To paraphrase Gandhi “Multiculturalism would be a good idea“.
Cultural diversity is a wonderful idea and as a speaker of 5 languages with bilingual kids, as someone who’s been the sole white guy in a provincial Zambian town, the sole non-Indian in a suburban Delhi apartment block, steered clear of gringos during a trek across Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina and spoke Italian habitually for over 8 years in Italy, I might understand real multiculturalism better than most.
Nonetheless, I’m aware many would disagree. They hate cultural diversity, are instinctively intolerant of backward peoples who wish to retain their time-honoured customs, vernaculars, religions, worldviews and mores. Why do the French still insist on speaking French or the Brits still talk in feet and inches, don’t they know we’ve all gone decimal now?. Many in the chattering classes who bleat about diversity and equality (ever heard of diversity training for the police?) are often the same people who’d like to ban smacking in the home and intervene abroad to change sexual customs. For them ethnic diversity means choosing between an Indian and Italian restaurant or between Reggae and Salsa music.
They think we should all boogey to the same international beat, shop at the same Walmart or Tescos, buy the same DVD movies, video games, watch the same set of TV programmes, attend the same business management courses, adapt to the same form of groupthink conformism and even use the same operating system with the same Office package or go on the same package tour holidays, drive the same cars, in short aspire to the same lifestyle. Parents who don’t embrace mass-marketed Anglo-American world culture in favour of alternative or more traditional values are often blamed if their kids are bullied at school.
The globalist agenda is antithetical to the very notion of cultural diversity. By multiculturalism they do not mean a patchwork of diverse cultural groups living harmoniously side by side, but a new world order in which a global supranationalism supplants all other mini-nationalisms. The new ways hardly represent a potpourri of Bangladeshi, Kenyan, Chinese and Bolivian culture with an admixture of French and Russian, they reflect a new culture promoted a planet-wide leviathan steamrollering traditional values everywhere.
Yeah, why not immerse yourself in US junk culture at Disneyland Paris? Why not give Iraqi police officers sexual diversity training? Why not teach Iranians the wonders of business-friendly liberal democracy?
As Joe Strummer of the late 1970s punk group, The Clash, sang, in one of his more thoughtful phases, “I’ll salute the New Wave and I hope nobody escapes