More blows struck for diversity

Over 2,500 years ago, Herodotus pointed out the advisability of multi-culti diversity. “We must,” he wrote, “respect other people’s customs.”

Then, 50 pages later in the same book, he inadvertently refuted himself: “Burying people alive is an ancient Persian custom.” An attentive reader may conclude that perhaps not all customs are equally respectable.

While modernity has built some of its ethos on the first statement, it hasn’t given much thought to the second. Hence we feel reverential awe at the sight of any alien custom being practised at our own doorstep. No hierarchy of foreign customs based on their compatibility with our own seems to be recognised.

When we observe some ethnic group respecting their elders, we smile admiringly. When we observe the same group stoning adulterers, we smile indulgently. But we smile in either case.

Not to do so would be to run the risk of being accused of discrimination, and no graver charge exists in our global madhouse. We simply can’t and won’t discriminate among different types of discrimination, good or bad. In fact, as far as we’re concerned, no discrimination can be good by definition.

This arrant nonsense is a symptom not only of a psychiatric disorder but also of sheer idiocy. Discrimination is the sine qua non of morality, taste, judgement, intellect – of everything that makes us human. It’s at the heart of the ability to tell good from bad, right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. Take that faculty away, and we’re all reduced to the level of Tony Blair.

Discrimination is a controlled test applied to anything we wish to evaluate. As such, it requires a certain set of criteria against which we judge, say, other people’s customs. In the West, such criteria can only be rooted in our own civilisation.

Thus an alien group respecting old people doesn’t contradict our own customs. The same group stoning adulterers does. The first custom should be encouraged and, ideally, emulated. The second should be decried and, ideally, punished.

What gave rise to this line of thought is the recent culture clash in Florida, involving a young Indian family. The husband, Devbir Kalsi, felt that his wife, Silky Gaind, wasn’t sufficiently obedient.

Western men are all familiar with this problem and have learned to live with it. Begrudgingly we’ve had to accept that our possible countermeasures are limited to the point of being non-existent.

That has been the case for a long time and, among the more civilised strata of Western men, practically for ever. Some men used to regard their wives as chattels, but that sort of attitude had been unwelcome for centuries before modern feminism made its appearance.

By contrast, Devbir was brought up in a different culture, one that Silky implicitly flouted by not always doing as she was told. Acting in accordance with the ancient customs of his native India, Devbir knew that a disobedient wife has to be disciplined. That means beaten.

That he proceeded to do regularly, and when Silky tried to use their baby as a shield, Devbir beat them both. A time-honoured custom was thus served, but it wasn’t served well enough.

Silky still persisted in her insubordinate ways, continuing to pretend that Florida was exempt from the more extreme of Indian customs. To his credit, Devbir realised his limitations as an agent of discipline.

He knew he needed help, and that’s where another fine Indian tradition came in: cohesion of the extended family. Not for the Indians the severing of ties among generations; not for them grown-up children hardly ever talking to their parents and only seeing them once a year, at Christmas.

As the Sanskrit saying goes, a family that slays together stays together (or words to that effect; my Sanskrit is a bit rusty). So, when Devbir cried to his parents for help, they dutifully flew 8,000 miles to lend him a heavy helping hand.

The parents and their son locked Silky in her room, took her mobile away and joined forces in beating the woman systematically, along with her baby when he got in the way. However, according to the book with only a limited appeal on the subcontinent, “nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest”.

Having heard the screams produced by the disciplining efforts, Florida police, in a flagrant exercise of racial discrimination, arrested Devbir along with his parents and charged them with “domestic violence, child abuse and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon” (Devbir held a knife to Silky’s throat while his parents worked her over).

All three may be deported back to the land of the Vedas, yoga and Mahabharata, back to the civilisation supposed to be at least equal to ours or, according to a strong minority opinion, even better. But that’s the US for you.

How many alien barbarians have been deported from Britain lately? Hundreds, at most. Out of probably hundreds of thousands of chaps who offend our traditions and customs every day, often by using women for punching bags.

Nothing pleases me more than watching our champions of multi-culti progress squirm trying to resolve the conflict of two pieties: diversity and feminism. Third World arrivals personify ideological virtue; wife beating, ideological vice.

A quandary if I’ve ever seen one. How does one find a way out? Wish I could help, but I can’t. Perhaps they should ask their parents.