The Multicult

All the colourful ethnicities that decorate the margins of empire.

A friend expresses concern that promoting Canadian culture and rejecting multiculturalism, as I proposed last post, will “come across to some as racism.” That suggests exactly why there is need for such an artistic movement. To educate.

Many indeed have bought the idea that opposing multiculturalism and supporting a Canadian culture is racism. They have also bought the idea that “cultural appropriation” is racist. Yet multiculturalism is itself pretty much just a new word for racism. We are in a funhouse standoff situation in which many people think it is racist to object to racism.

The good guys among us filled the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties fighting race-based ideologies, linking race with culture, segregation, and apartheid. We used to consider black ghettos in US cities, Jewish ghettos in European cities, and Bantustans in South Africa, were the problem. Now every big Canadian city has not just one ghetto, or two, of blacks or Jews, but a dozen or more: Little Italy, Chinatown, India Bazaar, Little Portugal, even a Koreatown or a little Burma or a little Malta. And now we celebrate the ghettoization! The typical Canadian Indian reserve enforces apartheid more completely than the South African Bantustans ever tried to—and now we demand more of it. And the current link of race to culture and insistence on cultural purity is, in essence, the same racial ideology we once called Nazism.

I don’t think there is a conspiracy here. It is that racism has a natural appeal—to some of our worst instincts—and accordingly eternal vigilance is necessary. We have been remiss in not examining our premises and motives. Or we have examined them, but indulged them by simply reversing the meaning of words to mask our responsibility.

Multiculturalism can be dated pretty exactly, to Pierre Trudeau’s government in 1971. At the time, it looked like a good tactical move. The current issue then was Quebec nationalism and Quebec separatism, an existential threat to Canada. Quebec saw itself as a minority threatened with assimilation by a larger culture. Trudeau countered by insisting that there was no larger culture in Canada, that Canada itself was really a collection of minorities, with no mainstream. The “French” were actually the largest single ethnic unit. There was no demand for anyone to assimilate. And no reason to separate. Bomb defused.

Trudeau’s idea was quickly adopted by Europe as well, for similar tactical reasons. Just as Canada was worried about Quebec nationalism, Europe was worried, for obvious historical reasons, about German nationalism. Below that level, any nationalism was a threat to the EU as a supranational union. Or what we used to call an empire.

Almost as quickly, multiculturalism was embraced by the US and Australia too, probably simply because it looked like the next trend, it came with the tag “progressive,” and they did not want to trail Canada and Europe.

And it appealed to racist instincts that are always present. And as a gift horse, nobody looked at it too closely.

Or inquired what had happened to the Greeks who had left it.

Nationalism is not on balance a good thing. It promotes unity within the group, but at the cost of disunity with those outside the group. But the remedy to nationalism is universalism, an appeal to the brotherhood of man. As advanced by Christianity, for example, or to a greater or lesser extent by the other universalist religions, or by true, Lockean liberalism.

Instead, multiculturalism moved in the opposite direction, down the evolutionary ladder a few thousand years, replacing nationalism with tribalism.

The problems we see with nationalism are made exponentially worse in tribalism. Notably, the racism.

We are now seeing this start to play out, and it is getting worse rapidly. We are moving into in the Weimar period. If we do not change course soon, the inevitable logic of multiculturalism will lead to a general bloodbath that, in the end, will make everything the Nazis did look trivial by comparison. Multiculturalism implicitly endorses not just segregation, but conquest, empire, slavery, and genocide. And as a standard feature of daily existence, not just once or on some distant battlefield. This is so for all truly tribal civilizations.

I think we will sober up before we get that far. I think we are starting to sober up. But I fear we ain’t seen nothing yet.

My friend writes that many of the multicultural festivals that once were held in every Canadian city have now, like Toronto’s Caravan, “died because the grandchildren of the Polish, German, Italian Ukrainian immigrants that wanted to share their culture no longer identified as an Ethnic Canadian ... just as a Canadian.”

That’s not quite right. It was not the grandchildren. It was the children, if not the first generation.

I once dated a girl whose parents had emigrated from the Netherlands. She would not accompany me to the local farmer’s market, although it was right across from the family’s storefront. She was too upset by one farmer who used to make a display of wearing wooden shoes. Later I dated a Greek girl, again the daughter of immigrants. During Caravan, she would never agree to go to the Greek pavilion—she was too embarrassed by it. Another friend, the son of Italian immigrants, would not go to Kensington Market. It was, he said, too much like Italy.

Think about it for a moment. What are celebrations of “multiculturalism,” really, other than human zoos? If someone did it to you, wouldn’t you be offended? It is a matter of commodifying, objectifying, othering, dehumanizing, your neighbours. At least one long step closer to putting them in the concentration camps, and then the ovens.

Sure, various ethnic groups participated. They were given public money to do so, after all, that they would lose if they did not. And it would go to all the other ethnic groups, but not to them, and they would feel and be discriminated against. A perfect plan for promoting tensions among ethnic groups.