I was honoured to be cited by Dr Kevin Donnelly in a recent article published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. I wholeheartedly agree with him and I also believe that Australians gain absolutely nothing from the amorphous atmosphere of multiculturalism. To the contrary, radical multicultural policies effectively pose a considerable challenge to our cultural identity as a nation.
The multicultural project is not really about a fair understanding of different cultures, but a radical ideology aiming at the dissolution of western values and traditions. According to the late Samuel Huntington, multiculturalism can be described as an “anti-Western ideology” that is opposed to “Eurocentric concepts of democratic principles, culture, and identity.”
In other words, we cannot judge other cultures but we must always condemn our own! As a result, English philosopher Roger Scruton concludes: “All criticism of minority cultures is censured out of public debate, and newcomers quickly conclude that it is possible to reside in a state as an antagonist and still enjoy all the rights and privileges that are the reward of citizenship.”
I strongly believe that Australia’s loss of cultural identity is already causing our great nation to fragment itself into enclaves of religion and ethnicity. For example, if a Muslim living in Australia comes from any immigrant background that preserves the memory of religious laws, then such an individual will often revert to a form of religious experience of membership. He will be instigated by government-sponsored policies to “celebrate” his religious identity and cultural background at the expense of the general values of the Australian community, which may naturally lead this person to primarily define himself in clear opposition to the territorial jurisdiction by which he is ostensibly governed.
Robert A. Dahl, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Yale University, identifies the underlying conditions in a country that would be favorable to the stability of democratic institutions. “Where these conditions are weakly absent democracy is unlikely to exist, or if it does, its existence is likely to be precarious,” he says. Among conditions identified by Professor Dahl as “essential for the stability of democracy,” he identifies “weak sub-cultural pluralism” and “democratic beliefs and political culture.”
According to Professor Dahl, “democratic political institutions are more likely to develop and endure in a country that is culturally fairly homogeneous and less likely in a country with sharply differentiated and conflicting subcultures.” Conversely, “cultural diversity,” Dahl argues, “threatens to generate intractable social conflicts whereby democratic institutions would be simply impossible to be maintained”.
Of course, some may claim that immigrants would be the first to support state-sponsored multiculturalism. As a person who migrated to Australia in order to enjoy its liberal-democratic cultural values and traditions of the rule of law and universal human rights, I feel particularly offended by such an assumption.
Indeed, I strongly suspect that the main impetus for multicultural policies do not come primarily from our average immigrant. Instead, such idea comes primarily from the local intellectual elites in association with the more powerful elements within certain non-western minority groups.
Apart from such privileged group of individuals, common people like ourselves gain absolutely nothing from the deeply amorphous atmosphere of multiculturalism, save a considerable degree of bewilderment and the complete loss of any sense of common values and national identity.