Steyn on immigration

After years of avoiding the topic, Mark Steyn seems to have finally taken a stand on the issue of immigration. He writes:

Two generations ago, America, Canada, Australia and the rest of the developed world took it as read that a sovereign nation had the right to determine which, if any, foreigners it extended rights of residency to. Now only Japan does. Everywhere else, opposition to mass immigration is “nativist”, and expressing a preference for one group of immigrants over another is “racist”. Even though 40 years ago governments routinely distinguished between Irish and Bulgar, Indian and Somali, now all that matters is to demonstrate your multicultural bona fides even unto societal suicide, as if immigration is like a UN peacekeeping operation – one of those activities in which you have no “national interest”.

“It’s overblown that suddenly Islam is going to spread across the nation,” a candidate for Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party said on the radio the other day. “And, if it does, so what?” Jens Orback, the then “Integration Minister” of Sweden (and pity the land that needs such a cabinet official), was less devil-may-care. On Sveriges Radio five years ago, he advised his fellow Swedes to “be nice to Muslims while we’re in the majority so that they’ll be nice to us when they’re in the majority.” Another “Integration Minister”, Armin Laschet of North Rhine-Westphalia, tells his fellow Germans that “in our cities 30-40 per cent of children have an immigrant background. It will be them who will sustain this country in 20 years.”

Very few Swedes knowingly voted for societal self-extinction, yet in barely a third of century it’s become a fait accomplis. And in a politically correct world there is no acceptable form of public discourse in which to object to it. This is the triumph of the left’s assault on language. As my colleague John Derbyshire put it in another context: Better dead than rude.

Full article

Wrongfully accused?

Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative has a very interesting post about the recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne.

Both internationally and at home, these attacks have been used as evidence of allegedly widespread European Australian racism, especially by the Australian mainstream media which loves to run stories about how evil and racist white Australians are.

Yet in the CCTV footage that Richardson posts of one particular attack, the attackers appear to be of non-European origin.

Richardson asks:

So what is going on here? Why would white Australians and white society be condemned for something they appear to have had no part in?

The answer, I believe, is quite simple: when it comes to allegations of racism, whites are always quilty until proven innocent. Moreover, it is only ever people of European descent who can be guilty of racism - non-European peoples are completely incapable of such a thing.

These are the rules that our modern, liberal, multicultural society seems to live by.

Stuart Macintyre: Anglophobe

Stuart Macintyre is a historian and former communist known for being one of the prime protagonists in the so-called "History Wars" here in Australia. He is also the chap that Kevin Rudd has decided should help write our national history curriculum for schools from the first year of school through to Year 12.

Unsurprisingly, Macintyre is one of those leftists who views Australian history since British settlement as little more than an appalling legacy of racism and genocide. Indeed, he is one of the leading proponents of this view. In his opinion, the sooner evil Anglo-Australia is relegated to the dustbin of history, the better. As this article points out:

Macintyre also harbours a deep distaste for this country’s British heritage. In the concluding chapter of A Concise History of Australia (1999), he is comforted by the prediction that, just as the Romans were displaced in Britain, Aborigines and Asians will eventually supplant the colonisers of British descent in Australia. Just as the only remnant of the Roman empire in Britain is “a thin slice of the island’s multi-layered past”, so too will the British colonisation be overlaid by the culture and practices of other peoples.

Personally, I'd like to know how someone with such strong biases was ever deemed the best choice to write the national history curriculum for a people and nation he so obviously loathes.