Fjordman

I’ve received some criticism for trying to figure out the ideological and historical roots of Multiculturalism. 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. 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.

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 the same things in different ways. However, not one of these individuals would 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. Nation states which create their own laws and uphold their own borders practice “discrimination” and constitute an obstacle to this new Utopia. They 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.

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 generation can inflict upon a 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 were obtaining state sponsorship for having several wives.

Antifascistisk Aktion [AFA] in Sweden, a group that supposedly fights against “racists,” openly brags about numerous physical attacks against persons, with their full name and address published on its website. According to AFA, this is done in order to fight against global capitalism and for a classless society. AFA subscribes to an ideology that killed one hundred million people during a few generations, and claims to be the good guys. Those who object to being turned into a minority in their own country through mass immigration are the bad guys.

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 Belgium’s 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:

We are 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 paint 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 into 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 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.

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 by 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 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’ house. 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.

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 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.

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 de-Nazification after World War II, and we are now paying the price. 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. .

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 treatment 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.

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Brussels Journal on May 17.