Playing the approved way

In his most recent column at VDARE.com, R.J. Stove writes:

If the boat people issue continues for long enough to do Rudd serious damage, Australia’s conservatives might have a chance at winning power. Or, who knows, they might even raise the issue of legal immigration, effectively kept out of politics by the usual bipartisan consensus since Hanson’s implosion.

But probably, like the GOP in the U.S., they will opt to play the political game in the approved way—and lose.

The Coalition does not have the stomach the question the immigration status quo. The useless Malcolm "I Can't Believe It's Not Labor" Turnbull and his hapless gang simply won't dare challenge Rudd's immigration free-for-all for fear of not only opening themselves up to allegations of 'racism' but also upsetting their Big Business friends and financiers who enthusiastically support open-borders.

The best thing that could happen would be for the Coalition to suffer a massive, debilitating defeat at the next election, thereby preciptiating its implosion and permanent disappearance from the Australian political landscape. This would allow an actual conservative party to take its place, a party that actually offered the electorate a real choice on immigration.

A joke

A politician died and went to Heaven to ask St. Peter for admission. St. Peter said "We don’t have many of your profession here in Heaven and it is our rule that you must spend a day in Hell and a day in Heaven before you elect for one or the other."

So the politician went to Hell, where he found himself on a beautifully manicured golf course, on which he enjoyed a pleasant round of social golf with some of his old mates who had preceded him. They then went to the bar and they reminisced about how they had conned and dudded people, followed by dinner - caviar, lobster, champagne - anything you fancied to eat or drink. The Devil turned out to be a most charming and solicitous host, full of jokes and leading the singing.

The next day the politician spent the day in Heaven, where he sat in the clouds, playing the harp and singing hymns. At the end of the day St. Peter asked him, "Which destination do you elect?" The politician replied, "Well it was very pleasant and relaxing in Heaven, but to be frank, I prefer Hell."

So down he went to Hell, where he found himself in a rubbish tip, where his old mates, with doleful expressions, were sorting rubbish and squabbling over the rotten scraps of food which had been thrown out. The politician cried out to the Devil "Where’s the golf course?" To which the Devil replied "Oh, that was during the campaign, this is the day after the election."

The enervated Anglosphere

Fjordman writes:

The entire Western world is currently in decline, not just in relative terms as a percentage of the global population or economy, but in real terms as functioning societies.

That being said, although all Western countries without exception are sinking under the weight of Third World mass immigration and in the process becoming a part of the Third World, they are not sinking equally fast. With the exception of France, Belgium and possibly the Netherlands and Sweden, the English-speaking world is leading the disintegration of the West, ideologically and demographically. The entire West is sick, but the Anglosphere is sicker than most. The English-speaking countries still have the most dynamic military traditions of the West, but that counts for little as long as they are used for promoting global Multiculturalism rather than for protecting the home country.

I cannot see that the Anglosphere has more freedom of speech than Continental European countries, either. The USA with its First Amendment does, which is great (we'll see what their new President does about that), but al-Canada is plain nuts and Britain is a Multicultural banana republic. Australia and New Zealand could be a part of Greater China by mid-century. Maybe they will be more prosperous than France will be as a part of Greater Algeria or the United States as a part of Greater Mexico, but by then they will be Asians, not Westerners.

I'm not sure why the Anglosphere is so bad. In the case of Britain, I strongly suspect it's partly caused by a Post-Imperial Stress Syndrome for a nation that once ruled much of the world and now cannot even rule its own suburbs. Empire was their identity. Much of the same can be said about the French. Indeed I suspect that one of their motivations for supporting the awful EU project is for them to resurrect some of their past imperial glory in another form.

Yet this cannot explain the actions of the United States, which is still the world's greatest power although that may not last forever. There is some form of universal proposition nation idea with roots dating back to the Enlightenment at work here. It's the concept that a country is not a nation based on a shared heritage, but an abstract entity which can be joined by absolutely anybody, a bit like an enlarged video club. If you claim that the United States is a "universal" nation and that Hamas-supporting Muslims, with which Westerners have absolutely nothing in common, can and should be imported to the USA, then you are a supporter of the concept of a proposition nation. This idea will eventually kill the United States as we once knew it.

While a secular theology of immigrationism certainly exists in the Anglosphere nations, a theology which teaches, quite falsely, that immigration is, and has always been, an integral part of their respective national characters, one cannot overlook the role that powerful transnational commercial interests have played in opening up the Anglosphere nations to massive Third World immigration. Continental European elites, in contrast, seem slightly more reluctant to throw their nations under the wheels of the "global economy" express.

Deconstructing Australia

Mark Richardson writes at Oz Conservative:

It turns out that immigration has been running at an astonishingly high level. And the officials in charge justify this on the grounds that the economy is king. Australia is one big labour market.

Last year there were 171,318 permanent arrivals in Australia. There were also 47,780 New Zealanders who settled permanently and 657,124 migrants with the right to work. This adds up to 876,222 arrivals in a country with a population of about 22,000,000.

What is the purpose of this immigration? The Immigration Minister gave this explanation:

"Senator Evans said immigration should be the nation's labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants ... Decisions about who came to Australia would increasingly be left to employers."

Are we a nation or an economy? Do we want to develop economically and industrially or just grow by selling passports and having more people? Do we really want to sacrifice individual standards of living just to have a higher overall level of GDP?

My apologies to Australian readers who find all this demoralising. I expect that at first it is unavoidably demoralising. But I hope that there will be at least one positive effect, which is to show just how bankrupt Australian liberalism has become. There is nothing worthwhile animating it. The focus of government policy is not even on real economic development anymore; it's just about crude technocratic management of the economy to maintain overall growth of GDP.

Richardson asks: what are we being delivered to?

If the rhetoric of our elites is anything to go by, I would say the post-national "new world order" of the "global economy."

Driven by an open-borders ideology that justifies their economic and financial interests, Australia's elites in business, politics, and academia have embarked on a course that will result in a staggering increase in the size of the our population, a radical change in our country's ethnic makeup, and the erosion of our historic national identity.

Of course, whether or not the Australian people wanted these dramatic changes imposed upon them is a question they were never asked.

Our interests and wishes don't matter.

All that matters is that we are delivered to the "global economy" through open-borders and the deconstruction of our nation-state.

In many ways, Australia's elites are examples of what the late Samuel P. Huntington labelled 'Davos Man', people who "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the élite's global operations".

As Huntington noted:

"The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability—within acceptable conditions for evolution—of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting so-called 'universal values' abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism."

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.