Would anyone here endorse a black Africa, or an Asian Asia? I certainly hope not if the very thought of a white Europe is so appalling. I don’t think there is anything particularly offensive about the concept of Europe being predominantly white. It always has been, after all. The Moors had a go, but were eventually kicked out. The first attempts by Islam to conquer Europe predate the first crusade by four hundred years or so.
I know the dear old Germans are doing their best to change it, but if ever a nation could be put collectively on the psychiatrist’s couch they would surely be prime candidates. While we Brits are continually reminded of the Empire (see The Guardian today for further evidence) the Germans more recent, what should we say, indiscretions, are the preserve of the History Channel rather than the comments sections. Berlin’s ongoing attempts to assuage their indelible national guilt might go down well at home, but in the Visigrad nations they seem less impressed by being put on the hook by Germany. For the third time in a century.
Nationalism and the alt-right has nothing to do with it. If I decided to go to Vienna tomorrow I would want it to be like Vienna. I don’t want to see Starbucks and McDonalds and M&S. I’d feel the same about Bangkok or Buenos Aires. I want to see and enjoy their cultures, not some homogeneous sprawl indistinct from Watford on a wet Wednesday,
I’m interested where this odd triangulation of globalism, nationalism and multiculturalism finally ends up meeting. If globalism (not really much more that the old socialist ideal of internationalism with added Goldman Sachs) and multiculturalism are closely allied politically, then why is multiculturalism only reserved for regions within (usually Western) states? Why can we not enjoy multiculturalism on the scale of nations, with each allowed to maintain largely its original culture? Don’t we celebrate and actively try to preserve those things usually? The British government funds the protection of cultural individuality in Wales, Cornwall, the Western Isles and other regions. I doubt there is a barely a government on the planet which does not protect in law the cultural history of one group or another. It is deemed important on that scale. Why not on a national scale? In what way is that less important?
Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that further left you go the deeper the oikophobia. It seems slightly incongruous that the two nations seemingly most reviled in the world if you read the papers, the UK and the USA, are also the primary magnets for immigration. The UK is such a terrible place that as we speak there are young chaps clinging onto the axles of articulated lorries in France desperate to get here to experience the sheer awfulness of the place first hand.
Unless they are just desperate to get out of France, of course, which is entirely possible.
