Suicide by diversity

My yesterday’s post has drawn some bitter comments from New Zealanders and Australians who find it hard to stay in the UK.

This is what I replied to one man being kicked from pillar to post by the Home Office – although, in addition to a well-paid job, he’s blessed with a British wife and children:

“Denationalisation has taken on a whole new meaning in Britain. Rather than privatising the economy, it now means empowering the state at the expense of the nation, destroying traditional institutions and debauching national culture.

“Peter Mandelson more or less admitted to that, when explaining Blair’s immigration policy. Since then the policy hasn’t changed much because the state’s inner imperative hasn’t. Hence your predicament, with which I thoroughly sympathise. A New Zealander won’t serve the denationalisation objective, but a Muslim or, at a pinch, a Romanian will.

“This is all very sinister, and I don’t think it’s understood widely enough. The debate about immigration is waged between the denationalising state and, largely, the kind of people who don’t like Johnny Foreigner, regardless of where he comes from. The issue, however, is deeper than that – it’s not so much political or economic as existential.”

My missive sounded as if I believed in some sort of conspiracy theory, which in a way I do. However, I’m not thinking of a gang of evil-doers concocting dastardly plots in a damp cellar. The conspiracy I mean is much wider. It’s called modernity.

The conspirators don’t really know what they want to create, outside this or that madcap utopia no sane person would take seriously. However, they know exactly what they seek to destroy: the Western nation, defined not geographically but culturally.

Every civilisation needs a safe depository protecting its valuables. In the West’s distant past, it was Christianity that served that purpose, downgrading the nation to a secondary status.

Nationhood was then so fluid as to be irrelevant. For example, contrary to Voltaire’s typically facile quip, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was indeed holy, Roman and an empire. But it wasn’t one of ‘the German nation’, as we understand it today.

It covered today’s Germany, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia (as it recently was), eastern France, northern Italy, Slovenia and western Poland. That Babel was loosely held together by one adhesive only: Christianity, with its culture.

Even when nations began to coalesce, they didn’t promote nationhood in today’s sense. For example, most subjects of Louis XIV weren’t native speakers of French.

Christianity was the cornerstone of Western identity, and it was knocked out by the revolt against our civilisation going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment. This had a divisive effect on a Europe already torn asunder by the Reformation.

Western man became extinct as the dominant cultural type. He was replaced by modern man, bearing only a superficial resemblance to his predecessor. It’s this new type that provides human material for the building of all modern states.

What was left of the Western cultural treasure had to seek another depository for safekeeping. It was then that the nation became paramount. As safety deposit boxes go, it was fairly flimsy. But it was better than nothing.

When the smallish cornerstone of nation was stuck into the giant hole left by religion, the structure became rickety and vulnerable. Yet at least it was still standing.

However, a battering ram was still attached to the front end of the modern juggernaut. It was now aimed at the new cornerstone, the nation. If nationhood preserved vestiges of Western culture, it had to be destroyed, an imperative viscerally understood by all post-Enlightenment governments.

They don’t need to conspire before pouncing on what’s left of our civilisation – any more than wolves need to conspire before pouncing on sheep. The urge to do so is coded into their DNA.

This – in my view only this – explains why all European governments have flung their gates open to millions of people doctrinally committed to destroying our civilisation or, at best, alien to it. Remove this inner imperative, and no one, not even European politicians, is stupid enough not to see suicide in the making.

If a hypothesis explains all known facts, it becomes an intellectual truth. Mine, I believe, explains all sorts of recent developments.

Such as modernity’s inordinate affection for creating international organisations and shifting more and more power their way. This reverses the traditional Western principle of subsidiarity, devolving power to the lowest sensible level.

While the EU has its critics, the rest of the alphabet soup of international bodies, from the UN to the WTO to UNESCO, get off too easily. But even the EU is often criticised for superficial reasons, rather than for being an existential threat to our civilisation.

For lack of other persuasive explanations, my hypothesis also accounts for our suicidal immigration policy, which loads the gun pressed to our collective temple. As a corollary, it also explains the plight of our cultural brothers from the Commonwealth.

Give them a generation or even less, and they’ll seamlessly fit into the culture they already share. That’s not what our governments, however they describe themselves, want. Divide and conquer is the principle they live by, wittingly or unwittingly. Or rather dilute and destroy.