Thursday, January 04, 2007

Does diversity allow for local attachments?

In yesterday's Herald Sun came news of a horror car crash in Footscray, a western suburb of Melbourne.

An African migrant, panicking when her car mounted the kerb, hit the accelerator instead of the brake. The car ploughed into an outdoor dining area, killing a man, himself a migrant from Korea.

A Herald Sun journalist at the scene reported as follows:

A big crowd had gathered behind the blue and white police tapes. There were tall men in colourful patterned shirts and tall women in vivid turbans and long dresses.

It could have been in downtown Mogadishu or Addis Ababa. There wasn't a word of English being spoken in the hubbub.

But this was Footscray, not Somalia or Ethiopa ...

Once this street was almost entirely a Vietnamese strip.

Now it's in transition again, and yesterday, in the wake of the tragic accident outside Cafe D'Afrique, racial tensions ran high.


So Footscray is changing yet again. It was once an Anglo working class suburb, then a mixed European one, then Vietnamese and now increasingly African. All in the space of about 35 years.

Which raises the issue of local attachments.

The attachments people have radiate outward. First, you might identify with your local town or suburb, then perhaps your city or region, then your state, then your nation.

But to invest yourself emotionally in a place requires some degree of confidence in its continuity. If we think that we will all too easily lose something we love and identify with, then we tend to withdraw emotionally from it.

So how is anyone supposed to form that key, original, local attachment to Footscray? If you held a reasonable belief that the cultural character of Footscray would change dramatically many times over within just a few decades, then how could you lay down roots there in the sense of identifying with its character and culture?

And if we can't develop a deeper attachment to the place we live in, then won't this also disrupt our larger attachments, such as to our nation?

Yet Footscray is our future unless the current policy of diversity and mass immigration is reconsidered.

Whilst on this theme it was interesting to read the comments of Emeritus Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki in yesterday's Age. The professor was one of the architects of multicultural policy in Australia. He now admits that his immigration policy is necessarily a very expensive one.

He said of black African migrants to rural Australia that:

You cannot dump people in a rural community unless you make a special provision for resettlement services on the widest possible scale.

Immigration includes, very prominently, the lengthy process of resettlement - an always expensive process.

6 comments:

  1. This is a good point and one that I hadn't heard before.

    It seems to me that in our multiculturalist Western countries only two classes of people can count on their neighborhoods remaining populated over the longer term by their own people: those who are so rich that almost no non-Western immigrants could ever afford to live there, and those whose behaviors and culture are the most odious, driving out everyone else.

    Those who fall into neither class, but who instead create pleasant, affordable, safe, genteel neighborhoods seem to eventually be invaded by some new group of alien immigrants looking for a suitable host spot for their new colony. Thus the white (and to some extent northern Asian) lower and middle classes will increasingly suffer this lack of local attachment as they are chased in slow motion across the Western landscape by people like the Africans who create neighborhoods that no one else wants to live in.

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  2. to remain a nation, a nation must be and remain ethnically, racially and religiously homogonous.
    Australia was that, as were most Western nations bar the US.
    Honestly, I think these multi culti types wanted to be like the US, they thought it cool that in America you had all the races, so all Western nations are unfortunatly going to end up like the States, with no ethnic bedrock, consumed by this silly we are the world nonsense!
    If you take lots of races, mix them up and hope for love and harmony, you will get Yugoslavia, or Austria-Hungary, Russia or Rwanda, the truth is we will not all blend together in a great melting pot, we will remain seperate and where once we were interested in other peoples, due to the socialist habit of dismantaling one's own nation, we will be suspicious of other peoples.
    England was Anglo-Saxon (with a dolop of Celt) for 1000 years, in 40 years the socialists in their lust for 'we are the world' sentimentality have left us with 10% of our population that has no ethnic or historical connection to this country, and with a substntial number of that 10% who wish us harm (muslims)
    America ended up multi cultural through it's immoral addiction to slavery, Lincoln may have freed the slaves, but he also envisaged repatriating them to Africa, as he understood they were African, not European and as such had no place in Americas future, he was assassinated before he could get round to this though!
    Black Americans are the poorest least succesful segment of the American population, not due to 'oppression' or 'racism' although they have been historical factors, they are poor, due to the fact that they live in what is a wholly alien culture.
    If they had been repatriated they would probably be a lot better off then they are now in America!
    So for other successful nations like Canada or Australia or any European nation to import Africans and Muslims is insane, for 1000 years the nations of Europe have remained distinct, true, there are movements of peoples, nothing wrong with that, it is natural and to be welcomed, but these movements were small, manageable and were assimilated into the host nation within a few short generations.
    Never has any Western nation had to contend with 10% of it's population being completely alien in every way, culturally, racially, religiously, morally.
    This is unheard of, 100 thousand Hugenots fled France for England and thousands more for it's American colonies, but they were racilly almost identical to the English, Irish and Scots they settled amoungst, they were Protestant like the majority of English, Scots or Americans, they had the same work ethic, they had no loyalty to France or it's King due to the persecution they received whilst in France, they are now seemlessly part of the greater Anglo world, the only hint of them is the few people you meet with Franch sounding names or names that begin with 'Le' or 'La'.
    Tens of thousands of Protestant Germans fled the Rhineland for England and it's colonies at the same time, again they were so close to us they have assimilated without a trace, again the odd guteral surname is all that is left, Catholic Irish, again racially similar, although religiously disimilar and yes there were problems, I know this only to well as a Catholic Irishman myself, but look now, who has the Irish blood? Everyone, the mixing twixt Irish and English and Scot is so intense as to blur the line between us! Religion once played a big part in our seperation but no longer. So if the Irish took so long to settle down and assimilate (And we were racially almost identical to the English) how long before the Muslims settle down and integrate?
    Ireland untill 10 years ago was completely Irish and mostly Catholic, now? 10% of the population are foreign, Nigerians, Somalians, Arabs, Bangalis ets, etc...In ten years! Was there any referenda? Not that I can recall.
    When I left Ireland, there were no non-whites, not even in the cities, now I go back and it's like London, and your average Paddy is pissed about it, they are very angry with the way Ireland has transformed in a decade without so much as a by your leave!
    That is wrong, that is a betrayal of an entire nation, an entire people to meaningless and silly sentimental socialist rubbish!
    Australia like Canada (minus Quebec) and New Zealand is a British settled and British build society, whether one likes it or not, we can take ethnic Europeans in small doses, small doses! We can take Italians and Spaniards and Portugese and even Greeks Armenians, Georgians and Slavs, even Chritian Arabs, all in small bite sized portions, but we can not take millions of Africans who are completely different from us in culture and race, we can't take millions of Muslims who are not only religiously different, but whose religion calls for our enslavement!
    This must stop, because it is good for none of us, it will end up distroying us all, and all that will be left are stogey, messy, cultureless, rudderless political entities with no one people able to say 'this is home' all of us will then be homeless, powerless even!
    Perhaps that is what they want? Perhaps that is the socialist Utopia?

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  3. You're right, A Free Man. The closer a migrant is ethnically to his new country the easier it is for him (and especially for his children) to identify with the mainstream national culture and tradition of his adopted land.

    Probably the Germans and Dutch can do this most easily in Anglo countries (Tolkien is a good example of someone who could very comfortably recognise his German ancestry and still be deeply English in feeling and identity).

    The Irish, as you say, had a harder time due to differences in religion and history. In Australia, too, some of the Catholic Irish set themselves apart politically from the mainstream. But the similarities were enough for a genuine assimilation to occur over the generations.

    What is happening now is not a host society accepting migrants who might assimilate over time.

    It's a rejection, for reasons of political ideology, of the existence of traditional ethnic nationalism.

    And yes, the consequences are that Westerners will be made rootless and cultureless; that the potential for social conflict will increase; and that no group will really feel responsible for maintaining standards in society.

    At least some resistance to this is beginning to form; we'll have to see if the momentum continues to build.

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  4. Bobby, a good point. It's interesting that some on the left are critical of this shallow consumeristic culture, too, but they don't have anything much to advance as an alternative, as they have rejected the more substantial forms of traditional culture.

    Mark, it's true in Melbourne that the more affluent suburbs tend to be hit last by demographic change.

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  5. Good comments, all, but I have to correct something that 'a free man' said. He said most Western nations, 'bar the U.S.' were originally homogeneous. Even the United States was very homogeneous, until the later waves of immigration, starting in 1840. Most Americans pre-1840 were of Anglo-Saxon and northern European descent. Even in the 1840-1850 wave of immigration, most were from Germany and Ireland (according to my old, pre-Politically Correct encyclopedia) and only later, around the 1890s, did many Eastern European and Southern Europeans arrive. Soon, they became the majority of new immigrants. Still later came the Asians and after 1965, most immigrants came from non-Western countries. So really, although it's not PC to say so, America was for a long time homogeneous ethnically and religiously. We in America don't want to be the 'country for everybody' as many of the new immigrants claim we are.

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  6. Vanishing American!
    Yes you are correst, I was simplifying it a bit, Even America in the 1950s was 80-90% white, something Teddy Kennedy ensured would not last by his immigration Act in the mid 60s.
    But is is true that America was the most 'deverse' nation on earth since it's independence due to the large group of slaves in the south!
    But I still stand by the point I made regarding lefties in the West wanting to ape what they saw as 1960s hippy America with it's free love, 'diversity' etc, this I beleive has been damaging to the rest of us, and the whole ideology of welcoming immigrants into America has been damaging, it only works when those comming to one's nation are closely related culturally and ethnically to the host peoples.
    The left in America has been quite savy in accusing people who want immigration control as 'anti-American', this is something that does not work anywhere else, even though places like Australia and New Zealand are also settler societies.

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