Zakaria, symbol of America’s self-undoing

(Note: this entry and the one immediately preceding it were written one after the other late last night. They are on two entirely different subjects, but make exactly the same point.)

John B. writes:

Apropos of nothing, I’ll say that I hate Fareed Zakaria. In speaking of America and Americans in his column in Newsweek, he invariably used the first person—“we” this and “we” that. And then, one week, he announced that he had just been granted American citizenship. In that same column, I think, he discoursed on America’s nature: It’s just a state of mind. After all, he explained, he had for years spoken as if he were an American, even though he was not a citizen—and nobody had objected.

“Gee, Fareed,” I thought to myself, “maybe nobody objected because everybody assumed, as I did, that you would not abuse trust by speaking as if you were an American though you were not a citizen.”

I won’t deny the possibility that I somehow missed something, i.e., that I don’t have the facts right; but that’s how it seemed to me. It was many years ago, and I’ve come to regard him as a sort of embodiment of the racial threat to whites.

LA replies:

You’re right, his use of the first person plural showed his lack of respect for this country. At the same time, who, by never objecting to it, enabled him to show that disrespect? Who, as an expression of our openness, virtually TOLD him to show that disrespect? Our entire society.

The key to national suicide is the abandonment of the word and the reality of “us,” as distinct from “them.” If there is no particular “us,” because that is seen as discriminatory and exclusive of the rest of humanity, then all people everywhere have the equal right to say “us,” as well as the right to immigrate here and become citizens. As with all attempts to make a good, such as marriage, equally accessible to everyone, the result of giving everyone the license to say “us” and of including everyone legally and existentially in that “us” is not to enrich the “us,” but to render it contentless and valueless. Which is proven by the fact that as soon as the outsider Zakaria—who had for years demonstrated his alienation from America by saying “us” in such a way as to show that he had no respect for “us”—acquired for the first time the legal right to say “us,” he announced that there is no “us,” there is no American people, there’s only a state of mind entirely disconnected from any concrete, identifiable country. At the moment of becoming an American citizen, Zakaria declared that America doesn’t exist. In the act of making him an American citizen, we turned ourselves into zero.

There is no way for us to escape the state of spiritual nothingness in which we have placed ourselves except by reversing the steps that brought us here.

- end of initial entry -

Howard Sutherland writes:

You and John B. are both right. Fareed Zakaria is a fine example of America’s self-undoing, and a pretty loathsome rootless cosmopolitan to boot. Casually passing himself off as an American before he bothered to get himself naturalized is repulsive, but then that is what the American establishment encourages. Of course, this American does not consider Zakaria an American just because some fool in the State Department was willing to give that Indian Moslem a U.S. passport. I consider Zakaria a man, no doubt talented in many ways, who chose to turn his back on his own country, India, and take the easier path of being an affirmative action beneficiary in America of opportunities that properly should be for Americans (getting to go to Yale for his college years and to Harvard for graduate studies). And then the American elite, in its never-ending drive to put America and Americans last, takes this alien and sets him up as some sort of expert in what America’s foreign policy should be.

Zakaria is culpable for misrepresenting himself as one of us when he was not, but not as culpable as those in our post-national elite who brought him, gave him preference over the natives in our prestigious universities, and then deferred to him as some sort of oracle about what America should be—even though it’s clear Zakaria doesn’t think America is anything in particular except a job market for his fellow Third-Worlders. If Zakaria were a man capable of real national loyalties, wouldn’t he be using his gifts in the service of India?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 17, 2008 11:30 AM | Send