LOS ANGELES, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- War, for all its horrors, has sometimes brought blessings to America. More than once in our history, a victorious struggle against a common enemy left the nation more unified than ever before.
The massive outpouring of nationalistic solidarity seen since Sept. 11 shows that Americans are hungering once again to transcend the petty racial and ethnic squabbles of recent years. We want to present a solid front to the foreign foe. Yet, American elites have grown so accustomed to encouraging racial divisiveness in the name of "diversity" that they might still waste this unique opportunity for national unity.
A terrible beauty is reborn, to paraphrase W.B. Yeat's famous line about the 1916 surge of Irish nationalism that eventually won independence from Britain.
Yet, American nationalism has been even more terrible to its enemies, precisely because, at its best, it has offered a rarer beauty than traditional race-based nationalist movements. While almost all others nations have defined their membership primarily in terms of blood relations, American nationalism has often been more expansive, welcoming many newcomers willing to take up America's language, culture, values, and ideals.
The vast increase in population made possible by America's national openness, combined with intensive inculcation of patriotism among immigrants, made the U.S. terrible in time of war, large enough and avid enough to simultaneously defeat both Germany's and Japan's fervent but inherently limited genetic-based nationalisms.
In many ways, America is a nation forged in war. For example, fighting the Revolutionary War made 13 separate and suspicious colonies begin to think of themselves as a nation.
Of course, there has always been a harsh side to the growth of American patriotism. The unity that developed in the late 18th Century was greatly assisted by tens of thousands of Americans still loyal to the King fleeing to Canada.
According to historian Shelby Foote, the Civil War had a telling effect on American grammar. Before, the "United States" was a plural noun. People said, "The United States are..." The Civil War made them spontaneously switch to saying, "The United States is ..."
The Spanish-American War of 1898 demonstrated that the schism between the victorious North and the defeated South had definitely healed. To the surprise of many Northerners, white Southerners volunteered in droves to fight for their nation. This reconciliation with the most warlike segment of the American people confirmed that America was indeed a Great Power.
White unity had come at a severe price, though: in 1877 the North had given up on the deeply resented Reconstruction, mollifying the ex-Rebels, but consigning the freed slaves to the less than tender mercies of their former owners.
World War I had a significant impact on America that is now almost completely forgotten. Anglo-Americans used the war fever to crush the only culture within America that could potentially compete with theirs for primacy: that of the German-Americans. Today, Germans have the highest numbers but probably the lowest profile of any ethnic group.
In countless WWII movies, a platoon featuring, say, a moonshining hillbilly, a wisecracking Brooklynite, a WASP college boy, a Midwestern farm boy, an Italian with a funny accent, and a Polish steel worker overcame their differences to defeat the racist Germans or Japanese. It's a cliché laughed at now, but it was also true. The diversity of white America did indeed merge toward unity during the war.
African-Americans, unfortunately, were largely banned from combat until late in the war, but even their brief time on the frontlines helped make possible the single most influential step toward desegregation. In 1945, Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler, despite having been a former governor and senator of segregationist Kentucky, said of blacks, "If they can fight and die on Okinawa, Guadalcanal [and] in the South Pacific, they can play ball in America." Upon hearing this, Brooklyn Dodger owner Branch Rickey immediately set in motion the plan that enabled Jackie Robinson to break the sports color line.
This helped make the Civil Rights Era politically feasible by giving white Americans black heroes with whom to identify.
From this beginning in the 1944-1947 era, sports teams and the U.S. military became the most successfully integrated institutions in American life. They succeed because they focus blacks and whites on a shared goal -- beating the foe -- rather than on obsessing on their differences.
Last year Denzel Washington had a surprise hit movie with the true story "Remember the Titans." In it, he played the black football coach of a newly integrated Southern high school. He gets his squad to overcome their racial hostility by appealing to their desire to win. Of course, to win they have to play together as a team.
"Titans'" popularity shouldn't have been a surprise, though. Its theme that competition with an outsider breeds racial cooperation is one that Americans find both heartwarming and realistic. The public senses that this strategy bridges far more racial gaps than having everyone sit around and talk about how racially oppressed they feel.
Similarly, Colin Powell made a reputation for himself by rebuilding a racially troubled division in Korea just after Vietnam. He made clear to his troops that in this man's Army, there's no black or white, just Army green.
The U.S. Army of today is, in the words of military sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler, multiracial but unicultural. The war-fighting advantages of this kind of multi-ethnic but monocultural military were advocated by the great science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his 1959 novel "Starship Troopers." It's now the first book on the Marine Corps' suggested reading list.
Heinlein played a remarkable trick on his readers to make his moral clear. It's the story of a desperate war between humanity and a genocidal alien species. The narrator, a young soldier called "Johnnie" by his war buddies is slowly revealed to be not the blue-eyed Middle American lad that his audience automatically assumed back in 1959. By the end, we learn that "Johnnie's" full name is "Juan Rico," and he's a Tagalog-speaker from the Philippines.
(By the way, the book has little to do with the ludicrous, Aryan-obsessed 1997 movie version of "Starship Troopers," with Juan Rico played by blonde poster boy Casper Van Dien.)
Yet, despite all of the evidence that what leads to racial accord is focusing attention on what unites the races rather than what divides them, American elites have become fixated on making everyone more "sensitive" to racial and ethnic divisions.
Universities, for instance, can't get their black and white students to eat lunch at the same table. The exceptions, of course, are the scholarship athletes. Yet, college administrators never seem to ask their coaches how they accomplish this feat. They know they wouldn't like the answers. So, administrators prefer to simply invest in more of the hair of the dog that bit them: more diversity sensitivity indoctrination, more racial preferences, and more victim studies programs.
Or consider the disgraceful but predictable current flurry of attacks and abuse directed toward Middle Easterners. Precisely because America is a multi-ethnic nation, and doesn't want its peoples attacking each other on the street, as happens in so many other multiracial countries, our government must protect Americans from foreign fifth columnists and criminals.
The most important thing that the state can do to encourage tolerance and trust toward people of other races is to make citizens confident that a careful government has checked out the people they see about them. When confident that the government is looking after their personal security, citizens don't feel the urge to take the law into their own hands.
Of course, we now know that the government cataclysmically failed at controlling who could come into the U.S. Further, for fear of being accused of racial and gender profiling, the Federal Aviation Administration has not used commonsense anti-terrorist techniques that are standard in Europe.
According to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, the profiles of potential hijackers given to airport workers at security checkpoints did not tell them to pay more attention to Middle Eastern males than to, say, Mexican females.
Inevitably, the government's failure to maintain a monopoly on violence has led to some individuals, most of them drunk and stupid, attempting to rid their nation of terrorists by harassing innocent individuals and institutions that reminded them vaguely of Osama bin Laden.
What can be done? Obviously, laws must be enforced and the nation's leaders must continue to denounce vigilanteism.
Beyond that, though, the public will feel less suspicious of Arabs and Muslims when it knows the government is more suspicious than it has been. Taking physical appearance into account when watching for Middle Eastern terrorists entering America seems a reasonable procedure. It imposes no sanction on those questioned beyond a slightly intrusive interrogation; and if they are innocent travelers, it protects them along with others.
The government should also stop ignoring a legal method for preventing terrorists from immigrating: the employment of "secret evidence" in immigration hearings. In 1996, Congress made it legal for undercover infiltrators of terrorist rings to testify anonymously against would-be immigrants with terrorist connections. Yet, in the last two years, following complaints by Arab and Muslim anti-discrimination organizations, the number held on secret evidence has fallen from about two dozens to just one.
Further, it's time for politicians and editorialists to explain to ethnic pressure groups that, for the good of their peoples and the American people as a whole, it's time for them to get serious. Complain less about stereotypes of Arab Muslims as terrorists. Make more of an effort to root out the small cancer of fifth columnists in their midst and in their mosques. This would serve the vast number of highly patriotic Middle Eastern-Americans far better than some of their leaders' current strategy of complaint.
Whether many of these reforms ever happen, however, will be a test of whether America's elites will properly nurture the national unity that has fallen in their laps.
In the past, they would have found it hard to resist playing the usual game of social status one-upsmanship. Much of what drives society's leadership classes is the urge to set themselves above the masses and their tawdry concerns about matters like fifth columnists.
In other words, because few want to be seen as sharing in any way the fear and anger that encourage a handful of drunken yahoos to take potshots at mosques, those who wish to be viewed as morally superior individuals are tempted to demand the government do nothing effective to protect society from terrorist immigrants. If the Armies of the Sensitive succeed in emasculating the fight against domestic Muslim terrorists, this will lead to more terror, more vigilanteism, and in turn ever more opportunities for the anti-discrimination crowd to flaunt their superiority over their fellow citizens.
Racially homogenous countries like Iceland, not diverse ones like American, can afford this kind of frivolous approach to the challenges of racial diversity. America, in contrast, needs hardheaded strategies for making sure that all of America's many races can live in peace.
