WHY MULTICULTURALISM?

Sean Gabb has a long but very good article on the fact that Britain now has a Leftist ruling class and that its official ideology -- multiculturalism -- is a recipe for disaster. “Multiculturalism” once stood for tolerance of unimportant differences. Now it seems to stand for denigrating and tearing down all the standards and values that have made Western civilization the tremendously successful phenomenon that it is. Excerpt: “In the neo-Marxist terminology, the ruling class and its ideological state apparatus are imposing a new hegemonic ideology of multiculturalism. The great apparent problem with this new ideology is its impossibility. It is a false ideology.... There cannot be one society made up of widely different communities each of which loves and respects all the others. There cannot be a society in which the ethnic composition of every group - from university vice chancellors to hairdressers, from lunatic asylum inmates to fashion models - exactly parallels that of the census returns. Instead, there will be a retreat into ethnic nationalism among all groups”. In other words, a race war looms and a police State will be needed to suppress it.

What I think we need to add to Sean’s account is WHY the Left have been so successful in promoting their perverse value-free gospel of multiculturalism. How have they got at least grudging acceptance of it from so much of the community? The Left have been successful precisely because very few people know much history and what little they do know tends therefore to be heavily oversimplified. And the oversimplified lesson that our intellectual class has drummed into everybody as a result of the vast trauma of World War II is: racism is evil. Never mind that racism was a normal and open feature of ALL human societies up until World War II. Never mind that this means that all our ancestors were evil. So dominant is this view among ALL people (not only Leftists) today that I feel I am pissing into the wind even to question it. But it IS a false assumption and question it we must if we are not to do ourselves and our society great harm. There is no doubt that Hitler’s racism was terminally evil but to conclude from that that ALL racism is evil is oversimplified “black-and-white” thinking on a grand scale.

Let us look at an obvious counter-example: The British Empire. There is no doubt that there were some terrible events in the time of the British Empire. The massacre at Amritsar and the Boer war still make me grieve. But far from the actions of General Dyer at Amritsar being officially encouraged, they were not even officially condoned. He was cashiered over it (i.e. dismissed from the Army). And, terrible though the Boer war was (for both sides), wars of territorial aggrandisement are as old as time and from China’s takeover of Tibet to General Galtieri’s assault on the Falkland Islands, still go on today. You don’t need any racist factor for such wars to occur and the Dutch Protestants who were the target of the Boer war were in any case as racially and culturally similar to the British as you were ever likely to get.

So setting those sad events aside, the plain fact is that the British Empire was as racist a phenomenon as any you are likely to get and yet it did NOT engage in genocide or anything like it -- rather the reverse if anything. It was to a significant extent benevolent towards what were seen as “the lesser races” -- Kipling’s famous “White man’s burden”. Virtually no Englishman at the height of the Empire had any doubt that the English were a superior race who were destined to rule. In racist ideology they were virtually indistinguishable from the Nazis. And that is one reason why Hitler admired the British greatly and made repeated efforts to stop the war with them that he did not declare -- even on his personal direct orders stopping his Panzern in their tracks so that the defeated British Army could go free at Dunkirk.

But Hitler was a socialist and the British, by contrast, were the great redoubt of conservatism and what a difference that made to what actions racist beliefs led to! Where Hitler massacred Jews wholesale, who did the British Conservative party adopt as their highly successful leader at the height of the Empire -- a JEW (Benjamin Disraeli). Disraeli DID have to make a pretence of conversion to Anglicanism that fooled no-one but that was it! That was the sole “racist” requirement of him and even that was only needed because he wanted to become Prime Minister. Had he chosen to remain a private citizen he could have done as he pleased. What a contrast to Auschwitz and Belsen!

And those naughty British racists were even so dastardly as to have two Indian members of Parliament representing them in the British House of Commons at the height of the empire (Dadadhai Naoroji 1892-1895 and M.M. Bhownagree 1895-1906)! It was not only Jews who could attain popular acceptance if they had the ability.

I know I must sound like a one-eyed Rightist nutter to be saying so but the plain fact of history is that it is only LEFTIST racism that is destructive. Conservative racism is essentially harmless. Racist attitudes can lead to all sorts of different actions but in the hands of the chronically destructive Leftists they of course lead to destructive actions. In the hands of comfortable, compromising conservatives they at worst put people on their mettle. Just remember: a racist Leftist murdered 6 million Jews but racist Conservatives made a Jew their Prime Minister. Such an extreme contrast should tell anyone how stupid it is to generalize about racism.

But because virtually no-one today connects together the simple facts of history that I have just outlined, we have this consensus that ALL racism is evil -- and multiculturalism follows more or less logically from that.

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