| Saturday, December 11, 2004 |
03:21 - Think Different (but just a little bit)
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I hope lots of people are paying attention to what The Telegraph has been saying lately in its op-eds and even world news coverage, because I haven't seen stories like this getting play in papers like The Guardian, The Washington Post or The New York Times.
There's this piece on how the Dutch, seeing their culture and country drowning in the forced silent anonymity of zealous multiculturalism, are taking the only road that doesn't lead to Naziism or death: the one that leads out of the country.
Escaping the stress of clogged roads, street violence and loss of faith in Holland's once celebrated way of life, the Dutch middle classes are leaving the country in droves for the first time in living memory.
The new wave of educated migrants are quietly voting with their feet against a multicultural experiment long touted as a model for the world, but increasingly a warning of how good intentions can go wrong.
Australia, Canada and New Zealand are the pin-up countries for those craving the great outdoors and old-fashioned civility.
. . .
More people left the Netherlands in 2003 than arrived, ending a half-century cycle of surging immigration that has turned a tight-knit Nordic tribe into a multi-ethnic mosaic with three million people of foreign roots out of 16 million. Almost one million are Muslims, mostly Turks and Moroccan-Berbers. In Rotterdam, 47 per cent of the city's population is of foreign origin. While asylum claims have plunged, the exodus is accelerating, reaching 13,313 net outflow in the first half of 2004. Many retiring workers are moving to the south of France, but a growing bloc leaving the country appears to be educated, working families.
. . .
Ellen, 43, a lawyer and banker who votes for the free-market Liberals, said the code of behaviour regulating daily life in the Netherlands was breaking down.
"People no longer know what to expect from each other. There are so many rules, but nobody sticks to them. They just do as they want. They just execute people on the streets, it's shocking when you see this for the first time," she said. "We've become so tolerant that everybody thinks they can fight their own wars here. Van Gogh is killed, and then people throw bombs at mosques and churches. It's escalating because the police and the state aren't doing anything about it.
"There's a feeling of injustice that if you do things right, if you work hard and pay your taxes, you're punished, and those who don't are rewarded. People can come and live here illegally and get payments. How is that possible?
"We didn't think about how we should integrate people, to make sure that we actually talk to each other and know each other, instead of living in ghettoes with different rules.
"It's not why we are leaving: the reason is that Australia feels different, it feels like a place where we would like to grow old," she said.
Evidently America isn't on the list of places the Dutch are going, perhaps as one final act of defiance, of not appearing to capitulate to the idea that maybe our way is positively comparable to that of Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, the cited list-toppers. Neither is Britain. I guess we can make of that whatever we will. But it's instructive to see what becomes the only viable option when one is trapped between the instructional ruler-wielding horn-rimmed spectres of Nazi Germany and a forever ghettoized, polyglot, posse-law dystopia: fleeing in dejected terror.
(This video/documentary does an excellent job of putting a visual face on all this. A must-see. And it makes it seem rather inevitable that something like this would happen; I wonder if Amsterdam will last much longer as the Mecca—as it were—of the pot-smoking sexual libertines of the world?)
And then there's this opinion column about the soon-to-be law in Britain forbidding the criticism of religion.
As I write, I am looking at a Christmas brochure for Channel 4. It contains an interview with Paul Abbott, author of the "current hit show, Shameless". Clever Paul swears a lot, and proudly tells a story about how, when his brothers held him upside down to help him steal a Christmas tree from his Yugoslav next door neighbour, he was so frightened that he started urinating. Ha ha.
There follows a two-page pictorial spread of Paul's characters, the Gallaghers, having their Christmas lunch. The tableau is presented (sub-Buñuel) as a parody of the Last Supper. (Do Paul Abbott and Channel 4 believe, perhaps, that this took place at Christmas?) The first page shows a line of yobs - mimicking the Apostles - beginning their meal in reasonably good order. The second depicts them towards its end, violent and drunk. The "Jesus" figure is lurching forward, halo awry, beer can in one hand and cigarette in the other.
The natural inclination of Christians in the face of such affronts is anger. But would it really be a better society in which silly, urinating Mr Abbott could go to prison for such a thing, and perhaps the bosses of Channel 4 with him? Before lots of respectable readers shriek "Yes!", think what it means.
Why is it that so many people resent religion and turn against it? Surely it is because of its coercive force, its tendency to mistake the worldly power of its priests and mullahs for justified zeal for the truth. It is not God who turns people away, but what people do in the name of God. If a law against religious hatred is passed, even when blessed by St David Blunkett, the natural consequence will be a rise in the hatred of religion.
Particularly hatred of Islam. The BNP website describes Islam in the hands of some of its adherents as "less a religion and more a magnet for psychopaths and a machine for conquest". If a law says they can't say that, the BNP will, in the minds of many, be proved right. On Tuesday, Mr Blunkett said that it would be illegal to claim that "Muslims are a threat to Britain". People already censor themselves through fear of Muslim reaction to mockery - I don't suppose even brave, incontinent, foul-mouthed Paul Abbott would write a comedy for the start of Ramadan showing Mohammed downloading dubious images from the internet. If the law criminalises such activity, the scope for resentment is huge.
I've seen recent examples of guys misinterpreting Canada's new gay-marriage legislation as forcing religious institutions to perform same-sex marriages (actually the law states the opposite), and reacting with undisguised glee at the prospect of such a government in shining armor riding to smite the wicked. Apparently free speech, and the separation of church and state, are only good things when they work in our favor.
This month we're dutifully erasing all mention of Christianity from our December festivities—the only time I saw the word "Christmas" in the mall today was on a furtive hand-written sign on the cash register at the Great Steak & Potato Company, and in the Christmas songs that they still feel it's justified to play over the PA system, at least for now; all the rest is touchily "End-of-Year Sales" and "Winter Holiday Shopping". And meanwhile, as the article points out, in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan you risk death or deportation for failing to conceal your non-state-approved religion. Surely we wouldn't want it to look like we're pursuing that model.
The trouble with arguing against these sorts of developments is that standing up for your own culture, if you're Western, is seen as tantamount to slapping on a swastika armband and writing everything in the Fraktur font. It takes a brave journalistic voice to even try to figure out a way to steer between the extremes—to avoid tripping the warning bells that make people curl up into their anti-fascist shells, while at the same time making compelling points about holding on to a tradition or two that we've found define us as a people and enable the simple, innocent things that we value in life—like being able to say "Merry Christmas" to a stranger, or, equally, to produce a construction-paper cartoon featuring a foul-mouthed Jesus battling Santa Claus in a snow-covered mountain town.
If such voices are congregating at The Telegraph now, it might be a good one to watch.
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Brian Tiemann
