Letter to the Editor: Dennis Prager's blind eye

Dear Editor:

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the irony that Dennis Prager’s assault on multi-culturalism appears in the Downey Patriot, in the deep Southwest and on the edge of the Pacific Rim, where multi-culturalism is a way of life.

To hear him tell it, some pure Christian (and white, although he won’t say it) civilization is under assault from every direction.

Prager acts as if the Western “Christian” culture developed in isolation, while in the East and other places evil was brewing. The truth of the matter is that for 500 years the West (European Countries along with our own) actively colonized the rest of the world, and specifically tried to control the Arab world in the Twentieth Century when the former colonies tried to struggle free from the West. The West is not blameless for the mess that causes migrants to want to seek a better life.

Prager is one of those “pundits” who just “says stuff,” with no rationale to back up his statements. For example, Prager states that the French Enlightenment sought the end of Christianity and the West. On the contrary, the expanding interest in science and the arts was a unifying force in Europe, and the technology that resulted from the enlightenment played a large roll in the creation of the industrial wealth of the West.

The French Revolution was a rebellion against the French state, which had tied itself to a “Christianity” that was by then rotten to the core. Would Prager prefer that the feudal kings like Louis the 14th in France had remained in power?

His analysis of the cause of the rise of Nazi-ism is equally self-serving. First, he uses a completely racist argument to say that Germans (who are of course European) were inherently violent, and that only Christianity had kept their natural violence in check. He downplays Hitler’s role as a political leader willing to play on Europe’s long-embedded anti-Semitic beliefs to whip up hatred and division as a way of maintaining power. And he most certainly turns a blind eye to the obvious parallels between Hitler’s divide-and-conquer tactics and the current hatred being whipped up against Latin-American (and almost entirely Christian) immigrants who have become the latest bogyman to supposedly threatening “our culture.”

In his grand finale, Prager says “I don’t know if a worker accident or a radical Muslim set fire to Notre Dame Cathedral …”. Well he must have cancelled his newspaper and cable TV subscriptions, because the whole world knows that so far there has been no hint of radical Muslim involvement. And we also know who burned the three churches in Louisiana, and it wasn’t the secular left, or Latin American immigrants, or other multi-cultural bogeymen that Dennis fears so much. Instead, it was a white nationalist advocating the same cultural purity that Prager advocates.

Not a word about that in Prager’s analysis of the fall of civilization.

Frank Kearns
Downey