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.