Multiculturalism. Dinesh D'Souza. Saul Bellow. Bishop Bartolomeo Las Casas. Mario Vargas Llosa. Carlos Fuentes. Claude Levi-Strauss.

Multiculturalism, anyone? . . . The essence of multiculturalism -- all the rage in schools big and small -- is not openness to other cultures but the denigrating of our own, argues Dinesh D'Souza in a 11/95 article in First Things.

For instance, multiculturalists' take on European discovery of the new world is that these were not discoveries by Europeans but encounters between residents and new arrivals. But who got off their duffs and sailed the ocean blue, Columbus or the Carib Indians?

Columbus and friends were bigots and holocaust-perpetrators, say multiculturalists. But Chris's bias was in Indians' favor. He praised them on their first meeting (encounter?) and pronounced them admirable in every respect. It was on returning to find his crewmen dead and perhaps eaten that he changed his tune. A mugged liberal, he became a neoconservative.

One of the true rats in the multiculturalists' book of rats is novelist Saul Bellow, who asked to be shown "the Proust of the Papuans" so he could read him. (If they're so good, where's their Proust?)

"Astoundingly racist," cried literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt, author of Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation and Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse -- without which no multiculturalist home should be.

Details, details . . . Again, multiculturalism is based not on openness but on relativism -- hell, if I were a Carib Indian, I would have eaten Columbian sailors too. Depends on how you're brought up. Live in a glass house? Don't throw stones. That sort of thing.

To sell this, multiculturalists have to fudge data on human sacrifice, for instance, declaring in approved school books that those may have been dog bones that Cortez and friends saw in Aztec cities or comparing them not unfavorably to the Christian Eucharist.

One book not approved for school use was condemned for describing human sacrifice "in gory detail," thus giving "a distortion of the Aztecs." One that was approved was praised as "a wonderful celebration of Aztec religion, beliefs, and customs, intermingled with the thoughts and feelings of today's Mexican-Americans."

Look, if you leave out the gory details, it's not much more than good, clean sun worship.

Approved school books also play up Euro atrocities. Actually, the king of Spain once called off expansion of Spanish rule for a while for the sake of Christian, Western principles -- unheard-of behavior by a king.

He did it when Bishop Bartolomeo Las Casas spoke up for the Indians. Las Casas had no more divisions than the pope facing Stalin, only Christian, Western principles to throw at the Spanish king.

It was not the horses, stupid! . . . As for how the Spanish defeated Aztecs and Incas though ridiculously outnumbered, there are a number of explanations. Spanish guns and horses would have confused the natives for a while, as would the Spaniards' sheer strangeness. Help from oppressed Aztec and Inca neighbors mattered. But more important was the sheer irrationality and superstition of the conquered.

Montezuma imprisoned his generals and had their wives and children killed when they gave unwelcome advice. Dreams and incantations guided him and his friends, while the Spanish used reason and prevailed. That's primitive vs. advanced civilization at work.

The same Euro tradition of reason and empiricism later devised a cure for the smallpox that had killed off so many Indians. Multiculturalists speak freely of genocide, but it was the pox that did 'em in so ruthlessly.

They want to be like Mike . . . D'Souza quotes the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, writers of our day, in support of what Fuentes called "the so-called discovery of America" as "a triumph of scientific hypothesis over physical perception" or common-sense observation.

These non-Anglo writers in essence have the agreement of underdeveloped-nation people who don't buy multiculturalism, much to the chagrin of the wild and woolly anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. They object, says Levi-Strauss, not to being westernized but to being westernized too slowly.

So it is that people prefer Western ways. Levi-Strauss seems to call that a benighted response. He has a better idea -- multiculturalism -- and in his way is something of a cultural imperialist. Right?