"multiculturalism is a lie"

Maybe, just maybe, the old lion of the sceptred British Isles is showing some signs of vigour. Maybe it will yet rouse itself in defending once more the England of Henry V, Shakespeare and Churchill against the ravages of multiculturalism.

British Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced in Munich that "multiculturalism has failed." He had spoken similarly when he was in opposition, but this was different.

In speaking as head of government at a security conference of EU member-states, Cameron went further by indicating multiculturalism has undermined national security.

This is significant, and Cameron is the second leader, following Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, in pronouncing upon the failed policy of multiculturalism.

What will be important to see is how Cameron and Merkel propose to repeal a failed state-sponsored policy that is harmful, subversive and contrary to the core principles of liberal democracy.

For several years, indeed since soon after 9/11, I have written here about how multiculturalism is a lie — perhaps a delectable or pleasing lie, yet a lie nevertheless — hoisted upon open and generous societies, such as Canada, by those who lost faith in liberal democracy and those who sought to unravel it from within.

Multiculturalism as official state policy proposes all cultures are equal. But there has to be some independent or objective standard for measure in offering such proposition.

Proponents of multiculturalism do not use an objective standard as the basis by which they judge or rank cultures, and conclude all cultures are equal.

If the culture of liberal democracy — that is, a culture based on individual rights and freedoms, equality of sexes, equality before the rule of law, etc. — is taken as an independent measure, it would be then false to conclude that while other cultures might not be liberal, nor democratic, they are all equal irrespective of different values they hold.

The entire edifice of multiculturalism is, hence, based on a lie. For we know from history and experience that all cultures are not equal, and if it were so, then the culture of Islam in North Africa, for example, would be on par with the culture of Europe across the Mediterranean.

Once we assert, as the basis of liberal democracy, that individuals are equal irrespective of their ethnicity or beliefs, we then have arrived at the summit of political philosophy since Plato and Aristotle as to how society might arrange its legal and political order.

From this summit of individual rights and freedoms, any advance, ironically, can only mean going downward to an inferior or relatively degraded political arrangement.

In opposing liberal democracy, Marxism derides individual freedom, and offers instead the blueprint of collectivist society representing class identity and interest. Marx sold his idea as "progressive" politics, and multiculturalism happens to be an illegitimate offspring of that retrograde ideology.

If the public in the West was wary, violence and homegrown Islamist terrorism since 9/11, without any meaningful Muslim opposition to such atrocities, have deepened and widened public skepticism about multiculturalism as failed policy.

The only question remaining for Cameron, Merkel and others is when, not if, will they demonstrate courage of their conviction by repealing state-sponsored multiculturalism.

Salim Mansur

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2011/02/11/17246941.html