"The long-term aim is to strip people of what are deemed their barbaric cultural affiliations, religious exclusionism, customs, laws, etc., and end up with a universal mass of citizens equally tolerant of each other, simply enjoying, but no longer worshipping or venerating, their own cultures."

           The English-speaking democracies, among others, have not yet awakened to the realization that a policy of wholesale accommodation to the conflicting customs and beliefs of all people, especially tribal people, is only working in one direction: it is dissolving traditional Western customs, standards, and values (for this, read: Christian values, and in the case of North America, and other democracies spawned by England, the entire historical framework of morality, custom and law inherited from a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon history). Whether allowing Turbans and Kirpans for Sikhs, or polygamy and shari’ah law for Muslims, or the outrageous land-claims and law-breaking of native peoples, this giving-way policy has the potential to erode the standard of toleration itself: watch for a vicious backlash from people frightened to see their cultural and moral standards disappearing forever, replaced by alien ones. And note also the recent publication - long overdue, and very close to the mark - of the book, "Liberal Fascism," which makes the case that despite the public promotion of differences, we are today half-slaves to massive egalitarian welfare states under which we put up with overbearing levels of control and regulation.

           What is unusual historically, and not a little puzzling, is to see all this top-down control mixed with such a fawning official accommodation of different cultures. The question is: How do we make sense of the fact that the liberal-democratic nations of the West have thrown themselves so completely into what seems the contradictory project of tolerating all differences even as we standardize, equalize, and over-regulate our citizens. How can we have both?

             The explanation, I believe, is that we are in the midst of a universalist revolution that began in the late 1960s and is continuing, powered by the idea that egalitarianism must be made to work not only within nations, but among all people's of the world. That is why Canada's former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said (and I disagree) that "it doesn't matter where the immigrants come from." But it actually matters a lot, because the underlying belief systems of different cultures are often so fundamentally opposed on basic moral, legal, economic, and theological principles that they cannot survive as different cultures once their core beliefs are eroded. The result is that under the egalitarian ethos – especially one in which all cultural differences are publicly funded - they discover too late that they have been thrown into a competition with each other and against the host culture for cultural dominance on every front.

             So it is tempting to conclude that the extreme cultural toleration shown today by our own core liberal culture is actually its last gasp. But in reality it is a strategic process for grooming citizens of the world for the egalitarian utopia by attempting to equalize, and thus neutralize, their real differences. Which is to say, it is a strategy for making everyone a liberal by first equalizing cultural and moral differences, making all differences equally valid, so that in the end we will have only a single people obedient to the same culturally-neutral regulations, controls, codes of human rights, etc., etc.

              That is why the first step for the dominant culture is to weaken its own "hegemonic" power.  Among the tools required for this, is the trivialization of historical, cultural, religious, and ethnic symbols and practices. The long-term aim is to strip people of what are deemed their barbaric cultural affiliations, religious exclusionism, customs, laws, etc., and end up with a universal mass of citizens equally tolerant of each other, simply enjoying, but no longer worshipping or venerating, their own cultures. We are to have a world in which the usual symbols of culture, nation, people, custom, and the like, are no longer powerful motivating forces that citizens would happily die to protect, but rather, they have become transformed into something portable, that can be put on or taken off at will, for the moment. Cultural symbols are to become so interchangeable, so mixed together, and so varied that they lose their psychological and religious hold. The cross, the moon, the turban, the yarmulke, the dreadlocks, and so on, will be fascinating cultural trinkets, embellishments, or decorations, up front and highly visible at malls and other popular gathering places where citizens of the world may enjoy Western sausage and pancakes for breakfast, Arabic cous-cous for lunch, and a Thai salad for dinner, all just another choice on the menu of life, items for consumption. Window-shopping is energetically encouraged, as long as there is no intent on buying.

             From another perspective what we are witnessing is in large measure the fallout of international capitalism spewing forth from its cornucopia a smorgasbord of commodified cultures for easy consumption. But deep underneath is the force moving it all: moral relativism, a visceral repugnance for religious thinking, and hence a near fanatical secularism, widely evangelized, which, while it seems at first to be anti-western, is nevertheless rooted in a core Western ideal: the Christian ideal of accommodation of the enemy.

            So from an even larger perspective, the sort of international secular tolerance now preached by all the liberal democracies is really a negative form of aggression; it is a philosophy of cultural disarmament for everyone, that is nevertheless promoted on distinctively Western universalizing terms: let us all lay down our cultural arms and follow radical secularism, egalitarianism, anti-theism, moral relativism, modern liberalism, “multiculturalism,” and so on. In other words, what is presented as a policy of universal cultural tolerance is in fact an aggressive policy aimed at defanging our opponents by asking them to remove the particulars of their own warring cultures, and accept the universalizing generalities of our own.

         When we were a sincere faith civilization, that was a clever strategy – you love the enemy in order to win him over. But in a secular age, especially when the enemy has no intention of surrendering to your way of life, when he prefers real theism to a secular religion, it amounts to handing over your weapons.