Is multiculturalism in Europe now in tatters, or does it reign as strongly as ever? A symposium of major analysts discuss the question. Those participating include Bat Ye'or, Claire Berlinski, Bruce Bawer, Leon de Winter, Fjordman, Hege Storhaug, and Lars Hedegaard. This important symposium needs careful reading and re-reading. I have only excerpted a fraction of the entire proceedings.
Bruce Bawer describes the present situation this way:
Multiculturalism has become official dogma in much of Western Europe,
and the word is routinely used as if it were a synonym for equal rights
or ethnic pluralism or colorblind democracy. Of course, it isn’t.
It’s a grotesque expression of cultural self-contempt and
self-destructiveness. Multiculturalism compels self-declared
anti-fascists to blind themselves to the most chillingly fascist
phenomena of our time. It compels feminists to accept the subjugation
and abuse of women by men who believe they have the right to rape,
beat, and murder them. It compels gay activists to embrace as allies
people who, given the chance, would drop a wall on them.
Multiculturalism is deeply, perversely irrational. If you’re a multiculturalist, it’s verboten even
to notice, acknowledge, and express concern about murderous hatred
directed against you and yours by the officially oppressed. For a
multiculturalist, any act or statement by a member of an officially
oppressed group, however morally reprehensible, is to be understood
either as a legitimate reaction against “our” prejudice (or our
forebears’ colonialism) or as a legitimate aspect of an alien culture
that we, in our pitiful narrowness, have failed to understand and
respect – which is, of course, our obligation.
Many
Europeans recognize that multiculturalism is leading their societies to
disaster. If you can get them to loosen up and trust you, they may
venture an awkward, uneasy critical word or two about the proliferation
in their midst of people who long for sharia law and about the refusal
of multicultural-minded political leaders to address this growing
crisis responsibly. But many such Europeans hardly know how to express
their concerns, because they’ve almost never heard such concerns
openly, intelligently, and responsibly articulated. All they’ve heard
all their lives from officially approved authorities – teachers,
professors, the media, politicians, government agency workers, talking
heads on TV, the representatives of state-funded “independent”
organizations like SOS Racism – is that any concern about
multiculturalism and its consequences is tantamount to racism. . . .
There’s
a widespread resignation to the fact that multiculturalists control the
media, academy, state agencies, and so on. Besides, they know what
happens to those few people who do openly dissent from
multicultural dogma – they’re demonized as bigots and racists. They
know very well that if you want to get ahead in European society, you
don’t take on multicultural orthodoxy.
. . . The
political establishment seems solidly planted, unmovable,
unchangeable. There may be a widespread rage, in short, but it’s
largely an impotent rage. Europeans today have been bred to be
passive, to leave things to their leaders, whose wisdom they’ve been
taught all their lives to take for granted. Even Europeans who are
highly uneasy about multiculturalism, then, tend to be incapable of
effective action or organization. They look around for somebody else
to do something, or at least to say things that might help clarify the
situation, help bring their own often muddled views into focus, and
help make them feel justified in their vague but increasingly intense
sense of alarm.
. . .They
were brought up to believe that their societies’ one great overriding
virtue, other than the bottomless generosity of the welfare state, is
an unbounded multicultural tolerance –a limitless openness to and
“understanding” of even of the most brutally intolerant foreign
cultures.
To
shake off a lifetime of this kind of indoctrination is not easy: it’s
hard to quit yourself entirely of the deeply instilled notion –
perverse though it is – that the ultimate act of goodness is to pour
endless amounts of your own hard-earned tax money into the pockets of
immigrants who hate you, hate your country, hate your form of
government, and will gladly destroy it all when they’ve gained enough
power to do so. The feelings of guilt and insecurity on the part of
many of those who dare to reject this orthodoxy should not be
underestimated.
I wish I had time and space to excerpt more material from this symposium. Particularly interesting (alarming?) are the various scenarios and suggestions made by the participants. -- I'll go ahead and bite the bullet and extend this post a little further. I apologize for its length. Fjordman says,
A Multicultural society is only temporary. Sooner or later, we will
return to a new mono-cultural society. This will happen either through
the division of the previously coherent territory into new,
mono-cultural enclaves or through the takeover by society as a whole of
the most forceful and aggressive of these competing cultures.
The
tectonic plates of global power are now shifting in ways they haven't
done for centuries. This is the retreat of the Western world order.
Multiculturalism and the inability or unwillingness of Western nations
to uphold their borders are viewed by Muslims as a signal that their
ancient Western rival is weak and ripe for conquest. This is no doubt
the background for the ongoing aggressive posture by the Iranian
president, among others. Al-Qaeda strategists have earlier outlined a
schedule for awakening the Islamic world and overthrowing the West,
with a timeline stretching over the coming fifteen to twenty years. A
world war of sorts with the Islamic world is already inevitable by now,
no matter what we do. The only question is whether this will be a cold
or a hot world war. . . .
It could be similar to the division of India after WW2, with the creation of one or several Islamic "Pakistan" enclaves. All of Europe will not be lost, but some parts may be, and many others will be damaged by the fighting. Many of our cultural treasures will burn. . . . The truth is that Europe has got itself into a bad fix, again, and will have some turbulent and painful decades ahead regardless of what we do at this point. The choice is between some pain where at least parts of Europe prevail and pain where Europe simply ceases to exist as a Western, cultural entity.
The
most civilized thing we can do in order to save ourselves, but also to
limit the loss of life among both Muslims and non-Muslims, is for
Westerners and indeed infidels in general to implement a policy of
containment of the Islamic world. This includes stopping Muslim
immigration, but also by making our countries Islam-unfriendly, thus
presenting the Muslims already here between the options of adapting to
our societies or leaving if they desire sharia law. Even whispering
about Jihad should be grounds for expulsion.
Since Islamic
countries can use organizations such as the United Nations to influence
Western freedom of speech and immigration policies, Westerners need to
discredit and disengage from the UN as much as possible, at some point
maybe withdraw from it completely. We cannot under any circumstances
allow Islamic nations to influence our legislation.
Regaining
our cultural confidence is a more complicated and longer term goal. It
probably cannot be achieved until today's version of Western Europe has collapsed. Western Europe is now a collection of several layers of different Utopias,
Multiculturalism, welfarism and transnationalism, that will soon come
crashing down.
However, just as Islam isn't the cause of Europe's
weakness but rather a secondary infection, it is conceivable that the
Islamic threat could have the unforeseen and ironic effect of saving Europe from herself. Europe will go through a turbulent period of painful, but necessary revival. Maybe Jihad will trigger a new Renaissance in the West.
Europe will bleed but she won't die. It remains to be seen whether this is wishful thinking or whether it will actually happen. In any case, it will take time to materialize.
It may sound unrealistic to talk
about the collapse of the European Union or pulling out of the UN, but
I believe things will rapidly get worse in the years ahead. A
generation from now, things that will seem improbable or outright
impossible now will have come to pass. We will see some of the largest
changes in world politics since WW2, perhaps in centuries.
Berlinski disagrees with Fjordman and points to Turkey as a place of moderate Muslims and a hopeful sign. She says, "I
would direct Mr. Fjordman’s attention not only to Turkey, but to the
flourishing in other Islamic countries of such groups as the Liberal Islam Network, the Progressive Muslims, the International Forum for Islamic Dialogue, and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy."
Bat Ye'or responds to the idea of Muslim women being a significant force saying,
"Can
Muslim women help? As much as I praise and admire Nonie Darwish, Wafa
Sultan and so many others, I will qualify Storhaug’s optimism. The
majority of Muslim women choose Islamism in Europe, Egypt, Turkey, and other countries, and a few even become suicide-bombers. Islamic
culture is fourteen centuries old and it has conditioned men and women
alike. In my view, it is a mistake to imagine that women’s emancipation
will impact considerably on Muslim relations with the West. These are
two different and unrelated domains. Traditional Muslim attitudes
toward non-Muslims are set in the religious, legal and historical
framework of jihad, totally unknown to most Westerners and which has
its own conceptual rationalization. . .
Eurabia
is a European self-poisonous secretion whose functioning must be
exposed in order to be neutralized. Its passion for multiculturalism
emerges from its hate of Judeo-Christian culture and even more, its
revulsion of Israel, and thus of the Jewish roots of Christianity. This is the drive to European self-destruction.
Everything
which happens today in the Muslim world develops within a religious and
historical civilisational framework that we deliberately ignore. What I
see and hear today I recognize it, as it is endlessly repeated in past
chronicles. Maybe we should start to learn this history to understand
what is happening to us, as a first step to find a solution, to
retrieve our lost basic liberties to life and security, and our
self-esteem. Because even if moderate Islam will prevail – a hazardous
speculation, even for Turkey-- it is our right to refuse Islamization and to maintain our Western secular rules and our spiritual values which differ from those of the shari'a.
