FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED OCT. 31, 1999
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
'Cultures' are not always defined by skin color
As advertised, multiculturalism is a fine thing.
Yes, the average inhabitant of this continent today has a longer life
expectancy and a vastly improved standard of living than if she was still
suffering 50 percent infant mortality and fending off Athabascan raiders
with flint-tipped spears.
But that's not to say the European conquest was an unalloyed triumph of
tolerance and Christian charity. By all means, let's teach our history
warts and all.
Mighty have been the contributions to modern America of the indigenous
Indians, and of the descendants of African peoples brought here against
their will. Let's give them their proper place in the history books, and
teach their descendants to be proud -- not ashamed -- of their heritage.
Next we can start to excavate and restore the cultural pride and proper
historical recognition, as well, of our forefathers who were Irish,
Italian, Polish, Chinese, Serbian, Jewish, Arab ...
Whoa, there. Today's brand of "multiculturalism" takes no such route,
does it? Instead, our children's textbooks are increasingly filled with the
historically bankrupt fantasy that Betsy Ross and Molly Pitcher had as much
to do with winning the American Revolution as Washington and Jefferson;
that the American Indian was some kind of mystically enlightened ecological
steward; and that today's black American is directly descended from an
ancient Negroid race that built the pyramids of Egypt and had already
developed electrical storage batteries and successful hang gliders long
before the birth of Jesus.
What gives?
The answer, of course, is that today's "multiculturalism" is in fact a
sharply limited political agenda sold under false colors. The goal here is
for a small segment of the academe with giant chips on their shoulders to
monomaniacally strip the pictures of dead white males out of our history
books and replace them with pictures of blacks, Indians, and women. (A new
American dollar coin is about the be issued, made of base metal and tarted
up with brass plating. What are the chances it will depict a dead white
male?)
Recognizing how much of the genius attributed to Thomas Edison was
actually bought at minimum wage from folks like Nikola Tesla -- that the
real cartoonist behind the entrepreneur Walt Disney was a guy named Ub
Iwerks -- is not well designed to upset white males and advance this
agenda, since it only shifts credit to other white males. So, it's a
non-starter.
And if you really want to upset a modern "multiculturalist," point out
that he or she seems curiously intolerant of some "cultures" within modern
America -- cultures with documentable thousand-year pedigrees -- where the
cultural divisions are not discernible by ski color, at all.
I was struck, as I recently read the introduction to the 1994 Barnes &
Noble edition of the esteemed archaeologist Ewart Oakeshott's "The
Archaeology of Weapons," by the passage where he describes the attitude of
the ancient Greeks and Romans toward their arms as being totally different
from "that extraordinary romantic veneration for their arms so
characteristic of Teuton, Celt, and Indian -- and on the other side of the
earth, the Japanese."
The Roman attitude toward arms was "actually very modern; the civilian
fears and shuns them, the soldier has them issued to him ... keeps them
clean and in working order because he will get in trouble if he does not,
and has no love for them at all."
How different from the classical Japanese, and from the German tribesmen
who repulsed the Romans in the year 9 A.D. -- from those of our ancestors
who built their warrior societies around the mastery of arms, who gave
their weapons names, endowed them with personalities, and would pass a
single, named blade down trough a family for hundreds of years. How
different from the Germans described by Tacitus, among whom "No business,
public or private, is transacted except in arms," where citizenship was
bestowed when "one of the chiefs, or the father or a kinsman equips the
young warrior with a spear and shield in the public council" and where, if
the audience approved of a speech at a public meeting, "they clash their
spears. No form of approval can carry more honor than praise expressed by
arms."
This proud culture is not dead. In peaceful, law-abiding 20th century
Switzerland, where every head of household is still considered a militiaman
and expected to keep a loaded machine gun at home, voters in some villages
still carry their swords as symbol of citizenship to annual town meetings.
Here in America, where many an American male still inducts his son into
manhood by teaching him to safely handle weapons and helping him score his
first kill in the hunt, there is probably no more achingly compelling
description of the long sufferings of America's culture of arms than John
Ross' magnificent 1996 novel "Unintended Consequences" (available from
Loompanics at $28.95; call 360-385-2230 or 800-380-2230.)
Ross' protagonist, Henry Bowman, protests at one point that "They have
treated me and others like me with utter contempt. They have confiscated
our property and put people in maximum-security prisons over ownership of
fender washers, claiming they were unassembled silencer parts. ... They
have shot a man's wife in the head because his gun's buttstock was too
short. ... They burned 90 people alive over a disputed two hundred dollar
tax.
"If you believe you have the right to buy, own and shoot small arms in a
safe manner, as much and as often as you want, and you exercise that right
regularly, our government has branded you as the enemy."
Here, surely, are two cultures. It's unlikely either side of this
cultural divide will ever convince the other it's "right" (in fact, true
multiculturalists would preach only understanding and tolerance) -- though
it must be observed the only thing that sets man apart is his ability to
develop tools and weapons, and the notion that men will be left in peace if
only they will lay down their arms didn't work out so well for the Armenian
minority in Turkey in 1915, the Ukrainians under Stalin in the 1930s, the
Jews under Hitler in the 1940s, or the Cambodian intellectuals under Pol
Pot in the 1970s.
But what (start ital)is(end ital) clear is which of the two cultures
practices tolerance -- I on't believe I've ever met a gun owner who wants
to make it mandatory for everyone else to own and shoot firearms.
Of course, our modern descendants of the Romans -- whose republic fell to
tyranny after they delegated the business of war and armed policing to
hired mercenaries -- those who today "fear and shuns arms, and have no love
for them at all," call those who esteem weapons by the same name the Romans
used: "barbarians."
But before they push their pogrom against these "barbarians" in their
midst to the point where America's gun culture must choose between fighting
back or suffering genocide, these modern Romans might remember what
happened to the governor P. Quintilius Varus, when he led his three
fully-armed Roman legions into the Teutoburger Wald in the year 9 A.D.
The Romans, virtually undefeated since the days of Hannibal, marched into
those woods, and did not emerge. So stunned was the emperor Augustus that
he commanded his successors that the frontiers of the empire would forever
be the Rhine and the Danube, and so they were.
The forest creatures fed for years on the unburied Roman dead ... and the
Romans went to Germany no more.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the
Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid from Mountain
Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127; by dialing 1-800-244-2224;
or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html .
***
Vin Suprynowicz, [email protected]
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John
Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and
thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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