G.K. Chesterton believed that we all needed to stand on our heads so that we could see things the right way up. This topsy-turvydom is not mere Chestertonian madness or “paradox” but a practical way of reorienting our perspective. We often believe that we see things the right way up and we, therefore, take our perception of things for granted. If, however, we are seeing things askew without knowing it, standing on our heads will allow us to see them from the new angle necessary to see them correctly. Solzhenitsyn’s words are a case in point. They show us that true multiculturalism in the form of a plurality of thriving national cultures is a good thing. The problem is not that multiculturalism is bad but that the form of it we are being sold by the globalists is not really multiculturalism at all.
How often are we told that those who oppose the Islamization of Europe, or who want limits on immigration levels, or who demand the restitution of national sovereignty are thereby opposed to multiculturalism? Indeed the headlines are currently full of such accusations, fueled by the globalist reaction to Brexit and to the rise of the so-called New Right across Europe. Are the ethnocentric parties throughout Europe opposed to multiculturalism, as the globalists proclaim, or are they the true multiculturalists?
Let’s compare the two forms of multiculturalism. The globalist variety does not want a multiplicity of multifarious national cultures; they want a melting pot in which all cultures meld into a global culture in which everyone wears the same global brands of clothing, shops at the same global chains, watches the same global movies and TV programs, plays the same global games, and listens to the same global music. What they want, in fact, is not any real form of multiculturalism but a worldwide monoculture of standardized people, reduced to being mere consumers of the bread and circuses that the global plutocracy provides for them. This mad and manic monoculture is what the globalists call multiculturalism.
In contrast, the subsidiarist view of multiculturalism as envisaged by Solzhenitsyn and those of kindred ilk calls for the thriving of independent national, regional, and local cultures. It calls for a Europe of the Nations and not a European Union. It seeks a patchwork-quilt cultural landscape in which local customs and cuisines flourish and are not mown down by the globalist insistence on standardization by a low standard in which the global brand is invariably bland.
When all is said and done, the globalists only seek temporary multiculturalism as a means to a global monoculture. Theirs is a false and sinister multiculturalism designed to destroy the authentic multiplicity of cultures, the latter of which have grown organically from the soil and soul of their peoples.
The globalist form of multiculturalism is in reality nothing less than cultural imperialism in which a global plutocracy imposes its will on the people, selling them the products that it produces and poisoning the roots of all cultures in which it comes into contact. The goal of the globalists is to plough down nations and their cultures in the same manner in which agribusiness ploughs down hedgerows, turning the richness of the patchwork landscape into a prairie wasteland in which only one brand of bland mass-produced culture is permitted. Such willful destruction of the cultural environment can be called many things but it is really Orwellian newspeak and doublethink of the most outrageous sort, worthy of the chutzpah of Big Brother himself, to have the temerity to call it “multiculturalism.”
Books by Joseph Pearce may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.