The Canadian Will Kymlicka is known around the world as the foremost defender of what he calls the “successful model of Canadian multiculturalism.” His main argument has been that multiculturalism is “first and foremost” about “overcoming” persisting racial inequalities in the West deemed to be inconsistent with the principles of democratic liberalism.
He has persuaded impressionable students to view multiculturalism as a lofty endeavour “designed to contest the lingering presence or enduring effects of older…ethnic and racial hierarchies” in the Western world after World War II. According to Kymlicka, the Western nations that defeated Fascism in the Second War were liberal democratic polities in their recognition of equal civic rights for all White citizens, but they were still illiberal in their “exclusion and oppression” of racial (and sexual) minorities. Eliminating this “lingering” racial oppression is what Kymlicka’s theory of minority rights is all about — or so he would like us to believe.
Don’t you believe him: Kymlicka’s theory is a misappropriation of liberal ideals to promote mass immigration into all Western countries in order to bring about a totally new form of citizenship and national identity across the West that is multiracial and “never again” “typically white and Christian.”
In prior articles I argued that the same Kymlicka who says that “most people have a very strong bond to their own culture,” and that multiculturalism is about affording immigrants with group rights to facilitate their integration into Western culture through such policies as affirmative hiring and funding of ethnic groups, is the Kymlicka who always describes the majority culture of Eurocanadians in disparaging terms, never considers the strong attachments Eurocanadians may have to the Canada they created, but instead views this majority culture as a universal setting for the affirmation of individual rights by humans across the planet, and as a multicultural place for the affirmation of special group rights for immigrants and aboriginal territorial rights.
Minority Rights as a Cover up for Illiberal Mass Immigration
This article will show the ways in which Kymlicka’s theory pretends to be in line with liberal principles when it actually manipulates these principles to promote a cultural Marxist agenda intended to replace the “white/Christian identity” of Western nations with a multiracial identity. I will do this by examining some key passages in the widely promoted article, Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future, published in 2012.
Multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights revolution involving ethnic and racial diversity. Prior to WWII, ethnocultural and religious diversity in the West was characterized by a range of illiberal and undemocratic relationships of hierarchy, justified by racialist ideologies that explicitly propounded the superiority of some peoples and cultures and their right to rule over others. These ideologies were widely accepted throughout the Western world and underpinned both domestic laws (e.g., racially biased immigration and citizenship policies) and foreign policies (e.g., in relation to overseas colonies) (p. 5).
There is no question that a few decades ago racialist ideologies were expressed in the West in citizenship and immigration laws that excluded certain races and in the colonial practices of Europeans over Third World countries. While I don’t think that racialist ideas as such are inconsistent with liberalism, I do agree that a country cannot be said to be liberal and democratic if different races therein enjoy different rights of citizenship. Likewise a country cannot be said to be acting according to liberal ideals if it endorses the subjugation of “inferior races” and precludes different cultures/nations from enjoying the freedom of national self-determination. If multiculturalism were to amount to no more than the elimination of laws that treat people differently and to the rejection of colonization, it would be consistent with liberalism. Minority rights for historic minorities are consistent with liberal values.
Kymlicka continues:
After WWII, however, the world recoiled against Hitler’s fanatical and murderous use of such ideologies, and the UN decisively repudiated them in favor of a new ideology of the equality of races and peoples. And this new assumption of human equality generated a series of political movements designed to contest the lingering presence or enduring effects of older hierarchies. We can distinguish three ‘waves’ of such movements:
1) the struggle for decolonization, concentrated in the period 1948-65;
2) the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, initiated and exemplified by the African-American civil-rights movement from 1955 to 1965; and
3) the struggle for multiculturalism and minority rights, which emerged in the late 1960s (p. 6).
I agree that these three movements, taken by themselves, are consistent with liberalism. The principle of equal rights under the law, and the principle of national self-determination, are both liberal principles entailing the right of all peoples to decide their own destiny, rather than to be ruled by outsiders, even if said people inhabit nations with illiberal constitutions. Decolonization, non-racial discrimination within Western liberal states, and minority rights within liberal states, are all presupposed by the theory of liberalism. Liberal nationalism involves equal treatment of individuals regardless of race as well as “the equal recognition of different national identities.”
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| UBC Grad Students: “I am so proud to be the last White still fighting for progressive multi-racial citizenship in Canada!” |
So far so good. But below is the key passage, along with other passages to be cited soon, in which Kymlicka surreptitiously introduces a program that has nothing to do with liberal minority rights for “previously excluded groups” and everything to do with imposing a multiracial identity “across the Western democracies” by bringing millions upon millions of foreigners:
The case of immigrant multiculturalism is just one aspect of a larger ethnic revival across the Western democracies, in which different types of minorities have struggled for new forms of multicultural citizenship that combined both antidiscrimination measures and positive forms of recognition and accommodation (p. 7).
It all seems innocuous enough when he explains that, just as indigenous peoples and historic minorities should be granted minority (multicultural) rights, so should “permanently settled immigrant groups.” But he is not talking about rights for a static group of settled immigrants. He is formulating a theory of “immigrant multiculturalism” and then calling, as he goes on to add, for the “construction” of a “new” “multicultural form of citizenship in relation to immigrant groups” (p. 8).
And he is not just writing about Canada, or the so-called “immigrant nations” of Australia and the United States. He is formulating a theoretical program for the total transformation of the national identities of all Western nations by mandating that these nations be open to millions of foreigners to be granted immediate multicultural rights.
Kymlicka portrays his theory as if it were “first and foremost about developing new models of democratic citizenship…to replace earlier uncivil and undemocratic relations of hierarchy and exclusion” (p. 8), when in fact his theory has never been about the past but always about the future.
His “theory of minority rights” has barely been about language rights for minorities, about self-government rights for indigenous peoples, or even about equal treatment of “settled” immigrant minorities. He knows that “in most Western countries, explicit state-sponsored discrimination against ethnic, racial, or religious minorities had largely ceased by the 1960s and 1970s” (p. 6). He also knows that Western nations were already legislating, through the 1970s to the 1990s, a variety of laws and policies designed to afford cultural self-determination and territorial rights to minorities such as the Quebecois, Basques, Catalans, Welsh, and Aboriginals.
Kymlicka, who completed his PhD under the supervision of the renowned Canadian Marxist Gerald Cohen, is one of many New Left or Cultural Marxists who infiltrated Liberalism in order to push the most radical agenda ever imaginable: the total eradication of White identity across the West by means of a “long march through the institutions,” a phrase he enjoys citing regularly. Like many Marxists in recent decades, he realized that the Leninist language of class struggle and communist ownership was no longer credible and that the best way to transform Western countries was to infiltrate and subvert its liberal language and concepts, camouflaging his true intentions.
Overtly, he wants White students to think that his theory is about eliminating “those deeply rooted traditions, customs, and symbols that have excluded or stigmatized minorities” (p. 9). But what he wants is a “profound transformation” in the identities of Whites by restructuring their nations as “immigrant nations.”
Establishment conservatives have missed entirely this goal in their preoccupation with the ways Kymlicka’s theory allows immigrants to retain customs that may be illiberally inconsistent with Western ideals. But, as Kymlicka has insisted, particularly in his later publications, the policies of multiculturalism he advocates, such as ethnic representation in the media, multicultural curricula, dual citizenship, are meant to facilitate integration into the Western world of civil-rights liberalism and democratic constitutionalism. Both immigrants and Whites are supposed to forego their racial prejudices in the process of merging into a new form of multicultural mongrel species.
Multiculturalism-as-citizenization is a deeply (and intentionally) transformative project, both for minorities and majorities. It requires both the dominant and historically subordinated groups to engage in new practices, to enter new relationships, and to embrace new concepts and discourses — all of which profoundly transform people’s identities (p. 9).
It is indeed a theory that is “intentionally transformative” in calling for Western nations to embrace mass immigration and enact policies designed to make the integration of multiple races into Western nations “successful.” The policy aspects of his theory are all about “civic integration” measures, not for historic minorities or long established immigrants, but for masses of newcomers envisioned as the agents that will radically reconstruct age-old White identities. The policies he suggests are about providing assistance and extensive language training programs for incoming immigrants, encouraging broadcasters to reflect on the increasing cultural diversity that comes with increasing immigration, offering grants to ethnic groups and affirmative action, as well as a citizenship tests to demonstrate knowledge of multicultural liberal values.
When news about the failures of multiculturalism in Europe come out, Kymlicka plays up the “distinctive” Canadian character of his theory, but his theory has always been about creating a totally new identity across the entire West. It is no accident that Kymlicka has spent most of his academic career lecturing in Europe, hardly ever in Canada, touting the “successful model of Canadian multiculturalism.” He believes that all nations with White majorities must become multiracial. He never says this explicitly, for he knows that citizens would democratically reject what can only be described as a genocidal program. But the meaning is there in-between the lines:
This is obvious in the case of the historically dominant majority group in each country, which is required to renounce fantasies of racial superiority, to relinquish claims to exclusive ownership of the state, and to abandon attempts to fashion publish institutions in its own (typically white/Christian) image (p. 9).
It is a central tenet of his theory that Western nations must accept millions of immigrants and that rejecting mass immigration is “far right xenophobia.” But why can’t Western nations remain “typically white” in the same way that all other nations in the world that are not Western but are nevertheless quite liberal and democratic, such as Japan, have decided to remain not just typically Asian but homogeneously Japanese?
Millions of students have been wrongly made to believe that the constitutions of Western nations make it mandatory to grant citizenship and group rights to endless masses of foreigners.
That is why he calls the program “a long march through the institutions,” in quotation marks. There is nothing liberal abut this march, which is a term coined by cultural Marxists to describe a strategy for bringing about a profound transformation of Western cultures by infiltrating and subverting the institutions, ideas, and the professions. The strategy Kymlicka came up with, along with others, was to infiltrate and subvert liberal thinking by manipulating the concept of minority rights to mean that Western nations must open their border to millions of foreigners until Whites are forever forced to relinquish their homelands.
Kymlicka has become rich, a member of the top two percent income bracket, promoting this illiberal theory. Meanwhile, Europeans have experienced mass raping by immigrants, endless terrorist incidents, massive welfare costs to support barely educated immigrants, coupled with constant harassment for their alleged racist past, indoctrination rather than learning, outright lies about how Africans and Muslims were long participants in the making of Western civilization, under the constant threat of ostracism and loss of employment if they ever question this “profoundly transformative” form of multiracial citizenship.
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