The Palm Beach Post

The unpardonab­le heresy of perhaps being correct

- Mona Charen She writes for Creators Syndicate.

Our diversity is our greatest strength.

After playing clips of Democratic politician­s reciting that truth of modern liberalism, Tucker Carlson asked, “How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific.”

Reaction to Carlson’s question, with some declaring him a racist for having raised it, suggests that what we are dealing with here is not a demonstrab­le truth but a creed not subject to debate.

Yet the question remains valid: Where is the scientific, historic or empirical evidence that the greater the racial, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity of a nation, the stronger it becomes?

From recent decades, it seems more true to say the reverse: The more diverse a nation, the greater the danger of its disintegra­tion.

Ethnic diversity tore apart our mighty Cold War rival, splinterin­g the Soviet Union into 15 nations, three of which — Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia — have since split further along ethnic lines.

Russia had to fight two wars to hold onto Chechnya and prevent the diverse peoples of the North Caucasus from splitting off on ethnic grounds, as Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan had done. Ethnic diversity then shattered Yugoslavia into seven separate nations.

And even as we proclaim diversity to be our greatest strength, nations everywhere are recoiling from it.

The rise of populism and nationalis­m across Europe is a reaction to the new diversity represente­d by the

Arab, Asian and African millions who have lately come, and the tens of millions desperate to enter.

Consider China, which seeks this century to surpass America as the first power on earth.

In his western province of Xinjiang, Xi has set up an archipelag­o of detention camps. Purpose: Re-educate his country’s Uighurs and Kazakhs by purging them of their religious and tribal identities, and making them and their children more like Han Chinese in allegiance to the Communist Party and Chinese nation.

Xi fears that the 10 million Uighurs of Xinjiang, as an ethnic and religious minority, predominan­tly Muslim, wish to break away and establish an East Turkestan. And he is correct.

What China is doing is brutalitar­ian. But what China is saying with its ruthless policy is that diversity — religious, racial, cultural — can break us apart as it did the USSR. And we are not going to let that happen.

America has always been more than an idea, an ideology or a propositio­nal nation. It is a country that belongs to a separate and identifiab­le people with its own history, heroes, holidays, symbols, songs, myths, mores — its own culture.

Is the Britain of Theresa May, with its new racial, religious and ethnic diversity, a stronger nation than was the U.K. of Lloyd George, which ruled a fourth of mankind in 1920?

The British Empire was the greatest in modern history. What tore it apart? Tribalism, the demands of diverse peoples, rooted in blood and soil, to be rid of foreign rule and to have their own place in the sun.

And who are loudest in preaching that our diversity is our strength?

Are they not the same people who told us that democracy was the destiny of all mankind and that, as the world’s “exceptiona­l nation,” we must seize the opportunit­y of our global preeminenc­e to impose its blessings on the less enlightene­d tribes of the Middle East and Hindu Kush?

If the establishm­ent is proven wrong about greater diversity bringing greater strength to America, there will be no do-over for the USA.

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