FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED OCT. 31, 1999
EDITORS: HERE IS A SHORTER VERSION FOR THOSE DESIRING
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
'Cultures' are not always defined by skin color
As advertised, multiculturalism is a fine thing.
The European conquest was not an unalloyed triumph of tolerance and
Christian charity. By all means, let's teach our history warts and all. And
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 of their heritage.
But today's brand of "multiculturalism" goes much further, doesn't it?
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 race
that built the pyramids of Egypt and had already developed electrical
storage batteries 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.
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 skin 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, andwould pass a
single, named blade down through 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," 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 ilitiaman
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. But what
(start ital)is(end ital) clear is which culture practices tolerance -- I
don't believe I've ever me 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," is available at
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 t safety -- by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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