In the few days since Anders Behring Breivik has been apprehended, it has emerged that he had links to the far right, claiming to have founded an organization called the Knights Templar that seeks to show the failures of Marxism and multiculturalism in the western world. In particular, Mr. Breivik described the evils of immigration as the fundamental threat to Norwegian society. Naturally, this has lead the most expedient and opportunistic bloggers on the left to condemn the attacks as another example right-wing extremist violence.
Ross Douthat, the New York Times's resident right-wing voice, called out such attacks today. He argued, by comparison to the Unabomber, that the actions of Mr. Breivik are indicative of violent extremism that can occur on either side of the political spectrum. And of course, Douthat is not wrong that violence motivated by extremist politics can occur from any political point of view. Although, it must be questioned whether all extremist political perspectives possess proclivity for violence in the same degree. It seems counter-intuitive, for example, that a person who was extremely devoted to the cause of tolerance would go about expressing such a point of view with violence, whereas a virulently intolerant person would seem more likely to perpetrate acts of violence.
Remarkably, however, Douthat uses the terrorist attacks in Norway to make a renewed call for rightist politicians to continue the pursuit of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-multicultarlist agendas. So, Mr. Douthat, if you will further degrade the victims of such an atrocity by besmirching the politics they believed in because of the misguided efforts of some overzealous bloggers, I will attack your philosophy on its merits alone. I have already, with the aforementioned discussion of tolerance and violence, showed how right-winged bigots are intuitively more likely to commit violence than left-wing tolerance advocates, but that is merely an aside. Below is the real deal.
The political right, yourself included, has consistently espoused anti-immigrant rhetoric. Much of the political right desires to reduce the levels of immigration, and you have even argued that xenophobic sentiment has helped to make America the great country that it is. Even after the Arab spring this year, Douthat is still willing to argue that Islam and liberal democracy are nearly incompatible. In Douthat's eyes, if the west is willing to accept immigrants into its society, it will forever be mired in a Samuel Huntington-esque internal clash of civilizations.
Of course, it might be easier to not allow anyone from the southern hemisphere into the country. We could maintain our white European-American heritage and entirely avoid the type of tension that comes from bringing people of very different backgrounds together. It might easier to stick our heads in the sand and only think about the way things have always been done as well. These are, of course, the same things. By confining our civilization to a certain type of people we would be willfully cutting ourselves off from all sorts of perspectives, traditions, histories, and cultures. We would be saying that, a priori, our culture is the best in the world.
Moreover, the entire creed of our nation is one based upon the continued accumulation of immigrants. Not only is our country dependent upon new sources of labor, even in some high-skill professions like medicine, but it is part of the very definition of this country. Everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence and everyone who voted in favor of the Constitution had either arrived here themselves or descended from someone who had come from Europe. In fact, the government even waged a centuries-long genocidal campaign against the indigenous peoples in "American" territory to ensure that all citizens would have arrived here from elsewhere either directly or indirectly.
And then there's the Statue of Liberty, the icon of American freedom. Guess what it says on the plaque inside? "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." In other words, we are a nation of immigrants, and our most iconic symbol reaffirms the notion that America is a place of freedom... of religion, of belief, of speech. These are all things that are protected in the document right-wing conservatives like Douthat hold so-dear: the Constitution. What would make The United States the greatest country in the world, as so many people claim, if it didn't demand these freedoms for all and not merely for those who fit the traditional image of what it means to be American? Its military might? That would be little better than globally hegemonic imperialism. Its economy? That would be akin to claiming Bill Gates or Carlos Slim is the greatest man in the world.
My thoughts are with Norway. There are few things more tragic than the death of young people who are trying to make the world a better place. While there are those who will see these attacks as a chance to flee from the noble pursuit of the creation of a multicultural society, do not see it as such. See it as a chance to recommit your efforts to the cause that a Machiavellian monster ignominiously sought to destroy. The attack itself is further proof against the calls against multiculturalism on the grounds that Islam is an inherently violent religion. This has been terrorism perpetrated by a fundamentalist who was Christian. Norway will overcome; Norway must overcome. Show the world how the society you have built can withstand the indiscriminate violence of rabidly intolerant neo-fascists.
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