February 09, 2011

See also by Alex Kurtagic: Dysfunctional Motherland: Reclaiming Ancestral Birthrights in Post-Imperial Britain

Decades too late, U.K. Conservative leader David Cameron, Prime Minister of the recently-elected coalition government, has stated the obvious: multiculturalism has failed.

According to the BBC, "[a]ddressing a security conference in Germany, David Cameron argued the UK needed a stronger national identity . . ." [State multiculturalism has failed, says David Cameron, February 5, 2011]

Mr. Cameron even went as far as to highlight modern Political Correctness' hypocritical double standard, where "racist" views are met with strenuous condemnation if expressed by a white person, but with timorous silence if expressed by a colored one.

This is certainly a remarkable flip-flop for Cameron, as his critics on the left indignantly pointed out [Did David Cameron really mean what he said about multiculturalism? By Sama Yaqoob, Guardian, February 7, 2011]

Still, in a sane world, this flip-flop would be reason to rejoice. We in Britain could expect tight border controls, as desired by nine tenths of the citizenry; we could expect illegal immigrants rounded up and thrown out, as desired by three in fourths of it; and we would expect nationalism and, yes, whiteness, emphasized and celebrated in an education system and media freed from Political Correctness.

Unfortunately, however, we do not live in a sane world.

While, as the BBC put it, Mr. Cameron "signaled a tougher stance on groups promoting Islamist extremism", and while  he "suggested there would be greater scrutiny of some Muslim groups which get public money" and that "[m]inisters should refuse to share platforms or engage with such groups," he also said "Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism."[Full Text of Cameron Speech.]

So the reason the multicultural experiment has failed is that there has not been enough "muscular liberalism".

I am sure Jared Taylor has some interesting thoughts on Mr. Cameron's extraordinary conclusion.

Completely unselfconscious, Mr. Cameron continued:

"Let's properly judge these organizations: Do they believe in universal human rights … Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy…?

"These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organizations."

Am I the only one at a loss for words here?

How can Mr. Cameron not see how liberalism, universalism, and egalitarianism cannot eventually but result in a multicultural society?

After all, a sincere belief in universal human rights and equality before the law make it impossible to exclude from a society the kind of immigrants who are incompatible with a strong national identity: it is impossible to deny them entry on the basis of their ethnic background; it is impossible to deny them access to employment; it is impossible to deny them access to citizenship; it is impossible to deny them access to public office; and it is therefore impossible in the long run to prevent them from changing their hosts' indigenous culture and society until these are fractured by fundamental differences on the issues that are most important to each group's most committed members.

A strong national identity is perforce traditionalist, particularist, and inegalitarian. It is dependent on localization, specificity, and uniqueness, as this is, stabilized into a tradition over many generations, what differentiates the indigenous from the alien, then native from the foreigner.

A strong national identity, therefore, implies that what is indigenous takes priority over what is alien. It is incompatible with multiculturalism or diversity.

This is well understood by immigrants from non-European ethnic backgrounds, which is why they have been the first to segregate themselves into ethnic ghettos, with their own food, their own butchers, their own press, their own dress, and their own places of worship. They have come here looking for the wealth, security, stability, opportunities, and high standard of living Western societies can provide; they have not come here to become Westerners. They want what we offer only on their own terms.

From their point of view, Westerners are idiots for opening their borders, their job market, and their power structure to foreigners, in a way they would never dream of doing themselves—for being, in other words, so damn liberal!

The success of the liberal project was predicated from the beginning on the destruction of traditional forms—and by extension, in replacing what was local, specific, and unique, with global, vague, and generic abstractions.

In short, aggressive liberalism is inevitably hostile to a strong national identity.

This is also well understood by immigrants from non-European ethnic backgrounds—which is why they have been the first to ally themselves to aggressive liberal causes.

And it gets worse: being the last to recognize the obvious, Mr. Cameron proposes to "abandon" multiculturalism in favor of integration, or assimilation.

But . . . Wasn't the failure of integration what led to experimenting with multiculturalism in the first place?

What Mr. Cameron's embarrassing statements serve to highlight, following Angela Merkel's analogous remarks last year, is how far removed "conservatism" in modern politics has become from traditionalism, and therefore how meaningless it has become. 

It used to be that conservatives were identified with tradition, as tradition is inherently conservative.

I do agree with Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson's views on this matter: when we have a "conservative" head of government telling us that the cure for a disease that was caused by liberalism is more liberalism—much like those who tell us that the solution to a problem caused by debt is to go further into debt—we know that we have gone beyond the point where reform is possible.

What Mr. Cameron's statements also highlight is that we need is a radical change of paradigm—and this change cannot be radical unless it is founded on traditional principles.

Alex Kurtagic (email him) (follow him on Twitter) is a U.K.-based publisher, cultural commentator, novelist, musician, and artist. He is the author of the dystopian novel, Mister (Iron Sky Publishing, 2009), the founder and director of Supernal Music, co-editor of Alternative Right, and editor-in-chief of Wermod and Wermod Publishing Group.