What is Wrong With Western Elites?

Below is Fjordman’s latest essay. For a complete archive of his writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.


Libya’s autocratic ruler Muammar Qaddafi was brutally tortured and killed on 20 October 2011 after France, Britain, the USA and NATO had actively given military support to rebel troops that were known to include groups with ties to terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda.

As writer Diana West said, “Qaddafi was not killed in retaliation for his attacks on American servicemen in Berlin in 1986, or the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1989. He was not killed for his central role in the USSR’s terror networks going back to the 1960s and 1970s. He was killed after coming over to our side of George Bush’s ‘war on terror’ in the final phase of a civil war in Libya in which his regime fought al Qaeda affiliates. Horrific as it sounds, Qaddafi was killed because we and our NATO allies joined the other side.”

In February 2011, a day before he quit as Egypt’s president after popular uprisings, Hosni Mubarak had harsh words for his former allies in the United States and their misguided quest for democracy in the Middle East. “They may be talking about democracy but they don’t know what they’re talking about and the result will be extremism and radical Islam.”

Mubarak during his three decades in power kept stability in Egypt, peace with its neighbors including Israel and promoted decent economic progress in his country without being cruel. Despite this, the USA quickly turned its back on him when protests began. The Muslim Brotherhood has since gained in strength, and attacks on Coptic Christians have escalated.

Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was with his writings among the inspirations for the Jihadists terrorists from al-Qaeda who killed three thousand Americans on September 11th 2001. A decade later, President Obama and his Administration are actively aiding the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere to gain more influence.

Many ordinary citizens, when witnessing our so-called leaders supporting our enemies, wonder whether Western political elites have lost their grip on reality. What are they trying to achieve with such stupid and suicidal policies? Why do they want to export democracy to Islamic countries, even if this brings radical organizations with hostile agendas to power, at the same time as the democratic system is being de facto abolished in Europe by the European Union?

My personal view is that the cultural, economic and especially immigration policies currently promoted by the ruling elites throughout virtually the entire Western world are harmful to the long-term interests of the European peoples who created this civilization. One fundamental question that has been hotly debated on the Internet by dissident writers is whether this trend is entirely accidental, and exclusively reflects the purely impersonal forces of technological globalization, or whether there is also a purpose and a plan behind some of these changes.

I believe that there is also an intentional plan of breaking down Western nation-states behind this trend. This is demonstrated by the statements of some key actors, by the all-pervasive (in the Western world at least) indoctrination with non-European “diversity” as well as by the systematic demonization and ridicule of all traditional practices, cultural symbols and national flags. The arguments, or rather lies, presented in favor of continued mass immigration and Multiculturalism are remarkably similar in all Western countries, too similar to be entirely coincidental.


The question is: Why? And what do those promoting such policies hope to achieve?

It is important to realize that this does not necessarily rule out other possible explanations, which may supplement rather than contradict the previous claim. It is undoubtedly true that modern Western technology has created a far more integrated world than existed in the past.

One could also successfully argue that there are deep underlying structures and ideas in Western culture and mentality at work here, too, for instance the concept of “universal egalitarianism” that could be found already in Greco-Roman Antiquity, and especially in Christianity. This was secularized after the Enlightenment in the form of human rights. Present-day Globalists, regardless of whether they come in a Socialist or a capitalist shape, can exploit these ideals.

Finally, there is no doubt that many people vote for open-border Globalists of their own free will. For example, I have been severely critical of the British government of Tony Blair, but we should remember that Blair with his Labour Party won no less than three elections in a row. Some of this can be attributed to media censorship and decades of indoctrination plus the mass importation of a new electorate in the form of immigrants who tend to vote for Socialist parties which give them access to more welfare payments. Some of it, maybe, but not all of it.

No matter how we twist this, the fact remains that tens of millions of Westerners have more or less freely voted for parties that insult and dispossess them and rob them of their heritage. We have become decadent, indifferent consumers who live only for the here and now, cut off from our historical roots and with little regard for the future of our nation. Far too often, we care little for what will happen 50-100 years from now as long as we can still personally enjoy a steady supply of material comforts and new electronic toys plus football and sex on TV.

My good friend Ohmyrus, an Asian essayist, has convincingly argued that one of the factors behind the booming budget deficits we can now observe in many Western countries plus Japan may be the short-term focus inherent to the democratic system, where people prefer short-term gain now at the price of long-term pain later and vote themselves into possession of other people’s money. Not enough of them think longer than a couple of election cycles — maybe ten years — ahead. History-conscious peoples who come from non-democratic cultures, for instance the Chinese, seem to find it easier to plan in terms of generations and centuries.

On top of this, the good components that a democracy may contain have ironically also been undermined by hollowing out this system from above through international organizations, which in many cases promote harmful policies even when the majority does not want this.


In 2009 it was revealed that the ruling Labour Party had purposefully flooded Britain with millions of immigrants without consulting its citizens, in order to socially engineer a “truly Multicultural” country. The huge increases in migrants over the previous twelve years were due in part to a politically motivated attempt to radically change the country and to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity,” if you believe Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair. He said that mass immigration was the result of a deliberate plan, but ministers were reluctant to discuss this openly for fear of alienating the party’s “core working class vote.”

Lord Glasman — a personal friend of the Labour Party leader — in 2011 stated that “Labour lied to people about the extent of immigration… and there’s been a massive rupture of trust.” He admitted that the Labour Party had sometimes been actively hostile to the white natives. In particular, they tended to view white working-class voters as “an obstacle to progress.”

To my knowledge, these shocking revelations of a government launching a full-front attack on its own people — in what could be seen as a policy of ethnic cleansing of a specific national group — did not cause a single word of protest from the political leaders or mass media in any other Western country back then. I have since come to suspect that the reason for this shameful silence is that the authorities in many other Western countries themselves follow roughly similar policies and therefore see nothing wrong in what the British government did.

In 2009, the former left-wing US President Bill Clinton stated publicly that Americans should be mindful of their nation’s rapidly changing demographics, which led to the 2008 election of Obama as president. He told an Arab-American audience that before 2050 the USA will no longer have a majority of people of mainly European descent and claimed that “this is a very positive thing.” This was just a few years after a group of Arab Muslim terrorists had staged the deadliest attack against the US mainland in peacetime, killing thousands of US citizens.

Bill Clinton is himself of European extraction. I have never heard representatives of, say, the Chinese Communist Party brag about the fact that they support displacing their own ethnic group from their own country. Only leaders from the supposedly democratic West do this.

The English philosopher Roger Scruton notes that “buying and selling of citizenship, often to people who think of it purely as a right and never as a duty, is common throughout Europe. The political élite sees nothing wrong in people collecting passports as they might collect memberships of clubs.” He thinks that the Western élite are immune to xenophobia, or fear of foreigners, but instead suffer from a severe case of what he terms oikophobia, the repudiation of home, the urge to denigrate the customs and culture of your own people. “The oikophobe is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism.”

Ibn Khaldun is somewhat overrated compared to other non-European historiographers such as Sima Qian, but the most useful aspect of his writings is the concept of asabiyya, which could be translated as group consciousness. Judged by the above cited examples of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton (numerous others might unfortunately be mentioned here), the ongoing decline of Western civilization can partly be explained as a decline of asabiyya among Western elites, who no longer feel attached to their own peoples but see them as obstacles to be overcome, or silenced through widespread anti-racism campaigns and doctrinal guilt imposed from above.

This does not mean that there is no grassroots support at all for Multiculturalism. Yet support for mass immigration is lukewarm at best among the population as a whole, whereas the ruling elites in politics, media and academia promote it enthusiastically. If anything, this pan-Western disconnect and deficit of trust between rulers and the ruled is growing larger. If unchecked, this widening political chasm threatens to seriously undermine stability in the Western world.


In June 2007, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, along with Chancellor (and PM-in-waiting) Gordon Brown and Conservative Party leader (also future PM) David Cameron, met Muslim leaders at a conference organized by the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme. Blair opened by defending Islam as a religion of “moderation and modernity,” announced a government fund to aid teaching of Islam and to train imams and designated Islamic studies as “strategically important” to the British national interest. Timothy Winter, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, said that “The question facing British society, and society as a whole, is not how we encourage minorities to engage with western countries, but how those countries define themselves as a collage of different religious cultures.”

In other words: Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Spain and other Western countries with white majorities are no longer nations with a distinct heritage, only random spaces on the map just waiting to be filled with a “collage of different cultures.”

I could add that North American authorities and mass media are little better than European ones, and sometimes worse. The USA was the first Western country, in 1965, to open its borders to mass immigration from the entire world as a matter of ideological principle. US authorities have been promoting similar policies elsewhere in the Western world ever since.

The concepts of “white privilege” and hostile “Whiteness Studies” were also developed in and spread from the USA. In conflicts between native Europeans and non-native colonizers, US authorities have repeatedly demonstrated that they will go against the interests of the natives.

Former PM Tony Blair showed no regrets when he stated in the fall of 2011 that it is “right” that the country should made up of different cultures and faiths mixed together. That is not to say you don’t encounter problems at certain points, but these “are to be overcome.” Blair added that the anti-immigration debate was now a thing of the past. Sir Andrew Green of Migrationwatch responded that: “This is completely shameless from the Prime Minister who brought more than three million immigrants into Britain in the teeth of public opposition.”

In The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature, Byron M. Roth, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology from the USA, argues that the debate over immigration policy in the Western world is critically uninformed by the sciences of evolutionary biology and psychology. A primary thesis of his book is that societies are mainly the product of the genetic nature of the human beings who make them up, not geography, as Jared Diamond claims. He mentions that rising crime has become a serious problem, often committed by ethnic minorities. Low IQ correlates highly with rates of criminality and antisocial behavior.

What consequences will the mass importation of low-IQ peoples to the West have? Is a certain minimum average IQ necessary to maintain a complex society? Roth speculates whether what may emerge from these demographic patterns is that the USA will move in the direction of countries like Mexico, corrupt and dysfunctional states with oligarchic politics.

Do some Western elites actively desire such a result? Do they hope to turn the Western world into a giant version of Mexico with a weak middle class incapable of challenging a tiny ruling elite (themselves) entrenched virtually as a caste? Perhaps the authoritarian key to crushing the white man’s traditional desire for self-determination is to paralyze it by flooding his lands with alien ethnic groups who themselves often come from repressive and authoritarian cultures. In parts of Europe, Christianity was in medieval times used to consolidate the embryos of nation-states. Perhaps those who seek to break down these nation-states today view a different and more repressive religion, Islam, as a useful tool for achieving this goal.

The phrase “Political Correctness” first came into use under Communism and meant that all ideas had to conform to and support the agenda of the Marxist movement. History and philosophy were the first to be forced into line, but as is clear from the career of Trofim Lysenko, science was made to conform, too. Those who dissented from the official doctrine were judged to be psychologically imbalanced or evil. Today the ruling ideology is an absolute egalitarianism that if you analyze it closely actually amounts to saying that all cultures have an equal right to exist, except the European one which is evil. As Roth says:

Whether Western elites really believe these things is less important than the benefit they gain from its promulgation. The primary benefit is that it paralyzes the popular preferences for national preservation by characterizing opposition to elite doctrines as immoral, indecent, and inhumane. It allows unelected elites to aggrandize their own power by obliterating national sovereignty and nullifying democratic accountability. Many are, without exaggeration, true totalitarians that have no regard for the well-being of those they control, since the only way they can consolidate their dystopian plans is through brute state power. While there is no doubt that many well-meaning individuals join their efforts, they are the sort of ‘useful idiots’ who excused and covered up Communist atrocities during most of the 20th century.