Can non-Western and nonwhite minorities be pro-Western?

Kidist Paulos Asrat, a woman of Ethiopian origin who has spent most of her life in the West, writes:

In the entry on Proposition 8 being approved in California with minority votes, you wrote:

Warning to naive conservatives: this does not mean that we can depend on “socially conservative” minorities to save our culture. We, the white majority, have to save our culture. Minority individuals may be of help, but the minority groups as a whole are on the left and will not be on our side.

You are right. I grew up mostly in England and France (that was the nature of the exile my family had to take to avoid the massacre of the Communist dictator). My best friends growing up were French and English (I have a great love for England—especially Kent, where I went to boarding school). I had very little to do with Ethiopians, except what we got at home. Very few Ethiopians went to England or France—most went to Canada or the U.S. Growing up there doesn’t necessarily make one a non-leftist, but I have an innate attachment to these countries, and of course the West (much more so than to Ethiopia.) My uniqueness was in our isolation (although I never felt isolated) from Ethiopian culture, something which those living in Canada or the U.S. never experienced.

So, now living in Canada, it is with great shock that I realized all my Ethiopian relatives (and there are many of them in Canada and in the U.S.) are decisively leftists, except maybe one. And that their attachment to Canada or the U.S. was purely opportunistic. And even their children who grew up here at some point will complain that this isn’t really their home, or that they are being discriminated against, or they believe in the leftist programs like subsidized housing (for all those poor immigrants), or they question the truth behind 9/11, or slide in the superiority of Muslim culture in discussions, or they have a lingering scorn for Western culture.

I said a few times, in quite large company, that the majority of Ethiopians should just go back, since they are so unhappy here and are basically recreating an “exiled Ethiopia” in the snow and the cold. It didn’t go very well. But it’s true, better in a country where you feel at home, even if it means a lower standard of life. Plus, just as these people suddenly picked up and came out West, some with nothing on their backs, how much easier is it to just pack up and go back now that many have prospered?

The big surprise is that the group that I was born into, the Amhara, were the leaders of Ethiopia throughout the centuries. Even now, although another group is running the country (a Tigre, also from the north), he has the Amhara running the government for him. So, the Amhara should instinctively know about leadership, and how countries are run by the strong and the able, and if a weak group comes along, how detrimental it is to the nation as a whole. In fact, the Amhara lived by this strict strategy for centuries. But a few in the 50s and 60s, after being “educated” and “liberalized” (mostly, ironically in the U.S.) decided that equality of tribes was the most important thing. Thus Ethiopian leftists were born. And then came the Communist dictator Mengistu Hailemariam in the 70s (himself an unknown hybrid).

You are right in that if such a strong and confident minority group cannot see through leftist groups, and in fact hides behind them and even joins them, then who will?

LA replies:

I was so impressed by your e-mail, so interested to hear these personal facts about your background. What a strange world we live in. Because of Communists taking over your country decades ago, you grew of age in England, and then ended up in Canada, where you found that your own relatives were on the left and hostile to the very country that had provided them refuge from those Communists. And you, an Ethiopian by birth, found yourself identifying with the countries that were really the only countries you knew, while your relatives absorbed, or perhaps brought with them, the typical leftist minority alienation against those countries.

How can we understand the disorder of human existence, without seeing that it is somehow a distortion of God’s order?

Kidist replies:

Yes, it is a little mystical.

But, I am actually an optimist by nature. I think part of my “mission,” although I am not making it part of my life’s plan, only putting it in where it is obviously asked for, is to tell my relatives that their best bet is their own country.

I also think, after a long study of Ethiopian art and culture (as an outsider!!) that the Amhara have always identified with Western culture—I see this in the religious art, in the development of the alphabet, in the aesthetics of the people, in the great Emperor Haile Selassie, in the political and social organization of the Amhara (always thwarted by more aggressive southern tribes and envious northern ones), and even in the very leftism that the Amhara elite adopted! There is something in the “brain chemistry” that understands Western culture and thought. So I would say that the Amhara are the most Western of the Africans. So my association isn’t so strange, I think.

Finally, I think in a strange way I also bring these insights, more intuitive than intellectual at the moment, to the West. I can see how a confident country gets destroyed (almost) because of the false gods of leftism, how Islam can (almost) destroy a country unwilling to see its evil, how it takes a long time for people to realize their deathly (almost) mistakes. I have a lot of faith in the Amhara. I have a lot of faith in the West as well.

Plus I love the West. I have studied under it—the music, the art, not just studied them but practiced them as well. I am a part of it. I have never met an immigrant who has passed my rigorous criteria for being part of the West. It is a tough call, and your skepticism about true minority support of Western civilization is well-founded.

- end of initial entry—

Kidist writes:

As I re-read my last email to you, where I wrote: “I think part of my ‘mission,’ although I am not making it part of my life’s plan, only putting it where it is obviously asked for, is to tell my relatives that their best bet is their own country,” it sounds as if I’m evading the issue.

Not at all. Even a quiet word of “Well, there is always going back” resonates, as shown by feedback I get months later. Also, I am not going to hold slogans saying, “Go back home,” but will consistently and continuously repeat my position in social and casual environments. Also, my general behavior and interpretation of things shows people my position. To be big-hearted about it, I just think that minority immigrants (and their off-spring) will be happier where they came from. I can see generations of discontent, bitter people otherwise. So, I’m saying this for THEIR benefit.

Finally, I am actually much more vocal about immigration, which is probably the more controlable factor.

LA replies:

I thank you again for this contribution to our discussion, and I want to add something. What is it that made it possible for you to see clearly this important truth about most non-Western immigrants’ lack of fit in the West—this truth that most contemporary white Westerners do not see? It is that for you, the West is not an abstraction. It’s not an idea of freedom. It’s an actual cultural tradition and way of being, which you yourself loved and chose to join. Furthermore, it’s not just the West that you see in real, concrete terms, but the cultures of the immigrants. They also are not abstractions but real people with real cultures and real ways of being. Therefore you understand that these two cultural substances, the West and the respective immigrant cultures, are distinct from each other and cannot happily co-exist in the same society.

Westerners cannot see this basic, obvious truth, because the modern Western mind only allows for universalist abstractions. In the name of the “equal dignity of all human beings,” liberalism strips away our actual humanity.

Kidist replies:

You say:

It is that for you, the West is not an abstraction. It’s not an idea of freedom. It’s an actual cultural tradition and way of being, which you yourself loved and chose to join. Furthermore, it’s not just the West that you see in real, concrete terms, but the cultures of the immigrants. They also are not abstractions but real people with real cultures and real ways of being.

That’s exactly right. Why is it so hard to see that? :-)

Sage McLaughlin writes:

I’d be gilding the lily by adding anything to your fascinating discussion with Kidist. I just thought you should hear that it is edifying reading, and illustrates why VFR is a treasure (if I may be so, um, sycophantic…).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 06, 2008 11:09 AM | Send