Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Let's get Marxist

As I understand the current Euro/Leftist take on Islamic extremists, it can all be spelled out in Marxist terms: the problem the West is having with radical Islam (most recently seen in the Paris riots) is that the rioters are victims of imperialism, economic discrimination, and Western style racism. In other words, the problems are failures of capitalism. Well, I'd like you to play a mind game with me. Please imagine a group of immigrants coming to a Western country: they are coming from a repressive society; they comprise tight knit communities; they not only don't speak English, but they speak a language completely unrelated to English, making English a hard language to learn; their origins are often rooted in deep, deep poverty; and many of them have village or agrarian roots. When they get to the Western country, they live in squalid tenement districts, with multiple family members packed cheek by jowl in miniscule apartments; the mothers are burdened by several children; they are often the butt of cultural jokes; they have no education in our high tech society. Do you have a good picture in your mind of this immigrant group? I know I do. I'm also willing to bet that, with the recent deluge of stories about pathetic Islamic immigrants into Europe, you're envisioning Muslims from Turkey or Morocco crowding into Birmingham, Frankfurt or some French suburb. Well, if you are, you're wrong. I grew up near (though not of) the group about which I speak: Chinese immigrants. For the last thirty plus years, Chinese immigrants have been invading America's (and Canada's) coastal communities. They come from China, one of the ultimate repressive and proverty stricken regimes; they are rural or agrarian refugees; they don't speak the language; they have no techno-culture education nor exposure to democratic thinking nor to capitalism; they have huge families that live closely packed in slums; etc. And yet I'm sure you've heard them referred to as the "model minority." I think two things are at work here in this modern minority appellation. Thing one is that Asians are indeed an ethnic group that places such a premium on learning and self-discipline that they will rise in any culture they embrace. Which leads me to thing two: These immigrants have embraced capitalism, and capitalism embraces them back. Mom and Dad may speak no English and live in their tenement apartment, but their kids go to school everyday, spent hours doing homework, work incredibly hard, get scholarships and end up with advanced degrees and good incomes. And they do this despite the PC police desperately trying to impose quotas on them. My question is whether Asians would be such a model minority if they were in an anti-Capitalist system that did not reward their extraordinary efforts to succeed. Would you work so hard in a country like Germany, whose employment laws force such perfect standards on employers that the employers just don't bother to hire? Would you work so hard in a country like France where the mandatory 35 hour work week gives you no incentive to put in the extra hours, make the extra money and send your kids to the better school? Would you work so hard where, no matter how little you work, you'll get paid, get medical, get retirement, get everything? Would you work so hard in a society where your hard earned dollars are taxed at a 70% rate to fund those who don't work very hard but still feel entitled to everything -- and everything of the highest quality. Please keep in mind that I'm also not talking about mere safety nets that a humane society puts in place for its poorest, weakest and sickest. I'm talking about a friend of mine in England a couple of decades ago who spent a summer working like a dog at a pretty damned distasteful job, only to see his sister, who spent the whole summer watching TV and getting dole checks, end up with a lot more money than he had. That's the end result of an anti-Capitalist economy. So my questions really boil down to this: Would you work hard for yourself and a children in a country that rewards lowest common denominator employment activities and actively discourages hard work, initiative and creativity? Because Asians got their start as a model minority before the PC taint set in, they've basically been ignored by the PC crowd, and haven't been coddled -- and I think they've done well in America precisely for that reason. They've hurled themselves into the open American work ethos and succeeded. Unfortunately, PC, multi-culturalism and Marxist economic doctrine still work to swaddle other minorities in this country, to keep them perpetually infantilized and to prevent them from ascending the economic ranks, and this despite the fact that economic success is, I think, the surest path to cultural assimilation, since you really can't have one without the other. So when I said, let's get Marxist, I meant it: Let's acknowledge that, despite the MSM's best efforts to the contrary, Marxist doctrines about oppressed minorities don't excuse Islamic aggression within Western societies. Let's also acknowledge, while we're being honest, that Europe's lingering love affair with Marxist social and economic theory has prevented minorities from achieving the economic success that would allow for happy assimilation, and has laid the groundwork for the explosion we're now seeing.