Diversity's Oppression and impact on Iraq

[Darth Rotor]

Thomas Sowell tends to recycle the same tired stuff over and over, but I found his most recent piece in the Wall Street Journal of interest. "Diversity's Oppression." . Diversity has been a fact of American, and global life for quite some time, but for some reason, during the Clinton years it was advertised as a national strength, rather than as a characteristic with its ups and downs, its strengths and weaknesses. To cut to the chase, Sowell points to "diversity" as being a root cause of the current problem in Iraq, an odd twist on his usual themes.

What is it that has made Iraq so hard to pacify, even after a swift and decisive military victory? In one word: diversity.

That word has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce.

Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.

Despite much gushing about how we should "celebrate diversity," America's great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.

Another concept whose bitter falsity has been painfully revealed in Iraq is "nation-building." People are not building blocks, however much some may flatter themselves that they can arrange their fellow human beings' lives the way you can arrange pieces on a chess board.

The biggest and most fatuous example of nation-building occurred right after World War I, when the allied victors dismembered the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Woodrow Wilson assigned a young Walter Lippman to sit down with maps and population statistics and start drawing lines that would define new nations.

Iraq is one of those new nations. Like other artificial creations in the Balkans, Africa and elsewhere, it has never had the cohesion of nations that evolved over the centuries out of the experiences of peoples who worked out their own modi vivendi in one way or another.

Tito's dictatorship held Yugoslavia together, as other dictatorships held together other peoples forced into becoming a nation by the decisions of outsiders who drew their boundaries on maps and in some cases -- Nigeria, for example -- even gave them their national name.

Even before 9/11, there were some neoconservatives who talked about our achieving "national greatness" by creating democratic nations in various parts of the world.

How much influence their ideas have had on the actual course of events is probably something that will not be known in our generation. But we can at least hope that the Iraq tragedy will chasten the hubris behind notions of "nation-building" and chasten also the pious dogmatism of those who hype "diversity" at every turn, in utter disregard of its actual consequences at home or abroad. Free societies have prerequisites, and history has not given all peoples those prerequisites, which took centuries to evolve in the West.

Sowell asserts that the turd cannot be polished in Iraq, since the cultural prerequisites are absent. Where was he, and what was he hyping, in early 2003, as the regime change rhetoric -- rife with doing this or that "for the Iraqi people" -- filled the various opinion pages. Hindsight is 20/20, but his position can be inferred from this. .

Speaking of Germany, Thomas Sowell notes the parallels between post-World War I efforts to disarm that country and the Iraqi "disarmament" regime today:

Back in the 1930s, Germany's military forces were limited by a ban on conscription, by limitations on the number and kinds of weapons it could have, and by a requirement that it station no troops in its own industrialized Rhineland. These requirements were in the treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War. . . .

Like Saddam Hussein today, Hitler at first pretended to go along with these restrictions, all the while clandestinely building up his military forces. However, this was clandestine only in the sense that the general public did not know about it. British intelligence was well aware of what he was doing and kept the Prime Minister informed.

When Hitler began openly violating the Versailles Treaty's restrictions, most notably by moving troops into the Rhineland, "France did nothing. It was the first of many nothings that France did in a series of crises that led up to World War II." As Sowell notes: "While history does not literally repeat itself, sometimes it comes very close."

Godwin on parade. More pre war rhetoric, which seems not to have abated much. No Phelps crowd here, just run of the mill anti war demonstrators and protestors, as seen through the lens of the WSJ.

Pro-Saddam protesters are demanding that New York City allow them to close down First Avenue and stage a "march past the United Nations next week," the Associated Press reports. The New York Sun, which broke the story yesterday, offers a provocative suggestion in an editorial:

And there is no reason to doubt that the "anti-war" protesters . . . are giving, at the very least, comfort to Saddam Hussein. . . . So the New York City police could do worse, in the end, than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution. Thus fully respecting not just some, but all of the constitutional principles at stake.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Marion Colston, wife of a U.S. Marine, reports:

Several of my fellow Marine wives . . . have experienced verbal and physical abuse in the past few weeks from so-called "peace protesters." One woman was told from another car at a stoplight that her husband was a baby killer, and that they hoped he would die. Another, and her young son, were yelled at and manhandled by a group of protesters as they were passing through the area. Why did this happen? Because the wives either had a Marine Corps sticker on the car or a Marine Corps shirt on.

How desperate is the New York Times to keep Saddam Hussein in power? Today the "paper of record" runs an op-ed piece that actually seeks to minimize Saddam's human-rights violations. "Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?" asks author Stephen Pelletiere. Everyone's always picking on Saddam, the poor baby.

Back to Sowell's gambit, to blame diversity, I wonder at his view on Diversity of Opinion: is it a strength, or merely a characteristic of our social setting?

What do you think?

DR

 

[Tony]

What do you think?

DR

He's a person who is simply assigning his pet boogyman to a completely unrelated problem. You could just as easily say, and I submit that it's more accurate, that the violence in Iraq is because of strong anti-diversity ideologies. The guy is a moron, American is one of the most diverse nations on the planet, much more diverse than Iraq, and you rarely see ethnic violence here. And what we do see doesn't even come close to the level of violence in Iraq or many other places around the world.

 

[Nick Bogaerts]

Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.

So if there were no diversity, no one would attempt to reduce it. I suspect this gentleman would consider amputation a cure for athlete's foot.

 

[Hutch]

I rather think he is simplfying the making of nations as "natural vs. done by committee'. when he says.

Iraq is one of those new nations. Like other artificial creations in the Balkans, Africa and elsewhere, it has never had the cohesion of nations that evolved over the centuries out of the experiences of peoples who worked out their own modi vivendi in one way or another.

I would note that there are numerous nations that still haven't worked things out over centuries of 'evolution' (i.e., Basques in Spain, Walloons in Belguim, French-Canadians in Canada)--none are really happy with where they have ended up and that they are for the most part peaceful now does not mean they will be peaceful forever. And some nations put together by committee (see Oman, Kuwait, Malaysia) seem to be functioning reasonably well.

What I am trying to say is that a country is an artifical construct either way--the United States is what it is by purchase, conquest and war; and if those instances had turned out differently so would the nature of the country.

While I tend to agree with him that diversity in the makeup of nations can lead to conflict, and that the great US experiment to date has managed to avoid this, he seems to want to say (given Mr. Sowells usual take on issues) that the "liberals" are so much in favor of Diversity that they have lead to the creation of diverse countries that has led to conflict and butchery; if this is what he infers, then I think he is, to borrow from Tobais the Commie, a poopyhead.

IMHO as always.

 

[Cleon]

"Diversity's oppression."

Oppression?

I mean, really?

Has the level of discourse sunk so low that it's considered "oppression" to have people different than you live in the same country?

Any time someone goes off on a rant about how evil "multiculturalism" or "diversity" is, I just think it's pathetic that some people are so insecure that they can't deal with anyone who isn't just like them.

 

[Tony]

"Diversity's oppression."

Oppression?

I mean, really?

Has the level of discourse sunk so low that it's considered "oppression" to have people different than you live in the same country?

He exhibiting the exact same mindset as those who are trying to ethnic cleanse (opps sorry, I mean de-enthnic diversify) Iraq.

 

[DanishDynamite]

I think he is very much on to something. Something which isn't PC at the moment.

For 10's of thousands of years, perhaps even 100's of thousands, humans were organized in tribes. You looked out for the well-being of the tribe and the tribe would look out for you.

I suspect looking out for the tribe and the tribe thus looking out for you was so winning a strategy that it became reflected in our genes.

In any case, it surprises me not at all that trying to integrate people from different "tribes" on a big scale by force, is showing itself to be difficult.