While browsing The New York Times Web site, I came across a rather interesting sentence imbedded in a piece chronicling the story of a former Russian army officer that is now living in the United States and has been granted asylum. It seems that the defector, Andrei Samorodov, has been giving interviews to several Texas dailies - Texas, his new home, I guess is even today still a step up from Russia - exposing behavior by Russian army units in Chechnya that he categorizes as "war crimes."
These allegations come as no big surprise to anybody and it was not the exposure of Russian cruelty in Chechnya that gave me pause, but rather this sentence: "Mr. Samorodov, now 40, himself betrays an ethnic bias against Chechens as chronically rebellious and prone to banditry." In a time more interested in accuracy rather than in political correctness, one could simply pass this sentence off as just reporting the feelings of Mr. Samorodov or as even as a description of the situation in Chechnya generally.
However, we do not live in such a time and it does not take too much perception to understand that far from being just reporting, this sentence is intended to place Mr. Samorodov in a negative light. Never mind that he finds atrocities against Chechens so wrong he deserted his post and defected, this man should be put into perspective - he holds an ethnic bias!
If there is anything a public education will teach you, it is that we should never hold any sort of biases, especially if they have anything to do with somebody's ethnicity. We are all really the same underneath and any sort of categorization harms others because they might think less of themselves. Furthermore, because we really are all the same, all human actions are more or less equal and are just as praiseworthy as each other. It is this view that is the crux of the multiculturalist dogma that controls much of the educational system in America today.
So, Mr. Samorodov is indeed only one step less guilty than those that actually committed war crimes and all for stating something that is rather clear; for a few centuries now Chechnya has been a hotbed for revolution and lawlessness. The Higher Being forbid that his characterization might have actually been true and even if it was we should denounce any such ethnic bias no matter how rooted in fact.
Oh course, ethnic stereotyping can have its nasty side as the evils of slavery and anti-Semitism have taught us, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with believing that the French are snobby, the Japanese industrious, the Irish prone to excesses of drink or even that the people of Chechnya predisposed to rebellion and banditry. In fact, these real and fundamental differences among people are what make the world so interesting.
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If you read accounts of Africa or Asia from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the world is a vibrant one made all the more alluring with tales of tribalism and of the differences between the writer and his subject. Read a book about Africa or Asia today and you will likely be told that the particularities of different cultures are merely different ways of addressing modern Western concerns such as gender roles or some sort of nonsense. It is rather ironic how multiculturalism, while purporting to be about the creation of some sort of an equal opportunity cultural world really results in a bland, one-dimensional and inaccurate one.
The tendency towards sameness reveals multiculturalism's true face; it is not about tolerance or the celebration of differences, but rather an attempt - either by design or by implication - to replace the traditions of the world with one overarching, stale and vulgar world culture. It is no wonder that the United Nations is a favorite institution of the multiculturalists; its moral relativism, the idiocy of the conference on racism and it's continued search for the lowest common denominator make it the perfect embodiment of the multicultural ideal.
The opposite of multiculturalism is, according to its supporters, a world filled with bigotry, warfare and cultural imperialism. Well even if it is, I'll take the most imperfect world over the most perfect multicultural existence. I think Mr. Samorodov would agree with me.
by Michael Carrasco
Daily Lobo Columnist
Questions or comments can be sent to mjc_carrasco@hotmail.com.
