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Old April 22nd, 2013 #1
Alex Linder
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Default Text: Marxism, Multiculturalism, and Free Speech, by Frank Ellis

[Going to be posting this in full here, adding three pages a day. Incompete but fantastic look at Political Correctness from a British academic, now retired I believe. I've decided to put this in this section because so much of PC concerns thought control through control of language and punishment for those now who misbehave but misspeak, according to the neo-communist commissars. PC is essentially the attempt to enforce a warped view of reality through twisted language. Use the cultists' code or be punished. Ellis won't tell you that jews are the primary driver behind PC; apart from that, what he says is mostly accurate.]

Discussion here (Radio Istina shows and more)
http://vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=990574&postcount=10

Buy it at amazon here:
Marxism, Multiculturalism, and Free Speech (Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies Monograph Series, 31): Frank Ellis: 9780930690601: Amazon.com: Books Marxism, Multiculturalism, and Free Speech (Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies Monograph Series, 31): Frank Ellis: 9780930690601: Amazon.com: Books

A Work as Eye-Opening as it is Measured and Studied July 27, 2007
By ScottTownsendPublishers
Introduction by Professor Dwight D. Murphey. A collection of essays which explore the neo-Marxist roots of the contemporary move to suppress race consciousness, to promote "multiculturalism," and to criminalize (at least in Europe) freedom of speech on such matters as race, national identity, and immigration. The author is a British professor of Russian and Slavic languages who is a recognized authority on Marxist and neo-Marxist ideology and propaganda techniques. Included are chapters on Race, Marxism and the "Deconstruction" of the United Kingdom; on the historical link between Communism's "Enemy of the People" and the European Union's concept of "Hate Criminals"; on "Political Correctness" and Race Legislation in Britain and the European Union; and on what the author calls "the Ideological Struggle from Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault."



Marxism, Multiculturalism, and Free Speech

Frank Ellis

Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies

Monograph No. 31

Council for Social and Economic Studies
POB 34070
Washington DC 20006

Copyright 2006

ISBN 0-930690-60-5




Table of COntents

Introduction
By Dwight E. Murphey............................................................1

Chapter 1:
The Parekh and Macpherson Reports:
"Deconstruction" of the United Kingdom.....................................6

Chapter 2:
Race Legislation in the European Union.....................................38

Chapter 3:
Political Correctness and the Ideological Struggle:
From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault............................52

Chapter 4:
From Communism's "Enemy of the People"
to PC's "Hate Criminal"...........................................................90




Introduction

Frank Ellis is primarily a scholar, an expert on the Soviet Union and its Marxist-Leninist ideology. He is a member of the faculty in the department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at Leeds University in the United Kingdom. It is not surprising that he is the author of several publications -- books and articles -- in his area of expertise.

But his is not a detached, effete scholarship. His voice is impassioned, and informed by his scholarship. He stands unabashedly for the England that is known to history and that now lies under the incubus of an alien thought-control that dominates the West today. The incubus of which we speak takes the form of a smothering cloud of ideology that insists entirely on its own prerogative to speak, barring quite militantly any opposing view, no matter how well-considered. It is in this context that we find Frank Ellis threatened today by the most strenuous efforts to silence his voice. Leftists student demonstrations have demanded that he be dismissed because in off-campus writings he has expressed opinions that opposite Marxism and multiculturalism and the suppression of free speech in present-day Britain and Europe. He is a man of great courage, and it would be easy to speak of him as potentially a martyr on behalf of the England-that-was. That would not be inappropriate, but doing so would obscure, perhaps, a larger truth: that it is England, the United Kingdom, and the West in general that is being martyred, not simply one man.

The amazing things is that the "multiculturalism" and "diversity" that seeks to still his voice presents itself -- and is no doubt accepted at face value as such by a great many who have not thought it through -- as a benign, well-meaning, life-affirming perspective. Anyone who opposes something so positive, so moral, must per se be profoundly evil. It is from this perspective that Ellis is under attack today, even though his message is in fact fully in keeping with what the overwhelming consensus among educated Englishmen held to be true even so recently as a few years ago. What, after all, could be more compassionate and more attuned to the moral high ground than a multiculturalism that makes everyone welcome and that values each individual and each culture as invaluable parts of the rich texture of the human race?

The difficulty, of course, is that that is not what "multiculturalism," as the West is experiencing it today, really is. When it welcomes an influx of large numbers of people from Asia, Africa and Latin America into Europe and North America, it is not primarily affirming those people and their cultures. What it means, first and foremost, is the cultural transformation and destruction of the existing societies of the West. If it were truly "multicultural," it would seek to strengthen Western societies precisely in their own uniqueness, and to do so to other cultures as well, so that true variety and diversity would continue to exist in the world. It is worth noting that in this course of negation, "multiculturalism" must adopt a ubiquitous double standard -- one that champions everything non-Western and that undercuts and denies everything originally European.

I saw the double standard at work even so recently as this morning. Ellis is under fire because he has argued, among other things, that not all cultures are equal, and that the West has had a superior culture. This is said to be "racist," and "to make those of other cultures uncomfortable." In that context, it isn't admitted as something that a reasonable person of good will might assert, having in mind the mathematics of Euclid, the astronomy of Copernicus, St. Paul's Cathedral with its Christopher Wren dome, the "Moonlight Sonata" of Ludwig van Beethoven, and countless other manifestations of high culture. Nor is it acknowledged that the overwhelming number of Englishmen of prior generations would have found Ellis' observations unexceptional. But this common wisdom is now damned as vicious. On the other hand, I shared a bowling lane this morning with a young Afro-American who sported a "black pride" T-shirt, with a picture of a submachine gun on it. No one took offense, and certainly the thought-police weren't called. It seems that within the prevailing ethos it is accepted as benign for all other cultures than the West's to proclaim their excellence -- and in the most militant fashion. The fact that there is such a double standard is, as I have said above, most revealing about the ideological fakery that is at play.

This deserves still another moment of reflection. There was a time when the West asserted its superiority and sought to extend its dominion over the world. I take Ellis' view to be far short of that. There is nothing in his writing suggesting a program of cultural conquest. Rather, his is no more than a defense of the West's right of continued existence. It is those who use "diversity" and "multiculturalism" as a pretext for a demographic swamping-out of the Western nations who are on the cultural offensive. When they shout loudly that it is he who is vicious, they artfully reverse the truth.

Those who do not understand the "attack on the West" that has "captured the moral high ground" and has come to suffuse virtually all of the institutions and "commanding heights" of Western society are not personally to be blamed for their acceptance of today's shibboleths. Most people are fully occupied with the details of their own lives, jobs, businesses, and avocations. They accept with implicit trust the truisms that are presented to them, especially when those truisms are repeated over and over again by the opinion-makers in academia, the media and the professions. The fault lies not with the average person, even the average "educated" person. The fault lies with those who make it their lives' work to deal in ideas and articulated opinion -- and who have signed on to the project of cultural transplantation. Even most of these have done so out of conformity, breathing in without question the ethos of their doctoral instructors, their "role models," or their peers. The few others -- the leaders -- act out of a conformity at a higher level. While ostensibly "thinkers," they have sucked at the breast of alienated social commentators going back over a long history within the literary, artistic and academic culture of the modern West. The alienation against all mainstream Western culture goes back at least as far as Rousseau in the eighteenth century. It is commonplace these days to attribute it to the Frankfurt School of half or three-quarters of a century ago -- to men like Marcuse, Adorno and Gramsci, who saw that the primary upcoming battle against the West was to be a cultural one, and that victory lay in "a march through the institutions." (Earlier, with Marx, communism was to be ushered in by a revolution of the "proletariat." But after the Left's disappointment with how the populations of Europe rallied to the side of their respective counties in World War I, there was a gradual disillusionment toward the "proletariat" as an ally of the intelligentsia. This made necessary a change in strategy, which eventually took the form of seeking all disaffected or unassimilated groups, and particularly "ethnic minorities," as allies.)

Last edited by Alex Linder; April 22nd, 2013 at 04:32 PM.
 
Old April 23rd, 2013 #2
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The two World Wars of the twentieth century weakened European civilization immeasurably, and one cannot help but think that the cultural Left played an opportunistic game in latching onto the rising assertiveness of all "peoples of color" in the aftermath of the Second World War. The predominant intelligentsia of the West -- historically highly alienated, but of course with many who stood outside it, not joining in the alienation -- have no particular love for the cultures of the non-Western world. We ought not to be fooled by the superficial and ultimately denigrating shows of "compassion" that serve primarily to demonstrate "how really good we are." What the Leftist elements that dominate the present-day Western intelligentsia actually feel, and feel with a seemingly white-hot intensity, is hatred. Ironically, we are taught to believe that "hatred" is an ignoble passion, and that "hate speech comes from those who would champion the West's right to exist. All the while, the real hatred burns within the Left -- and in the name of "acceptance of others," in truly Orwellian style, has made itself the official ideology of government policy and of the institutions in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

As Frank Ellis points out, many streams of thought feed into this hatred. As a Sovietologist, he sees most acutely the relevance of Marxist thought and the earlier "multiculturalism" sought within Stalin's empire. Ellis does not himself have occasion to explore them, but there are other major forces at work in the world today that have the same tendency. It is often pointed out that the leaders of "neo-conservatism" (so influential at the core of the George W. Bush administration in the United States) trace their mental histories to an affinity years ago for Leon Trotsky, who sought to universalize Communism. The neo-conservatives' messianic desire for universal meliorism is joined by the regnant ideology of "globalization," a prime feature of which is to argue for "economic efficiency" and "reduction of costs" while deliberately eschewing any concern for a given country's or peoples' own particular interests. Given the truly incredible developments recently in communications, transportation and world finance, the winds of economic globalization blow fiercely over every land, increasingly stripping away the vestiges of local culture. Interestingly, there are a number of movements of "devolution," by which local peoples seek to preserve their own identities; but it remains to be seen whether they can prevail in any meaningful way against so imposing an array of forces against them.

A subset of these issues -- a subset that is of infinite importance -- is the question of intellectual freedom and its offshoot, "freedom of speech." It was Herbert Marcuse who, in his "Essay on Repressive Tolerance," argued that all speech that advocated change in (Western) society should be encouraged and all speech that defended existing social structures should be repressed. Only in this way, he said, could a truly meaningful "tolerance" be attained. It takes only a moment's reflection to see that this was a rationale for a totalitarianism of the Left. Indeed, it is the rationale for today's multiculturalist demand that all opposition to the demographic and cultural invasion of the West be silenced.

Thus, the overriding moral issue for all caring persons in England and elsewhere in the West today is whether this totalitarianism is to be praised, coddled and encouraged. There was, not so long ago, outrage in the intellectual culture of the West when the Soviet Union sought to enshrine "proletarian science" in the form of Lysenkoism in place of Mendel's genetics. Where is the outrage today?

We find it in the impassioned voice of, among others, Frank Ellis. I recommend his essays collected in this volume (all of them published recently in the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies) to all readers, of whatever persuasion, who believe that intellectual freedom should continue to be one of the fundamental values of the West.

Dwight D. Murphey




Chapter One

THE PAREKH AND MACPHERSON REPORTS: "DECONSTRUCTION" OF THE UNITED KINGDOM*

Cities and towns the length and breadth of Britain -- from Bristol, the Medway towns, Slough and London in the south, to Birmingham and Leicester in the Midlands, to Bradford, Burnley, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Oldham, Leicester and Manchester in the north -- all now harbour large populations of non-white immigrants, a significant proportion of whom, for various reasons, refuse to or are unable to adapt to the host country. Over the last 20 years violent street confrontations between the native indigenous majority population and black and Asian immigrants have become depressingly familiar. In fact, racial strife is now a recognizable feature of the British urban landscape. Meanwhile, the numbers of legal and illegal immigrants entering the United Kingdom continue inexorably to rise. By any standards these are dramatic changes in an already densely populated and traditionally, racially homogenous country such as Britain. Given the failure of the British government to address the scale of the problem, it is reasonable to assume that the worst is still to come. And the problem is by no means confined to the United Kingdom. Similar and equally deleterious effects of legal and illegal immigration can be observed all over the Western world.

The native British population faces two threats from these changes, one immediate and on-going, the other a distinct possibility in the next two decades. For the present, there is the covert and overt war being waged against the indigenous majority population, against its history, language, folkways, culture and traditions. This is a war in which
multiculturalists exploit existing institutions -- the legal system, the education system at all levels (especially the universities), the print and broadcast media, parliamentary democracy and free speech -- to achieve their goals (Bork, 1997, Honeyford, 1998, Vazsonyi, 1998). These methods are analogous to those used by Soviet commissars to sovietise Central and Eastern Europe after 1945 (Ellis, 2001). Attacked in this way, institutions retain their outward form but the heart is torn out, the soul extirpated. Incapable of defending themselves, these institutions and the people who work in them can no longer serve the nation state that has created and nurtured them over the centuries. A second, long term threat is terrorism. Street riots, as the experience of Northern Ireland and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict demonstrate, can easily escalate to well organised terrorist campaigns against the security forces. It is difficult to see what would prevent determined militant immigrant groups from using the same means, were they so minded, especially were they wedded to some form of Islamic fundamentalism.[1] In this regard "Islamophobia", fear of Islam, is fully justified.


__________________________
*This chapter first appeared as an article "Race, Marxism and the 'Deconstruction' of the United Kingdom" in Volume 26,

Number 4, Winter 2001 of The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies.

Last edited by Alex Linder; April 24th, 2013 at 03:02 PM.
 
Old April 24th, 2013 #3
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Two reports published recently in the UK, The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny (1999), sponsored by the British Labour government, and The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), sponsored by the Runnymede Trust, and authored by Bhiku Parekh (both reports being more widely known, respectively, as The Macpherson Report and The Parekh Report) illustrate the scale of the threat to the white indigenous majority population. For, in their respective analyses of British society and the recommendations they propose, both these documents represent a fundamental break with the norms of English common law and culture. In his report of the police investigation into the murder of a black teenager, Sir William Macpherson, a retired British judge, accused the police of "institutional racism". Predictably, the consequences on police morale have been disastrous. On the streets, ever fearful of attracting the catch-all "racist" label, the police have adopted a low-key approach towards non-white suspects. The result has been an increase in the number of violent street crimes as immigrant criminals operate with apparent immunity from prosecution (something which has been observed in Cincinnati and Seattle in the aftermath of black rioting). More worrying in the long term has been the readiness of many senior police officers uncritically to accept Macpherson's accusations and, perversely, to revel in public displays of self-flagellation and self-accusations of "racism".

Based on the illiberal neo-Marxism that underpins so much of multiculturalism, The Parekh Report is a far more comprehensive and aggressive attack on the United Kingdom than its predecessor. For example Parekh, believes that we in the UK are suffering from 'multicultural drift' (Parekh, 2000, 11) and that what is required is 'a purposeful process of change' (Parekh, 2000, 11). Later in the report, and with obvious approval, Parekh cites a respondent who argues that: 'People in positions of power must really believe, in their hearts and minds, that black and white are equal' (Parekh, 2000, 141, emphasis added). And again in chapter 20 we are given the thoughts of an anonymous race bureaucrat: 'Training is encouraging people, but we have reached the stage where people must be told to do it or else' (Parekh, 2000, 284, emphasis added). We have been warned.

National Identity and History

History's would-be nation killers hae always understood that to subjugate or to weaken a nation it is necessary to destroy a nation's sense of history, or at the very least dilute it. In the twentieth century the masters of the genre have always been communists or other activists of the left, such as Ceausescu, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Kilm Il Sung. For the multicultural agenda to succeed in the UK the indigenous majority population must be coninced or intimidated into believing that it is just one of a number of groups, with no special privileges conferred by the past, then opposition to the coercive incorporation of large numbers of non-white aliens will be made all the more easier (or so believe the advocates of multiculturalism). In practice, however, there is widespread resistance, instinctive and rational, and frequently violent, to multiculturalism in the UK. This can be seen not just in the street confrontations between gangs of Asians and indigenous whites but in the periodic outbursts of politicians who, having expressed views contrary to orthodoxy, then recant in spectacular fashion, John Townsend, the former Conservative Member of Parliament for East Yorkshire being the latest example.

Any one who reads The Parekh Report can have no doubt that the destruction, or in postmodernese the "deconstruction" of any strong white identity, is one of Parekh's main aims. Thus, in the preface Parekh talks of 'the non-existent homogeneous cultural structure of the 'majority' (Parekh, 2000, x), only, subsequently, to expend vast amounts of ideological energy attempting to destroy something, which apparently, does not exist. When whites are no longer able to say "we", they are vulnerable to groups of non-white immigrants who most assuredly are encouraged to promote the use of "we" at the expense of the host society. To this end, divide, weaken and rule are the essential policies deployed by Parekh against the whtie, indigenous majority population. Case as victims, the Irish are singled out for sympathetic treatment, as are the Scots and Welsh.

Symptomatic of Parekh's confusion and muddle on the question of race is the astonishing disclaimer in chapter 10 that: 'Irish people are classified as white for statistical purposes' (Parekh, 2000, 130). Curiously, while highlighting Scotalnd as a special deserving case, as victim of English rather than a beneficiary of the 1707 Act of Union, Parekh pointedly refrains from criticixing the nationalist movements in both Wales and Scotland. In fact, he justifies them in a way which would not be the case were there a strong English Nationalist movement: 'The rising tides of nationalist sentiment in Scotland and Wales, however, have clearly been driven by historical resentments of long-standing relations of privilege and dependency' (Parekh, 2000, 21).

Among the Scottish politicians, I suggest, any drive for nationalism is inspired not by images of Braveheart but by the tantalising possibility of bypassing Westminster and acquiring ever more generous subsidies from the European Union (EU). Any English National Party would be singled out by Parekh for putting the interests of the indigenous British population before aliens and foreigners, whereas the perfectly legitimate aspirations of the Scottish National Party towards independence are ignored. There exists an unbridgeable contradiction between Scottish nationalism and the multicultural agenda which Parekh wishes to impose on the English (Linsell, 2001). And violent conflict between native Glaswegians and large numbers of immigrants in the summer of 2001 over the allocation of resources -- the wave of the future -- supports this view. Parekh applauds the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism not out of any regard for these legitimate aspirations towards Welsh and Scottish independence, which his multiculturalism obliges him to reject, but for the weakening effects it has on the British identity as a whole. On the other hand, any similar sense of identity or national revival among the English is to be deplored as 'a new kind of little Englandism' (Parekh, 2000, 24).

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Old April 25th, 2013 #4
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Especially resented is Bill Bryson's best-seller, Notes from a Small Island, first published in 1995. Bryson's crime in Parekh's eyes is that he omits blacks, Asians and others from his story of a small island. Such omissions are perfectly rational. For these minorities have arrived very late in the day and the national story can only 'exclude them'. Here we have another reason why English history and the history of the United Kingdom have to be written off and where that is not possible, rewritten Orwellian-style to suit the purposes of multiculturalism. Trafalgar, Oliver Cromwell, the English Civil War, the Battle of Britain, the Somme, the Falklands, Sir Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, Elizabeth I are hardly likely to inspire the same love, admiration or other emotions in immigrants as they do in the white indigenous majority population. And why should they? Quite reasonably, Asians and blacks look to their own. With regard to Bryson, Parekh is also guilty of an omission of his own, failing to point out to the reader that Bryson is a white American, who clearly loves Britain, warts and all.

Identity is inextricably linked with history and so it is to be expected that Parekh and his social engineers with to "deconstruct" British history to serve their purposes. Having noted that the Act of Union in 1707 created Great Britain, Parekh then argues that: 'The dominant national story of England includes Agincourt, Trafalgar, Mafeking, the Somme and Dunkirk' (Parekh, 2000, 16). To be sure, the Royal Navy was founded by an English King and Nelson's historic address was to Englishmen to do their duty, but Trafalgar was fought and won in 1805 nearly a century after the Act of Union. Though the vast majority of Nelson's sailors were Englishmen, the consequences of defeat would have affected all of Britain, not just England. Likewise, it was not just English soldiers who fought and died at the Somme. Nor can the English, as Parekh implies, lay sole claim to the miracle and the pain of Dunkirk. For the memory of Dunkirk is also the memory of the surrender of the British 51st Highland Division at Saint-Valery. Dunkirk, as the Somme, belongs to a number of great and sometimes painful moments in the life of Britain. This can be appreciated in a memorable passage taken from Alistair Maclean's HMS Ulysses, possibly that Scottish writer's finest novel, and certainly one of the best we have of the Battle of the Atlantic in World War Two. A senior naval commander feels the crushing weight of the command and reflects upont he British lives lost in the Atlantic as the convoy battles its way through repeated German air and U-boat attacks:

Quote:
And the broken sorrowing families, he thought incoherently, families throughout the breadth of Britain: the telegram boys cycling to the little houses in the Welsh valleys, along the wooded lanes of Surrey, to the lonely reek of the peat-fire, remote in the Western Isles, to the limewashed cottages of Donegal and Antrim... (Maclean, 1955, 170)
These are crucial defining moments in British history which bring English, Scots, Welsh and Irish together. History can bind as well as divide.

Especially dubious in the Parekh deconstruction of English and British history is the emphasis placed on imagining history, part of a much wider attack on traditional method inspired by French radical theories, so popular in the academy (Windschuttle, 1997). If history is just imagination, then anything goes and anything can be claimed and the way is open for all kinds of charlatans to take centre stage. Imagination is hardly a reliable historical source. Imaginative use of historical data and documents is another matter entirely. There is, Parekh points out, more to Britain than just England, which is true enough. But England was and remains the economic powerhouse of Britain. This has long been obvious to foreign observers. Russians, for example, routinely refer to Britain and the UK as Angliya the Russian word for England. And the Irishman, Edmund Burke, pointedly writes of "we English" in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. English Common Law, the break with Rome, The Book of Common Prayer, the model of parliamentary democracy and free speech, the special role of maritime matters in shaping the life of the country (this after all was why Trafalgar was so decisive since it guaranteed British naval supremacy for nearly 150 years) have all contributed to England's special nature. Foreign observers have well understood the monumental significance of the evolution of private property, free speech and parliamentary democracy in England and the benefits for the rest of the world unlike Parekh who seems to be trapped by his parochial multiculturalism. A mere 20 miles of water separates Britain from continental Europe, yet the effects of this separation have been profound for the political, cultural, intellectual and religious development of Britain. What we have here in the separates and highly distinctive political and cultural evolution of Britain is perhaps analogous to what happens in genetics, namely that very small differences in the genes can have large phenotypic consequences. As with race, it is not the size of the genetic difference but rather the impact that change has on the phenotype.

None of these differences however has deterred Parekh from asserting that the uniqueness of the British system of parliamentary democracy 'is not supported by the known historical facts' (Parekh, 2000, 19). In part this is correct. For the system is a uniquely English contribution to world civilization, certainly not Welsh, Scottish or Irish, though Irish and Scottish thinkers, most notably, Edmund Burke, David Hume and Adam Smith, have shaped this process. In reviewing the role of representative institutions in continental Europe, Richard Pipes notes that there were various assemblies in Spain, Scotland, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Denmark. None, however, was as successful as the English. Pipes argues, convincingly, that 'one factor that bolsters parliamentarism is territorial smallness. As a rule, the smaller the country and its population the easier it is to forge effective democratic institutions, because they represent manageable communities with shared interests and are capable of concerted action: conversely, the larger a country the greater is the diversity of social and regional interests, which impedes unity.' (Pipes, 1999, 153). Pipes, in other words, recognises the importance of homogeneity, cultural and racial. Again, Pipes notes, it was to England's advantage that she 'never developed provincial parliaments' (Pipes, 1999, 153). This, of course, is something that the EU is desperately trying to foist on England so as further to weaken any strong sense of English national identity, and yet another reason why Parekh wants the British to cast away their independence and become totally absorbed into the EU.

Discussion of religious conflict in Britain is intended to show that there has always been strife in Britain and division over religious matters between the people of England, Scotland and Ireland. Thus, runs the argument, the conflicts arising over multiculturalism in the UK are part of this on-going historical conflict and adaptation to change. Three points can be made here. First, there is the question of race. The idea that since large numbers of Normans, Saxons, Jutes and Danes have come here and settled is not in itself and argument in support of large scale non-whites immigration to the UK. None of these were genetically very distinct from the earlier population of the islands. The Norman Conquest imposed a very thin layer on the Anglo-Saxons and by the 14th and certainly no later than the 15th century, the Normans had been totally absorbed into Anglo-Saxon England (Johnson, 1995). Second, if as Parekh believes, race is a social and political construct, not something that has evolved in different parts of the globe in response to differing survival challenges, then the large scale legal/illegal immigration is simply a matter of "deconstructing" the dominant white indigenous identity and reconstructing it along multicultural lines. (Note for example the title of chapter 3 "Identities in Transition"). As we know from countless historical examples, people and nations emphatically do not lend themselves to this kind of neo-Marxist moulding and remoulding. For better or for worse, race matters, and will continue to matter, however much people such as Parekh and others deny it.

Last edited by Alex Linder; April 27th, 2013 at 07:44 PM.
 
Old April 27th, 2013 #5
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Third, desperate to convince us of the benefits of multiculturalism, Parekh fails to provide any convincing evidence from anywhere in the world, past or present, of a successful and enduring multicultural (multiracial) society. Catastrophes and bloody failures on the other hand are easy to find: Rwanda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Empire. For all the differences and disagreements that exist among the white indigenous majority population, when Britain has been in peril the nation has pulled together. Similarly, Russians rallied to fight the Germans in the darkest days of the German invasion not out of loyalty to the Cominterm (the Soviet version of multiculturalism) but out of deep love of Mother Russia. In the words of Viktor Kravchenko: 'At the core of a nation there is a hard, eternal and unconquerable element - it was this that was bared in Stalingrad, that survived blood-letting and disaster on a horrifying scale. It had nothing to do with Karl Marx and Stalin' (Kravchenko, 1946, 402). And whether it was Henry V's band of brothers on the eve of Agincourt, Nelson's Jack Tars at Trafalgar, or the Few in the summer of 1940, it was love of hearth and country and a sense of duty, tempered by military discipline, that prompted soldiers, sailors and airmen to risk their lives in battle, not the perverse, unnatural abstractions of multiculturalism. Parekh is oblivious to the very history and its significance that he wishes to erase.

In citing a great many things that bind people into something called a community -- many of which are sensible -- Parekh unwittingly cites reasons why multicultural societies cannot remain stable and why there is so much friction. He argues that a sense of belonging is needed, failing to see that multiculturalism destroys that very sense of belonging. The cult of multiculturalism demands that white Englishmen value the achievements (or in many cases the non-achievements) of foreigners above those of native Englishmen. Now, granted many of what one might regard as better and, in some cases, superior achievements include a degree of subjectivity. But not all. For example, the scientific achievements of Europeans completely overshadow those of subSaharan Africans. We can argue about why this is so, but the enormous disparity in achievement remains (for an analysis of the relationship between national IQ and economic performance see Lynn & Vanhanen, 2001).

Having ridiculed the idea of the nationalist state, Parekh then argues for something called 'One Nation'. In passing one can note that Parekh's use of 'One Nation' bears a close resemblance to Evgeniy Zamyatin's use of 'One State' in his powerful satire of Soviet totalitarianism, We. In Zamyatin's 'One State', the inhabitants, or numbers, as they are called, live out a wreteched existence in which every possible aspect is governed by a brutal bureaucracy. Orthodoxy (multiculturalism?) is associated with mental health, dissent (belief in the nation state?) with madness. Written in the early 1920s and then banned by the communist party for over 660 years before being finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988, We turned out to be a dire predictions of totalitarianism. And twenty five years after The Camp of The Saints was first published, Jean Raspail's deeply disturbing analysis of cowardly politicians and intellectuals and enervating compassion is proving to be a similarly dire prediction of multicultural distemper.

Parekh's idealised 'One Nation' will not be based on a unifying and enduring national identity. Only bureaucratic coercion and something akin to Soviet-style totalitarianism can hold things together. This is conceded by Parekh when he talks of 'substantive values' or 'common values':

Quote:
Substantive values are those that underpin any defensible conception of the good life. They include people's freedom to plan their own lives, the equal moral worth of all human beings, and equal opportunities [...] On the basis of such values it is legitimate to ban female circumcision, forced marriages, cruel punishment of children and repressive and unequal treatment of women, even though these practices may enjoy cultural authority in certain communities (Parekh, 2000, 53-54).
Once again we are confronted with the barrenness of postmodernism; the view that identities can be remade and reinvented; that they are endlessly malleable. Ultimately, there are no privileged perspectives and one idea of the good life is no better than anyone else's conception of the good life and emphatically not superior to it. Given that multiculturalism recognises no one culture as superior to another, the support for banning female circumcision, for example, is rather odd. If female circumcision enjoys 'cultural authority', then the very essence of multiculturalism with its endless calls to respect something called "diversity" demands that this authority be respected.

There is of course a profound irony here of which Parekh is painfullly unaware. For it is preeminently Western societies, and within that framework, English traditions of equality before the law and the assertion of individual rights, (the Taliban, as far as one can tell, did not have habeas corpus or free speech) that provides the moral, legal and intellectual basis for banning the non-white practices of female circumcision, arranged marriages and unequal treatment of women. Parekh needs to be reminded that it was in the sceptred isle that the ideas of individual freedom, the rule of law and parliamentary democracy were born and bred, certainly not in India, Pakistan, Japan or China, let alone Africa.

Last edited by Alex Linder; April 28th, 2013 at 10:02 AM.
 
Old April 28th, 2013 #6
Alex Linder
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Racism

Parekh has much to say on the subject of racism and the definition offered differs substantially from that given in The Macpherson Report. According to Parekh:

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[...] racism, understood either as a division of humankind into fixed, closed and unalterable groups or as systematic domination of some groups by others, is an empirically false, logically incoherent and morally unacceptable doctrine (Parekh, 2000, ix).
No doubt Parekh believes that 'empirically false', 'logically incoherent' and 'morally unacceptable' is the trident that slays the dragon of racism. The Parekh definition of racism is a fallacious diversion, since it attacks a straw man. It is not at all obvious that scientists accept the division of mankind into 'fixed, closed and unalterable groups' which, as has been pointed out by Arthur Jensen was an idea advanced by Plato's politics in c.370 BC not one found in modern genetics (Jensen, 1998, 420). What can be demonstrated empirically - whether many will accept the findings publicly is another matter - is that race is something much more than an exogenous factor.[2] In the light of the vast amount of data now available, Arthur Jensen's definition of races is far more convincing, and more importantly, independently verifiable, than the unreconstructed Marxism of Parekh. According to Jensen: 'Races are defined in this context as breeding populations that differ from one another in gene frequencies and that vary in a number of intercorrelated visible features that are highly heritable (Jensen, 1998, 421). And both Vincent Sarich (1995, 85) and Jensen (1998, 423) have applied the notion of fuzzy sets to race, neatly turning one of multiculturalism's most hallowed metaphors - the rainbow - against it in the process: To quote Jensen:

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The fact there are intermediate gradations or blends between racial groups, however, does not contradict the genetic and statistical concept of race. The different colours of the rainbow do not consist of discrete bans but are a perfect continuum, yet we readily distinguish different regions of this continuum as blue, green, yellow and red, and we effectively classify many things according to these colors. The validity of such distinctions need not require that they form perfectly discrete Platonic categories (Jensen, 1998, 425).
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[2] Later in the report Parekh cites a correspondent who bemoans the fact that: 'Young children are not colour blind. As young as two or three y ears old they are aware of differences between the people around them...' (Parekh, 2000, 149). Is this evidence for a genetic preference for one's own race or evidence that race is something inculcated into children.

Yet this has not deterred Parekh from asserting that: 'Race, as is now widely acknowledged, is a social and political construct, not a biological or genetic fact. It cannot be used scientifically to account for the wide range of differences among peoples' (Parekh, 2000, 63).[3] At no stage in this report does Parekh attempt to justify the basis on which he makes this astonishing assertion. We are expected to take it on trust. While one would not expect to see the names of John Baker, Thomas Bouchard, Chris Brand, Carleton Coon, Jon Entine, Hans Eysenck, Linda Gottfredson, Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, Vincent Sarich and Glayde Whitney in the bibliography, one would most certainly expect to find the names and works of Stephen Jay Gould, Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin and others who deny the biological and genetic basis of race and who, when they attack the hereditarians, as they are called, are given pride of place in the print and broadcast media as being the legitimate voice of science, whereas Baker et al are to be dismissed as cranks or wose. One anomaly is the inclusion of Charles Murray's & Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in the bibliography, though, curiously, the sub-title is omitted. Equally curious is the absence of any attempt to challenge the Murray & Herrnstein thesis that: (i) race has a biological basis and; (ii), to challenge the well established empirical finding of a 1 standard deviation between the average black and white IQ. Parekh passes up an opportunity at the very least to criticise Murray & Herrnstein.

Since the whole basis of multicultural social engineering rests on the assertion that race is a social and political construct and not a biological or genetic reality, Parekh's assertion is of the greatest importance. That this assertion -- no more -- is repeatedly cited as evidence that those who oppose multiculturalism are racists, the omission of any source material in The Parekh Report's lengthy bibliography or endnotes, which would serve to provide some independently verifiable corroboration of this all important assertion is quite striking. Why this obvious omission? I speculate that the reason the latter set of names is absent is because

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[3] Parekh's approach to race can also be seen in his egregiously political/ideological definition of what he calls sexism: 'Similarly, sexism involves seeing all differences bewteen women and men as fixed in nature rather than primarily constructed by culture' (Parekh, 2000, 67, emphasis added).

Parekh is deeply worried that by citing any authors who have written about race, pro or contra, he is merely drawing attention to the huge amount of evidence in the professional and specialist journals, as well as the many monographs, all in the public domain, and, as a result, the huge discrepancy between what many scholars say publicly on the subject of race and what they accept professionally. Studying this huge reservoir of empirical data, independently minded individuals might just be dissuaded from the notion that race is a social and political construct. To this end The Bell Curve's sub-title might well stimulate interest in forbidden territory, indicating, as it does, that there is a link between intelligence and socio-economic status. Unable to bypass the question completely, Parekh nevertheless wants to shut the discussion down as soon as is possible. This implies that he is possibly aware that race is not a social and political construct or that he is ignorant of the developments made, and which continue to be made, in genetics and evolutionary biology.

Some of the objections to race as a genetic reality cited by Parekh are the usual collection of fallacies. We are told that there is more genetic variation within one group, or as Parekh writes, 'any one so-called race than there is between 'races'" (Parekh, 2000, 63). Again, Jensen's comment is far more convincing, since it has withstood independent scrutiny:

Quote:
[...] individuals in a given group differ only statistically from one anotehr and from the group's central tendency on each of the many imperfectly correlated genetic characteristics that distinguish between groups as such. The important point is that the average difference on all of these characteristics that differ among individuals within the group is less than the average difference between the groups on these genetic characteristics (Jensen, 1998, 425 [emphasis in the original]).
In view of the data -- psychometric, genetic and statistical -- that have been accumulated over the last 150 years, Parekh's assertions are an example of the perverse refusal to recognise let alone to evaluate, some of the enormous strides made in evolutionary biology, genetics (the Human Genome), and physical anthropology, since the time of Darwin. The view that race is a social and political construct is race Marxism and, in Parekh's own words, 'empirically false'. Far from rejecting the idea of race beign a social and political construct, the state of scientific knowledge as of 2001 provides powerful empirical evidence for the view that race is a biological and genetic reality which can be readily subjected to objective mathematical and statistical analysis. Race is not something that has been invented by "Neo-Nazi racists".

Last edited by Alex Linder; April 29th, 2013 at 03:00 PM.
 
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