5. "You seem very concerned with the preservation of individual cultures. Is this necessarily reasonable?
   
   You can't just take one moment in history arbitrarily, and mourn its passing. Each of these cultures you value grew out of the merging of a number of earlier cultures. The Romans overrun the Gauls, and in turn are overrun by the Franks, and France results. So, if, for example, France, is in some sense overrun by yet another culture, is this not simply a reflection of the continuing process of cultural evolution?"

No, Herr Rommel, it is not. The beauties of French culture, to make use of your example, are not a product of the destruction of the older versions of that country. They arose because someone made the most of what the conquerors left behind. But as we enjoy the beauty, we are left with the ever unanswered question of what it is, that we never had the chance to enjoy. What would an unconquered Gaul have made of itself? What works of art, music, literature and philosophy will never see the light of day, because of the paths that history will never take? How egotistical of us to imagine that of all the worlds that antiquity could have given birth to, ours must necessarily be the best, ourselves the crowning glory of what humanity could have been, by now. How naively trusting of us to place such blind faith, in whichever path history should slip down next, by pure uncontemplated chance.

If one thinks it reasonable to assume that the culture that maintains its distictness will accomplish less, consider the richness of the culture of Ethiopia, compared to that of most of its neighbors, and note that it was the only nation in its region to avoid conquest, prior to this century. Conquest isn't enrichment. Conquest is violence, nothing more. To assume that the unconquered Gaul would have become a less intriguing land than our France, would be unwarranted.

I can't take one moment and mourn its passing? Why not? Just because someone says so? What if it is a good moment that offers much to be enjoyed and much to build on and learn from? What if it is being discarded too lightly, or the direction we are moving in is not a good one? Do we just accept this passively? If we do so, declining to take an active role in our culture's development, are we displaying a sophisticated practicality or a cowardly weakness and a lack of motivation?

To believe that fatalism is a sign of strength, is to believe that those who are lead by their noses are stronger than those who lead. If so, then what do they mean by the word "strength", and how, aside from the offering of an assertion, could they argue for the adoption of such a trait?

What this defense of assimilationism seems to take for granted, without stating directly (ie. takes as a hidden assumption) is that the moment the Franks conquered Roman Gaul, modern France was born. Pure nonsense. The modern variant on the culture was not to be seen for centuries, until conditions were more settled and what was created could live long enough to grow and develop a life of its own, before being disrupted out of existence. What is seen in the immediate aftermath of such a conquest is never a cultural flowering, but a loss of old beauties, replaced by a sterile hodgepodge of discordant elements. If the disruption never ceases, there will be no time to build on this hodgepodge and create a new harmony out of the discord, before all is swept away, to be replaced by a new hodgepodge. The sterility, then, would never have a chance to depart.

One might add, that the eclecticism of the roots of what follows is often highly exaggerated. In the case in question, the Franks were a tiny ruling minority who, having relatively little culture of their own (compared to the Gallo-Romans) assimilated into the culture they conquered. To this day, France follows a derivative of Roman, not Germanic law, and about the only Gothic impact on the language can be found in the names of the directions. Yet one will still find some who will blather on about the "Germanic roots" of modern French culture.

In the place of military conquest, which does not so frequently see the barbaric endorsement it still was offered, even a mere 25 years ago, we now have a guilting directed against those who would oppose massive population movements, or the assimilation of their cultures. But if one people should be guilted into letting another resettle its country, how is the end result materially different from a conquest? If I should be manipulated into losing the resolve to hold onto my own traditions, then have I not merely become the instrument you use to force your ways upon me?

What I see in political correctness is a refusal to acknowledge the fact that emotional and social pressuring are forms of force, and a contemptible willingness to try to manipulate others into doing to themselves, that which is admitted to be shameful when forcibly inflicted on them by others. Such an attempted distinction is an absurdity, though. Either one does have the right to take a course of action, or one does not. By ruling against the use of force to prevent it, one rules out the latter possibility. Given the truth of the former, how can one then criticise the action one has thus validated the rightness of?

How can I be obligated to give another, that which may not rightly be taken from me by force, by the very acknowledgement of the one who asserts the existence of the obligation? If it would be wrong for one country to forcibly resettle another (as the US did the Indian nations in the last century, and China is doing to Tibet, to general condemnation), how can that other nation then be morally obligated to allow itself to be resettled? Is it entitled to control over its borders, or isn't it? If it is wrong for one culture to persecute the members of another for refusing to adopt its customs, then how can one claim that the other culture would be doing anything wrong by declining to adopt those customs on its own? Is it entitled to live its own way, or is it not?

You can't have it both ways.

In the "progressive" argument given in the question above, I see nothing more than the same tired old rationalisation of imperialism, that we've heard offered a thousand times before. Namely, the argument that all countries are the product of conquests past, so what's wrong with committing another? It has merely been reoriented along the fashionably passive agressive lines of the 1990s, in which one seeks to have one's victim conquer himself for you. Here, it has been redirected to support cultural, rather than territorial imperialism. (In lieu of taking the home of another people, and giving it to one's own, one instead seeks to transform that other people into a replica of one's own).

Not to mention that, ethically speaking, this approach helps promote a very bad precedent. One that has done a lot, to make the world a far more dangerous place than it needs to be. In this case, as it is used to promote a cultural transformation whose end product would be ghastly to behold.

Question ... ..... Is this sort of thing really so bad as all that?
Answer .... ...... click here

Much as we scornfully reject the call for the dissolution of nations and regions, in favor of a blandly homogenised world culture, so we reject the ever present pressure placed on many of us to cast way our own subcultures, so as to not be "divisive". We shall not join with all around us to take part in this unnatural fraud of a subculture made up more or less the day before yesterday, just to suit the whims or purposes of a handful of self appointed opinion makers. As we reject conquest, direct or indirect, outside our borders, so we reject it from within.

We will hold to our traditions, building on them, instead of adopting that which another would presume to dictate to us. We will stay with those we think of as our people, and if that doesn't suit someone's conceptions of how integration and progress are supposed to work, tough. It's none of his business, and if we and ours don't allow ourselves to be manipulated, there is nothing that he can do about it. Or, really has a right to. Our way of life, shall remain our way of life, and our religion and the philosophy that attends it, will be rooted in that way of life.

Plus, if we are to go there, let us not belittle those "few nice recipes", mentioned in the passage linked to above. These beauties that we share, bring us together. Remove the opportunities to experience pleasure in life, and what remains of kindness, but so much empty posturing? Life is to be enjoyed. To feel otherwise, is a form of mental illness. Those who disagree, are invited to leave. I've known as many crazy people as I care to. I don't need to talk to any more.

Now, to continue ...