Mark Steyn, Richard Dreyfuss, & multiculturalism

Jaws image seen on SteynOnline

Mark Steyn’s column yesterday was in part a renewed pitch for his book America Alone The End of the World as We Know It.  Having read the book some years ago, I can highly recommend it.  But it’s Mr Steyn’s reaction to actor Richard Dreyfuss that prompted the column. Here’s some of it:

American conservatives on the Internet are abuzz with the recent interview given to Glenn Beck by Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws, Mr Holland’s Opus, American Graffiti and many more. Mr Dreyfuss has given up acting to save his country:

@RichardDreyfuss tells me he gave up acting “ONLY for something I loved as much, which was saving my country…It infuriates me that people don’t understand what this place means.”

SteynOnline regulars will not be surprised by this development. Mark and Mr Dreyfuss have met only once, very briefly, two decades back at the memorial tribute in Montreal to their mutual friend Mordecai Richler. But seven years ago it emerged that the actor was one of many who had read Steyn’s bestselling book. As Mr Dreyfuss put it in a three-part theopolitical dialogue with Susannah Black:

Mark Steyn, a writer with an irritating case of the smart-alecs, has written a book I urge you read called America Alone. Just the first few chapters are a geo-political wake-up call, and he is not someone I agree with very much. But he quotes bin Laden: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” And he quotes Donald Rumsfeld: “If we know anything it is that weakness is provocative.”

We are on a clock we don’t see or comprehend. We will not survive this century unless civic virtue is revived. We can discuss its origins all day—if we have the right to speak at all, and aren’t dead under jihad.

Seven years after that observation, “the right to speak at all” is increasingly imperiled, in ever more areas – even for those as celebrated as J K Rowling, and even in Richard Dreyfuss’s own field, the arts. As Mark mentioned on his first post-heart-attack appearance, he ran into an actress friend, a lifelong leftie, who nevertheless has grasped the essential fact of our time – that western civilization is sliding off a cliff. And, as Steyn put it, once that is seen it cannot be unseen.

Mark’s book was never Harry Potter boffo, but it kept selling year on year, and picking up new fans en route, including from Hollywood. For a tome by an irritating smart alec, America Alone proved somewhat prescient, but its warnings went unheeded by the presidents and prime ministers in a position to do something about them.

. . .

Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live in anything but an advanced western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school “holiday” concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug. . . . Multiculturalism was conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

For the rest of it, click here.

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