THE SCOURGE OF MULTICULTURALISM
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
Much has been said
and written over the years about the blessings conferred by
multiculturalism on the countries that have opened their doors
to large numbers of immigrants and refugees. Multiculturalism
has, apparently, fostered the (unexplained) virtues of “diversity,”
repaid a debt incurred by the colonial West to those it has
exploited, led to economic productivity, and contributed to
the putative boon of an anti-border globalist world in which
national animosities and military strife will become a thing
of the past.
This
was the idea behind the Schengen policy adopted by the European
Union, the Diversity Visa Lottery or “chain migration”
program in the U.S., and the hospitality to primarily Muslim
immigration in my own country of Canada. Every one of these
measures has, by any honest report, proven a failure.
The
argument made by immigration and refugee enthusiasts, namely
that the Western democracies were founded and settled by immigrants
and therefore should continue to welcome newcomers, is valid
only to a point. In the course of time the original settlers
created a national identity, a sense of communal membership
in a common world unified by custom and law. It is that identity
that should be preserved. But owing to many factors, including
a loss of confidence in the rectitude and worthiness of what
came to be regarded as a racist and imperialist civilization,
reasonably coherent societies have been gradually transformed
into a mosaic of ethnicities.
To
my dismay, Canada is no exception. Canadian immigration presumably
operates on a merit system, but there is little evidence of
it in practice. True to Liberalist form, our feckless Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau is on record as affirming that Canada
has no identity. “There is no core identity, no mainstream
in Canada,” Trudeau told The New York Times,
proclaiming Canada as “the first post-national state”
held together not by a hard-earned tradition but by a shopping
list of abstract values -- compassion, respect, openness and
the like. Trudeau continued: ‘‘Countries with a
strong national identity -- linguistic, religious or cultural
-- are finding it a challenge to effectively integrate people
from different backgrounds.” This is true if one sees
one’s country as a permanent airport terminal or a teeming
bazaar, as Trudeau apparently does, viewing Canada as a country
defined not by our history or proto-European origins, but by
a “pan-cultural heritage.”
As
Candice Malcolm, author of Losing True North: Justin Trudeau’s
Assault on Canadian Citizenship, writes: “He doesn’t
think there is anything special about Canadian history or traditions.
Instead, he suggests Canada is nothing but an intellectual construct
and a hodgepodge of various people, from various backgrounds,
who just happen to live side by side in the territory known
as Canada. Trudeau seems embarrassed, even ashamed of, our Western
culture and values.”
If
there is nothing special about Canada’s traditions, they
will surely be supplanted by immigrant traditions. Ricardo Duchesne
writes in Canada in Decay -- one of the most important
books of our day explaining the emergence of the ideology of
immigrant multiculturalism across the West -- that Canada is
an extreme though not unique example of impending ethnocide,
“promoting its own replacement by foreigners from other
races, religions and cultures.” The elites of most Western
nations manifest the same lack of loyalty to “[their]
ancestors and basic dignified pride.” The same form of
national self-deprecation we note in Canada is at work in most
Western nations today.
If
we accept that the Western democracies are not mere accidental
aggregates but nations with a foundational and settled history,
we must be wary of admitting new immigrants in great numbers
who may have little in common with an already established ethos,
especially if they hail from regimes that are alien or hostile
to the civics and culture of the host country. Naturally I will
be deliberately misunderstood by left-wing ideologues, social
justice warriors and the army of bleeding heart liberals who
have lost touch with the roots and principles that ground our
heritage and for which our ancestors struggled, fought and died.
I am not opposed to immigration per se, only to ill-advised
and special interest agendas that would weaken and adulterate
the stable domestic accords arrived at over many generations.
To
say “we are a nation of immigrants,” then, is immaterial.
We are now a nation of citizens. Skilled immigrants, properly
screened and taking into account real domestic needs, should
be part of the country’s future, but not in multiples
that threaten to dilute a nation’s internal cohesion,
not from backward countries whose inhabitants are all too often
uneducated, illiterate and functionally inassimilable, and certainly
not from parts of the world -- in particular, the Islamic world
-- whose history, culture, theology and politics have ranged
it against everything that Western civilization comprises. The
plight of European nations like Germany, Sweden, England and
France, sinking into a morass of civil unrest, criminal violence
and legal subversion, should be an incontrovertible object lesson
that multiculturalism is the devil’s gift to a forgetful
and undeserving people.
The
congeries of welfare recipients bankrupting our fiscal resources,
inner-city ghettoes of disaffected and belligerent residents,
the array of lawfare plaintiffs, the proliferation of de
facto censorship procedures (cf. Canadian federal Bill
C-16 and Motion l03 and the various “hate speech”
laws) and the consequent erosion of community standards are
the poisoned fruit of such unstructured immigration protocols
-- a scourge prettified under the term “multiculturalism.”
A trenchant analysis of the damage to national coherence caused
by multiculturalism may be found in Salim Mansur’s Delectable
Lie. (Full disclosure: it is a book I vetted and brokered
with Mantua Press; interestingly, Duchesne takes exception to
Mansur’s “small l liberal” views.) Mansur,
himself a believing Muslim, deals with the incalculable harm
that this ideological movement has done to the security and
well-being of Canada -- and by extrapolation, to any nation,
in particular the U.S., subject to the liberal delusion of universal
harmony.
Mansur
writes: “[D]espite the lip service proponents of multiculturalism
pay to the notion of individual freedom as the founding principle
of liberalism, their strident promotion of group-based demands
in a liberal democracy has meant diminution of individual rights
and freedoms, or abridging them, whenever they are in conflict
with collective rights.” Ironically, Mansur seems unaware
that his own fervently dogmatic brand of “pure”
or “original” Islam is at odds with his deposition,
but he remains correct in his assessment. The result, he goes
on, is that “liberal democracy begins to lose ground [to]
an anti-liberal ideology.” The new multiethnic society
begins to resemble not a politically mature country intent on
preserving its freedoms and maintaining the bond of solidarity
between state and citizenry but a Coca-Cola commercial. No Western
country should feel it has to buy the world a Coke. What it
ends up buying is civil discord, political disunity, economic
insolvency and intermutual ruin.
John
Lennon’s sappy “Imagine” is no substitute
for a national anthem.
The
media flap over President Trump’s vulgar expression concerning
third world sewers from which many immigrants are drawn -- there
is no proof one way or another that he uttered the remark --
is merely another sign that the West, or its elites, have denied
their own historical exceptionalism. Why they should demean
their own civitas is perhaps obvious. It is, or should
be, common knowledge that an ascendant and ever-assertive Left
is quite willing to turn Western nations into dumpsters in order
to procure immigrant votes and advantageous electoral results.
These quislings demand, observes Geoffrey Hunt in American
Thinker, “that we disembowel Western civilization
and instead venerate all non-white, post-colonial cultures,”
which is nothing less than an “open invitation for failed
states to plant their failed cultures and wretchedness here.”
Indeed, if Western civilization were not endowed with superior
attributes, why would it be besieged by foreign claimants for
its freedoms, perquisites and shelter?
Why
this mass exodus from countries whose cultures are equal to
or better than ours?
There
is no shame in cherishing and defending one’s “old
country” patrimony and the values upon which civic and
communal life are founded. This has nothing to do with an antecedent
“Eurocentrism” that ostensibly degrades other peoples
or with the risible canard of “white supremacy,”
but with the sense of belonging to, for all its flaws and errors,
the greatest civilization ever to appear on earth, a Judeo-Hellenic-Christian
civilization that gave us, among innumerable gifts, the Bible
and the Greek library, the Magna Carta, the concept of individual
liberty, scientific and medical advances never before seen,
and a technological, commercial and industrial infrastructure
that has made life easier for untold millions.
To
gamble these goods away on the premise of the relativistic equality
of all cultures, the toxic nature of “Whiteness,”
and the need to “diversify” our institutions and
practices is the very height of ignorant folly. As Duchesne
sensibly points out, “welcoming the White demographic
displacement by other ethnic groups” is a deception and
a betrayal by our guilt-ridden and self-hating elites and their
credulous votaries. It is a mental disease leading to eventual
ethnocide and the forfeiture of the vast store of accomplishments
which other peoples and cultures have not scrupled to exploit
and from which they have immeasurably benefitted. Such is a
kind of parricide, the killing of the Father whose endowments
have been ungratefully usurped.
All
this got me thinking about Enoch Powell’s controversial
“rivers of blood” speech (and revised text) in which,
as far back as 1968, he warned of the imminent and future perils
of unchecked immigration. Borough life for many was becoming
unpleasant and problematic. Native Englishmen were being displaced
and marginalized in their own homeland. Of course, he was, and
still is, viciously smeared by the liberal press as an unreconstructed
racist, although he has proven to be correct. At the time Powell
was worried mainly about immigration from the West Indies, which
was changing traditional neighborhoods into violent ghettoes,
whose first- and second-generation inhabitants were not interested
in cultural integration.
I’ve
spoken to people who are horrified by his “apocalyptic”
prophecy that the Thames would be flowing with blood. Informed
people know that Powell was alluding to a passage from Book
VI of Virgil’s Aeneid in which the Sibyl prophesizes
that the “Tiber would flow with blood” as a classical
metaphor for the threat of civil dissension. One can guess what
Powell would have thought were he still among us and observing
the rapid Islamization of the UK, the spread of Sharia, the
Rotherham grooming scandal and the litany of terrorist attacks.
He would not have been surprised that London now boasts a Muslim
mayor intent on soft-pedaling jihadist violence. And, of course,
he would have received the same or worse treatment from the
FNM (Fake News Media).
Let’s
scratch the “rivers of blood” metaphor, since not
everyone is familiar with the classical context, and supply
another, more current and well-known metaphor. Let’s say
instead that the river that runs through it is a turbulent flood
of social division and cultural disorder, from which the subsequent
clean-up becomes progressively difficult and ultimately impossible.
As mentioned, the disintegration of Europe is a warning to us
all. The rapidly fading hope is that the clean-up can be managed,
as Roger Ebert writes in a review of the film, with “grace,
courage and honesty.” Grace under current circumstances
may be hard to achieve, but courage and honesty are indispensable
if we are to avoid or at least mitigate on our own shores the
European imbroglio and the fate of a dying continent.
