Multiculturalism and the Melting Pot

Is Uncle Sam in real danger?

by John Derbyshire

London Mayor Boris Johnson spoke the other day about the riots that devastated London and other English cities last summer:

"The biggest shock for me from the riots was the sheer sense of nihilism—perhaps I should not have been shocked, but in my view literacy and numeracy are the best places to start. In seven particular boroughs in London one in four children are leaving functionally illiterate. In a few schools it is nearer 50%. We have to intervene at an earlier stage, and I think the mayor can help."
Here is a thing that The New York Times said on Tuesday, March 20. The subject is the shootings at a school in Toulouse, France, the previous day. The victims were Jewish, but the gunman’s identity was unknown, so the Times defaulted to basic liberal assumptions:

"The political debate around the shootings, and whether the deaths of an instructor and three young children were somehow inspired by anti-immigrant political talk, is likely to continue.…In the middle of a long and heated presidential campaign, with President Nicolas Sarkozy trying to win back disaffected supporters who have drifted to the far-right National Front party, the shootings at Toulouse have raised new questions about the tone and tenor of the debate here about what it is to be French."

Here is a thing that General Wesley Clark, then the supreme commander of the NATO alliance, said back in 1999. The subject was the NATO bombing of Serbia:

“Cultural diversity within a nation causes nothing but trouble—what could be more obvious?”

"There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states."

The common thread there is multiculturalism, the notion that entire populations of different cultures can coexist in reasonable harmony together under a common sovereignty.

In Europe and the Anglosphere, this is the Age of Multiculturalism—an age when the doctrine is so much taken for granted, at least by elite types such as the Mayor of London, editorial writers at The New York Times, and American generals, that it has seeped into the tissues and bones to the degree that contrary notions cannot be thought.

My three quotes all illustrate that. The Mayor of London cannot think the following thought: Last summer’s riots were initially and essentially race riots, with what is left of England’s native underclass only joining in later as scavengers.

As for “functionally illiterate,” well:

Across the 14 boroughs that make up Inner London, there are 98,000 schoolchildren whose first language is not English, compared to just 79,000 native English speakers.

So the dismal educational outcomes the mayor cites were not the cause of the riots. Rather, both London’s mass functional illiteracy and the riots are effects of a common cause: fifty years of insane immigration policies turning the capital into a Tower of Babel (while simultaneously gifting it with beauties like these). Multiculturalism’s horrible consequences can, this fool mayor tells us, be cured with a little extra algebra.

The thought that New York Times editorialists cannot think about anti-Semitic murders in Europe is that Jew-killing has nothing to do with “anti-immigrant political talk” or the “far right.” It is instead an activity favored, encouraged, and committed pretty exclusively by radical Muslims who have been admitted to Europe in ululating multitudes by the same lunatic multiculturalist immigration policies that gave London its riots.

Here’s the thought that General Clark could not think: Far from being a discredited 19th-century relic, the ethno-state has been the very foundation of Europe’s long post-WW II peace. The multiculturalist assault on ethno-nationalism will return Europe to strife, conflict, and national instability.

In the year 2099, a hundred years on from General Clark’s pronouncement, all three of those quotations will sound chimerical. Reading them, our great-grandchildren will shake their heads in wonder. “Couldn’t they see?” Cultural diversity within a nation causes nothing but trouble—what could be more obvious?

In that future world, nations that had the sense to remain ethnically intact and which had “Arctic” distributions of intelligence, behavior, and personality—China, Japan, Korea (presumably united by then), Finland maybe, Israel if she survives, just possibly Russia, some outlier oddities such as, perhaps, Hungary—will have steamed ahead of those who inflicted the multi-culti blight upon themselves.

The rest of us will either be dragging ourselves along wearily, towing behind us the millstones of unproductive, unassimilable, low-human-capital subpopulations left over from the Age of Multiculturalism, along with the associated frictions and rancors; or else we shall have broken up in complete ethnic disaggregation, casting off those subpopulations to fend for themselves in mini-states of their own while we join—rejoin, really—the ethno-nationalist march of mankind.

Historians of the future will amuse themselves by coming up with theories to explain why European civilization, at the height of its powers, rich with unparalleled achievements in science, music, art, literature, mathematics, and technology, gave up its lands and its treasures to people for whom those achievements were mere hated tokens of oppression or the impious and superfluous productions of infidels.

For those of us living through the Age of Multiculturalism, the interesting question is: When will the sleeper wake? When will the obvious become undeniable, even to those as sheltered and blinkered as Boris Johnson and New York Times staffers?

Given the well-nigh unlimited human capacity for self-deception and wishful thinking, together with the power of unanimous elites to enforce their version of reality on a distracted populace, my guess is that we have a decade or two to go. Multiculturalism is barely half a century old; Soviet communism lasted seventy-four years.