Skip to content

Self-Deception Is Intrinsic To Conservative Support For Diversity

We often hear conservatives and liberals are alike in their support for immigration and globalism. This is true politically speaking. Deep down, however, within their inner beings, conservatives are very unhappy with the way diversity has been eroding the whiteness of their nations. They go along with diversification because they are terrified of the leftist taboo against white identity politics. They avoid like the plague any fact that points to the failures of diversity and the necessity of white racial consciousness. To this day, they are insisting the problem lies with the way multiculturalism discourages assimilation to “Canadian values”. According to conservatives, a Canada that is overwhelmingly Chinese, Indian, African, and Filipino is no different from a Canada that is 95 percent white as long as Canadians behave legally, find some job, and accept the Charter. This is what they have forced themselves to believe.

Canada in Decay reviewed by Dorchester Review

Leftists believe what they say. Conservatives self-deceive themselves into believing what they dislike because they are afraid of leftist repercussions. This is how I read a conservative review of my book, Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017), published in Dorchester Review. This is a respectable “magazine of history,”  launched in 2011, which comes in printed form only with a limited online presence. It has a readership among educated conservatives, with university library subscriptions. Its intention, so the editors tell us, is to “challenge the politically correct vision of history often found in the media and in academe.”

The review is by Australian conservative academic, Gregory Melleuish, with the title, “Is the West Really ‘White’?” Right from the beginning Melleuish is trying to convince himself that I am wrong to call Canada and the West “White”. He does not mean that it is becoming less White; he means that we should not worry about diversity since the West was never white in the first place. My book is packed with historical statistics about the ethnic composition of Canada, and one of these is that Canada, right when multiculturalism was announced in 1971, was 96 percent white. This fact worries Melleuish, and this is why he sidesteps all the opposing evidence and logical argument I present showing that Canada was White throughout its history. (In Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age I do the same in regards to West civilization.)

It is noteworthy, to start with, that the pictures and images in this issue of Dorchester, and in many other issues I have seen, are mostly of white Canadians, with a nostalgic vent about Anglo Canada. Conservatives, those who are white, let me repeat, prefer whiteness over diversity; the pictures are not acts of self-deception but reveal a preference for white culture at a subconscious level, in contrast to your typical leftist historical magazine with their endless pageants to Amerindians and Chinese rail workers .

I met Melleuish at a Telos conference a few years ago in Italy. He seemed a decent person. This rebuttal is against the self-deceptions of the politically correct conservative establishment, not him personally. From the opening lines, Melleuish tries to convince himself there is nothing to worry about current immigration levels:

There is a large movement of people between countries as may be expected in an age of easy communication and travel, but it is the movement of people from less developed ones which has become contentious. Some advanced countries, such as Japan, take very few people outside. Others such as Canada and Australia, take a very large number in relation to their existing populations. Of course, both Canada an Australia have a long tradition of seeking immigrants as a means of both growing their populations and enabling national development.  

At various points in Canada in Decay I challenged the claim that current immigration trends are merely a natural continuation of immigration patterns in the past and globalizing tendencies today. Melleuish knows that Canada and Australia accepted white immigrants only until recently, and that diversification is a totally new phenomenon. I argued against the false claim (advanced by Canada’s official multicultural ideologue, Will Kymlicka) that “massive numbers of people are moving across borders, making virtually every country more polyethnic in composition”. I explained that this claim should be described as a willful attempt to deceive white students into believing that diversification is happening across the world.

Mass immigration is not a normal and inevitable affair happening across the globalizing world. Immobility is typical for the vast majority of the world’s population. In 2005, it was estimated that only 1.4 percent of the population of less developed countries was foreign born. In the case of highly globalized Asia, immigrants have accounted for a mere 1.4-1.6% of Asia’s population over the past twenty years – despite fertility rates well below replacement levels in Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and other Asian countries. Only Western globalists are encouraging millions upon millions of third worlders to arrive.

Canada in Decay is about the Ultimate Nature of Immigration

Dogs Love Canada in Decay

He then claims that my book barely discusses “the nature of immigration” when in reality he means to say that Canada in Decay is the ONLY book by an academic in the West that discusses the nature of immigration without kowtowing to leftist mandates. 

One of the topics which is least discussed is the nature of immigration into Canada over the past twenty years. For example, there is little discussion of the occupations of these immigrants, their level of education and, most importantly, the extent to which they have inter-married with the existing Canadian population.

The entire book, actually, is about the ultimate nature of immigration, not as an incidental consequence of global markets, but as a well orchestrated program that is bringing about the dispossession of whites. Chapter 6, and paragraphs in other chapters, discuss levels of education, government costs, employment opportunities, and other similar subjects about integration and ethnic enclaves in Canada. Melleuish is right that I don’t discuss these subjects in the way academics are required; the book has no “policy proposals” about how immigration can be improved, nothing about how Canadian society can become more inclusive. Neither does it frame immigration problems as problems about “white discrimination” or lack of funding for multicultural programs.

Instead Canada in Decay addresses questions such as why all white created nations are currently regulated and mandated to diversify themselves in the first place. I believe this is the supreme historical question of our times. Immigration is altering forever the millennial ethnic character of European nations. As I state in the first page: “There is no example in history of a people or a nation promoting its own replacement by foreigners from other races, religions, and cultures”. Melleuish’s review does not have a word engaging this ultimate question. He allows himself, rather, to believe the leftist lie that immigration is inevitable and intrinsically good. I would think that a historical magazine that seeks to “challenge” political correctness would have some interest in this question.

Melleuish continues:

Issues of ethnicity only become an issue when different groups seek to put up boundaries between themselves and other groups. This was the case in Australia with regard to Protestants and Catholics but it has faded over time…Over time, the cultures of which multiculturalism is composed cease to exist, unless they are prop up artificially by governments.  

In other words, it does not matter how many immigrants from the Third World arrive with widely different customs and religions, they are bound to assimilate as long as governments don’t encourage separation. It is odd that in a four page review with two columns in each page, Melleuish never cites a word from Canada in Decay, not one. Maybe he just skimmed the book. It brings up differences between immigration patterns in the past, when almost all the immigrants were from Europe, and immigrant patterns today. It argues that the cultures that have ceased to exist separately in America, Canada, and Australia are all European and Christian, while noting that the only groups that have encountered persisting difficulties at integration are blacks and aboriginals.

Deep down Melleuish knows this. He knows the quality of life of aboriginals in Australia is the second worst of the planet; 45% of aboriginal men and 34% of women die before the age of 45. The ones doing well are mostly race-mixed. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to close the gap between aboriginals and Whites but the gap persists. Maybe this is why Melleuish brings up “interracial marriages” two times; globalist elites have now calculated that the best strategy to integrate non-whites is to force whites to marry them.

Melleuish repeats that I prefer “biologically-determined” arguments over cultural arguments in my assessment of diversification. This is not true. I just argue that race cannot be ignored. The left has chosen race as their battle ground, and the intention of the establishment is to diversify white nations, while designating as “racist” any white who objects to this mandated program. Race is an inescapable political reality, not just a biological fact. Conservatives are deceiving themselves pretending that race is not biologically and politically real.

I spent considerable time explaining why a “civic identity”, or an identity based on political liberal values alone, is not enough to integrate multiple races but is a political weapon chosen by the establishment to mislead whites into believing that their nations are nothing more than congregations of abstract, rootless, and deracinated individuals. Melleuish reduces the “Anglo heritage” to a “legal tradition” as if this heritage was a product of legal academics acting in concert with the peoples of the world. He ignores my argument about how classical liberalism was infiltrated and transformed by cultural Marxists into a set of universal propositions amounting to the idea that diversity enriches us all. He self-deceives himself about the history of liberal values and the history of the Anglo heritage. Ethnic nationalism was the order of day among all classical liberals up until recently, before cultural Marxists conducted their “march through the institutions.”

Melleuish brings up my argument about the Charter of Rights without actually indicating what it says, but only to pretend that Australia “has escaped the tyranny of an ‘entrenched’ Charter of Rights.” I argue that the Charter was heavily influenced by supranational human rights principles detached from Canada’s shared culture, history, religion, and ethnicity. But I also argue that liberalism across the West has always suffered from the imagination that nations are contractual arrangements forged by abstract individuals, even though liberal historians have known that European nations were never created in this manner but were indeed products of historically rooted groups who clearly distinguished themselves from other groups.

No European nation was created and sustained without an in-group identity and a friend/enemy distinction. I explained at length how the tendency among liberals to forget the inescapable reality of in-group national identities was exploited by cultural Marxists in the wake of the post-WWII hysteria against any form of white in-group identity.

Chinese in Melbourne: “Hi Aussies, thanks for designating us the defenders of Anglo Heritage. We certainly are in charge of Chinese Heritage, not you.”

Melleuish ignores everything I said but instead opts for the self-deception that Australia has escaped Canada’s Charter-based multiculturalism to be a nation in which multiple races cohabit in a state of concord around a strong Anglo heritage. He is oblivious to the many projections indicating that Australia will become an Asian nation by the end of the 21st century. Numerous regions, including the cities of Sydney and Melbourne, are already over 20-25% Asian. Multiculturalism is rampant in Australian education, no less than in Canada, and everywhere Aussies are compelled to repeat that “diversity is culturally enriching”. Not a day goes by in which they are not called upon to apologize for their past “white only” immigration policies while handing out billions to Aboriginals. Melleuish says he is “very happy” with this situation. He claims it meets the test of what it means to “conserve” the Anglo heritage.

Rome was White

This is the self-delusional world conservatives inhabit. The self-deceptions extend to their readings of history. Roman extension of citizenship, he writes, “to all free men in the empire” regardless of “connection between ethnicity and being Roman” shows that multiculturalism and race mixing have been at the heart of Western achievement. From its origins Roman culture was “derived from a mixture of peoples”. Leftists love to make similarly wishful claims.  The truth is Rome originated out of Italic peoples with an Indo-European (Aryan) ancestry. There was only a little bit of Etruscan input, a people with a Near Eastern DNA lineage. The Roman Empire was undoubtedly extended over many lands that were racially non-European, but as Azar Gat observes in Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (2003), ethnicity was no less an important component of the makeup of the Roman empire than domination by social elites over a tax paying peasantry or slave force. Not just Rome, but empires through history, Gat says, “almost universally were either overtly or tacitly the empires of a particular people or ethnos” (p. 111).

While Gat does not identify the Romans and Italians as a race, but writes of the Romans and Italians as ethnic groups with their own distinctive culture, it is worth noting, first, that the Etruscans were, and would remain, the only non-Indo-European people in the Italian peninsula, and, second, that as the Romans defeated all other ethnic groups in Italy, they imposed a process of acculturation to Roman ways, through elite connections, military service, and eventually the granting of citizenship. Citizenship was granted to all Italian residents after the so-called Social War of 91–88 BC. These Italians were almost all white, and this is why, as Gat notes, “by the time of Augustus the concepts of Roman and Italian had become virtually identical” (p. 120).

Whites from different ethnic groups can assimilate. By contrast, non-Europeans never really assimilated to Roman culture. It is true that as the process of Romanisation continued, in 212 AD the free population in the Empire, including members of other races, was given citizenship status. Historians agree the only reason the Emperor Caracalla extended citizenship was to expand the Roman tax base. All in all, the acquisition of citizenship came in graduated levels with promises of further rights with increased assimilation; and, right until the end, not all citizens had the same rights, with Romans and Italians generally enjoying a higher status. Rome was a very Eurocentric empire.

It is also the case that Romanisation was largely successful in the Western half of the empire, in Italy, Gaul, and Iberia, all of which were white in race. Meanwhile, when Rome broke apart after the fourth century AD, the Eastern Empire retained its upper crust Greekness, with a mass of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Judaic, Persian, and Assyrian peoples following their ancient ways, virtually untouched by Roman culture. The process of Romanisation and expansion of citizenship was effective only in the Western (Indo-European) half of the Empire; whereas in the East it had superficial effects apart from the Greek inhabitants.

Melleuish offers a few lines about how the “brutal” system of apartheid in South Africa “failed in part because demography was running against would-be White masters”. Why are conservatives so reluctant to show sympathy for the thousands of white farmers killed by the would-be Black masters now in charge in South Africa? He implies that the “would-be White masters” of Canada and Australia are also facing a demographic crisis because both populations “are not particularly fecund.” Immigration, he wants us to believe, is merely an effort to solve this demographic crisis. “Feminists,” he says, “would not allow” a policy encouraging higher fertility rates. So what? Why should conservatives follow the dictates of childless academic feminists? What’s wrong with encouraging our domestic populations to have more babies the way the Japanese are openly advocating rather than lazily trying to steal talent from elsewhere? Why can’t we learn from the Japanese leadership, which has openly stated that an aging population is “not a burden, but an incentive to boost productivity through innovations like robots, wireless sensors and artificial intelligence” without immigration? These is the way Canada in Decay addresses immigration issues. It is obviously a way that is prohibited by the establishment, and this is why Melleuish gave it a review filled with self-deceptions. 

Please follow and like us:

Author