August 01, 2007
An English classicist, broadcaster, and man of letter, Sean Gabb, has just sent me a copy of a booklet he had written Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England and How To Get It Back (Hampden Press, 2007). Sean’s tract has aroused my interest because of its unconventional revelations about English society and government. He tells us about the seamy side of English attempts to enforce multiculturalism which the American media hardly ever cover. I am also struck by the declaration in a long footnote on page 72 about the overlap between Sean’s critical perceptions and mine. He states (and I fully believe his assertion) that since he had only read my relevant books on multiculturalism after having worked on his study, “I cannot say that they influenced me in my own analysis.” What Sean is noting is the self-evident character of much of what a detached observer from a pre-multicultural era would gather about contemporary life in the US and Western Europe. It is not only that morals and social concerns have changed with the inroads of cultural Marxists, to use the accepted term for this group, but an even more alarming phenomenon is the role played by “democratic” governments in promoting the destruction of bourgeois Christian civilization. This is in fact the main focus of Sean’s plea to those who are still identifiable as his countrymen to take back England before it is too late.
Anglican clergy being hectored by state agents for expressing insensitive views about gays, museums being cleansed of the symbols of England’s “imperialist” past, hate speech laws being invoked against Christians while Islamicists are protected in their right to rail against the Christian West, Sean documents all of these grotesque aspects of “liberal democracy” in practice. Organizers of the English Libertarian Alliance, Sean and his Slovakian wife, who are clearly people of the Right, present themselves as libertarians because they properly understand that “democratic administration” is the problem. The administrative state, acting by virtue of the votes collected to justify its power by increasingly indistinguishable party blocs, are attacking traditional English liberties, English national consciousness, and English social morals. Contrary to the established position of left-libertarians and the Wall Street Journal- global democratic crowd, Sean calls for tight controls on the immigration of Third World refugees. Since the present policy contributes to the further cultural and demographic destruction of what had once been an English nation, Sean warns: “we must stop accepting refugees from other parts of the world, and deport those refugees whose home countries are no longer exceptionally dangerous.” One might note that a country well ahead of England on the road to national extinction, Germany, accepted annually between 1984 and 1993 something on the order of one-half to three-quarters of all Third World refugees seeking asylum in a European country. In the same period England accepted on average about 17%. Such facts illustrate not so much that the English government had or has a sane immigration policy but that the German government is even more eager to wipe out its country’s national identity.
What comes to mind, as I read Sean’s jeremiad is how silly American movement conservatives are when they glorify the “Anglosphere” and celebrate “our two countries” as paradigmatic “capitalist democracies.” Today’s England is a moral-social basket case, full of violent crime, outrageous state-enforcement of political correctness, and protected Muslim extremists. Whether or not its prime minister supports our ill-conceived crusade for democracy in Iraq, the land of Anglo-Saxon freedom, as Sean convincingly demonstrates, has ceased to be that. As an American, I can fully share his agony in trying to chart a useful course for dealing with the major party blocs in England. Faced by a choice on what we are made to believe is the English right between a Conservative Party led by a torpid equivalent of Giuliani, David Cameron, and a rightwing populist party, the British National Party, which the government has begun to harass, Sean clearly sympathizes with the latter. The leader of this party in the face of government intimidation has openly denounced the Islamic threat to England and calls for a halt to further Third World immigration to England. Sean also suggests that voting for Labour may be more useful than supporting a degraded, former Center-Right party. By accelerating the excesses of a multicultural public administration under a party that is explicitly for such government, it may be possible to generate a backlash. This, he intimates, may be better than allowing the slide toward anarcho-tyranny to go on in a more gradual manner. On one point, I must respectfully disagree with Sean. On the basis of his description of British party politics, I do not think he is being fair when he opines: “We have yet to sink entirely to the level of America, where elections seem to be decided wholly by money and competing armies of drum majorettes.” Both of the party systems being compared are so despicable that I would not want to have to judge between them.
