{"id":87858,"date":"2016-02-14T12:30:48","date_gmt":"2016-02-14T20:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=87858"},"modified":"2016-02-14T12:30:48","modified_gmt":"2016-02-14T20:30:48","slug":"europes-open-doors-are-a-civilisation-death-wish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=87858","title":{"rendered":"Europe\u2019s open doors are a civilisation death wish"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Australian<\/a>: Australians should feel unashamed about our immigration policies and instead fight the growth of identity politics and the undermining of free speech.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the message of provoc\u00adative Canadian commentator Mark Steyn, who tomorrow begins an Australian speaking tour sponsored by the Institute of Public \u00adAffairs.<\/p>\n

Free speech is at the heart of Steyn\u2019s message. He is surprised that the controversial section 18c of our Racial Discrimination Act is still standing when his own country successfully repealed the equivalent parts of its Human Rights Act in 2013.<\/p>\n

\u201cFree peoples are losing the habit of free speech,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re taught, not really just at university but in fact from kindergarten, that there is a correct view of certain subjects and that incorrect views are distressing. The last two generations raised in the Western world, they don\u2019t do that thing, the apocryphal Voltaire line, \u2018I disagree with what you say but I\u2019ll fight to the death for you to.\u2019 They\u2019ll fight to the death for you not to be allowed to say it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The consequences can be disturbing. \u201cPeople can actually lose the spirit of liberty and once you\u2019ve lost that there are not a lot of easy paths back,\u201d he cautions.<\/p>\n

Steyn says the initial reluctance of politicians and much of the media to acknowledge, let alone discuss frankly, events in \u00adCologne on New Year\u2019s Eve or the growing problem of sexual assault in Sweden did nothing to preserve social cohesion but instead widened a democratic deficit between governments and the governed over the tide of asylum-seekers sweeping across Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cFree speech is like being a little bit pregnant,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t be a little bit free speech.\u201d<\/p>\n

He talks of meeting people fleeing the Balkans as a journalist covering the wars that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia. \u201cIn Europe the whole migrant thing is basically open mockery of the whole idea of refugees,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Steyn says EU leaders need to speak frankly about the forces now pulling people to the continent and how they are different.<\/p>\n

He points to Africa. \u201cPeople now have cell phones,\u201d Steyn says. They can see what\u2019s going on in the world. Even as recently as the 1980s their glimpse of life in the West came from re-runs of Dallas.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a different world now. They can see in real time their cousin who got on a boat from Libya and wound up in Italy and walked over to Sweden. They\u2019re seeing in real time the kind of life their cousin is living. What percentage of North Africa has to decide \u2018We\u2019d quite like to move to Europe\u2019 for there to be no \u00adEurope?\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result, Steyn sees nothing wrong with Australia\u2019s asylum-seeker policies. \u201cAustralia does what every country used to do until the 1960s. It reserves the right to pick and choose who it admits to within its borders.\u201d He adds: \u201cIn effect, everyone in Australia is Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Steyn points to the different recent experiences of asylum-seeker flows of Europe and Australia. \u201cEurope is basically as near to Africa as Australia is to \u00adIndonesia,\u201d he says, describing the EU\u2019s approach as \u201cthe equivalent of Australia telling everyone in \u00adIndonesia, \u2018See you in Darwin on Tuesday\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steyn is blunt on the potential consequences of the uncontrolled flows of people. \u201cIf you lose control of your border you don\u2019t have a country,\u201d he says. In this environment, he is particularly concerned about the impact of identity politics and \u00addiversity policies that play on differences. He points to his experiences in the Balkans. \u201cOnce people start to think of tribal identities, you end up with tribal politics,\u201d he warns. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if the tribe is Bosnians or Croats or whether its transgender and lesbians versus straight white males.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steyn jokes about \u201cthe Stanley Gibbons stamp collection approach to diversity\u201d but says it is a trap that can cause \u00addivisions in wealthy, comfortable and largely homogenous societies, be they in Europe or our own.<\/p>\n

\u201cI raise my kids in New Hampshire which is 99.99999 per cent white,\u201d he says. \u201cI think there\u2019s rumoured to be three black guys somewhere in the southern part of the state and two Hispanics. That\u2019s it for New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gets kind of boring and people think wouldn\u2019t it be nice to have bit of this and a bit of that. We live here and we\u2019ve got all these people called Smith and Jones and all the rest of it. It would be much more interesting if we can have a bit more diversity. So look. There\u2019s that nice gay couple who have moved into No 28 Victoria Gardens. And \u2014 ooh, aren\u2019t we lucky now? There\u2019s a nice fire-breathing imam who has moved into No 30.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey can all meet. The fire-breathing imam can make conversation with the nice gay couple over the garden fence as they do on a Sunday afternoon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the joking ends. \u201cThe situation they\u2019re now realising in Europe is that when you\u2019re so boundlessly tolerant that you tolerate the avowedly intolerant then you basically have turned that whole kind of Stanley Gibbons diversity thing into a civilisational death wish,\u201d Steyn says.<\/p>\n

He warns against embracing the self-loathing that comes with the increasingly common use of concepts such as privilege and entitlement to delineate societal goodies and baddies \u2014 witting or not. \u201cThe minute you start using these things like privilege, what you\u2019re doing is incentivising the most reductive kind of identity group politics,\u201d Steyn says.<\/p>\n

Here, he specifically references 18c and \u201cwhat groups you can claim to be a member of\u201d so before the law \u201cwhat matters is not that you are a citizen like any other\u201d but which \u201cgroups you have a purchase on\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Australian: Australians should feel unashamed about our immigration policies and instead fight the growth of identity politics and the undermining of free speech. That\u2019s the message of provoc\u00adative Canadian commentator Mark Steyn, who tomorrow begins an Australian speaking tour … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9993],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87859,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87858\/revisions\/87859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}