Date: Mon, 07 Oct 1996 23:23:28 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Multiculturalism Debate summary


Hi,
     A number of people have asked for a summary of my moderated
discussion with "legendary Communist infiltrator Charles Wiley"
at a recent SUNy-Oneonta debate entitled, "Is Multiculturalism
the New Fascism?" put on by the SUNy Freedom Association. 
     The president of the SUNy Freedom Association described Mr.
Wiley as a "hired gun" who goes from campus to campus debating
multiculturalism. A former newspaper reporter who has been to
over 100 countries, Mr. Wiley was supposedly going to expose the
intellectual bankruptcy of "multiculturalism" and the movement's
political agenda of "academic repression" and the elimination of
"the university [as] a place where free minds are intellectually
and morally cultivated to search for mankind's most elusive
treasure, truth."
     The night before my debate (Monday) Mr. Wiley was supposed
to speak at SUNy Binghamton (it was canceled), and I was told
that he would be speaking at Cornell the following evening. He
had flown in from California on Sunday.
     I was ready for a formidable opponent, but instead
confronted someone spouting the same old stuff that the far Right
was saying in the eighties: that multiculturalists propose an
evil West and edenic non-West; white men are evil incarnate;
multiculturalists never mention female circumcision, wife
burning, or any other unpleasant aspects of the non-West, etc.
     Two examples of my opponent's approach are: the fighting in
Rwanda and Burundi shows that multiculturalism doesn't work. I
countered that Wiley's statement was made in a "vacuum" totally
ignoring Belgian colonialism and the grooming of the Nilotic
Tutsis (who, at least partly were chosen because the Belgians
felt they looked more "European") and marginalization of the
Bantu Hutus which led to a power imbalance, tension, and set the
groundwork for today's pogroms. Mr. Wiley countered that I was
ignoring centuries of Tutsi-Hutu warfare before the arrival of
Europeans--a "fact" Mr. Wiley seems to have made up.
     More astounding was Mr. Wiley's statement that American men
freely gave women the right to vote, despite no threat of
violence, and that this was the first time in history that such a
thing had ever occurred. Mr. Wiley went on to propose that
America led the way in giving women voting rights, and that
America's example paved the way for the rest of the world to
recognize women as equal citizens. This was part of Wiley's
argument that all the good things that America does (and has
done) are ignored by multiculturalists, and all multiculturalists
ever talk about is how "bad" slavery was, how even Thomas
Jefferson had slaves, and a whole bunch of other relatively
unimportant aspects of American history. Instead we should be
focusing on the great ideas of the Western tradition.
     I did not have the facts to dispute Mr. Wiley's contentions
re. women and voting, but I knew he was so wrong that my reply
was that "I didn't think I had followed his argument." He replied
he'd explain it to me after! That evening my suspicions were
confirmed:  New Zealand first gave women voting rights (among W.
nations) in 1893 and U.S. was the 14th country to do so, in 1920.
Moral: have someone with an encyclopedia in the audience (I never
expected such shoddy scholarship from someone doing this
professionally).
     Whenever Mr. Wiley mentioned those "other" unimportant
countries that multiculturalists keep talking about he would make
up a name such as "lower Slovenia."
     Approx. 95 people attended the debate--I'd say about 15 SUNy
Freedom Association members and the remainder sympathetic to
multiculturalism. The program lasted 2 1/2 hours and was taped,
but the arguments from the Right made for an uneven discussion.

Kevin Hickey
SUNy Oneonta (capital "y's" don't upload, sorry)

SUNy Freedom Association's motto is "In Defense of Permanent
Things"


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