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By Melanie Phillips

In Britain, statues of historical figures associated with colonialism or slavery are being pulled down or slated for removal. This is to appease the Black Lives Matters activists and their supporters, both black and white, who have seized upon the appalling death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody to claim that Western society is fundamentally racist.

The destruction of these statues and similar artifacts, which are part of the cultural memory of a civilization, inescapably calls to mind another act of cultural extermination the Nazi regimes burning of books in the 1930s. They threw into the fire books by Jewish, socialist, liberal or any other authors they deemed to be inimical to Nazi ideology. They did this to erase a Western culture they wanted to destroy and replace by their own horrific ideas.

The removal of Britains statues is not just a protest against racism. Its an attempt to destroy an entire culture and replace it by a society organized according to an unchallengeable dogma.

Of course, theres anti-black, racial prejudice in America and Britain. Theres also vicious black anti-Semitism, just as there are black people who are deeply sympathetic to the Jewish people and Jews who are prejudiced against black people.

The point is that racial prejudice exists in every single society, in the developing world as well as in the west. To single out the West as endemically racist is therefore a gross double standard and calumny.

As usual, however, liberal Jews have taken the wrong side in this most explosive development of the culture wars against the West. Having fully internalized the inversion of truth and lies, victim and oppressor involved in identity politics, they have uncritically embraced black victimology, which casts black people as the invariable victims of white society, and championed the agenda and values of Black Lives Matter.

Endorsing that groups representation of its own anti-white, racist, anti-Semitic animus as anti-racism, they have also engaged in the vicious demonization of anyone who dares call out BLM activists for what they really are.

After the Zionist Organization of America president Mort Klein denounced BLM on Twitter as a a Jew hating, White hating, Israel hating, conservative Black hating, violence promoting, dangerous Soros funded extremist group of haters, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, denounced him as a racist and tried to get the ZOA kicked out of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

In Britain, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has set up a commission to investigate racial prejudice within the Jewish community. It isnt clear whether this is to be confined to alleged racism by the community towards its tiny number of black Jews or whether it will cover alleged community racism towards non-Jews.

There may be instances of community prejudice against some black Jews or Jews married to black people. Those who have experienced the isolation and rejection resulting from this deserve sympathy, and it is a worthy aim to seek to address it. However, the context in which this inquiry has been launched is not auspicious.

In both Britain and America, anyone who criticizes black victimology for its anti-white, anti-Jewish, insurrectionist or subjectively suspect side is called a racist. A Twitter mob then assembles to strip such people of their reputation, platform or job for the crime of telling the truth.

In an atmosphere redolent of the 17th-century Salem witch trials, the risk is that the Board of Deputies may have appointed a hanging jury to find Britains Jewish community guilty under rigged cultural rules. If so, this would be yet another example of the board taking a knee to people with a rotten agenda, but who have the power to dictate the terms of public debate.

Its not just that many liberal Jews are on the wrong side of this titanic struggle to defend civilization.

Its not even that they dont recognize the danger to themselves from an agenda of destroying a culture whose roots lie in the Hebrew Bible. Its also a striking fact that the tactics now being used in this ramped-up onslaught against the west are mirrored in the attempt to bring down the State of Israel.

Pulling down the statues is the physical manifestation of the decades-long attempt, through the hijack of the education system, to destroy the West by erasing the record of its achievements and presenting it instead as intrinsically racist, colonialist and evil.

In Israel, Palestinians have systematically vandalized archeological digs in Jerusalem in order to tip into the garbage excavated materials containing possibly priceless artifacts. They do this to destroy the evidence that is constantly being dug up of the ancient kingdom of Israel and thus the unique claim of the Jews to the land. By attacking these ancient items, they are physically trying to erase the Jews own history.

Black victimology routinely blames others for all disadvantage suffered by black people, denying the part the played by chance, misfortune or their own behavior, while claiming moral impunity as victims for any wrongs they may themselves do.

Palestinians blame Israel for all their misfortune, falsely accusing it of driving them out of their homeland and denying them their own state.

At the same time, they deny their century-old war to destroy the Jewish homeland and have always refused the offer of a Palestine state that has been repeatedly made to them ever since the 1930s.

BLM activists smear Western society with distorted claims about slavery and oppression in order to both facilitate and obscure their real agenda of overturning white capitalist society.

Palestinians smear Israel with false claims about occupation and oppression in order to both facilitate and obscure their real agenda of wiping Israel off the map.

Anti-white racists project their own offense of racism onto others, falsely accusing anyone who criticizes the sinister agenda of black victimology of being a racist.

Palestinians, whose aim is a Palestine state from which all Jewish residents of the land would be driven out, project their own agenda of racist ethnic cleansing onto Israel, which they accuse with malicious and demonstrable absurdity of committing genocide against the Palestinians.

BLM supporters who single out the West as the endemically racist perpetrators of slavery while ignoring the same or worse in the rest of the world subject the West to a double standard.

Palestinians and their supporters who single out Israel as a human-rights abuser while ignoring Palestinian anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-free-speech and other human-rights abuses, as well as ignoring the human-rights abuses of the other tyrannies and terrorist regimes of the world, are practicing a double standard straight out of the anti-Semitism playbook.

Palestinianism is the poster cause of Western progressives. It is no coincidence that the tactics being used in the culture war against the West turn out to be the same tactics used against Israel.

What starts with the Jews never stops with the Jews. In this current mayhem on the streets of America and Britain, so it is now playing out before our horrified eyes.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author.

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Echoes in the culture war against the West - The Jewish Star

Culture watch: Toppling History and Nuance

Many liberals really do think that America is fascist, laments Daniel McCarthy in Spectator USA, so they genuinely see petty vandalism as a heroic act of resistance. Knock the head off a statue of Columbus, smash the glass of every storefront on the street, and youre defeating Adolf Hitler all over again. The sheer ignorant zealotry means all nuance is lost to the iconoclasts. Thus, they attacked an Appomattox statue in a DC suburb, named for the courthouse at which the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered. Far from a gesture of defiance toward the victorious North, it showed an unarmed soldier, eyes downcast and arms crossed, his face somber an image of manly defeat intended to trouble a civilization given to self-congratulation and as a reminder that even Americans know what it is like to lose a war.

Liberal: Experts Catastrophic COVID Messaging

For months, scientists and other experts have known that warm weather, mask-wearing and better hygienic practices could mitigate the spread of COVID-19 yet, New Yorks David Wallace-Wells sighs, they failed to communicate most of these nuances to the American public, insisting that lockdowns were absolutely necessary. Adding to the confusion, many of the experts alternately played down the threat before they vociferously attacked Wisconsins in-person election then 180d to defend left-wing protests. The United States is now the single most significant global incubator of the pandemic thanks to these messaging failures.

Science desk: To the Moon, SpaceX!

SpaceXs successful rocket launch last month proves that commercially developed spacecraft can carry crews to the moon and perhaps beyond much faster and cheaper than wed ever envisioned, Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam cheer at The Washington Post. Shouldnt we take advantage of it? When Vice President Mike Pence challenged NASA to land astronauts on the moon by 2024, it just kept working on its Orion spacecraft still years away from launch. Yet SpaceXs Dragon craft, used in last months launch, is cheaper and much better than Orion and doesnt require building a new space station, as NASA proposes. If Team Trump and Congress really want to reach the moon by 2024, they should embrace private firms efforts.

Conservative: Our Broken Republic

Historically, The New York Times Ross Douthat points out, Americas culture wars were often settled through democratic deliberation, rather than the kind of ruling the Supreme Court just delivered on gay and transgender civil rights. In an earlier age, Congress debated and passed laws. State legislatures did the same. Constitutional amendments were proposed, passed, ratified and when necessary, repealed. But now, Congress hardly legislates, and the Supreme Court does the heavy lifting on social and cultural issues. That leaves major decisions to a select few robed and highly educated lawyers and their preferences. The boundaries of voting rights and free expression are policed by John Roberts. Our abortion laws reflect the preferences of Anthony Kennedy. And now anti-discrimination law and religious liberty protections will reflect what Neil Gorsuch, author of the new decision, thinks is right and good. Whether such a republic can last, Douthat archly concludes, rests with a higher court.

Education beat: A Vet for (College) President

University of South Carolina President (and US Army vet) Robert L. Caslen faced dissention from board members, student organizations and faculty members early on but, Barrett Y. Bogue and Emma Moore note at The Hill, he now enjoys high praises on how he approached his first few months on the job. Indeed, research shows that veterans bring unique and beneficial skills to higher-education leadership roles. The military and academia, after all, share overlapping values, traditions and leadership opportunities, including mission focus, resiliency and comfort with ambiguity. These skills will be invaluable to university systems now facing a number of challenges, including decreasing enrollment, that require flexible leaders prepared to navigate the unknown. Bottom line: More schools should look beyond academia and hire veterans.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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Toppling history and nuance and other commentary - New York Post

In the aftermath of Mondays Bostock decision, a common refrain issuing from social media and various articles has been, Yes, this decision is consequential, but lets wait and see how it plays out.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) were told, is religious libertys safe harbor. US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, in his opinion, cited the RFRA as key to settling future religious liberty disputes. Professor Daniel Bennett recently wrote,

The case will certainly have major implications for religious exercise. But contrary to initial reactions, this decision should not be read as a decision that dooms religious liberty in America, but rather as an inevitable step toward something Congress and most state legislatures have thus far been unable to do: crafting a compromise that balances LGBT rights and religious freedom.

To accept the logic of such voices as Gorsuch and Bennett, one must rely on at least two assumptions: One, that progressives see some sort of compromise as desirable; and two, that the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts provisions remain intact in the present form, well, forever.

As much as I want to share in Gorsuch and Bennetts patient optimism for a better way forward, I believe the aforementioned assumptions are flawed. Mondays decision, barring a comprehensive statutory compromise, will be judged by historians as a significant inflection point in the never-ceasing culture wars.

We already have the evidence for why.

On Thursday, Senate Democrats attempted a voice vote to pass the Equality Act, legislation profoundly hostile to religious liberty. To do this by unanimous consent only signals that Democrats, with the wind at their backs, have little desire to defend religious freedom and are advancing a take-no-prisoners approach in their culture war victory.

In a move that demonstrates just how cowed Republicans are in wanting to spend any political capital on defending religious liberty, only three Republican Senators rose to challenge it: Senators Josh Hawley, Jim Lankford, and Mike Lee. Were it not for these three Senators, the Equality Act would surely become law. Even still, given Mondays ruling, it seems that the spirit of the Equality Act has indeed become law, and all that awaits are its future entailments elsewhere in federal law.

A lesser-known feature of the Equality Act undermines the argument that RFRA will sufficiently protect religious dissenters. To understand why the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not the permanent salve some declare it to be, consider that a provision of the Equality Act aims at specifically undoing RFRA of its provisions where they come in conflict with sexual orientation and gender identity. The firewall heralded as the last preserve of religious liberty is already on the chopping block.

Toxic legislation with little resistance is not a good sign for religious libertys future. And yet, here we are.

In an interview from last year with National Review, noted religious liberty scholar Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia said that the Equality Act

goes very far to stamp out religious exemptions . It regulates religious non-profits. And then it says that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does not apply to any claim under the Equality Act. This would be the first time Congress has limited the reach of RFRA. This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.

For now, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act remains intact, but its provisions are one election away from passage if Democrats take control of the Senate. Even still, that its provisions remain intact is no sure proof that it will give relief to those who appeal to it in future cases.

In 2016, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet infamously compared those with traditional views about sex and gender to racists and Nazis. He was more than honest about what victors in the culture war ought to do: Give them no quarter. Writes Tushnet,

For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. Thats mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (You lost, live with it) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who remember defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didnt work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the wars over, and we won.

No normative pull at all. What does that mean? It means the Judeo-Christian understanding of sexuality and gender are not remotely persuasive or deserving of protection. It means to leave no room for it to flower or grow, especially if it is a hindrance to social justice. This hypothesis is what a lot of us have been saying for some time: Nothing within the internal logic of progressivism explains why there should be robust protections for those holding beliefs deemed harmful to society.

Are we really to believe that cultural elites so brazenly contemptuous of historic Christian belief will have the magnanimity to leave cultural and public space for those who they liken to racists to continue in their bigotry? We can hope, but I am not optimistic.

Like anyone, I am fallible and cannot predict the future. Maybe RFRA will stay intact; perhaps a compromise will be struck. If one is, expect religious liberty to grow increasingly narrow in its conception. A lot of religious libertys future hinges on elections, personnel, and policy. Those are doubtlessly important. What we must do in the meantime is work even harder, in truth and grace, to explain that what we believe is believed not just by faith alone, but reason as well. We must work even more diligently in our churches and in our homes to catechize ourselves, to know that what our faith teaches is not only true but beautiful. We must promulgate and fortify the virtues of courage, gentleness, humility, perseverance, and hope. A belief in an enchanted world such as our own is to believe that the God who created it and stands behind it always wills our good, even in the face of great challenge.

Because we believe that Christ is the ultimate Lord and Judge of history, Christians reject all forms of fear and panic, but that should not stop us from being honest about the bleak future awaiting religious liberty.

Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Speaking Out is Christianity Todays guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the publication.

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Bostock Is as Bad as You Think - ChristianityToday.com

In Britain and the US the law is becoming an ass. Liberals historically held up the impartiality of law as central to what made these countries great. The system, at least in theory, was based on the key universal principle that all men and women would be treated equally before the law. Today this is being torn to shreds as the culture war is incorporated into legal and police practice, making a mockery of the most basic principles of law.

If the bias within the British criminal justice-system and political class wasnt already obvious, the differential treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters compared to other people who have breached lockdown rules has helped further drive a coach and horses through the idea of equal treatment before the law.

In the US, many public-health experts refused to condemn the BLM gatherings while at the same time stating that, This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. So, just to be clear, for this group of experts BLM demos should be allowed, while those demonstrating against the lockdown should be targeted by the law.

Journalists, another section of the new elite, have been similarly biased. In the UK, an online BBC news report of the London demonstration was headlined: 27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protest in London. The following weekend, a counter-protest took place in London, with many protesters drawn from the far right. Only six police officers were injured this time, but the BBC reported this as violent clashes with the police.

And of course we have all seen the muted, sometimes even supportive approach adopted by police authorities themselves to some of the protests, violence and vandalism in cities in the US and the UK.

With the recent Dominic Cummings case, the point was often made that he was wrong to drive where he did without consequence theres one rule for them and another for the rest of us went the argument. But this is an outdated understanding of who us and them are today. Indeed, the mass outrage by the media about Cummings should at least raise questions about the idea that the toffs are lording it over the little people.

Today, the form that us and them takes is less the old class divide and more one best summed up by Hillary Clinton when she denounced a vast swathe of voters as deplorables. Here we find the new elite standing not as advocates for traditional values and institutions, but rather as advocates for the vulnerable, in opposition to the basket of deplorables who are, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, as Clinton put it.

This incorporation of the culture wars into politics has been replicated in the development of law and policing practices in the past two decades. We can see this quite clearly in the development of hate-crime legislation in the UK, where the same criminal act is punished more severely if purposefully carried out against a person with what is now called a protected characteristic. In defining particular groups of people as vulnerable, the law is explicit in its move away from a universalist approach to crime and punishment. Instead, we literally have a law which grants more protections to certain groups than to others (whether they want it or not).

This process of prioritising certain crimes above others has been seen in Scotland, where violent crimes have been downgraded while hate crimes and cases of domestic abuse, even where no violence has taken place, are prioritised. The policing of domestic violence, for example, has been accompanied by an overzealous and interventionist approach to peoples private lives. But few if any criticisms are publicly raised about these police practices which have, at times, impacted badly on both the accused and the alleged victims.

Reach for the Scottish police training manual and you will not find a booklet that prioritises an understanding of law, order or even crime. Police Scotlands Initial Training Course Manual 1 starts with a 50-page explanation of Diversity Awareness. Those who are not aware are the people we are now meant to be concerned about, the people the newly educated cops know all about the deplorables.

The deplorables, in the British context, can be summed up by the put-down terms Sun reader and Daily Mail reader, or as Fintan OToole put it, the people with tattooed arms and golf-club buffers. These are the imagined bigots that make up white Britain, the White Van Man coupled with his more middle-class compatriot who lack not only the political but also the cultural and even emotional awareness of the metropolitan elite. These men and women are the targets of modern law and order.

We can see this even in the popular depiction of crime itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, crime was a conservative, right-wing issue. It was street crime, muggers and robbers who captured the imagination and who were depicted in cop dramas. Crime was also politically linked to radicals and hedonists, to outsiders and militants the enemy within, as Margaret Thatcher called them. Criminals were seen as lefties.

Now, with TV programmes like The Good Fight, crime has been reconstructed through the minds of the modern liberal elite and has come to be associated with the deplorables, the racist, sexist bigots, who have become the new abusive baddies responsible for all the crimes that matter.

Deplorable football fans in Scotland have been severely criminalised and policed over the past decade. The Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (now repealed) was a law that specifically banned offensive language among football fans while ensuring the cultured types your poets and artists were excluded from the law. Here, what are depicted as sectarian (ie, racist) fans have particularly been targeted with a variety of laws and initiatives to change their behaviour or their culture with the threat of up to five years in prison for their offensive behaviour.

This targeting of Celtic and Rangers fans the Old Firm included one campaign that attempted to discover Old Firm domestic violence. They are football fans, they are sectarian bigots, so clearly they must also beat their wives, went the argument, and police actions and interventions developed accordingly.

Even before the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act was passed, a man called Stephen Birrell was imprisoned for eight months for his online rants. His crime was to say he wants Celtic scumbag, Fenian tattie farmers to die. There was no threat of violence, simply an inane drunken rant. Sheriff Bill Totten explained that by arresting Birrell, he intended to send a clear message that the right-thinking people of Glasgow and Scotland will not allow any behaviour of this nature, or allow any place in our society for hate crime. It seems it was not enough for the right-thinking people of Scotland simply to disapprove of foul language it had to be criminalised and Birrell needed eight months in a cell to help him to become aware.

Online offences are being politicised and policed by the new elite. Facebook has a new board of censors filled with right-on individuals who approve of deplatforming deplorables. In right-thinking Scotland, the YouTuber Count Dankula was found guilty of offending people with a comedy video of a pug doing a Nazi salute.

Similarly, in England, there was the case of Harry Miller, who was harassed by the police for posting trans-sceptical tweets. And the list goes on, following a similar pattern, with similar targets and issues being addressed by laws, online authorities, political pressure and police practices all developing a new form of criminalisation and policing of deplorable individuals, ideas and thoughts.

There also appears to be a scale of deplorability the more right-wing a person is, the more they can expect the authorities and the law to interfere in their lives and activities. In 2012, for example, a pregnant mother of three, Toni McLeod, found that getting her children back from social services was at least in part dependent upon her giving up her friendship with people associated with the English Defence League. The social work report read, Toni needs to break away from the inappropriate friendships she has through the EDL in order that she can model and display appropriate positive relationships to the baby as he / she develops. Toni needed a culture change and the Durham County social-work department was going to make damned sure she developed one.

The culture war against the deplorables is not only a matter of who is being criminalised but also who is not being criminalised. We have seen, for example, the divergent attitudes to mass gatherings during the pandemic as well as to acts of vandalism and violence recently. This was previously clear in the case of Extinction Rebellion, which brought areas of London to a standstill and dug up or vandalised other parts of the UK with barely a raised eyebrow from onlooking police.

We have also seen the numerous cases of grooming gangs, made up of largely British Pakistani Muslim men, who used and abused thousands of underage girls while authorities turned a blind eye and the media said little. Those who spoke up, like Labours Sarah Champion, were ostracised. Champions crime was to claim that Asian grooming gangs had been allowed to thrive because people are more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.

As has been noted, this lack of concern for white working-class British girls appears to be because it did not fit the correct deplorable narrative. If the perpetrators had been Sun or Mail-reading types, one suspects a very different approach would have been taken and a very different level of outrage would have been expressed.

The silence about the sexual abuse of underage girls also stands out in contrast to the #MeToo campaign which had an enormous impact on institutions across the UK. This involved largely middle-class professional women who rarely experienced anything like the levels of abuse that the girls in Huddersfield, Rotherham, Newcastle, Rochdale, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Oxford, Bristol and Keighley were subjected to.

These cases are important because they demonstrate what is becoming increasingly clear that there is a war going on, not just in culture, not just in politics, but in law and on the streets of Britain where PC police officers are helping to transform the nature of policing across the UK.

Britain is becoming a country less of the haves and have nots than the chavs and the chav-nots a country not only divided by cultural differences but also one that is becoming increasingly authoritarian as the new elite attempts to enforce its cultural values on the entire population with the threat of law, policing and ultimately prison.

Stuart Waiton is a sociology and criminology lecturer at Abertay University in Dundee.

Picture by: Getty.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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The culture war is destroying equality before the law - Spiked

PUBLISHED: 17:00 19 June 2020

Will Self

Following a social media post by the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson, members of far-right linked groups have gathered around statues in London. Here, one argues with a police officer. Photo: Getty Images

2020 Anadolu Agency

WILL SELF on the paradoxes and contradictions which make up multiculturalism

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Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only continue to grow with your support.

Years ago I had the misfortune to be seated at a fancy dinner next to Conrad Black, who at that time was a controversial if ennobled media tycoon. Throughout the meal we argued about everything, such was the divergence in our opinions, our beliefs, and our very weltanschauung. Then, at the end, as we rose to leave, he grasped my hand firmly in his and said: Good! Thats settled then we agree, turned on his handmade heel and left.

At the time I understood Blacks besetting character defect to be a need to be always in the right and little thats happened since, including his imprisonment for fraud and obstruction of justice, has changed my view. There are some people who will do anything they can to maintain a sense of self-righteousness including arbitrarily enlarging it to include another whose views dont accord with theirs whatsoever. And this leads me, fairly logically, to the culture wars currently consuming the British body politic.

As the two sides of the argument concerning Britains culture square off in one corner conservative traditionalists, in the other post-colonial revisionists so levels of self-righteousness are rising throughout the body politic, inducing a feverish state within which the greatest crime of all is to be neutral. Yes: you can tell when things really are falling apart because the centre not only cannot hold but is actively under attack by partisans who claim that if youre not with them, youre necessarily opposed.

For the record: any essentialist judgement made about anyone by virtue of their race or ethnicity disgusts me, and I believe we should do everything we can individually and collectively to foster a society in which such judgements are entirely otiose. This being noted, a culture as Ive had cause to remark numerous times in this space is a vector that carries through time (and space) commonly held values, together with their associated practices, including aesthetics in the form of taste and the cultural objects (artworks and artefacts) born out of that taste and those values. The problem for multiculturalists is that they are caught up in a colossal paradox: in order for a culture to enshrine multiple value-systems it would have to cease being a culture, since its manifestly impossible to educate young people to, for example, believe in God and not believe in God at the same time.

The suppressed premise that lies behind both multiculturalism and liberal humanism more generally is that of world-governance: human rights were a sequel to the establishment of the United Nations following the Second World War, and unless you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God capable of enforcing divine justice, you must aspire towards a mundane authority thats capable of doing the same for secular justice. Because no one has any rights purely by virtue of being human as any of the chattel slaves currently owned in Eritrea and Mauritania could tell you, or the indentured workers in the UAE and China for that matter. There arent even equal rights in this country something made abundantly clear by the disparity in death rates between the haves and the have-nots during the current pandemic.

Even if we did have an effective world government, able to ensure equal dibs for all groups everywhere, what could that possibly look like? Surely, in order to ensure that the God-believers could pursue their cultural agenda unfettered including proscriptions and practices that liberal humanists find deeply offensive their cultural space would need to be demarcated. So, this great progressive development would mirror the Biblical homily of the Tower of Babel: we would have built a great edifice exemplifying our commonality, only by that act alone to bring about still further fissiparousness.

Another way of grasping the paradox is that some people are currently passionately insisting on the absolute significance of cultural identities that they wish to be totally ignored when it comes to others forming judgements about them whether this is their ethnicity, their religion, their sexual orientation or gender. Meanwhile, others of the formerly dominant culture are reduced to a literal rump: obese thugs, p***ing in public and beating up on the police. Both sides are intent on colonising the past (which is, indeed, another country), because neither party is capable of envisioning a viable future. The British culture which was based, entirely hypocritically, on the manifest destiny of white Europeans has foundered on brute geopolitical and environmental reality; the multi-culture that aspires to succeed it will founder on its own internal contradiction.

Of course, neither moiety will thank me for pointing this out let alone indulge in the sort of radical critique of their own views that might lead to genuine clarity. For my part, I wont commit the Conrad Black solecism and insist on an agreement where none actually obtains. As it is with Brexit, for me, so it is with this: a plague on both your houses. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only rebalance the right wing extremes of much of the UK national press with your support. If you value what we are doing, you can help us by making a contribution to the cost of our journalism.

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Will Self on the paradox of multiculturalism - The New European