COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Monday, January 07, 2008

'Change"- How Youthful Idealism and Vision Killed Britain

Change Artist, Tony Blair

Britain is a social mess, much of it created by the sixties generation that wanted to prove that they were unlike the racist and bigoted Americans of the fifties. Britain also had to prove amends for colonialism and they did so with a vengeance. Britain swung the doors open to one and all and embraced the idol of multiple cultures. It disparaged anyone who dared to question the youthful vision of the new changed Britain. Myth and belief trumped experience and skepticism. Change indeed causes change and with change comes unintended and often unforeseen consequences. The consequences of change often outlive the youthful idealisms of the visionaries and architects. Let the buyer beware.

Multiculturalism is breeding intolerance
By Philip Johnston, Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 07/01/2008



It has taken a long time to happen, but at last an authoritative and senior establishment figure has pointed to the elephant in the room. Before the Bishop of Rochester's article yesterday in The Sunday Telegraph, the debate about immigration focused almost exclusively on who benefits financially. We have tiptoed around its effect on our society and culture. Even the somewhat belated recognition by ministers that newcomers should show a commitment to British values and demonstrate a knowledge of English tends to be couched in economic terms and ones favourable to the immigrants themselves - that they will get a job more easily and their lives will be enhanced if they are more integrated.


'Few politicians have been willing to question the impact of a growing Muslim population'

However, few politicians have been willing to do what Michael Nazir-Ali has done, which is to question the impact of a growing Muslim population upon the very fabric of the nation, turning it within half a century into a multi-faith and multicultural land. It is hardly surprising, perhaps, for a Christian prelate to lament the powerful appeal of another faith challenging where his own once reigned supreme. Furthermore, the recent immigration of more than half a million eastern Europeans has delighted Roman Catholic leaders whose churches were full to bursting over Christmas.

But they share an historic and religious heritage. The issue that Bishop Nazir-Ali raised has more to do with our failure to integrate Muslims because our political elites were in thrall to what he called "the novel philosophy of multiculturalism". One consequence was the ease with which extremists exploited an emphasis on separatism to recruit among the more impressionable young men in their communities.

Attempts have been made to impose an "Islamic" character in some cities by insisting on artificial amplification for the adhan, the call to prayer, and even to introduce some aspects of sharia to civil law. Sitting in the background, seemingly stalled for the time being, are plans to establish Europe's largest markaz - an Islamic prayer and meeting area able to accommodate at least 40,000 people - right beside the site for the 2012 London Olympics, where it would be a potent icon of how Britain has changed.

In truth, the bishop has simply articulated what many in the Government and in the race relations world have already come to realise (and which most of the rest of us understood years ago), and that is the baleful consequences of three decades of multiculturalism. Last year, even the Commission for Racial Equality, once a cheerleader for the concept, recanted with a report that depicted Britain as an unequal and segregated nation in danger of breaking up.


Like Bishop Nazir-Ali, it feared that extremism was being fostered by the retreat of different groups behind their ethnic walls. For many years, those who wanted Britain to be recognised as a multicultural society which needed to revise, or even jettison, five centuries of Protestant hegemony held centre stage. Anyone who questioned it had their reputations trashed. The multiculturalists even coined an insult - Islamophobia - to try to close down the debate. Some of them yesterday accused the bishop of "scaremongering".

But while multiculturalism began as a facet of Britain's characteristic toleration of other people's ways, religions, cuisines, languages and dress, it metamorphosed into a political creed that held that ethnic minority groups should be allowed to do what they like. It became a guiding principle of governance. When he became prime minister in 1997, Tony Blair urged the nation to embrace multiculturalism. Almost 10 years later, as he prepared to leave Downing Street, he was making speeches informing immigrants they had "a duty" to integrate with the mainstream of society. "Conform to it; or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed," he said.

But the "hate-mongers" were already here; and if they weren't they found getting here easy enough. There was a ready-made audience for their anti-western rhetoric among some sections of the Muslim community who had become estranged from the rest of the country - not just from the white Christian majority but from everyone else. So estranged that some were, and still are, prepared to kill others and themselves. When Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the July 7 suicide bombers, spoke in his "martyr video" of "the injustices perpetrated against my people" he did not mean the folk among whom he grew up in Yorkshire.

As Bishop Nazir-Ali recognises, the religious diversity that can - and should - be easily accommodated in a liberal, democratic and (still) overwhelmingly Christian country has taken on a more malign aspect which politicians are belatedly seeking to address. Ministers are even trying to enlist the help of Muslim women in countering the extremists by sending them on training courses to give them the skills and confidence to confront fanatics. This may be a laudable aim but simply is not going to happen in many Muslim communities.

Inevitably, Bishop Nazir-Ali's comments have proven controversial, not least his observation that some parts of the country are no-go areas for non-Muslims. But this segregation has been apparent for many years and was officially acknowledged as long ago as 2001 after riots in some northern towns. The inquiry into their cause was appalled to find British people living "parallel lives", with some young people from ethnic minorities able to go through life exclusively in the company of their own kind.

The diminution of this country's commitment to Anglicanism mourned by the bishop was taking place even without the arrival of another proselytising faith as potent as Islam. However, there is a wider issue that affects everyone: it has to do with the sort of country in which we all want to live. Religious intolerance breeds political intolerance; and we are seeing the great legacies of an enlightened Christian tradition - individual liberty and freedom under the law - squandered because of a need to face down extremists who deride such concepts and who should have been confronted a long time ago.


15 comments:

  1. The sun sets, on the British Empire.

    Or never did.

    Now the fruits of Empire are coming home to roost.

    The CIA can tell US:
    Ethnic groups:
    white (of which English 83.6%, Scottish 8.6%, Welsh 4.9%, Northern Irish 2.9%) 92.1%,
    black 2%, Indian 1.8%, Pakistani 1.3%, mixed 1.2%, other 1.6% (2001 census)
    Religions:
    Christian (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist) 71.6%,
    Muslim 2.7%, Hindu 1%, other 1.6%,
    unspecified or none 23.1% (2001 census)


    The United Kingdom, whiter than the white the USA. The US Ethnic groups:
    white 81.7%, black 12.9%, Asian 4.2%, Amerindian and Alaska native 1%.

    The UK-92% white, the US-82%

    Britain is 72% Christian, but 23% none.
    That's 95%, or all the white folk, near abouts.

    The US 78% Christian, to include Mormons
    10% other, 10% none. 1% Muslim

    Few or no Jews in the UK, 1% of US.

    In the US the mussulmen and Jews are equal in number, having wi"o" living in fear of his future.

    Why?
    It is the Irish that are cannibals

    ReplyDelete
  2. Whenever I see the phrase "freedom under the law" I am compelled to inform that in the UK it doesn't exist.
    For over twelve years I have been sat on by what can only be described as an illegally tax funded civil service population control organisation. It is sometimes referred to as 'the friends' ( you may have heard of it, I know some people have, and a lot of those who have heard of it are then tricked and/or coerced into silence and co-operation.)
    Illegally tax funded is accurate because its task is to subvert the rule of law repressing human rights and freedom under the law for the convenience of civil servants.
    Essentially it's a tidied-up copy of the typical repression arms of all totalitarian regimes. Tidied-up in the sense of a heavy reliance on perception distortions ( misusing and abusing Freud and Jung's work on the production of psychoanalysis ) rather than the physical abuses which is limited to a black-eye perhaps, and the careful application of drugs viruses and bacteria, but to illustrate the point, the terror induced by perceptually orchestrated death threats is very real.
    So too is loss of freedom of association ( associates, neighbours landlords employers etc. tricked/coerced into cooperation using the same perceptual distortion methods );
    So too is the attempts at re-education, using Pavlovian dog training methods of reward and punishment via 'circumstantial' good and bad 'luck', ( in my own case to get me to abandon the idea of the rule of law as my only master ) and believe it or not a relentless assault by psychopaths using Freud's dream inducing techniques producing a nightly routine of sex and nightmares.
    Mystique is ruthlessly exploited. With a tax funded budget any talent can be recruited from anywhere for its control effects whilst constant illegal surveillance provides evidence of the effects.
    Contempt for the rule of law is total with respect only for the absence of hard evidence that might attract the attention of law enforcement.
    After twelve years of this attention and whilst observing the effects of 'the friends' on wider society, (particularly the lower income groups which have the most contact with the civil service and suffer the most damage) I get the strong impression that the civil service wants wide acceptance of a particular sub-message that reads similarly thus, "There is no law, there is only control. Do as you're told. Law is no protection and your vote is useless".
    I hope this is of interest to our American kin because I know the American Bar Association pay regular tribute to the site of Magna Carta's signing at Runnymede here in England. What the British civil service have done is a rank betrayal.

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