The Brussels Journal, the essential European blogFrom the desk of
FjordmanI’ve received
some criticism for trying to figure out the ideological and
historical roots of Multiculturalism. Critics claim that it’s all about hate, about a desire to break down the Established Order at any cost. Many of the proponents don’t believe in the doctrine of Multiculturalism themselves, so we shouldn’t waste any time analyzing the logic behind it, because there is none. A desire to break down Western society is certainly there, but I do believe there are some ideas about the desired end result articulated as well.
On one hand, we’re supposed to “celebrate” our differences at the same time as it is racist and taboo to recognize that any differences between groups of people exist at all. This is hardly logically coherent, which is why Multiculturalism can only be enforced by totalitarian means. Perhaps it boils down to the fact there are no major differences, just minor quirks, all cute, which should be celebrated at the same time as we gradually eradicate them.
We are told to treat cultural and historical identities as fashion accessories, shirts we can wear and change at will. The Multicultural society is “colorful,” an adjective normally attached to furniture or curtains. Cultures are window decorations of little or no consequence, and one might as well have one as the other. In fact, it is good to change it every now and then. Don’t you get tired of that old sofa sometimes? What about exchanging it for the new sharia model? Sure, it’s slightly less comfortable than the old one, but it’s very much in vogue these days and sets you apart from the neighbors, at least until they get one, too. Do you want a sample of the latest
Calvin Klein perfume to go with that sharia?We should remember that this view of culture as largely unimportant is essentially a Marxist view of the world, which has now even been adopted by segments of the political Right, united with Leftists in the belief that man is homo economicus, the economic man, the sum of his functions as worker and consumer, nothing more. Marxism doesn’t say that cultures or ideas are of absolutely no consequence, but that they are of minor or secondary importance next to structural and economic conditions.
I have heard individuals state point blank that even if Muslims become the majority in our countries in the future, this doesn’t matter because all people are equal and all cultures are just a mix of everything else, anyway. And since religions are just fairy-tales, replacing one fairy-tale, Christianity, with another fairy-tale, Islam, won’t make a big difference. All religions basically say that the same things in different ways. However, not one of them would ever dream of saying that all political ideologies “basically mean the same thing.” They simply don’t view religious or cultural ideas as significant, and thus won’t spend time on studying the largely unimportant details of each specific creed. This is Marxist materialism.
The unstated premise behind this is that the age of distinct cultures is over. All peoples around the world will gradually blend into one another. Ethnic, religious and racial tensions will disappear, because mankind will be one and equal. It’s cultural and genetic Communism. Nation states who create their own laws and uphold their own borders constitute “discrimination” and an obstacle to this new Utopia, and will gradually have to be dismantled, starting with Western nations of course, replaced by a world where everybody has the right to move wherever they want to and where international legislation and human rights resolutions define the law, upheld by an elite of — supposedly well-meaning — transnational bureaucrats managing our lives.
What the proponents of this ideology don’t say is that even if it were possible to melt all human beings into one people, which is in my view neither possible nor desirable, this project would take generations or centuries, and in the intervening time there would be numerous wars and enormous suffering caused by the fact that not everybody would quietly allow themselves to be eradicated.
All aspects of your person, from language via culture to skin color and religion, are treated as imaginary social constructs. We are told that “all cultures are hybrids and borrow from each other,” that we were “all immigrants” at one point in time and hence nobody has a right to claim any specific piece of land as “theirs.”
Since “we” are socially constructed, we can presumably also be socially deconstructed. The Marxist
“counter-culture”of the 1960s and 70s has been remarkably effective at attacking the pillars of Western civilization. It is, frankly, scary to notice how much damage just one single generation can inflict upon a society. Maybe it’s true that no chain is stronger than its weakest link. Our education system is now used to dismantle our culture, not to uphold it, and has moved from the Age of Reason to the Age of Deconstruction. Socialism has destroyed the very fabric of society. Our countries have become so damaged that people feel there is nothing left fighting for, which no doubt was the intention. Our children leave school as disoriented wrecks and ideological cripples with no sense of identity, and are met with a roar of outrage if they demonstrate the slightest inkling of a spine.
Codie Stott, a white English teenage schoolgirl, was arrested on suspicion of committing a section five racial public order offense after refusing to sit with a group of South Asian students because some of them did not speak English. She was taken to Swinton police station, had her fingerprints taken and was thrown into a cell before being released. Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said: “A lot of these arrests don’t result in prosecutions – the aim is to frighten us into self-censorship until we watch everything we say.”
Bryan Cork of Carlisle, Cumbria in the Lake District, was sentenced to six months in jail for standing outside a mosque shouting, “Proud to be British,” and “Go back to where you came from.” This happened while Muslims were instituting sharia laws in British cities and got state sponsorship for having several wives.
Antifascistisk Aktion in Sweden, a group that supposedly fights against “racists,” openly brag about numerous physical attacks against persons with their full name and address published on their website. According to AFA, this is done in order to fight against global capitalism and for a classless society. They subscribe to an ideology that killed one hundred million people during a few generations, and they are the good guys. Those who object to being turned into a minority in their own country through mass immigration are the bad guys.
The extreme Left didn’t succeed in staging a violent revolution in the West, so they decided to go for a permanent, structural revolution instead. They now hope that immigrants can provide raw material for a violent rebellion, especially since many of them are Muslims who have displayed such a wonderful talent for violence and destruction. The Western Left are importing a new proletariat, since the previous one disappointed them.
A poll carried out on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag, although 95 percent knew of Auschwitz. “Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the findings,” Ander Hjemdahl, the founder of UOK, told website
The Local. In the nationwide poll, 43 percent believed that Communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives. The actual figure is estimated at 100 million. 40 percent believed that
Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world. Mr. Hjemdahl states several reasons for this massive ignorance, among them that “a large majority of Swedish journalists are left-wingers, many of them quite far left.”
I have personally read statements by leading media figures not just in Sweden, but all over Western Europe, who openly brag about censoring coverage of issues related to mass immigration and the Multicultural society.
The Muslim writer
Abdelwahab Meddeb believes that as a result of French influence, the whole of the Mediterranean region “is suited to becoming a laboratory for European thought.” First of all, I don’t think Islam can be reformed, and even if it could, France currently lacks the cultural confidence to lead such an effort. Behind their false pride, they are a nation deeply unsure about themselves, and still carry psychological wounds from their great Revolution of 1789. And second: A bridge can be crossed two ways. Will France be a bridge for European thought into the Islamic world or for Islamic thought into Europe? Right now, the latter seems more likely. And finally: I greatly resent seeing tens of millions of human beings described as a “laboratory.” Unfortunately, Mr. Meddeb is not alone in entertaining such ideas.
Belgian Prime Minister
Guy Verhofstadt has said: “Belgium is the laboratory of European unification.” What kind of confidence does it inspire in citizens that their supposed leader talks about their country as a laboratory? Are their children guinea pigs? Apparently, yes.
In 1960, 7.3% of
the population of Belgian capital Brussels was foreign. Today the figure is 56.5%. Jan Hertogen, a Marxist sociologist, can hardly hide his excitement over this great experiment in social engineering, and believes this population replacement “is an impressive and unique development from a European, or even a world perspective.” Yes, it is probably the first time in human history that a nation demographically has handed over its capital city to outsiders without firing a single shot, but judging from trends in the rest of Europe, it won’t
be the last. The European Union and the local, Multicultural elites will see to that.
The Dutch writer
Margriet de Moor provides another example of why Multiculturalism is a massive experiment in social engineering, every bit as radical and dangerous as Communism. Ms. de Moor lives in some kind of alternate reality where “Europe’s affluence and free speech” will create an Islamic Reformation. But Muslim immigration constitutes a massive drain on the former, and is slowly, but surely destroying the latter:
“When I’m feeling optimistic I sometimes see the Netherlands, a small laconic country not inclined towards the large-scale or the theatrical, as a kind of laboratory on the edge of Europe. Now and then the mixture of dangerous, easily inflammable substances results in a little explosion, but basically the process of ordinary chemical reactions just continues.”
What kind of person refers to her own country as a laboratory? Ms. de Moor sounds like a scientist, dispassionately studying an interesting specimen in her microscope. I’m sure Theo van Gogh would be pleased to hear that he was basically a lab rat when he ended up with a knife in his chest for having “insulted” Islam, along with that of the “racist” Pim Fortuyn the first political murder in Holland for centuries. What was once one of the most tolerant nations in the world is now being ruined by Muslim immigration. But hey, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, right? These murders were an unfortunate business, no doubt, but one mustn’t call off the entire Multicultural experiment because of a few minor setbacks.
We are all told that Arabs triggered the Renaissance in Europe. Michelangelo was commissioned by the Pope to paint the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel within the Vatican. He painted God creating Adam. Did any of the Caliphs or Sultans ever commission an artist to pant the image of Allah in Mecca? Why not, if all cultures are one and the same? Likewise, the political works of the ancient Greeks were never translated to Arabic, as they presented systems such as democracy where men ruled themselves according to their own laws. This was considered blasphemous to Muslims. The same texts were later studied with great interest in the West.
Far from being irrelevant, culture is a massively important factor in shaping a society. Islam’s hostility to free speech is why Muslims never had any Scientific or Industrial Revolution, for instance. If you believe in evolution, isn’t it then also likely that some cultures are more evolved than others? That kind of blows Multiculturalism away, doesn’t it?
British PM Tony Blair is stepping down after having ruined his country more in one decade than arguably any other leader has done before him. He ran on the platform of New Labour, but as it turned out, his party was still wed to the same old ideas of international Socialism.
According to the writer
Melanie Phillips, “He is driven by a universalist world view which minimises the profound nature of the conflicts that divide people. He thinks that such divisions belong essentially to a primitive past. (...) Hence his closely-related obsession with ‘universal’ human rights law. Hence also his belief that national borders no longer matter, that mass immigration is a good thing and that Britain’s unique identity must give way to multiculturalism. This is the way, he thinks, to eradicate conflict, prejudice and war, and create a global utopia. What a profound misjudgment. It is, instead, the way to destroy democracy and the independent nations that create and sustain it.”
Marie Simonsen, the political editor of the Norwegian left-wing newspaper Dagbladet, wrote in March 2007 that it should be considered a universal human right for all people everywhere to migrate wherever they want to. This statement came just after a UN report had predicted a global population growth of several billion people to 2050.
It doesn’t take much skill to calculate that unlimited migration will spell certain death for a tiny Scandinavian nation — not in a matter of generations, but theoretically even within a few weeks. Ms. Simonsen is thus endorsing the eradication of her own people, and she does so almost as an afterthought. Her comments received no opposition from anyone in the media establishment, which could indicate that most of them share her views, or at least have resigned themselves to the fact that our death as a people is already inevitable.
Karl Marx has defined the essence of Socialism as abolishing private property. Let’s assume for a moment that a country can be treated as the “property” of its citizens. Its inhabitants are responsible for creating its infrastructure. They have built its roads and communications, its schools, universities and medical facilities. They have created its political institutions and instilled in its people the mental capacities needed for upholding them. Is it then wrong for the citizens of this country to want to enjoy the benefits of what they have themselves created?
According to Marxist logic, yes.
Imagine you have two such houses next to each other. In House A, the inhabitants have over a period of generations created a tidy and functioning household. They have limited their number of children because they wanted to give all of them a proper education. In House B, the inhabitants live in a dysfunctional household with too many children who have received little higher education. One day they decide to move to their neighbors’. Many of the inhabitants of House A are protesting, but some of them think this might be a good idea. There is room for more people in House A, they say. In addition to this, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others claim that it is “racist” and “against international law” for the inhabitants of House A to expel the intruders. Pretty soon, House A has been turned into an overpopulated and dysfunctional household just like House B.
This is what is happening to the West today. Europe itself could become a failed continent by importing the problems of Africa and the Islamic world. The notion that everybody should be free to move anywhere they want to, and that preventing them from moving into your country is “racism, xenophobia and bigotry,” is the Communism of the 21st century. And it will probably lead to immense human suffering.
One of the really big mistakes we made after
the Cold War ended was to declare that Socialism was now dead, and thus no longer anything to worry about. Here we are, nearly a generation later, discovering that Marxist thinking has penetrated every single stratum of our society, from the universities to the media. While the “hard” Marxism of the Soviet Union may have collapsed, at least for now, the “soft” Marxism of the Western Left has actually grown stronger, in part because we mistakenly deemed it to be less threatening.
Ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse. By hiding behind labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship they could never have achieved had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.
According to the French philosopher
Alain Finkielkraut, “the lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: A source of violence.”
Alexander Boot, a Russian by birth, left for the West in the 1970s, only to discover that the West he was seeking was no longer there. This led him to write the book
How the West Was Lost. Boot believes that democracy, or in the words of Abraham Lincoln, the government of the people, by the people and for the people, has been replaced
by glossocracy, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.
In a culture where language is power and words are used as weapons, those who control the most fearsome of these weapons control society. In the West, where equality in all walks of life is the highest virtue and “discrimination” is a mortal sin, the “racist” is the worst of creatures. Those who control the definition of “racist,” the nuclear bomb of glossocracy, have a powerful weapon they can utilize to intimidate opponents. The mere utterance of the word can destroy careers and ruin lives, with no trial and no possibility of appeal.
Currently, the power of definition largely rests in the hands of a cartel of anti-racist organizations dominated by the extreme Left, often in cooperation with Muslims. By silencing all opposition to mass immigration as “racism,” they can stage a transformation of society every bit as massive as that of Communism, yet virtually shut down debate about it.
Boot totally rejects the claim that Marxism has been misunderstood:
“Any serious study will demonstrate that Marx based his theories on industrial conditions that either were already obsolete at the time or had never existed in the first place. That is no wonder, for Marx never saw the inside of a factory, farm or manufactory. [...] Whatever else he was, Marx was not a scientist. […] Marx ideals are unachievable precisely because they are so monstrous that even Bolsheviks never quite managed to realize them fully, and not for any lack of trying. For example, the [Communist] Manifesto (along with other writings by both Marx and Engels) prescribes the nationalization of all private property without exception. Even Stalin’s Russia of the 1930s fell short of that ideal. In fact, a good chunk of the Soviet economy was then in private hands [...] Really, compared with Marx, Stalin begins to look like a humanitarian. Marx also insisted that family should be done away with, with women becoming communal property. Again, for all their efforts, Lenin and Stalin never quite managed to achieve this ideal either. So where the Bolsheviks and Nazis perverted Marxism, they generally did so in the direction of softening it.”
The former Soviet dissident
Vladimir Bukovksy, who has warned that the European Union is on its way
to becoming another Soviet Union, thinks that while the West won the Cold War in a military sense, we lost it in the
context of ideas: “Communism might have been dead, but the communists remained in power in most of the former Warsaw bloc countries, while their Western collaborators came to power all over the world (in Europe in particular). This is nothing short of a miracle: the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 quite logically brought a shift to the Left in world politics, while a defeat of communism in 1991 brought again a shift to the Left, this time quite illogically.”
Bukovksy is right: We never had a thorough de-Marxification process after the Cold War, similar to the de-Nazification after WW2, and we are now paying the price for this. Many Marxist ideas have been allowed to endure and mutate, such as the notion that culture is unimportant or that it is OK to stage massive social experiments on hundreds of millions of people. The Marxist historian
Eric Hobsbawm has stated that had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning Socialist society, tens of millions of deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay. But Marxist ideals of forced equality can only be enforced by a government with totalitarian powers, and will thus inevitably lead to a totalitarian society. There is no “enlightened Marxism,” and the idea that there is has ruined more lives than probably and other ideology in modern history.
Marxism is an organized crime against humanity.The Australian writer
Keith Windschuttle warns that the consequence of cultural relativism is that if there can be no absolute truths, there can be no absolute falsehoods, either, which explains Western weakness when confronted with
Islamic Jihad. Our sense of right and wrong has been deeply damaged by Marxist thinking. Windschuttle praises Greek historian Thucydides’ writings about The History of the Peloponnesian War from the 5th century BC:
“Rather than being impelled by great impersonal forces, political history reveals the world is made by men and, instead of being ‘absolved of blame’, men are responsible for the consequences of their actions. This was the very point that informed Thucydides’ study of the Peloponnesian War: the fate of Athens had been determined not by prophets, oracles or the gods, but by human actions and social organisation.”
Ideas matter. Individuals matter. Cultures matter. Truth matters, and truth exists. We used to know that. It’s time we get to know it again, and reject false ideas about the irrelevance of culture. We are not racists for desiring to pass on our heritage to future generations, nor are we evil for resisting to be treated as lab rats in social experiments on a horrific scale. We must nip the ideology of transnational Multiculturalism and unlimited mass migration in the bud by exposing it for what it is: A Communism for the 21st century.
Dean
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