Melanie Phillips for a Monday
Get a cup of coffee and then read Melanie Phillips’ interview over at Front Page
Multiculturalism has turned Britain’s values inside out – and the root cause of the problem is the deconstruction of Britain’s identity. For decades, the British elite has been consumed by loathing of its national identity and values which it decided were racist, authoritarian and generally disagreeable. Much of that was due to our old friend, post-colonial guilt. The elite was therefore vulnerable to the predations of the left, which had signed up to Gramsci’s insight that a society could be suborned by replacing its normative values by the mores of those who transgressed them or were on society’s margins.
This gave rise to multiculturalism and minority rights, which held that all cultures were equal to each other and which thus provided minorities with an enormous weapon with which to force the majority to give in to their demands. One of the consequences of this was moral inversion, which holds that since minorities are weak they must always be victims of the majority because it is strong. So even when minorities behave badly, it’s always the majority’s fault. Translate that onto the world stage, and you arrive at the view that even when third world people commit terrorist outrages against the west it must be the west which is to blame. That’s why multicultural Britain said, after 9/11, that America ‘had it coming to them’ – and why, after the London bombings last July, it said the reason British Muslim boys had blown up the London transit system was because of Britain’s support for the US in Iraq.
Written by jay on May 15th, 2006 with
1 comment.
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#1. May 16th, 2006, at 5:58 AM.
I’ve never really understood this deconstruction of identity stuff.
I think the British identity was just fine as it was a hundred years ago — the small-l liberal one — the main issue was to get rid of the racist side.
i.e. stop overt discrimination, and that’s all that needed to be done.
Ugh.