Reaction to the speech, with its ever so mild and measured criticism of the failures of 30 years of multiculturalism has been predictably laden with cliches and school boy Marxist rhetoric. But this article by Ed West is exceptional for its clarity of analysis. He writes in a post entitled: "It is state multiculturalism that is racist, and David Cameron who is a liberal" as follows:
One of the most moronic themes running through the internet reaction was that Cameron had made his speech in, wait for it, the birthplace of Nazism! Yet Cameron's line, the cultural assimilationist line, is the polar opposite of Nazi doctrine. In contrast, state multiculturalism, which proposes that each ethnic and religious group should only be treated as a group, and aspects of their culture, religion and identity promoted by the state, is based on ideas not entirely different to scientific racism.
Contrary to the idea that the far-Right stole the language of multiculturalism in the 2000s by using such phrases as "biodiversity" or "Indigenous rights", multiculturalism itself was based on ideas not too far removed from the old-fashioned racist notions that exaggerated differences between peoples. Polygenism, the original 19th century scientific racist theory that held blacks and whites to be different sub-species, was originally called "the doctrine of diversity". (For anyone wishing to understand just how it all went wrong, I cannot recommend Kenan Malik's "From Fatwa to Jihad" enough).
So why did the Left embrace such an idea? Because it never rejected ethnic nationalism, racial pride or religious identity, only, in line with the turgid Marxist theories they learned at university, when it was expressed by the "dominant culture" ie whites. And minority chauvinism, however unpleasant and bigoted, could actually be used to promote the Left's agenda. As James Bennett writes in New Criterion magazine this month:
Postmodernists deliberately embraced mass immigration without assimilation - specifically suppressing assimilation, in fact - in order to break down adherence to a common culture and to subvert prevailing family systems. A population without a common language, common assumptions, or indeed any means of generating a genuine polity is easier to manipulate and turn into the common clay from which a new transnational order can be moulded.
As few outside of the minority recruited in the universities find such a future attractive, postmodernism has cultivated (or imported) as allies groups that holds or can be taught to hold grievances against the mainstream societies. They include racial, ethic, religious, and sexual minorities who do not accept one or more shared premise or cultural characteristic of the common culture. Concepts of racial and ethnic authenticity and grievance narratives are used to bind these groups as allies against the majority culture, no matter how divergent the actual practices of the minorities are from the preferences of the postmodernists.
Indeed. Multiculturalism is a way not of making Britain more diverse but of imposing a new and different uniformity. But opposition also springs from confusion; many people confuse "hard" multiculturalism with immigration itself, so that when conservative politicians attack "multiculturalism" they're really giving a little wink and a nod to racists. Yet by those rules of engagement it is simply impossible for any conservative to criticise a system that encourages forced marriages, female circumcision, honour killings and religious extremism.
Read the rest here.
Multiculturalism serves as a tool for undermining the majority culture in several ways. For one, it makes all honest affirmations of one's own (white, European) culture implicitly racist. For another, it uses minorities as allies, as West says, in the fight against majority cultural institutions and practices. For another, it implements a cultural and moral relativism that erodes belief in absolute standards of right and wrong.
What all this is setting up is a divided society of hatred, misunderstanding and endless tribal warfare. Then, the "enlightened" bureaucratic class of social engineers who caused the problem in the first place can present themselves as the ones who can fix the problem by top-down, intrusive government regulation and control of more and more of the lives of ordinary people. So rather than mothers teaching children that prejudice is wrong because all people are made in the image of God and promoting a liberal society (i.e. "liberal in the classical 19th century sense) in which everyone is treated equally by the law and everyone has the same chance to succeed, we see "human rights tribunals regulating what they consider to be "hate speech" and "equality legislation" designed further erode further the common traditions, religion and morality of the nation.
Once we have been turned against one another by the real racists, the real racists will ride to the rescue to fix by government fiat a problem that would not exist without their interfering, illiberal policies in the first place.
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