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34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, April 5, 2003
This review is from: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (Hardcover)
In light of the depraved nature of American culture, it's easy for any second-hander to catalog a bunch of disparate events and ideas and package them with a littany of canned-bromides about "multiculturalism" and "political correctness." (As an example, I just read a story the other day about "ethnomathematics.") On the other hand, it takes a scholar to make sense of the intellectual trends that are dominating the Western world. Fortunately, the paleoconservative movement has such a scholar in Dr. Paul Gottfried. Prof. Gottfried focuses on trends such as "diversity," "multiculturalism," and "sensitivity" showing that there is a theology behind them. The Christian view of sin and redemption is replaced by a secular counterpart of "insensitivity" and psychological manipulation. Based on Prof. Gottfried's approach, the desire of the left (old left and neocon "right") becomes understandable. American foreign policy (which was historically based on the idea of American interest, however misguided at times) is now focused on fighting "intolerance." The love affair of the left with immigration likewise becomes understandable. What better way to apologize for your nation's alleged sins then slowly destroying your culture through a change in the population? This fact isn't lost on European conservatives, who - as Prof. Gottfried notes - realize that these new voters aren't likely to vote conservative. For some reason, the Jewish holocaust takes center stage in this new religion, in which both liberals and their alleged opponents seeks to draw lessons from this event. That nearly three million Poles died at the hands of the Nazis is ignored. Likewise, Stalin's murder of millions of Ukrainians in the name of egalitarianism gets short shift. Whereas people are put in jail for denying the Jewish holocaust, even mainstream publishers will print books downplaying Stalin's evils. Prof. Gottfried breaks from standard neoconservative and paleoconservative analysis by showing that although the "sensitizing" may be carried out by the managerial class, it appears to have substantial public support. The multicultural agenda has majority support in the United Kingdom, and perhaps close to that in the United States. This work follows upon Prof. Gottfried's AFTER LIBERALISM, which is also highly recommended.
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Secular Theocracy, March 1, 2003
This review is from: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (Hardcover)
Much cant has been written about "multiculturalism" both by its supporters and its enemies. Paul Gottfried is no friend of multiculturalism, but his book is not the sort of thoughtless griping that often comes from conservative critics. Instead he takes a hard look at the historical force from which multiculturalism derives, and where those forces are ultimately leading those of us in the United States and Europe. Gottfried's subtitle is even more apropros than his main title, because his subject matter really is a newly emerging "secular theocracy." It's a theocracy, as Gottfried explains, in part because of its concern with reforming and reshaping the individual conscience. The cultural preconditions for this have been within Western civilization for some time, Gottfried shows, but it is now, with the rise of the managerial-therapeutic state, that they have become truly virulent. Multiculturalism is not simply an attitude or a set of beliefs, but a policy that governments are enforcing upon unwilling invdividuals. Gottfried is a careful scholar whose work cannot be reduced to an easy ideological pigeon-hole. He's a firm conservative whose analysis can be apprecaited by thoughtful readers of any persuasion. The depth of analysis in *Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt* makes it more profoundly politically incorrect than any of the more superficial, sensationalistic treatments of multiculturalism offered by most other writers.
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39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Blame the Protestant Deformation, December 25, 2002
This review is from: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (Hardcover)
Professor Paul Gottfried wrote _Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt_ as an extension of his earlier book, _After Liberalism_. Let's face it, society is under fire from political correctness, diversity schemes, and anti-discrimination fascism handed down from the political elite and their appointed "experts" that are running rampant trying to micro-manage the State's progressive agenda. The Managerial State has moved from economic redistributionist schemes and welfare economics to total Thought Control, where every aspect of individual attitudes and behavior comes under fire by the Feds and their appointed "experts." Behavioral policies are set forth upon unwilling "subjects" by the ruling regime when and where it is advantageous to its identititarian political schemes. Hence, we have the modern Therapeutic State. The Protestant Deformation movement (liberal Protestantism), Gottfried says, is one of the major players in the progressive self-destruction of European and American traditionalist institutions. He warns that the new internationalism put into practice by modern leaders "aims at nothing less than a transformation of human consciousness." This excellent book is perhaps the most courageous one of its kind, and certainly, the only book to so deftly challenge the therapeutic statists on their own turf.
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