Multiculturalism, Islam and the Death of the West

All cultures are NOT equal:

When a culture decides that its core values and beliefs are not worth defending, and are even immoral and outdated, then that culture is in a bad way. And when you bring into that culture thousands or millions of people from other cultures who see their own cultures as superior, then that host culture really is in big trouble.

Lastly, when those new arrivals refuse to integrate, but instead spend their time warring against the host culture, declaring it to be evil and in need of replacement, then you know that culture is finished. We are now of course living through all this in the West. Places like England and Europe are in advanced stages of this self-immolation.

And overwhelmingly it has been brought about by allowing millions of Muslims into the West who have no desire to fit in, but instead are doing all they can to see the host countries being turned into Islamic hellholes, just like the ones they left.

Two American writers who have often spoken about such matters can here be briefly quoted. Thomas Sowell put it this way: “What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.”

And Mark Steyn said that multiculturalism “is a cult of tolerance in which you demonstrate your sensitivity to other cultures by being almost totally insensitive to your own.” And again: “Multiculturalism was the West’s last belief system. Its final set of values accorded all values equal value. Which is to say that it had no values—for, if all values have equal value, what’s the point?”

Consider Angela Merkel who was Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. She allowed millions of migrants to come in, mainly from Muslim nations. But after some years of doing this, even she began to realise that the multi-culti experiment had been a big mistake. As I wrote in October of 2010:

Germany is a nation of 82 million people, including around 4 million Muslims, mostly from Turkey. The trouble is, for the most part they never did integrate very well. Indeed, many did not want to. And trouble has been brewing there for quite some time.

 

Thus Merkel declared on the weekend that multiculturalism has been one monumental failure. This is how the newsagency Reuters covered the story: “Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society has ‘utterly failed,’ Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday, adding fuel to a debate over immigration and Islam polarising her conservative camp.

 

“Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel said allowing people of different cultural backgrounds to live side by side without integrating had not worked in a country that is home to some four million Muslims. ‘This (multicultural) approach has failed, utterly failed,’ Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, south of Berlin. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2010/10/18/islam-and-the-failure-of-multiculturalism/

The problem is, plenty of sensible and sage voices had been warning about this before, during and after all this out of control immigration was allowed to occur. In this regard let me feature two English greats who have both departed. They certainly sounded the alarm back then.

A full 23 years ago Margaret Thatcher was warning us about all this. Writing in the New York Times a few months after the September 11  terror attacks, she penned a piece rightly calling out the problem: “Islamism is the new Bolshevism”. She began her piece with these words:

“Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.” Milton’s words perfectly describe America today. After the horror of September 11 the world has seen America gather its strength, summon its allies and proceed to wage war halfway across the globe against its enemy – and ours.

 

America will never be the same again. It has proved to itself and to others that it is in truth (not just in name) the only global superpower, indeed a power that enjoys a level of superiority over its actual or potential rivals unmatched by any other nation in modern times. Consequently, the world outside America should never be the same either. There will, of course, arise new threats from new directions. But as long as America works to maintain its technological lead, there is no reason why any challenge to American dominance should succeed. And that in turn will help ensure stability and peace.

 

Yet, as President Bush has reminded Americans, there is no room for complacency. America and its allies, indeed the western world and its values, are still under deadly threat. That threat must be eliminated, and now is the time to act vigorously.

 

In many respects the challenge of Islamic terror is unique, hence the difficulty western intelligence services encountered trying to predict and prevent its onslaughts. The enemy is not, of course, a religion – most Muslims deplore what has occurred. Nor is it a single state, though this form of terrorism needs the support of states to give it succour. Perhaps the best parallel is with early communism. Islamic extremism today, like bolshevism in the past, is an armed doctrine. It is an aggressive ideology promoted by fanatical, well-armed devotees. And, like communism, it requires an all-embracing long-term strategy to defeat it.

Of course, looking back, we now see that America and Europe really did not change all that much. Instead of clamping down on mass migration, especially of those who have no great love of Western values like freedom, democracy, rule of law and the like, we have simply dug our graves even further.

Her final paragraph went like this:

The events of September 11 are a terrible reminder that freedom demands eternal vigilance. And for too long we have not been vigilant. We have harboured those who hated us, tolerated those who threatened us and indulged those who weakened us. As a result, we remain, for example, all but defenceless against ballistic missiles that could be launched against our cities. A missile defence system will begin to change that. But change must go deeper still. The west as a whole needs to strengthen its resolve against rogue regimes and upgrade its defences. The good news is that America has a president who can offer the leadership necessary to do so. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/feb/12/afghanistan.politics

Those thoughts have also been proven to be a bit idealistic and utopian. But one line there is well worth repeating. “We have harboured those who hated us, tolerated those who threatened us and indulged those who weakened us.” She was 110 per cent correct there, but as always, her incisive words fell on deaf ears.

Another prophetic voice sounding the alarm on multiculturalism and the rise and rise of Islam in the West was Roger Scruton. I mentioned how Merkel came to see that her grand plans of DEI (not yet known by that acronym back then) had fallen apart.

A few months after she had made that concession, Scruton wrote a piece for the American Spectator titled, “Multiculturalism, R.I.P.” He too is worth quoting from. He begins:

Throughout my adult life governments around the Western world have been propagating the gospel of multiculturalism, which tells us that immigrants, from whatever part of the world and whatever way of life, are a welcome part of our “multicultural” society. Differences of language, religion, custom, and attachment don’t matter, they have reassured us, since all can form part of the colorful tapestry of the modern state. Anybody who publicly disagreed with that claim invited the attentions of the thought police, always ready with the charge of racism, and never so scrupulous as to think it a sin to destroy the career of someone, provided he was white, indigenous, and male. To be quite honest, living through this period of organized mendacity has been one of the least agreeable ordeals that we conservatives have had to undergo. Keeping your head down is bad enough; but filling your head with official lies means sacrificing thought as well as freedom.

 

But now, quite suddenly, the oppression has ceased. Even Angelika Merkel, chancellor of a country whose reputation for political correctness is more carefully nurtured than any other cultural asset, has just told us that multiculturalism is dead — quite dead. President Sarkozy has for some time been saying the same, while Prospect, Britain’s leading left-wing intellectual monthly, currently carries the caption “re-thinking race: has multiculturalism had its day?” This caption is in many ways the most revealing of the current attempts to put multiculti at a distance. For it manages simultaneously to deny and to affirm the original message, which is that to discriminate among cultures is to discriminate on grounds of race — in other words, to be a racist. This is perhaps the most pernicious of the lies that we have been required to swallow during these years of oppression, since it is one that compares all defense of the majority culture, and all attempts to integrate minorities, with some of the greatest crimes of recent history.

 

So let’s be clear from the outset: culture and race have nothing to do with each other….

He goes on to say this:

Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side-by-side. To deny this is to forgo the very possibility of moral judgment, and therefore to deny the fundamental experience of community. It is precisely this that has caused the multiculturalists to hesitate. Rightly enjoying the polytheistic festivals of the Hindus, the Carnivals of Caribbean blacks, and the celebrations of the Chinese New Year, they have led us to believe that cultural difference is always an addition to social life, and never a threat to it. Anyone who discriminates between cultures, therefore, really must have something more dangerous at the back of his mind — a desire to exclude on grounds of strangeness, which is the first step towards the racist mindset.

 

But experience has finally prevailed over wishful thinking. It is culture, not nature, that tells a family that their daughter who has fallen in love outside the permitted circle must be killed, that girls must undergo genital mutilation if they are to be respectable, that the infidel must be destroyed when Allah commands it. You can read about those things and think that they belong to the pre-history of our world. But when suddenly they are happening in your midst, you are apt to wake up to the truth about the culture that advocates them. You are apt to say, that is not our culture, and it has no business here. That is what Europeans are now saying — not just a few crazies, but everyone. And the multiculturalists are reluctantly compelled to agree with them.

He looks at how very different Western cultures, built on the Judeo-Christian worldview, are from most others – certainly Islamic cultures. He then concludes this way:

So what happens when people whose identity is fixed by creed or kinship immigrate into places settled by Western culture? The multiculturalists say that we must make room for them, and that we do this by relinquishing the space in which their culture can flourish. Our political class has at last recognized that this is a recipe for disaster, and that we can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them into our culture, and not beside and against it. But that means telling them to accept rules, customs, and procedures that may be alien to their old way of life. Is this an injustice? Surely not. If immigrants come it is because they gain by doing so. It is therefore reasonable to remind them that there is also a cost. Only now, however, is our political class prepared to say so, and to insist that the cost be paid. And it may be that this change of heart comes too late. http://spectator.org/articles/38473/multiculturalism-rip

Here we had two very strong and very sensible warnings about the massive mess the West was getting itself into. But most Western leaders, elites, politicians and members of the commentariat refused to listen. And so today our problems are even so much worse than back then.

For the third time, let me remind you of the words of Thatcher: “We have harboured those who hated us, tolerated those who threatened us and indulged those who weakened us.” We are now paying a very heavy price for this indeed.

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