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What Youth for Western Civilization has to say for itself

Posted April 27, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

As you know, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time lately on this new anti-immigrant group called Youth for Western Civilization. Its the sort of group I’d normally ignore, but since it has some big money backing it, I find I have to keep looking.
Riley Matheson, the chairperson of the University of North Carolina chapter of Youth for Western Civilization gave an interview to IndyWeek.com about the founding of the group.
The group was apparently founded because students and faculty have a deep “hatred” of Western culture. Here are Matheson’s own words:
The problem with university students and faculty is that there is basically, in our opinion, a deep mistrust and hatred of Western heritage. We’re constantly focusing on the sins of our past. It’s not to say they weren’t sins. It’s just to say that we need to revitalize our culture and not constantly talk about mistakes we might have made. We’ve long since made up for the sins we might have committed.
Do you mean slavery and the Inquisition?
I can definitely say that slavery’s one of the sins. When it comes to things like the Inquisition, I’d rather not comment—I don’t want to condemn it. That’s a personal opinion, and not really a club opinion.
Hard to keep from laughing, because while the “club” is firmly against slavery, it doesn’t “want to condemn” the Inquisition. As a scholar, Matheson apparently wants to keep an open mind on the persecution of the Jews.
The interviewer next asks the Youth about the great bug-a-boo of conservatives-Multiculturalism:
YWC is specifically against “radical multi-culturalism.” What is that, and does it exist at UNC?
If we look at most college campuses, UNC especially, diversity is celebrated. You’re told from the second you get here for orientation that diversity is a strength. And we believe that that makes absolutely no sense.
If you look at a country like Japan, Japan’s not multi-culturalist, and they’re a perfect, thriving nation. When you get together with your friends, you don’t talk about the stuff that makes you different, you talk about the stuff that makes you similar. Sure, there are differences, but we don’t need to celebrate those differences. We don’t need to highlight them and augment them. What we need to do is highlight and augment the things that make us similar.
Whenever I debate cultural anti-immigrantists, they always love to point to Japan. “We need to be more like Japan”, they always say. The allure is obvious. Nearly everyone there comes from the same racial background, and those that don’t are not in a position to demand recognition. Sort of like the way White Americans perceived our country before 1954.
The Youth is also worried about the possibilities that students might study a “non-American” subject:
The idea of radical multi-culturalism is the changing curriculum, the different subjects we have that focus on non-Western, non-American subjects. It’s not to say you shouldn’t study, as an academic person, other cultures, it’s just that you need to be well-versed in your own, before you sort of extend out into others.
It should be obvious. You need to be well versed in the history of North Carolina before you venture to study the literature of Latin America.
The response to the next question shows why it is important to study American history:
Attempts to achieve similarity throughout history have horribly misfired. The Final Solution comes to mind. America is a diverse nation, so how would we go from being diverse to being similar, in a way that wouldn’t be violent?
One thing we have to realize is the reason we’re a diverse country is because people naturally segregate themselves according to their differences. If it weren’t for that segregation, we wouldn’t be a diverse culture.
Ummm, I am not sure that Jim Crow and Seperate But Equal can really be called “natural”. If you think that segregation is “natural” then you might be inclined to overlook what Youth calls “the sins of the past”. One might think that a group so focused on heritage would be more inclined to learn about the past as it actually was lived.
Then he takes the obligatory stab at immigrants:
While we’re not necessarily advocating forcing people to become similar, we do need to realize that when we have immigrants who come to this country who can’t speak English—and many of whom are unwilling to learn English, and when you go to the store and everything you buy is half in Spanish and half in English—you’re pandering to that diversity that segregates us. If everybody just learns English—because, after all, it is the language of this country—then it would be much easier for us to be united.
I went to the store today and bought an apple and it was not “half in Spanish”. Also, the evidence apparent to anyone who actually teaches English to immigrants is that the vast majority desperately want to learn the language.
The Youth is next asked about interracial marriage:
This is not racial. None of the official positions—you might find somebody at the club who might hold some opinions on that, and indeed you will—but in terms of YWC itself, no. There really isn’t any kind of official position or stance (on interracial marriage).
OK, he is honest enough to admit that some of the guys might have a prob with their sister marrying a brother, but, as with the Inquisition, the Youth for Western Culture have no official position on interracial marriage.
And finally, back to bashing immigrants again:
A recent YWC blog post claims “our culture would be assaulted” by an increasing Latino population. Isn’t language like that unfavorably casting an entire ethnic group living in the U.S.?
I do think that language such as that, while it might be strong, I think it’s true. We’re talking about people who don’t ... show much interest in learning English. And so that would change part of our culture, because we’re going from English to Spanish.
Here is a look at how Youth for Western Civ gets start-up funding
Co-founder of Youth for Western Civ pleads guilty to hate crime.