The racist New York Times

Leafing through a copy of the New York newspaper the Times, Dalrymple finds France’s World Cup win described as

a victory of multiculturalism over identity politics. Not only did the victory celebrations signal what the Times called France’s embrace of multiculturalism, but it pointed out that the all-white Croatian team represented a country that was hostile to immigrants from very different cultures from its own.

This, says Dalrymple,

assumes two things, one of which proves the truth of one of modern American liberalism’s main planks, namely that racism is more difficult to eradicate from minds than one might suppose.

• The newspaper assumed that the French team was multicultural ­because six of its players were of African descent, as if the colour of their skin and culture inevitably went together: once an African, ­always an African, presumably for genetic reasons.
• By implying that the French victory signals some kind of cultural superiority, it ascribes to mere sporting events the ­importance that totalitarian ­régimes used to ascribe to them: we are back to the days when the Soviet Union used the victories of Tamara and Irina Press in putting the shot, throwing the javelin, etc. (it still has not been quite decided whether they were truly ­female), to suggest the superiority of the Soviet political and social system.

Tamara and Irina Press

The multicultural ideal

The lion of Hinduism shall lie down with the lamb of Mohammedanism (for example), and vice versa

Such a world is what people normally have in mind when they use the word ‘multiculturalism’, Dalrymple notes. They think of

1. a lot of different restaurants
2. charming exotic customs and tribal loyalties, all perfectly compatible with one another

British intellectuals loathe Britain

Self-hatred is neither attractive nor constructive. It is not only insincere but unjustified

The British, Dalrymple writes,

are fortunate enough to be the inheritors of a tradition as great as (though not necessarily greater than) any. Why reject it?

He writes from India, where he says

it is far easier to find genuine and knowledgeable admirers of British culture than it is among Britain’s own political class. This is the saddest commentary on the condition of England.

In Great Britain, says Dalrymple, you find

officially-sponsored indifference or hostility to anything which might be considered part of the European and British cultural and religious heritage.

This is combined with

a tender regard for any non-European and non-British cultural heritage.

For example,

no British minister would go to Brick Lane in East London and say it was horribly Bangladeshi; but a British minister had no compunction in complaining of an institution that it was horribly white.

English intellectuals, Dalrymple points out,

have long harboured a hatred of their country and its culture. The attitude has deeply infiltrated the political class, and has come to affect legislation.

Moral exhibitionism

But it is

insincere. Those who adopt it are not admirers of other cultures, for to admire other cultures it is necessary to study them. To know another culture is not a matter of slipping down once in a while to a restaurant that serves its cuisine: it is very hard work indeed, and the more different that culture is from one’s own, the harder the work it is.

When members of Britain’s political class express their adherence to multiculturalism,

they are not expressing their love of other cultures, they are expressing hatred of their own. It is this which explains the discrepancy in the way a Christian who derides Islam can expect to be treated by comparison with a Muslim who derides Christianity.

The hatred of that section of the political class for their country’s culture, traditions and past is insincere in another sense, Dalrymple notes.

By expressing that hatred, they imagine themselves to be exhibiting their moral superiority for all the world — and especially the intelligentsia — to see.

Rubbing their noses in diversity

Another factor in the political class’s hatred of their culture is that it is politically advantageous. Mass immigration,

with the concomitant ideological glorification of the multicultural society, has had as its purpose the production of a permanent change in the nature of the British population, which can be relied upon to vote for ever for the kind of politicians who brought it about. It is one thing to encourage immigration because your commerce is so strong that there is a labour shortage; quite another when neither of those conditions obtains. Britain’s commerce was never strong and there never was a labour shortage. The country imported people while there was still mass unemployment (disguised as sickness) to create a vote bank for those who brought this about.

Why young occidentals hate

Cretinous iconoclasm

Youth in the West, writes Dalrymple, is deliberately kept from any deeper knowledge of civilisation by the

ideological self-hatred that has been so strong a current of Western intellectual life for the last three or more decades, that precludes any pedagogic affirmation of the Western tradition.

This self-denigration

explains in part the kind of hatred (and contempt) that young Muslims feel. Not only does the ideological self-hatred of Western intellectuals prevent them from learning anything of the Western tradition, other than Radio One and McDonald’s, but it supplies them with the tropes with which to justify their pre-existing anger and violence.

Dalrymple notes that the self-hatred of Western intellectuals

is not genuine or sincere: they do not really want to beat our supermarkets into souks, as swords into ploughshares. Rather, the intellectual’s expression of self-hatred is directed at other Western intellectuals, to prove the self-hater’s broadness of mind, moral superiority and lack of prejudice. It is not only rebellious youth who experience peer pressure; and anyone who pointed out, for example, that for a very long time now the Western medical tradition has been incomparably superior to all other medical traditions in the world combined and multiplied a thousandfold, would forfeit approval, even though what he said was true, and obviously so.

Barbarism

Insincere ideas can become official orthodoxies, with very real consequences. The Muslims of the West

are hardly to blame if they do not realise that the posturings of our intellectuals are not intended to be taken literally. When Western intellectuals express no admiration for or appreciation of the cultural achievements of their civilisation’s past, when only denigration and iconoclasm appear to advance an intellectual’s career, when moral stature is measured by the vehemence of denunciation of past or present abuses, real or imagined, it is hardly surprising that Muslims conclude that the West is eminently hateful; it must be, because it hates itself. They haven’t heard of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess.

The insincere play with fire

Those who claim to hate and despise themselves

will very soon be taken at their word by others, particularly by those who believe themselves to be in possession of an all-embracing creed. Far from promoting reconciliation and tolerance, therefore, multiculturalism breeds contempt, hatred and violence.

No attempt, writes Dalrymple, is ever made to explain the West’s hitherto overwhelming superiority in many fields

except by reference to injustice, exploitation and colonial depredation. That the phenomenal and unique inventiveness of the West might be connected in some way with its long philosophical and cultural development, going back to ancient Greece, is a thought that is never for a moment entertained.

In the mental world of many young people in the West, and especially Muslims,

the difference in the wealth of nations is the result of plunder, not invention and innovation, to be redressed by more effective plunder in the opposite direction.

No attempts are made at school to induct young people into the tradition of Western civilisation,

for fear of offending their parents’ cultural sensibilities if they are, say, Muslim; though no more efforts in that direction are made on behalf of kafir youth. Both kafir and Muslims enjoy the fruit without ever knowing the tree. They are like the East End boys of old, who thought that milk came in bottles because they had never seen or heard of cows.

Europe’s death-wish

Dalrymple notes that in Western Europe today there are

large populations whose loyalty to, or even absence of hatred for, the host country cannot be assumed, and whose integration into that country’s society has been actively retarded and opposed by the doctrines of multiculturalism.

You have only to see, he says,

a group of men from the North-West Frontier gathering outside a Victorian terraced house in Bradford converted into a mosque, whose only obvious concession to Occidentalism is the wearing of Nike shoes and the possession of a mobile phone, to wonder what exactly they believe, think, and preach.

He points out that this population,

in the name of certain abstractions and shibboleths, is able constantly to replenish itself with new migrants, so that the need to integrate never arises: a huge ghetto, potentially hostile, is created that is self-sustaining.

Such a society

suffers from a death-wish, composed of an admixture of self-hatred and over-confidence that it is so unshakably strong that nothing can destroy or seriously undermine it.

Islamism in Britain is not the product of Islam alone

Dalrymple notes that some British Muslims succeed in life, a fact which is interpreted backwards:

not that Muslims can succeed, but that generally they cannot, because British society is inimical to Muslims.

In coming to this conclusion, Dalrymple points out, young Muslims

would only be adopting the logic that has driven Western social policy for so long: that any difference in economic and social outcome between groups is the result of social injustice and adverse discrimination. The premises of multiculturalism do not even permit asking whether reasons internal to the groups might account for differences in outcomes.

This sociological view is peddled consistently by the poll-tax-funded British state broadcaster, which states, for example, that Muslims ‘continue to face discrimination’. Thus,

• if more Muslims than any other group possess no educational qualifications, even though the hurdles for winning such qualifications have constantly fallen, it can only be because of discrimination—though a quarter of all medical students in Britain are of Indian subcontinental descent. It can have nothing to do with the widespread—and illegal—practice of refusing to allow girls to continue at school, which the Press scarcely mentions, and which the educational authorities rarely if ever investigate
• if youth unemployment among Muslims is two-and-a half-times the rate among whites, it can be only because of discrimination—though youth unemployment among Hindus is  lower than among whites (and this even though many young Hindus complain of being mistaken for Muslims)

Dalrymple comments:

A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on ‘social justice’, the negation of which is ‘discrimination’, can breed only festering embitterment. Where the definition of justice is entitlement by virtue of group existence rather than reward for individual effort, a radical overhaul of society will appear necessary to achieve such justice.

Islamism in Britain, Dalrymple emphasises, is

the product of the meeting of Islam with an entrenched native mode of thinking about social problems.

Failure and feeble-mindedness of the Left

Dalrymple writes that whenever the Left see

a foreign enemy of their own country whom they can usefully co-opt as an ally in their disputes with their own domestic enemies, they resort to nihilistic relativism and multiculturalism, thus explaining away the vileness of their new ally’s atrocities as being the expression of his sacrosanct cultural tradition.

The Left

has comprehensively lost the economic argument that was once its raison d’être, and is reduced to the work of cultural destruction and the balkanisation of society into little communities of ideological monomaniacs—the feminists, homosexual and animal liberationists, and so forth. The Left lost its soul when it lost the economic argument.

So complete has been the defeat of socialism

that anyone who now avowed a belief in the superior efficiency of state-run industry would be more a candidate for the lunatic asylum (supposing that any remained open) than for high political office.

All that the Left can nowadays propose is

social policy so destructive that it allegedly necessitates a vast state apparatus to repair the damage it does.

Of the domestic policy prescriptions of the Left,

multiculturalism is among the most destructive. It was once the honourable goal of the Left, at least in Britain, to spread higher culture to the working class, and to immigrants, so that every person capable by inclination and natural endowment of enjoying, participating in, or contributing to that higher culture would do so. More recently, however, the Left has devoted its energies to denying that there is any higher or lower, better or worse in cultural matters. Not coincidentally, this betrayal allows Leftist intellectuals to preen themselves on the broadness of their minds while they maintain their membership of a social élite. They rarely educate their own children as if their theoretical pronouncements were true.

With regard to the Vietnam War,

it was one thing to oppose it because you thought it was futile and ethically worse than not fighting it (not necessarily true, but at least an honest opinion); quite another because you thought that Uncle Ho was a good man who was leading his people to freedom and prosperity, something that you could believe only by employing all the human mind’s capacity for special pleading and self-deception.

How the West cringes before the Mahometans

Not one of Dalrymple’s favourite journalists

Polly Toynbee of the London newspaper the Guardian is, Dalrymple admits,

not one of my favourite journalists.

But Dalrymple notes (from 1:05:09) that Toynbee has said that

if she must choose between her feminism and her multiculturalism, she chooses her feminism. So she will argue for the protection of Moslem women.

The problem of the cultural cringe before the Mohammedans goes quite far in British administration, Dalrymple points out. He used to have many young Moslem patients

who had been denied access to school by their parents. The authorities never once did anything about it. But if a white working-class girl didn’t go to school, the parents might be threatened with legal action or imprisonment. A considerable part of this is fear — straightforward physical fear.

Furthermore, on the question of Islam as on so many other matters, Western politicians and intellectuals

are always on the lookout for an opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of their sympathies. This does a lot of harm.

Justin Trudeau gesticulates in the direction of the Musulman fundament

Nationalism is fraught with danger

But so is refusal to recognise that attachment to one’s culture and history is a normal part of human experience

A democracy that stifles debate on vital and difficult matters by means of speech codes, explicit or implicit, is asking, writes Dalrymple, for a fascist reaction. He points out that in France, the genie of unease about the North African influx cannot be returned to its bottle. For the sake of democracy,

vigorous, civilised debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.

France, Dalrymple reminds us, has

a large, undigested, and growing immigrant population from North Africa that congregates—unwanted by the bulk of the population—in huge and soulless modern housing projects that surround French cities, as if besieging them. There are now Muslim ghettoes in France so crime-ridden that the police will not enter, except in armoured convoys.

The Front national addresses

widespread anxieties that ‘respectable’ politicians have preferred to ignore for fear of appearing illiberal and unenlightened.

The party dares say on the subject of mass immigration

what many Frenchmen think and feel. A problem as essential to France’s future as how 5m North African Muslims are to be integrated successfully into French society has been left unexamined, obscured behind a cloud of wishful thinking and politically correct platitudes.

Dalrymple explains that the ‘respectable’ politicians,

by espousing the banalities of multiculturalism, left those with a desire to conserve something of traditional French identity with nowhere to go but Le Pen. By declaring that realities as obvious as the high immigrant crime rate and the resulting fear that many Frenchmen feel cannot be mentioned by the polite and sophisticated, they have ceded all public discussion of such evident facts to the impolite and the outré. The élites were the architects of the Front national‘s triumph.

Dutch ethical narcissism

In the Netherlands, Dalrymple points out,

a very large proportion of immigration was in accordance with the family reunification program. The original economic migrants, principally from Morocco and overwhelmingly male, were felt to be suffering from loneliness.

So it gave the political class

a nice warm and fuzzy feeling inside (a bit like that experienced in the gullet after a shot of whisky) to let immigrant labourers be reunited with their families—in the Netherlands.

One thing led to another,

and suddenly 11% of the population, much of it economically inactive, was of immigrant origin.

Unfortunately, Dalrymple notes,

those who had the warm and fuzzy feeling—which included the knowledge that they were not repeating the less than glorious record of their country during the Second World War—did not bear the consequences. But they felt good about themselves.

Into the stew of ethical narcissism

was poured multiculturalism. Its object in the Netherlands was the opposite of, or at least very different from, what it  became. Moroccan economic migrants were originally encouraged to maintain links with their homeland and continue their cultural practices so that when they became surplus to the Netherlands’ requirements for cheap unskilled labour—that is to say, of pensionable age or sooner if there were an economic downturn—they would be able to reintegrate easily back into Morocco. As Goethe said, however, grey is theory, but green is the tree of life.

For many years, Dalrymple writes,

the political class and much of the educated middle class refused to see that there was a problem—not only because it did not obtrude much on their personal lives, but because they had created it, and they would have to lose their ethical virginity if they tried to do anything about it.

Unfortunately,

molten lava has a habit sometimes of breaking through the placid surface of the earth. The rise of Pim Fortuyn was the tremor and his murder, as well as that of Theo van Gogh, the eruption.

Fortuyn has found a successor in Geert Wilders, who

is accused of incitement to hatred and discrimination. But it is quite clear that he has done no more in regard to Islam than, say, an anticommunist might have done in claiming that the implementation of communist doctrine inevitably leads to tyranny.