"I feel in a rather abusive mood today ..."
"Globalisation In One Country"
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is trenchantly written and robustly argued. It is complex and often subtle. It is also fundamentally wrong in both premise and conclusion.
Let's take Malik's 'point-by-point refutation' one point at a time. While Caldwell and Malik are talking about Europe, I prefer to concentrate on the UK - because that's where my children are growing up. Foreigners begin at Calais.
Three basic arguments underlie Caldwell’s thesis. First, postwar immigration to Europe has, he believes, been fundamentally different to previous waves of immigration. Prior to the Second World War, immigrants came almost exclusively from other European nations, and so were easily assimilable. Indeed, ‘using the word immigration to describe intra-European movements makes only slightly more sense than describing a New Yorker as an “immigrant” to California’. The cultural apartness of postwar immigrants, on the other hand, has not just posed problems of assimilation but also undermined the very fabric of European societies. Take away colonial guilt, Caldwell suggests, and ‘the fundamental difference between colonization and labor migration ceases to be obvious’.Second, Caldwell argues that Muslim migration in particularly has been akin to a form of colonization. ‘Since its arrival half a century ago’, Caldwell observes, ‘Islam has broken – or required adjustments to, or rearguard defences of – a good many of the European customs, received ideas and state structures with which it has come in contact.’ Islam ‘is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it.’
And third, Caldwell suggests that Islam’s success has been made easier by a crisis of identity of identity in the West. Europeans, in particular, ‘are coming to despise their own cultures, much as the bigots among their forebears had despised the cultures of other peoples.’ Immigration, Caldwell points out, ‘enhances strong countries and cultures but it can overwhelm weak ones’ – and that is what is happening to Europe.
According to Caldwell, prewar immigration between European nations was different from postwar immigration from outside Europe because ‘immigration from neighboring countries does not provoke the most worrisome immigration questions, such as “How well will they fit in?” “Is assimilation what they want?” and, most of all, “Where are their true loyalties?”.’ In fact, those were the very questions asked of European migrants in the prewar years ... One of the consequences of postwar migration has been to create historical amnesia about prewar attitudes.Well, I'd say on that last point the 'historical amnesia' is the byproduct of the 'nation of immigrants' liberal myth. After all, we welcomed immigrants in the past, didn't we ?
"People come over here for a fortnight's holiday and see a lot of pretty chalets and chateaux and schloesser and say what a fine place it is to live in. They don't know what they're talking about. They only see the top coat. They don't see the real differences. They don't see behind the scenes... I was in sunny Italy when the fascisti went for the Freemasons in twenty-five. Florence it was. Night after night of it with shooting and beating and screams, until you felt like vomiting. I was in Vienna in thirty-four when they turned the guns on the municipal flats with the women and children inside them... I saw the Paris riots with the garde mobile shooting down the crowd like flies and everyone howling 'mort au vaches' like lunatics. I saw the Nazis in Frankfurt ...In Hitchens' phrase 'Britain is the only virgin in a continent of rape victims'
Nice chaps, aren't they ? Picturesque, gay, cleverer, more logical than silly us."
Hmm. That public notice wasn't exactly in the spirit of the Government responses to 9/11 and 7/7, was it ? Similarly the Irish influx to the mainland was greeted with hostility - yet they (mostly - a few were still inveterate enemies) integrated - to the point where they themselves were hostile to newcomers. From Robert Roberts' classic A Ragged Schooling, Salford :'He took from his pocket a piece of the single newspaper which circulated
in the county in those days, and she read--
"The magistrates acting under the Alien Act have been requested
to direct a very scrutinizing eye to the Academies in our towns
and other places, in which French tutors are employed, and to all
of that nationality who profess to be teachers in this country.
Many of them are known to be inveterate Enemies and Traitors to
the nation among whose people they have found a livelihood
and a home."
'He continued: "I have observed since the declaration of war a marked difference in the conduct of the rougher class of people here towards me.
Syd's father, in his teens, had been a well-known 'scuttler' - one of the gangs of hooligans who, in the nineties, infested northern slums... for a time, the activities of this gang (Cope Street) gained even national repute. Mr Carey, once a leader there, now looked upon himself as a model citizen. But in his cups at the street corner, drivelling over 'happy days', he would tell of 'how we stopped them bloody ****'. A Jewish dealer, we heard, had opened a second-hand clothes shop in the district, only to see his goods pulled out onto the pavement and burned openly by scuttlers, while a policeman stood by to see fair play. 'That kept 'em out ! We got no more of the buggers ! He felt he had performed a social service.What of those outside 'the rougher class ?' As I've written before of the early 20th century , "the exotic (but relatively tiny) immigrant quarters of London, with their Jews, Russians, Letts and seafaring communities provided colour for a generation of crime and adventure writers, from Dorothy L Sayers to Dornford Yates" (in America similar immigrants inspired fiction like Lovecraft's The Street). As late as 1962, Paul Gallico is writing (in Scruffy, set in WW2) of upper-class Englishmen who don't want their babies delivered by 'that Jewish fellow' - an eminent gynaecologist.
This of course is also related to Point 3 - the collapse of self-confidence in the host culture. As I pointed out in the linked post, it's no coincidence that the change from immigrants to colonists coincided with the collapse of the host culture's self-confidence.
The first generation of immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh came here as "immigrants". They came expecting and wanting to integrate to some extent into the existing community. The collection of photographs taken of the first generation by the photographic studio in Manningham Lane illustrates this. The first week’s wages went on a Burtons suit and the men proudly displayed watches, pens and radios, mostly supplied by the photographer.
Immigrants come to a country expecting to change their lifestyles. They can and often do maintain key elements of their culture for generations, particularly their religion, but in many ways they adopt the dominant culture in such aspects as work, dress, leisure, housing and family composition... however, this process seems to be thrown into reverse in Bradford. The Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities now expect to recreate the environment of their country of origin. They have settled in village patterns which reflect their origins and they constantly reinforce this by bringing in new members from the country of origin. This, in turn, leads to spatial and social immobility, communities which are internalised on themselves and are relatively self-sufficient in social and cultural terms although reliant in many ways on the economic and government resourced infrastructure.
‘What secular Europeans call “Islam”’, he (Caldwell - LT) points out, ‘is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus would recognize as theirs’. On the other hand, the modern, secular rights that now constitute ‘core European values’ would ‘leave Dante and Erasmus bewildered.’ There is, in other words, no single set of 'European values' that transcends history in opposition to Islamic values.Now I don't pretend to know much about Dante or Erasmus, but I'd agree that our grandparents and great-grandparents would in many areas find their values (examples here) expressed better in the mosque than in the Guardian or on the BBC (I'd also agree that outside the single important exception of Christianity, there's not historically been a huge amount of commonality between the values of Europeans over the last 200 years). "The average middle-class Labour activist and the average Ibrahim in the mosque are 180% apart on social issues." But again, that comes down to the cultural collapse - aka Caldwell's point 3 - which has at its heart the decline of Christianity. The current confusion about values is because - well, because there's confusion about values. The moral putsch of the cultural revolution stands on very shaky foundations.
"He is right."
But it is an argument that sits uneasily with claims about the inherent cultural apartness of Third World and Muslim immigrants. Many immigrants want to join the club, Caldwell seems to be saying, but they can’t because the club has lost its rulebook.Yay ! He broke the code ! As Spiked put it :
This explains the immense difficulty the government has with drawing up guidelines for immigrants. The exercise of trying to tell immigrants how to be British is becoming an embarrassing demonstration of the fact that the elite doesn't know itself.And why don't they know ? Because the cultural revolution destroyed the existing common culture while not replacing it. There's little shared culture any more - just lots and lots of cultures, some co-existing, some competing. There is one overarching national culture - the culture of our liberal elite, of the grown-up suburban revolutionaries - perhaps that of Kenan Malik - but it is extremely fragile, and is aware of the fact. That awareness is why school bus drivers get sacked in Bradford for being BNP members.
Caldwell clearly thinks that Europe cannot be the same with different people in it. But in asking the question Caldwell confuses the diversity of peoples and the diversity of values. People of North African or South Asian parentage, he seems to believe, will inevitably cleave to a different set of values than those of European ancestry. Why? Being born to European parents is no passport to Enlightenment beliefs. So why should we imagine that having Bangladeshi or Moroccan ancestry makes one automatically believe in sharia?which IMHO is a bit of a straw man. While Islam is a religion not a race, the vast majority of Muslims in the UK are brown-skinned people whose forbears (and often marriage partners) hail from Bangladesh or Pakistan - which is what enables people to shout 'racist' when Islam is criticised. My view is that social cohesion is simply made that much more difficult when culture and ethnicity are so closely aligned. To be fair, plenty of people are similarly 'confused' :
MY MUSLIM PRIDEIt's Malik's last paragraph that's key to the whole thing :
I WILL NT HIDE
MY PAKISTANI RACE
I WIL NT DISGRASE
There are no such things as ‘European values’, of course. What has eroded is faith in the idea that it is possible to win peoples of different backgrounds to a common set of secular, humanist, Enlightened values. And that is the real problem: not immigration, nor Muslim immigration, but the lack of conviction in a progressive, secular, humanist project.
A man who became notorious for making a v-sign behind Scotland's former justice minister during a TV interview has been jailed for assault. Jamie Smith, 20, is the 25th person to be prosecuted for a gang attack on passers-by in Cumnock, Ayrshire. Smith from Auchinleck, was sentenced to six months in prison.
He was 16 when he was filmed making obscene gestures behind Labour's Cathy Jamieson as she launched a crackdown on anti-social behaviour.
The Record told in 2006 how Smith and his then girlfriend Lisa Wilson, both 16, were expecting their first child.
