Tolerant Xenophobes
1. We tolerate the abusive misuse of adjectives. Terms such as „Nazi," „Fascists„, „racist", are thrown around with the abandon of a kindergarten's snow-ball fight. The following shall illustrate the misuse of abusive terms. Newly I can vote in Switzerland. Therefore, I joined the SVP (founded in 1919). At best, it is labeled in the foreign press as xenophobic. Recently, I attended in my first local assembly of members. My friend, Rico, a local physician, introduced me. By opening my mouth, I betrayed the fact that I am not be native to Swiss German - which Germans do not understand to the extent that Swiss films are subtitled for them. Furthermore, while the Swiss write in High German, they do not like to speak it. Most people here are rather handicapped in German as it is a foreign language learned in school. Hardly seated, the chairman approached me. Do I want the meeting to be held in German? My passive command of the language being perfect, I asked that, by all means, we should use „Schwitzertütsch". After that, it took a moment to realize that the episode tells much about the charge of yahoo nativism. In fact, the SVP is not at all against „foreigners". What it is against is, besides big government, criminality. This position is held resolutely, regardless of whether culprits are indigenous or foreign. Me think that the smeared SVP deserves the apology it will not get.
Gudrid Thorbjorn's Daughter: A Conservative Instance
If conservatism (a word that discomfits me somewhat) were an attitude to existence based on a yearning for truth and if, as Plato and his twentieth century exegete Eric Voegelin argued, truth were not a doctrine, but rather a loving quest for harmonious relations among mortals and the divine, then neither would conservatism qualify for a doctrine, any more than truth. I take these propositions not merely as hypothetical, but rather, as commonsense-wise, "just so." Conservatives should in that case heave a sigh of relief because in being other than a doctrine, conservatism, supposing that one kept the word in usage, must likewise be other than an ideology. Ideologues of every stripe not only can explain – they in fact eagerly leap from the start to explain – who they take themselves to be and in what, passionately, they believe. The passion counts more for them than the specific content of any belief, but the themes, such as equality and tolerance, are consistent. Liberal loquacity, once let out the gate, has a nightmarish way of never shutting itself up.
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