Some days, I wonder if I'm becoming the stormy petrel of RedState. But when one looks around at the state of affairs today, in the United States and the other advanced, developed Western nations, it could be a justified concern. In particular, today, one has to wonder why the West seems to be bound to self-destruct.
It seems the former British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, shares my concern.
Speaking in Washington, DC, in September, British home secretary Suella Braverman declared that multiculturalism has ‘failed in Europe’. To illustrate her point, she highlighted the numerous violent clashes, involving distinct ethnic groups, that have erupted ‘on the streets’ of Malmo, Paris, Brussels and Leicester. Had Braverman delivered the speech a few weeks later, she would no doubt have also drawn attention to the Islamist-dominated anti-Israel protests that have taken over European capitals on a weekly basis, following Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October.
She argued that multicultural policies have fuelled this fracturing of society into sometimes antagonistic identity groups. ‘Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate’, she said. ‘It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.’ She added that, in some extreme cases, certain groups of people can ‘pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society’.
That last seems like something of an understatement.
My colleague Bonchie informed us on Monday that Suella Braverman was fired by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak over this stance.
If anyone was holding on to some slight glimmer of hope that the United Kingdom could turn things around, that was pretty much snuffed out on Monday. Now former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been fired after penning an op-ed calling out the pro-Hamas protests taking over London and the antisemitism being espoused at them.
Braverman has made waves in the past by declaring "multi-culturalism" a failure and taking a harder line on migration in her country. Here's a bit of what she had to say back in late September.
BRAVERMAN: Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades. I'm not the first to point this out. In 2010, Angela Merkel gave a speech in which she acknowledged that multiculturalism had utterly failed, and then, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British PM David Cameron echoed similar sentiments shortly thereafter.
Multiculturism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society, and in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of our society.
She was ultimately fired by PM Rishi Sunak, who is a member of the Conservative Party. With that move, one of the last voices of sanity in the UK has been extinguished.
Bonchie also has, in the usual inimitable manner, covered and analyzed the former Home Secretary's statements, so I won't go any deeper into that; instead, I'd like to look deeper into the idea of multiculturalism, its origins, its effects, and how it is shaking out today. As I wrote only last month, none other than Henry Kissinger is calling out the ill effects unchecked, uncontrolled immigration and the lack of assimilation are having on the West.
Multiculturalism is a fairly recent phenomenon, something that began with the opening up of borders at the end of the Cold War, arguably abetted in Europe by the Continent's demographic crash. But the early proponents of this practice either didn't foresee the end result or didn't care; and the results have been, to put it mildly, unfortunate.
Those results?
- Sweden now has "no-go zones," where local law enforcement is not allowed by an increasingly restive Muslim minority who are demanding they be allowed to rule those zones under Sharia law.
- Following mass riots by Hamas supporters, parts of London have effectively become "no-go zones" for Jews; and in the case of the once-Great Britain, it's interesting to note that the former Home Secretary, who is quoted above as to her concern over "antagonistic identity groups," has dubbed these "hate marches" — and she's right.
- France, while pushing back on their own troublemakers a little more briskly, still is suffering rioting by this same religious minority that seems responsible for all these domestic uproars in Europe.
We might also note that given current demographic trends, Europe may well become a Muslim-majority region in the next few decades.
And as for our own nation?
America has traditionally been referred to as a melting pot, but that era may well be past; we are instead becoming a salad bowl. People used to come here because they wanted to be Americans; now they come here because they want to have what America offers but not to give up the culture, language, and practices of the lands they leave behind, no matter how barbaric, self-destructive or poisonous those practices are.
How long will it be before we have no-go enclaves like Sweden? We already have the genesis of these zones: Dearborn, Michigan, the self-segregated Somali immigrant communities in Minneapolis, and more. We have seen massive pro-Hamas protests all over the nation — in New York City, at President Biden's Delaware residence, and other places. In some of our nation's increasingly leftist-run colleges and universities, Jewish students are, in effect, told to hide, to cower, to deny themselves their very identity in the face of threats by antisemitic barbarians.
In 1916, while addressing the Knights of Columbus, President Theodore Roosevelt said:
I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism. I do not speak of the hyphen when it is employed as a mere convenience, although personally, I like to avoid its use even in such manner. I speak and condemn its use whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.
In his usual direct, straight-to-the-point manner, old Teddy got this right. Too many people now have come to Sweden, France, Britain, or the United States of America but do not want to adopt Swedish, French, British, or American manners, practices, rights and obligations, language, and social norms. That's the heart of the problem. That's what has to change. If anyone wishes to come to America because they are yearning to be free, to take part in the endless opportunity America offers to those who are willing to work for it, to learn and become American, then we should welcome them.
And only them.