Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Why Multiculture Will Always Fail

Nicolai Sennels’ latest guest-essay concerns a topic that has greatly preoccupied Western European leaders in recent months: the failure of Multiculturalism.

Immigrants in Birmingham

Why multiculture will always fail
by Dr. Nicolai Sennels


Several leading European politicians have now declared the multicultural project dead and impossible to implement. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has concluded that the “so-called ‘multikulti’ concept — where people would ‘live side-by-side’ happily — did not work” (BBC, 17. October 2010). Merkel said straight out that the attempt to build a multicultural society has “utterly failed”. British prime minister David Cameron (BBC, 5 Feb 2011) and French president Nicolas Sarkozy (The Telegraph, 11 Feb 2011) quickly followed suit and declared multiculturalism a “failed” effort. Cameron added that the “UK needed a stronger national identity” and Sarkozy argued that “We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.”

As a psychologist who has had hundreds of immigrants as clients, my conclusion is that the multicultural society will always fail because it is contrary to the fundamental psychological principles that are needed for building healthy communities. This basic psychological principle concerns identity — national identity. As quoted above, Cameron and Sarkozy reached the same conclusion.

National identity

For a society to succeed, its citizens must be able to unite around common core values. The most fundamental values are national identity and a wish for fellowship with one’s countrymen. National identity means that you feel like a Dane if you live in Denmark. Fellowship means that similarities — first of all the fact that you live in the same country — means more than differences, for example religion, color, or country of origin.

National identity and the feeling of fellowship increase work morale, taxpaying morale, morale in relation to social services, and respect for the country’s laws in general. People who experience themselves as part of the community will feel that they harm themselves if they harm the community. National identity is also important for respect towards the nation’s authorities.

The sense of community is crucial to the quality of life for us “pack” animals, and common core values are the foundation of the mutual trust and mutual helpfulness, openness, understanding and respect among the population. People who are deeply divided on core values and who want the community to evolve in completely different directions simply feel less fellowship with one another.

When people identify with a culture whose values are not rooted in the nation’s indigenous culture, this identification happens at the expense of identification with the greater community. The step towards acting in violation of the community’s interest is therefore shorter, which is one of the reasons for the dramatic over-representation of certain immigrant groups in crime and unemployment statistics.

Multiculturalization of a society, therefore, leads to an increased need for control, prohibitions, police, and tougher sentences in order to prevent internal factions from cheating or committing crimes against the community. Multicultural societies thus move easily towards a less democratic and more fascistic condition. The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt concludes in hindsight: “The concept of multiculturalism is actually incompatible with a democratic society. … If one asks, where in the world are multicultural societies functioning, he quickly comes to the conclusion, that multiculturalism can only exist peacefully within strong authoritarian states.” (Hamburger Abendblatt, 24 Nov 2004).

Anti-culture

Fortunately, immigrants from almost all over the world have been able to accept and identify with our basic Western values. There are a few problems with organized crime and demographic clumping among immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe but it has never became a threat to society.

Despite certain success stories and role models, one culture has proved impossible to integrate sufficiently, namely the Islamic one. Muslim culture and religion have demonstrated some inherent self-protective mechanisms which makes Muslim immigrants resistant to external influences from the host culture.

What we are dealing with here is a culture that in the most important areas — including true democracy, free speech, equality of women, and tolerance towards other faiths — has changed very little or not at all since it first appeared in a medieval clan society 1,400 years ago. It is almost unbelievable, given how much the rest of the world has changed during that time. The unfortunate combination of excessive Western tolerance and a lack of flexibility from the Muslim culture’s side has resulted in a kind of cultural osmosis, where Western values have not yet been able to penetrate the Islamic world while Islamization diffuses from the Muslim community into non-Muslim societies.

In multicultures which includes Muslim culture, the problems arising from lack of national identity and sense of community are therefore proportionately larger. Hence today the term “multiculture” is equivalent to societies where both Muslim and non-Muslim cultures exists. A more precise term would therefore be “bi-culture”. Instead of integrating into the common society, parallel societies appears, where benefit fraud and tax evasion are highly prevalent and where lawlessness and hostility against non-Islamic authorities are extreme and often violent.

According to police, Denmark has 25 to 30 “sensitive areas” with many immigrants, where police and fire departments can not work without risking being attacked (Midtjyllands Avis, August 7th, 2010). One among many examples is the Facebook page “Ishoj Ghetto”, which encourages its 650 members with the following battle cry: “My brothers. We shall destroy all the police cars approaching Ishoj. It is our city.” (Ekstrabladet, August 3rd, 2010). Holland, France, Britain, Belgium, Germany and most other Western European countries have cities and ghettos with similar problems. A study in Taastrup (city in Denmark) shows that immigrants and their descendants are behind 75 percent of all benefit fraud cases — although the proportion of immigrants is only 21 percent (Jyllands-Posten, August 31st, 2010).

Across Western Europe, there are parallel Muslim societies that have reached a stage so advanced that they have built their own political, economic and legal infrastructure. The executive, legislative and judicial power lies with the imams, police-like Muslim father patrol groups, homemade Sharia Courts and Islamic mediation meetings. The economy is characterized by the fact that Muslims prefer to buy goods and services from other Muslims, and the Islamic Havala banking (a system of private money transfers outside of authorities and banks) has largely replaced the normal ways of conducting financial transactions. It is too short a jump from this well-developed Islamic infrastructure and aggressive attitude toward the non-Islamic environment to the demands for autonomy and secession. Such demands have been made by Muslims throughout Islamic history, and in today’s China, Russia, Thailand, Africa, and the Balkans Muslims use guerrilla warfare, terrorism, kidnappings and threats to achieve this end.

Common sense and mature life experience could have prevented us from making the mistake to begin with. A couple of decades too late — always being the last to admit a mistake — our politicians finally admit the obvious problems (but only after opinion polls proved that the majority of voters do not want multiculture). But what will they do about it?

Three obvious solutions

The first and most basic solution is to stop immigration from countries that are not Western-oriented, which primarily applies to the Islamic world. As the Americans says: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Secondly, we need to do as Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and Nicolas Sarkozy recommend: We must strengthen the national identity both among immigrants and the indigenous population. This is done primarily by making our educational institutions and public service media focus more on our countries’ history, culture and values. Moreover, we must force immigrants to integrate by making language proficiency, knowledge about our culture and history, adherence to the law and tax payment for e.g. 10 years a condition for receiving social benefits. Problematic demographic developments can partly be solved by limiting the state’s economic child support to the country’s average amount of children per mother (2 children). We do that in Denmark and it prevents immigrants from moving to Denmark, having/bringing a lot of kids and living on the money that the family get from the state for each child.

Thirdly, we must stop diluting and challenging our own culture and national identity through Islamization and parallel societies. The influential mosques and Islamic cultural centers makes Muslims stay in a very rigid version of their original culture. Dominant symbols like minarets, Halal food in public institutions, closure of public taxpayer-funded sports facilities in order to make Muslim women able to use them, state-supported Koranic schools, prayer rooms in public workplaces, hospitals, etc. are also harmful to the development of national identity among both immigrants and the rest of us. Islamization and parallel societies make it possible to live from cradle to grave in non-Muslim countries without ever leaving the circle of Muslim culture. It is contradictory and counterproductive to want national identity among immigrants when the government simultaneously allows and even supports Islamization.

Muslim parallel societies in the West produce tens of thousands of alienated citizens with very low or no national identity and loyalty — every year. These parallel communities must be dissolved by all means possible. This includes zero tolerance towards any breach of the law. Tax authorities, Social Services and the police play a crucial role in this context.

I would like to add that after working as a prison psychologist for years, my conclusion is that the only thing criminal immigrants really fear is being deported. We also need to do as the Danish Municipality of Aarhus does: Send female social workers or midwives into the homes of non-Western immigrants to meet with the women (without participation of male family members) to ensure that they and their daughters are safe, free and know their rights to divorce, and about family planning, contraception, women’s shelters and repatriation (state-paid emigration to the family’s country of origin).

In order to stop multiculture and challenge the rigid traditionalistic, unassimilable and widespread version of Muslim culture, the women have to be freed to choose their sexual partners, number of children, clothing style, and religion. As the Danish Muslim activist Kristina Khader, initiator of the women’s advisory centre Project New Hymen, told me in an interview: “The social control of women aims to preserve the core of the Muslim culture. A big part of the Muslim culture’s core is about female sexuality.” (JP-blog “Kulturkloeften”, November 2, 2009).

In general multiculture must be fought by making the inability or unwillingness to integrate so practically difficult and economically unprofitable that repatriation the only attractive option.

This is a long list of necessary demands and consequences, but the carrot is equally big: Participation on equal footing in the world’s freest, richest and best functioning culture — the West.


Nicolai Sennels is a psychologist and the author of “Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s experiences with the Copenhagen Municipality”.

Previous posts by or about Nicolai Sennels:

2010 Jan 6 The Eternal Victim
  Feb 19 Youths, Crime, and Islam
  Apr 11 The Stigmatization Fallacy
  May 8 Islam Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
  Jul 28 Nicolai Sennels: An Open Letter to David Cameron
  Aug 5 Rape by Proxy
    10 Islam and Inbreeding
  Dec 17 The Connection Between Muslim Inbreeding and Terrorism
2011 Jan 10 The Dhimmification of the Red Cross
    12 Was Muhammad a Gelotophobe?
    26 Food Crises are Caused by Overpopulation
  Feb 10 Send in the Midwives!
    23 Western Quran Schools Are “Terrorist Factories”

22 comments:

Pat H. said...

Yes, multiculturalism is a complete failure.

It's why Muslims can't fit Western Culture.

It's why Zionist Jews can't fit Western Culture either.

Manfred Kleine-Hartlage said...

Do you think Nicolai Sennels would object if I translated this article into German?

M.A. said...

.
Multiculti is doing just fine in Singapore.
Enforced there by government mandate.
Government requires a mix of Chinese, Indian, and Malay-Muslim in every school and apartment block.
The three groups don't love each other, but they have been living together without troubles for half a century.
So, why does multiculti work in Singapore, but not in The West?

Baron Bodissey said...

Manfred --

I think it will be fine with him, provided that you credit him and include a link to this post. Thanks for asking.

Prospero said...

@ M.A.
Forgive my ignorance, but it begs the question: What is the penalty for failure to abide by the government mandate?

Anonymous said...

M.A. asks: So, why does multiculti work in Singapore, but not in The West?

The answer illustrates Dr. Sennels' point about multiculti leading to increased social control by authorities. Singapore is so strict, people get flogged for writing graffiti. Chewing gum in public is forbidden. No wonder everyone gets along, they're shaking in their boots, thinking of what will happen if they don't!

Nicolai Sennels said...

Latté island:
You are absolutely right. And: is it a succesfull multicultural society when every ethnic groups lives separated from the others?

Anonymous said...

“The most fundamental values are national identity and a wish for fellowship with one’s countrymen.”

While national identity and a wish for fellowship with one’s countrymen are important, I disagree with the general premise, if that’s all he’s saying there is to it. Multiculturalism doesn’t work if it doesn’t go both ways but there’s more to it than that. All fundamental values are based on motivational goals; self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence, and universalism. By Universalism I mean an understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protection for the welfare of all people and nature. The subject of multiculturalism is intimately tied to religion in Europe and America which is why I dislike multiculturalism. The argument always comes down to religion, in my view. Islamic doctrine runs counter to the US Constitution, as does I must mention, does Christian doctrine by fundamentalists who insist that Creationism be taught as a science in America’s public schools. If Muslims or Christians wish to teach their own children 4th century beliefs, they may do so in private but not at the public’s expense. If they live in a democratic country and wish to implement barbaric laws based on their religion, they may not do so as long as they are living in a democracy.

syntec said...

I believe we are all missing the big picture by a very long way.

It isn't just the presence of Muslims albeit they being the most prominent and pernicious threat right at this point in time, it's also all non-White Third World peoples and their respective cultures collectively that will eventually bury Western civilization and the indigenous peoples of Europe and their descendants elsewhere along with it.

The problem is, firstly, the ruling ideology of Marxist Liberalism and its extensive tentacles across the whole of the political, judicial and general societal areas of life.

The second is the imposition of the man-made unnatural legislation called Human Rights and Affirmative Action edicts upon all of Western society.

The third stumbling block is, of course, the enablement and aiding and abetting of by the Marxists, of mass non-White Third World immigration and asylum whether supposed legal or clearly illegal.

These are the three killer road blocks indigenous European peoples will first have to demolish and I have no doubt, they will indeed succeed.

JS123 said...

The major mistake in this piece lies in this passage: "For a society to succeed, its citizens must be able to unite around common core values. The most fundamental values are national identity and a wish for fellowship with one’s countrymen."
National identity isn't a value, or a set of values. It is the perception of one possessing a shared history with others. It has nothing to do with the possession of a set of values.

Anonymous said...

Just one example of the success of refusing to adapt the multiculturalism paradigm:

Earthquake Ravaged Japanese Highway Rebuilt in Three Days

Contrast and compare to any society infused with the debilitations of Islam and shariah.

EJGB said...

I could be entirely out of my depth on this, but it would appear to me that in any culture where there is an influx of Islamic zealots, there soon follows discord.

Someone correct if I am off base on this.

urah2222 said...

#3 M.A.

3 Word answer - Lee Kwan Yew. That is all.

Dr. Shalit

ib said...

@ Pat H
Please explain your statement "It's why Zionist Jews can't fit Western Culture either."

Dymphna said...

In general multiculture must be fought by making the inability or unwillingness to integrate so practically difficult and economically unprofitable that repatriation the only attractive option.

This idea was explored in quite practical terms by Queen Margrethe in her autobiography. That was our introduction to modern Danish thinking and it was most congenial to our own ideas.

That woman has such common sense it makes one weep for Queen Elisabeth.

Sagunto said...

Quote:

"The unfortunate combination of excessive Western tolerance and a lack of flexibility from the Muslim culture’s side has resulted in a kind of cultural osmosis, where Western values have not yet been able to penetrate the Islamic world..[..]"

The social engineering mentality is seeping through here.. Add that to the part that starts with "Secondly..", a paragraph amounting to a typical progressivist mandate for the welfare state to use its power in order to create compliant Muslims and, here we go again, "liberate" Muslim women (something that even hard-core Soviet bureaucrats failed to accomplish), and what do you have? More power to the state, exactly how progressives, now enabling Islam, like it. Part of this article thus contributes to the fierce debate among progressives how to save the modern liberal welfare state, while also laying just another brick in the vast wall of PC MC that surrounds us.
The part about deportation could have been more in line with the realization that both Islam and practising Muslims cannot be "reformed" along "laiciste" lines, certainly not by using state coercion.

The other quote that effectively ruins this otherwise wonderful article for me:

"we need to do as Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and Nicolas Sarkozy recommend"

The short answer: never.

But seriously, one couldn't have wished for more sincerity about the true nature of this kind of CJ theorizing, for when combined with the call for strengthening the "national identity" quo modo Sarkozy et al, the actual progressivist colours of this scheme really begin to shine. State worshipping Socialists of the past (in the US most notably the Bellamy nephews) called themselves Nationalists. I think some caution about watered-down variants emerging in progressivist anti-Islam policy recommendations, is warranted.

Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.

Hesperado said...

Sagunto wrote:

"The social engineering mentality is seeping through here.. Add that to the part that starts with "Secondly..", a paragraph amounting to a typical progressivist mandate for the welfare state to use its power in order to create compliant Muslims and, here we go again, "liberate" Muslim women..."

I agree. Proposals such as this (and they are rather common even from within the anti-Islam movement) reflect an inability to grasp the full nature and dimensions of the horror and terror of Islam and of all Muslims.

Were we talking about any other immigrant group from any other Third World region, Sennels' drift would be more or less cogent and sensible. Muslims, however, are a unique, and the danger they embody and promote is uniquely pernicious, wicked and deadly.

Michael Servetus said...

Western politicians saying multiculturalsim has failed amounts to the local imam saying Islam is a religion of peace. In both cases the practical effet will be that they will both try harder to eliminate that which is in the way.

Sagunto said...

Michael Servetus -

I think you're right. But even if there was just a hint, a nano-bit of sincerity in the statements of these late-to-the-stage opportunists, they should be damned to whatever ugly place for having tried to make multiculturalism work.

Sag.

Anonymous said...

Values are never enough. Country's like the USA are places people come to in order to abandon their culture in favour of a new life and culture. That may be okay for the USA - which, for the most part, accepts its duty as a nation of immigrants but it won't work elsewhere. Europe, for example, will never accept becoming a "United States of Europe".

In Europe people don't want to abandon their culture - or be put into a position where their ethnic majority status is threatened. I think the notion of "Europe" where there is only a handful of ethnic Europeans - is meaningless. Europe will already be dead - because values can (and do) change as quick as the weather.

People are just wrong when they say race and ethnicity mean nothing. They are a source of stability - which Europeans are now removing. All peoples have a natural sense of race and ethnicity - accepting this in no way entitles people to become racist, supremicist or hate anyone because of their race... but to deny it is to avoid reality.

People naturally depend on the security and stability of race and ethnicity - especially in times of threat, problems and strife.

The reason Europe is becomig less stable is because our politicians have undermined our Europe's ethnic and racial foundations - and now hey are faced with the problem that they have communities which have nothing in common.

Values are never enough to hold a nation together. I don't even believe he USA will hold itself together. Values are inherently prone to shifting and instability.

A society based on values is just kidding itself.

1389 said...

@Hesperado
Good to see you again, and, of course, you're absolutely right. All of this pussyfooting around is not going to solve the problem.

It's time to start talking about immediate mass deportation. If the Muslims riot because they want to stay and feed off the government teat and continue spreading their poison, then that's why every country has (or should have) police and armies.

Marriage between Muslims and non-Muslims (or even between Muslims and Muslims) should NOT be considered legal in any non-Muslim country, given the fact that Islam allows polygamy. Instead, it should be considered just another form of chattel slavery, and not be given any legal protection whatsoever. Just sayin'.

Anonymous said...

Reply to MA.

"Multiculti is doing just fine in Singapore.
Enforced there by government mandate.
Government requires a mix of Chinese, Indian, and Malay-Muslim in every school and apartment block.
The three groups don't love each other, but they have been living together without troubles for half a century.
So, why does multiculti work in Singapore, but not in The West?".

Singapore is also a Police state, has a totalitarian Govt. and little freedom to criticise (bound by PC).

Singapore is a multi-racial state but with limited multiculturalism. Of course there is alot of affirmative action but the Chinese and Western cultures are dominant. The Singaporean Govt. does not see Indian or Malay culture as equal, do they?

Also Singapore is nowhere as racially mixed as most Western nations. Try adding some Somali refugees, Muslims from Central Asia and Arabs. Let's see how cohesive the nanny state of Singapore becomes?