In the aftermath of the atrocities of October 7, the resulting war between Israel and Hamas, and the volatile fallout across Western countries with supposedly enriching immigrant populations, there has been a nervous re-evaluation of ‘multiculturalism’ as a state-sponsored article of faith.
Is this the best we can do? Angela Merkel and David Cameron, hardly darlings of the dissident Right, were admitting the failures of multiculturalism as long ago as the early to mid-2010s. Are we supposed to be impressed that politicians like Suella Braverman have managed to twig that this still holds true? There is plenty of room, as well as every warrant, for Braverman to go further, particularly given the widespread contempt in which she is already held by race communists and other loons who will jeer if the woman so much as brushes her teeth in the morning.
A very confused piece on this topic, recommended by Braverman on X, was recently published in the Telegraph by a commentator named Isabella Wallersteiner. Typical of someone with just enough in the way of acuity to notice a problem, but too weighed down by normie dogmas to draw any worthwhile conclusions, she argues that the attacks of October 7 and the outbreaks of ethnoreligious zealotry on the streets of London as a result have blown a lid, at long last, on the folly of multiculturalism.
Before this, of course, all was going swimmingly. The occasional terrorist incident, an uptick in rape gangs, and de facto blasphemy laws aside, at least there was consolation to be found elsewhere: a seamlessly integrated Muslim mayor of London who just happens to plaster the tube with vengeful anti-white poetry, not to mention a self-described “son of the soil of Pakistan” running Scotland with a track record of talking about native Scots in ways which, if said of Jews, would belong in the pages of Der Stürmer. Still, if we are feeling charitable, perhaps a ‘better late than never’ is in order.
Except that it gets worse. “We have not created a harmonious melting pot,” Wallersteiner goes on, “but a society where prejudices and tensions can fester.” This implies that it would have been a good thing for the British people as a whole, as well as the United Kingdom’s four founding ethnic groups in particular, to have their cultural identity dissolved in a bland, cosmopolitan soup if only the experiment—for which we never volunteered as guinea pigs—had occurred without divisive hiccups. No other distinctive people, whether Ukrainians or Israelis, is expected to suffer such liquidation. Why should Anglo-Celtic Brits be any different?
More to the point, how come so many of multiculturalism’s critics never bother to ask why it is unworkable? They tend to stop short at noticing the failures and then leaving it there. Yet is it any wonder that not just native Brits, but also newly imported immigrant diasporas, are resistant to having their particularities gradually watered down?
As the social chaos in European cities over a conflict thousands of miles away has made all too plain, the fact is that immigrants, however charming as individuals, are disposed to identify more fervently with their ancestral background—whether ethnic, religious, or both—than with the culture of the nations in which they have opted to live. Multiculturalism is not so much the cause as the product of these tribal loyalties. To resist them at the level of policy is to fight a Sisyphean crusade against human nature itself.
When people like Braverman denounce multiculturalism as the failure, they are correct in spirit but hopelessly wide of the mark in terms of detail. “For too long,” continues the opinion piece praised by Braverman, “we believed that embracing ‘diversity’ without considering how different cultures, beliefs and rights might collide, would deliver harmonious integration and social cohesion.” What “we” is supposed to denote in this sentence, if not complacent liberals with a habit of calling their vindicated critics racists, is not immediately obvious. The author then adds: “It didn’t, and it won’t, until we fix the underlying factors which lead some to be radicalised.” In truth, the “underlying factors” which prevent diversity from working in practice are the all-too-human dynamics of diversity itself. Whatever the fault line at any given moment or in any particular place, tribalism will always be a vital feature of individual and collective human psychology.
This kind of complacency goes hand in hand with a radically impoverished account of what it means to be a nation. Multiculturalism is thus indicted by Wallersteiner for failing “to uphold shared values such as democracy, human rights, tolerance and peaceful coexistence.” This anodyne set of liberal principles might as easily describe Finland as Britain. Are we supposed to believe that a country is nothing more than the sum total of its most bougie members’ best-loved slogans? As I recently argued on The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, Lord Bolingbroke did not believe in many of the things that pass for ‘British values’ today. Does this make him less British than, say, a Yoruba Nigerian who does?
To define a nation with a list of fashionable bullet points is to denude a rich heritage of meaning. It also nominates the descendants of the people who built it for erasure. After all, the whole gamble of civic nationalism is to assume that, so long as there is a continuity of ‘shared values,’ it is not only possible but a cakewalk to replace a founding, long-established population and be left with exactly the same country.
As well as being an organism that is itself subject to shifts in collective values, a nation cannot be expected to assimilate any immigrants—let alone hundreds of thousands—unless prospective new members are tasked with integrating into something actual: the living heritage of an existent people. They can hardly be expected to assimilate into something on its way out. Even in theory, it would be absurd to think it within anyone’s power to assimilate into Japan if the Japanese people were swapped out by French colonisers. At best, they should find themselves integrating into an outpost of France in East Asia.
Gimmicky civics tests will not save us. No number of attacks on multiculturalism will make it any less dangerous to indulge the anti-human corporate-speak which holds that a people, rooted in shared history and instinctive ancestral attachments, can live on synthetic values alone.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/diversity-not-multiculturalism-is-the-problem
