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All men are not
equal
Mark Steyn
New Hampshire
There’s an abandoned town in Labrador
called Davis Inlet. An Innu community — i.e., natives, of the Mushuau
people, if you’re big on who’s who in the Great White North. About a decade
ago Canadians switched on their televisions and were confronted by
‘shocking’ images of the town’s populace passing the day snorting drugs,
glue, petrol and pretty much anything else to hand.
So, as any impeccably progressive soft-lefties would, Her Majesty’s
Government in Ottawa decided to build the Mushuau a new town a few miles
inland — state of the art, money no object, new homes, new heating systems,
new schoolhouse, new computers, plus new more culturally respectful town name
(Natuashish). Total cost to Canadian taxpayers: $152 million, which works
out to about $217,142.85 for each of the town’s men, women and children.
Got a wife and two kids and you’re looking at a government handout of about
nine hundred thousand bucks.
And the upshot of Canadian taxpayers’ generosity? Two years after the
new town opened, the former Mushuau chief and the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police both agreed that there were more drugs, alcoholism, gas-sniffing
etc., than ever before. Also higher suicide rates.
Gas-sniffing is not a traditional native activity. Before the first
European settlers came, the Mushuau did not roam the tundra hunting for
Toyota Corollas to siphon the tanks of. That’s a particularly perverse form
of cultural co-mingling, but one in which ‘compassionate’ white liberals
seem determined to keep the natives mired. The government showers native
communities with money; there’s no economic downside to sniffing petrol all
day; and as everyone in Natuashish is driving around in brand-new pick-ups
on roads that go nowhere you might as well use that full tank of gas for
something. The net result of 40 years of a ‘caring’ policy intended to
maintain communities in their traditional ‘culture’ is that Canadian
natives now have tuberculosis, diabetes, heart disease and brain damage at
levels accelerating further and further away from those in society at
large, not to mention lower life-expectancy, higher infant mortality, and
endemic suicide. On the last point, the Canadian government doesn’t give
natives the rope with which they hang themselves, but they do give them
free supplies of ammunition. (Natives have higher murder rates, too.)
Identity-group grievance-mongers routinely go on about the first Europeans
introducing disease to hitherto vigorous North American Indians four
centuries ago, but the current health crises afflicting literally dying
communities are of less concern. Nonetheless, the math seems unarguable:
too many agonised white liberal multicultural chiefs leads to not enough Indians.
Canadian natives, as the most comprehensively wrecked minority on the
continent, are a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with
multiculturalism. The premise of multiculturalism is that all cultures are
equally ‘valid’, but of course that’s bunk: some cultures are better, some
are worse, some are successes, some are failures. I’m not being
‘Eurocentric’ here. Perish the thought: an awful lot of European cultures
have proved hopeless at sustaining over any length of time representative
government, property rights, the rule of law and individual liberty. Those
are largely features of the Britannic world — not just of the United
Kingdom, America, Australia and New Zealand but also of India, Singapore,
St Lucia, as well as Quebec and Mauritius, to name but two francophone
jurisdictions all the more agreeable for having spent their formative years
under the British Crown.
That’s one reason why I’m a Eurosceptic — because I don’t think the
British have anything to learn from the Belgians or Germans; on the other
hand, the Belgians and Germans have quite a lot to learn from Belize and Barbados. The debate led by the
editor of this magazine and others over this last month about promoting
‘Britishness’ is perplexing to an offshore observer, if only because the
superiority of the Britannic inheritance should be self-evident. Even in
the dodgier parts of the globe, a good rule of thumb is head for the joint
that was under British rule the longest: try doing business in Malaysia and then in Indonesia
and you’ll see what I mean. The fact is that the further you remove people
from the Britannic inheritance, the greater disservice you do them — the
unfortunate Innu of Davis Inlet, excluded from the normal currents of
advanced society (home ownership, economic activity, etc.) are merely a
particularly grim example of this general truth.
In the Telegraph the other week, Boris Johnson mentioned Mary Seacole, a
19th-century black nurse from Jamaica who was in her day as
famous as Florence Nightingale. And, reading of her, I was reminded for the
umpteenth time of why the British, of all people, should never have fallen
for the neo-apartheid of multiculturalism. ‘British’ was the prototype
multiethnic nationality: if you were a doctor from Kingston-on-Thames
or a nurse from Kingston, Jamaica, or an assistant choreographer from Kingston, Ontario,
you were British — and, unlike the Germans, race didn’t come into it. ‘The
British,’ wrote Colin Powell of his Jamaican background, ‘told my ancestors
that they were now British citizens with all the rights of any subject of
the Crown.’ That’s correct: in law, there was no distinction between a
British subject in Wales
and a British subject in Tobago.
Britishness was far more of a genuinely multicultural identity than the
yawning we-are-the-world nullity of modern multiculturalism. I’m still a
wee young thing but my earliest passports bore in bold print on page three
the words ‘A Canadian citizen is a British subject.’ It requires a perverse
ahistorical fanaticism to decide that Britishness is some shrivelled
Little-Englander thing that should never be passed on to our children. It’s
always been the great outward, global, embracing identity.
Conversely, I don’t see why we should pretend that self-evidently
deficient cultures are our moral equal. In so far as I understand the
Arabist mindset of the FCO, it would seem to be something to do with the
old Lawrence-of-Arabia
routine, dressing up in robes and singing ‘The Desert Song calling/ Its
voice enthralling/ Will make you mine...’. I’m sympathetic to the romance
of the noble Bedouin riding his Arab on the moonlit sands, just as, apropos
the Innu, I can see the attraction of seal and bear hunting. But both
cultures seem to have a difficulty accommodating contemporary life. Even in
corners of the Arab world that have the veneer of modernity, people say
nutty stuff to you all the time. Not misfit weirdsmobiles in loser jobs,
but fellows at the very heart of the community. To pluck at random, take
Abd Al-Sabour Shahin, respected Egyptian professor, lecturer at Cairo University and head of the Sharia
faculty at Al-Azhar university, the Harvard of Sunni Islam. On Monday on
Saudi Channel One, Dr Shahin told viewers:
‘Our enemies weave many lies about us, which we are not necessarily
aware of. For example: one day, we awoke to the crime of 9/11, which hit
the tallest buildings in New York, the Empire State Building.
There is no doubt that not a single Arab or Muslim had anything to do with
these events. The incident was fabricated as a pretext to attack Islam and
Muslims.’
Er, OK. So if no Muslim hit the, um, Empire State
Building, who did? On
that, Dr Shahin was in no doubt: ‘I believe a dirty Zionist hand carried
out this act.’
Dr Shahin is the product of a deformed culture. In the days after 9/11,
we heard innumerable reprises of the lazy leftist trope ‘poverty breeds
terrorism’. But the Arab world is wealthy. It suffers, as David Pryce-Jones
has said, from intellectual poverty. And, whether or not Boris and co. need
to talk up Britishness, we’d be doing ourselves and them a great favour if
we were to make a concerted effort to talk down Muslim nuttiness. With
hindsight, the problem with the Salman Rushdie affair — the prototype
example of the Islamists claiming global jurisdiction for their psychoses —
was that the resistance was left to a bunch of largely humourless
self-important literati who made it all into a dreary business about the
‘need’ for ‘transgressive’ ‘artists’ to ‘challenge’ ...zzzzzzz ...losing
will to type.... Instead we should have resisted with a gleeful mocking
campaign against Islamoparanoia. Every day of the week you can find some
bonkers story from the Muslim world. Here’s the Sunday Age in Melbourne reporting
on 31 July on Werribee Islamic College:
‘The imam told the students that the Jews were putting poison in the
bananas and they should not eat them.’
You don’t have to be bananas to teach in an Islamic school but it helps.
That’s a college, by the way, that receives funds from Australian taxpayers
of about $3 million a year. For three million bucks they can’t hire a
catering guy who can find them Jew-free bananas?
Even their terrorism is mostly laughable. The shoebomber gets his bomb
on the plane but has only a damp book of matches. The 21 July bombers are
all hot for their 72 virgins but their bombs refuse to perform, like a
bunch of dud fireworks. One Palestinian suicide bomber is intercepted en
route by another Palestinian who tries to steal his suicide bomb and they
both get blown up before they’ve got near any Jews.
The only thing these guys have going for them is our undervaluation of
ourselves and perverse boosting up of them. By pretending that all cultures
are equal, multiculturalism doesn’t ‘preserve’ traditional cultures so much
as sustain them in an artificial state that ensures they’ll develop bizarre
pathologies and mutate into some freakish hybrid of the worst of both
worlds. With the Innu, the destructive ‘compassion’ of guilt-ridden white
liberals is no big deal — at least for us. The Innu live a long way away
from anybody else and so for the most part they mostly harm each other.
But the Islamists are much closer to home. Like the Innu, they’re a
dysfunctional amalgam of traditional and Western culture, fundamentalist
Islam filtered through an old-school European fascist movement. Like the
Innu, they’re hooked on welfare and the glorification of self-destruction.
Like the Innu, they’re the creations of Western largesse — from the firebrand
imams bilking the British welfare state, to the bananaphobic imams of
taxpayer-funded Aussie schools, to Osama bin Laden himself, who took his
pa’s dough from the US-fuelled Saudi construction boom and sunk it into a
hole in the ground in Tora Bora. Remember Mohammed Atta? He piloted the jet
that hit the first World Trade Center tower — or, for any Saudi TV viewers
reading this, the first Empire State Building tower — and his main concern
seemed to be that his corpse would make it to paradise without being
contaminated by infidels and whores. As he wrote in the will he left
behind, ‘He who washes my body around my genitals should wear gloves so
that I am not touched there.’
Young Mohammed graduated from Cairo
university with a degree in architectural engineering and later studied at Hamburg university.
One had assumed his wealthy parents didn’t put junior through architectural
engineering in order to pull off one spectacular demolition job. But his
dad, also called Mohammed, recently popped up on CNN to praise the 9/11
attacks and the 7 July bombings and tell the network that if it wanted
another interview it would cost $5,000 which he’d donate towards financing
the next attack in London. He’s a lawyer, his son was an engineer and
qualified pilot (well, except for the landing and take-off part, which he
told his flight school he didn’t need to learn). But they’re kookier than
the most in-bred backwoods up-country yakherd.
Yet somehow we’ve wound up in a situation where it requires a hugely
agonised public debate — even in the Telegraph — about whether we should
state the obvious and historically indisputable truth about British
culture, while simultaneously we all agree to dissemble like crazy about
Muslim culture, handling it with the kid gloves Mohammed Atta wanted
reserved for his genitals. This is a disastrous strategy. One lesson of Dr
Shahin’s drivel is that a culture in which it is difficult if not
impossible to tell the truth eventually goes nuts. It would be a most
unBritish ending.
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