoning, amputations, et al)
Anyway, contrast the boldness with which Napier overruled Hindu practices within India with that of today's law enforcers who are shy about having Western norms overrule Islamic ones in the West itself. Note that unlike Napier, who was busy preventing widow burning in India itself, none of the non-PC characters are talking about abolishing stoning or amputations in Pakistan or Iran or Saudi Arabia: they're talking about restricting the scope to the West, and doing what they can to ensure that such norms don't become the norm in the West. And in that, they are opposed by the PC types.
Ironically, the practice of widow cremations was rare in pre-Islamic India, when Hindus wrote all the rules (even though one concedes that the lot of Hindu widows was nothing worth writing home about). It's amazing what Hindus had to do in order to prevent their defeated survivers from becoming like the janissaries in the Ottoman empire, such as the practice of jauhar, where the women and children of entire cities would self-immolate before a city was about to come under Mohammedan control, so that children didn't become janissaries and women didn't become breeding tilths for more Mohammedans. Note that practices such as jauhar were unheard of in pre-Islamic India, since Hindus generally followed a code of conduct that not only spared, but generally respected the civilians of conquered cities (not to mention the fact that they usually shared the same value systems as those of the conquered).
nobody,
I know that widow-burning probably developed as a tragic response to Islamic invasions and rape and/or kidnapping of Hindu men's wives; however, it seemed to have become woven into the cultural mores of many Hindus.
Your other point is well taken, and points to the extent of the PC MC disease in our time -- namely, that even when the West is confronted with anti-Western cultural practices of Islam in the West itself, Westerners are for the most part refusing to condemn them and instead bending over backwards (or forwards) to accomodate them. However, the difference is not quite so stark I think as you make it out to be, insofar as India was considered by the English to be at that time part of the British Empire, and socialization of India was applied not so much in order to "help" a Third World country (as we frame it in our time today) but in order to civilize and Westernize as much as feasible a region for the purposes of Westerners living there and taking over there. This, of course, is the "shameful" aspect that nearly everyone in the West today decries -- namely, Western Colonialism. However, two things must be borne in mind about this:
1) Nearly all peoples of the earth have expanded, colonized, and stolen land over the course of human history (and those that haven't were simply too weak and too unprosperous to do so)
2) In the total history of colonialism, Western Colonialism has been the most beneficent and respectful of other cultures -- one facet of this among many others is the amazingly multifarious and massive industry of studying other cultures with care and curiosity, in the disciplines of archeology, anthropology, cultural history, research into languages -- the very opposite attitude from the Islamic one that relegates the Other's culture to "jahiliyya".
And, of course, were there bouts of cultural "expression" (whether widow-burnings or honor killings, etc.) within Great Britain proper in Napier's time, it is certain that it would have been met with swift punishment and prevailing condemnation from nearly every quarter -- save perhaps for the then rather tiny minority of nascently Leftist flakes, examples of which can be gleaned from reading some of the great Philosophes of the French Enlightenment; e.g., Rousseau.
The difference between then and now is that the vast majority today think like Rousseau when it comes to depreciating our own culture while coddling non-Western cultures, while back then it was a very small minority.
Erich: However, the difference is not quite so stark I think as you make it out to be, insofar as India was considered by the English to be at that time part of the British Empire
At the time Napier did what he did (he died in 1853), it wasn't. The East India Company, which was a British commercial enterprise, was the one that was responsible for the various conquests in India pre 1857 (the year of the Indian Mutiny). They originally came to India to trade, but since they were in competition with other European powers - initially the Portugese, and later the Dutch and the French, conquering various allies of their rivals - both Mohammedan and Hindu - became part of their 'commercial' operations. In a lot of kingdoms, they left behind a trail of bad blood, which contributed to the Indian mutiny in 1857.
It wasn't until that war that the British crown intervened on behalf of the Brits there, and after the various Indian powers were defeated, the East India Company was abolished, and Queen Victoria was proclaimed 'Empress of India'. It was only then that India started formally being recognized as British territory.
I laud Napier for what he did, but by their own definitions, the territory in which they were implementing British norms weren't then recognized as part of the British crown. But when their sensibilities were offended, they acted on them, regardless of whether it fell within or beyond their coverage of influence.
On your other points, I agree with you that all people in history have conquered lands, and did various things to the conquered people - from simply marrying them to killing them.
You are also right that Western culture has been the most respectful of other conquered cultures. However, in the context of Mohammedan complaints, one needn't go even that far. Even the bloodthirsty Mongols of Chengiz and Hulegu Khan, for all their ferocity, allowed full religious freedom in all the lands that they conquered: if they didn't, Tengri would have been the religion from Moscow to Delhi, and from Karakorum to Aleppo. And at the time Mohammed was busy raping Arabia, Indian royal families had different family members practicing different religions, such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism. That's why the example of Indonesia being brought up as a case where Islam 'peacefully' took over riles me: when the East Indies had Hindu rulers, their subjects were Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians,... there was never the requirement or the expectation that all the subjects be Hindu. But once the rulers embraced Islam, they started forcing it on their subjects. Peaceful, my ass!
nobody, thanks for the historical info on British involvement in India. However, I still have residual problems with the argument you make based on the apparently clear-cut division of pre-1857 and post-1857 India. I base this doubt on the facts & nature of Napier's career, juxtaposed with his quote that forms the crux of my essay here.
Napier wasn't just a soldier -- he spent years in political administration, apparently distinguishing himself with excellence, in Greece before relocating in India. Therefore, it seems unlikely that his understanding of the legality of his statement (in the famous quote) would be exaggerated for rhetoric, or would be inaccurate due to his ignorance of the true relationship between British people in India at the time, and India itself.
His famous quote rather clearly connotes a certain degree of definite politico-legal control over Indians -- a degree of control that does not quite seem to fit a mere business company setting up shop in a foreign land. So I think there might be a sociopolitical complexity to the history of British in India that your simple formula of pre-1857 and post-1857 India might not adequately convey. I'd have to research further into this issue to verify my tentative logical conclusion here.
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