Democracy, Immigration, Multiculturalism...Pick Any Two

From the New Sisyphus blog comes a transcript of a recent Mark Steyn speech from Australia. Mark Steyn is a great writer and columnist who I believe to be far ahead of the thought curve seeing what grave threats multiculturalism and unfettered immigration (legal or illegal) pose to democracies worldwide. All cultures are NOT created equal, especially not ones who advocate the extermination of all those who don't agree with their views and who subjugate and abuse women in the mostly ghastly of ways. This speech is chocked so full of great stuff I read it several times and reposted it all here. Any bold, ellipses, or other emphasis on certain statements belongs to me, read it all.

"It's Not 'Them', It's Us: The Need to Regain Confidence in Western Culture"

"I'm honoured to be here on what's beginning to feel a bit like my End of The World Tour. Everywhere I go I just talk about depressing issues like the decline and death of the West, but my End of the World Tour is a bit like Barbara Streisand's Farewell Tour: if the world doesn't end I'll be back to do another End of the World Tour in a couple of years. ... I don't want to make an argument for more war, more bombing, more killing but for more will, more civilisational confidence that's the best way to avoid all the death and destruction.

Here's what I mean, here's the quote I get requests for. It's about a relatively minor imperial administrator. Two hundred years ago, in a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of Sati-that's the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husband. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural. He said: 'You say that it's your custom to burn widows, very well. We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their neck and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it my carpenters will build a gallows; you may follow your custom, then we will follow ours.' As it happens, my wife's uncle was named after General Napier which I guess makes me a British Imperialist by marriage. But India today is better off without Sati. And what's so strange about the times we live in is that even to say that is to invite accusations of cultural supremacy. If you don't agree that India is better off without Sati, if you think that's just dead white-male-euro-centricism, fine, but I don't think you really do believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism, cultural relativism, is an obvious fraud and I think it's subliminally accepted on that basis. I think that, after all, most people, given the choice, don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. They think that pretending that all societies are equal is in a sense part of the wallpaper of living in an advanced Western society. And they think you can contain multiculturalism, they think multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting them to sing jingle bells...or that your holistic masseur uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality. But it doesn't mean that you or anyone that you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society.

I checked into my hotel yesterday and I'd been in the room 10 minutes when I got a call from the Spa asking if I wanted to have a new kind of massage they were offering a special on using techniques I think developed from Buddhist spirituality. I'm very grateful for that, I think its marvelous and that it adds a lot to the gaiety of life, but it's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug if it goes beyond that. And if you think Sati is just an example of the rich vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your present suburb would be like if 25, 30 or 48 the people around you really believed in it too. That's the situation that much of the Western world is facing; that we're losing the consensus within our populations on what it means to be a citizen of a pluralist society. Multiculturalism, I believe, was conceived by Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own and in that sense it's the real suicide bomb. Islam and terrorism would not be a threat to the Western world if the Western world weren't so enervated that it gives the impression that it's basically just dying to keel over and to surrender to somebody.

Sati's gone, nobody in India burns widows, so when Indians immigrate to Sydney, or London or Toronto, they're not building pyres in the front yard for grandma anymore. But there are other cultures where women lack basic rights. Under the Taliban, Afghan women were prevented by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces; by law. As Ahmed Al-bakar (spelling unclear), an MP from the one of the more progressive Muslim nations, Kuwait, recently put it, mixing the proposal to give women the right to vote, 'God said in the Holy Koran that men are better than women...why can't we settle for that?' Why indeed? Well here's a story from the Associate Press in Multan, Pakistan. Nazeer Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25 year-old step-sister to salvage his family's honour. Well, you know, I suppose to a lot of us, Pakistan's a crazy place a long way away. But the honour killings, the murder of Muslim women, punished often for no other reason than that they happened to have been raped by some fella, the honour killings are getting closer. In London last summer, the Metropolitan police announced they were reopening investigations into 120 deaths among British Muslim girls that they'd hitherto declined to look at too closely on grounds of cultural sensitivity. Now think about that. Think about that. One hundred and twenty women are murdered and their murders go uninvestigated because the cops thought it was just some multicultural thing. I believe you had a similar issue here when one of your state police departments announced that it was changing the basis on how spousal abuse and battery of women was investigated according to what cultural community you happened to belong to. So in other words, in parts of Australia, law enforcement takes the view that whether you're allowed to beat up a woman depends on who you are. If I try it, I'll be going to jail; but if other people try it, it's part of their rich cultural tradition. You cannot have a society organised on that basis. I don't want to live in a country where honour killing is regarded as part of the rich tapestry of cultural diversity, like a slightly livelier version of a national dance at the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony. So those are the sorts of things you can make judgements about competing culture, judgments on liberty, on religious freedom, the rule of law, we need to recover the cultural cool that General Napier demonstrated. That's really the word: cool. You don't have to go through a whole lot of excitable talk about nuking Mecca and all this kind of thing; that's all a waste of time. If we knew who we were, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems that we seem to be having and rousing ourselves to defend our society. If we know who we are, if we're secure in our sense of where our society came from, we'll be fine.

Let me give a small example of the wrong way of looking at things. It's not life threatening, but if you don't understand the philosophy that underpins it, it can become life threatening. In your nation and in mine, many people have acknowledged, and indeed even boasted, that immigration changes our country. For example, in Australia, and to a lesser extent in Canada, there are a lot of people who wish to replace the monarchy with a republic and there are respectable arguments for and against the monarchy.

The dangerous argument is the lazy line pedalled by too many politicians that in an Australia or a Canada of evolving immigration patterns, an immigrant from Moldova or China or Brazil or Saudi Arabia can't be expected to relate to the Queen, to the existing constitutional system. Now try this line the next time you're in Saudi Arabia: if you immigrate to Saudi Arabia and say 'hey man, I just can't relate to the House of Saud, and what's with this Wahhabism, can't we get a couple of sports bars with wet t-shirt nights every Thursday'? The Saudis would have a grand old laugh about it and then behead you. So when we accept that argument, in essence we're explicitly promoting the principle of reverse assimilation; that immigration imposes not the obligation that the immigrant assimilate to his new land, but that his new land assimilate to him. And thereby lies great peril, not for the Queen, she'll get by, but for a whole bunch of the rest of us. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen, its whole merely the sum of its parts...and so in the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide. In the superb summation of the American writer James C. Bennett, 'democracy, immigration, multiculturalism ... pick any two'.

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally valid. To accept that proposition means denying reality; the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, global population movement. Multiculturalism isn't the first ideology founded on the denial of truth. You recall Herman Goering's memorable assertion that 'two plus two makes five, if the Fuhrer wills it'. Likewise, we're asked to accept that the United States' Constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation. If a generation of multi-culti theorists in American universities, if the ethnic grievance lobby, and even if a ludicrous resolution of the United States Congress so wills it, that's what happened. The United States Congress passed a resolution hailing the Iroquois Confederation as the inspiration for the U.S. Constitution, which would have been news to the dead white euro-centric males who wrote it. Harmless, harmless isn't it?! What's wrong with playing make-believe if it helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other?

Because it's never helpful to put reality up for grabs; there may come a day where you need it, and today is the day that we do need a shot of reality. We need to understand what it is that is important and vital and rare about our society, because if we don't, then in a thousand, silly, itsy-bitsy, little ways, like removing pork from Australian hospital cafeteria menus, we're giving the very clear message that we lack the will to defend our civilisation. In 1773, one of America's founding fathers Simeon Howard, addressed the ancient and honourable artillery company in Boston, and 'an incautious people' he said, 'may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries, small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them, especially if they're persisted in.'

During the Danish cartoon Jihad, you may recall, over the representations of the prophet Mohammed earlier this year, the New York Times gave one of its routinely pompous explanations as to why it wouldn't be showing readers these offensive cartoons: sensitive news organisations, the editors explained, have the duty to 'refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbol symbols'. The very next day, the Times illustrated the story on the Danish controversy with an illustration of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung ... a piece of New York art from a couple of seasons earlier. They had no problem with gratuitous assaults on religious symbols when it came to a dung-covered Virgin Mary or the Piss-Christ, the crucifix immersed in the artist's urine that was the sensation of the New York art world a couple of seasons back. He was the biggest artist in America for a while, a guy called Andre Serrano. I don't know what he's doing now, haven't heard from him a couple of years, I don't know what he's doing ... maybe he got cystitis or something ... anyway, his career dried up.

A friend of mine did a satirical play in England a couple of years ago, he's an old leftie, very anti-Iraq war, so in his show he had Bush and Blair come out and sing 'we're sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus' ... ha-ha, very funny. Well how about if you have a couple of Imams dancing around singing 'we're sending you a schoolgirl bomb from Allah'? Well oddly enough, my pal was far more reluctant to do that, on the reasonable grounds that unlike insulting Christianity, if you insult certain other faiths, a far more motivated crowd is likely to be waiting for you at the stage door. Multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke, in which the American tells the Soviet that 'in my country, everyone is free to criticise the President' and the Soviet guy replies 'same here! In my country everyone is free to criticise your President'. Under the rules, as understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one had to choose, on balance, Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elite's loathing of their own. Now I have a great sympathy for Muslims that face demands that they assimilate; it's on the front pages of all the newspapers in London this weekend. Even if you wanted to, even if you wanted to, how would you assimilate with say, Canadian national identity? You can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It's much easier to dismantle a society than put anything new and lasting in it place, and across much of the developed world, that's what's going on right now.

The advantage for the U.S. and for Australia, and to a lesser extent other parts of the English-speaking world, is that Europe, in its civilisational exhaustion, is ahead in the line, and its fate might wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the continent. It comes down to this: we are the issue. It's about us. We don't understand that the world we've lived in since 1945 is very precious, very unusual, and very rare and is at odds with most of human history, and if we want our world to continue, if we want our children to grow up in the kind of society we've lived in this last half-century, then we have to understand the blessings we enjoy are not an accident. If we don't value it, we won't have it."