Second in a series on America's imperiled future.[I, III, IV, V, VI]

Who are we? What are we?

Fifty years ago there was only one answer. We were Americans, and most knew what that meant. When American principles were found lacking in practice, reformers stepped forth. In those days, reform meant to apply the principles, not to overthrow them.

Today there are as many answers to the questions as there are hyphenated-Americans and organized "victim groups." Assimilation is no longer a function of America's educational system. Not even native-born whites are being assimilated. The real answer to the questions is that America is a Tower of Babel, not only in races, languages, religions and cultures, but also in beliefs.

Multiculturalism teaches that all cultures are equal with the exception of traditional American culture, which is a racist, sexist, homophobic, hegemonic white male engine of oppression. The formerly venerated Founding Fathers are despised as "hegemonic oppressors." A common interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is that it is an anti-democratic device for protecting rich property owners and "hate speech" offensive to minorities and women.

In his bestseller, The Death of the West, Patrick Buchanan shows how American intellectual confidence was sapped by the relocation of the Frankfurt School of German cultural Marxism to U.S. universities. Substituting accusations, propaganda and emotion for knowledge and reason, cultural Marxists have blocked the transmission of the beliefs that cemented America together.

With the cement gone, what once was a nation is dissolving into a collection of victim groups taught to regard white males as oppressors. We are left with a thin gruel of comity between the races and the genders.

Hatred cannot be taught without consequences.

Communists taught hatred of the upper classes, and the result was tens of millions murdered in Russia and China.

German intellectuals taught hatred of Jews, and millions were murdered.

Now it is whites who are demonized. Earlier this year a number of black youths were arrested in idyllic Charlottesville, Virginia, for a series of brutal racial attacks on white university students. Just the other day, when Cincinnati police broke up a street fight between two teenage girls, 300 blacks shouting "get whitey" attacked the police and white motorists who were driving by.

Recently at the University of California, Berkeley, a student publication criticized a Hispanic student group for advocating the liberation by "bronze people" of California and the Southwest from "the gringos." The Hispanics responded with violence, breaking into the publication's offices, destroying copies of the publication and issuing death threats to the staff.

Nonwhites feel confident and justified in assaulting whites. Nonwhites have been taught that they are victims of white oppressors and that they are justified in responding to oppression with violence.

Nonwhites have learned that, despite the "hegemonic" white power structure, they have little to fear from confrontations with white students. A double-standard operates. Hispanic violence is due to "anger and resentment" and is met with "understanding," but whites who responded to violence with violence would definitely face expulsion and hate-crime charges.

In multiculturalspeak, whites lack the moral status of a victim group. When whites are beaten and shouted down, it is seen as retribution. The confidence and courage of whites to defend free speech is undermined, because everything whites say can be said to be "offensive" to preferred minorities.

"Anger and resentment" has also become a protective cover for women's violence against men.

Once violence is exonerated by "understanding" the motives, all constraint is gone. Donald Kagan, perhaps Yale's most distinguished scholar, writes in the current issue of the Intercollegiate Review that among the faculties of the prestige universities, the main response to 9/11 is to sympathize with the desperate, angry and bereaved Muslims who, understandably, replied to offensive cultural messages with violence.

A country, especially a moralistic one, whose intellectual elites do not believe its history and culture are defensible, and whose politicians will not protect its borders from illegal immigration, will become a country whose youth will not serve it in combat.

The U.S. does more to defend the borders of Kosovo and Bosnia than it does to secure its own border with Mexico. How long can a country, portrayed by its own educators as a bastion of white racism, continue to bomb brown-skinned Muslims in a war on terror?

We are told that the war on terror will last for years, but where is the belief system to sustain it?

Will multiculturally-indoctrinated youth kill and die for racist, sexist, hegemonic power?

Paul Craig Roberts is the author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

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