Windschuttle on the Consequences of Multiculturalism

Keith Windschuttle, one of the most refreshing voices in historiography, analyzes the Australian "race riots" in, where else, the Australian. He writes:

IT was inevitable, given the prevailing mind-set within government and the media, that Sydney's beachside violence this week would be called race riots.

The New South Wales Premier, his ministers and many newspaper headlines all used the term.

However, a more ungainly but nonetheless more accurate description would have been multicultural riots.

For the doctrine of multiculturalism is really to blame.

The tensions that exploded this week were defined into existence by multiculturalist policies and ideas.

It wasn't the youths at Cronulla beach who decided that all Lebanese constitute an ethnic group.

That was done for them by politicians, bureaucrats and academics in the name of constructing ethnic communities.

...

Multiculturalism is... at odds with the core tenets of liberal democracy, where rights inhere in the individual, not the collective, and where people's representatives are elected politicians, not self-appointed ethnic spokesmen or godfathers.

Multiculturalism is a reversion to tribalism that is anachronistic in a modern, liberal, urban society.

In Sydney it has been plain for at least a decade that, instead of ethnic communities living happily in the diversity of social pluralism, multiculturalism has bred ethnic ghettos characterised by high levels of unemployment, welfare dependency, welfare abuse, crime and violence.

The social engineers responsible should have been well aware of the likely outcome, especially for young men.

All the evidence from the numerous studies of similar ethnic ghettos in North America and Europe show they produce much the same result, whatever the colour or ethnicity of their inhabitants.

Ghetto culture for young men everywhere is characterised by interpersonal violence, sexual irresponsibility, incomplete education, substandard speech, a hypersensitivity about being disrespected and a feckless attitude towards work.

The Lebanese assaults on the Cronulla lifesavers that led to this week's mass retaliation were nothing new.

This behaviour has been with us for more than a decade.

Read the whole thing here.

Windschuttle has emerged in recent years as one of the most prolific and perceptive critics of modern liberalism. I first became aware of him when I read his devastating critique of left-wing Australian historigraphy, "The Killing of History". Check out his site here and read some of his product -- it's wonderful!