A year ago I wrote a post that I sarcastically titled More on Archbishop of Canterbury's voter registration drive for the British National Party, in which I warned that the archbishop had gone too far in his determination to shut up Britons and ram Sharia law down their throats.
That followed my Rise of Mordor posts on the archbishop's call for the instatement of Sharia law in Britain, and his frightening call to criminalize unkind and thoughtless speech.(1,2) While Britons fumed over his remarks, Williams ducked the issue by parsing in virtually unintelligible sentences exactly what he had said and not said.
The archbishop -- Rowan Williams -- and the Labor government, were clearly unaware of the strength of the gathering storm in Britain. Yet the signs were starkly evident by 2007 because Britons had been signing up in droves to join the extremely nationalist, right-wing British National Party.(3)
A year or so before, many of those Britons wouldn't have been caught dead belonging to the BNP. But with the widespread perception that British society was crumbling while Labor fiddled, desperation had driven many Britons to the BNP -- with the inevitable result that the BNP platform had to become somewhat more inclusive to accommodate all the new members.
As late as the Spring of 2008 the Labor government had a chance to save the situation by making real changes. But Gordon Brown and his advisors settled for trying to 'manage' the outpourings of anger.
Of course the government didn't have a crystal ball; they couldn't imagine the meltdown in the banking industry and the credit markets and how, within a matter of weeks, the financial crisis would engulf the United Kingdom and ignite the most virulent protectionist sentiments.
But that's always the way it is. It's never just one thing; it's a buildup of several things, until a government is sitting on a mountain of bone-dry tinder. Then, all it takes is the spark of one incident. The spark turned out to fury about loss of jobs to foreigners and immigrants, as is evident from John Batchelor's post.
Realize that it was never really about Islam. The growing Islamization of British society was only a symptom. It was always about Gordon Brown's push to make Britain the world's Sharia banking capital, and the government's attempt to quash both dissent against Islamization and the loudest yelling from extremist British Muslim groups.
To get everyone to shut up, the government had to deploy multiculturalism laws so ruthlessly that it could be fairly said the government was veering toward totalitarianism. That is why even some British Muslims (and Sikhs and Hindus) demanded to join the BNP. They or their parents or grandparents had not fled their countries to live under a government so sweeping in its control that even the slightest politically incorrect word or action might be cause for criminal charges.
By the time Queen Elizabeth noticed that something had gone terribly awry with British society, it was too late; the RUSI report in response to her discreet inquiries did nothing to remove the government's blinkers:
[...] The report had concluded that Britain's "misplaced deference to multiculturalism" was undermining the fight against extremists, and that military and security services were having to fight threats at home and abroad.So it really comes down to David Cameron. If he listens to Phillip Blond, that is perhaps the Conservative party's one chance at mounting an effective answer to the British National Party.
The defence minister, Bob Ainsworth, described Rusi's report as "extraordinary", and rejected its findings strongly.
"There's a lot of nonsense talked about deference to multiculturalism. Who is deferring to multiculturalism?" he asked on the BBC's World at One. "Who in our society objects to the basic premise that all of the people who live in our country owe allegiance to our country?"[...](5)
It seems Cameron is listening, at least to some extent. But the window for decisive action is closing fast.
If all the above is news to Americans, ask your major news outlets why they haven't been reporting on the issues. Only those Americans who kept very close tabs on doings in Europe had any idea how much anger had built up in several EU countries about the heavy-handed use of multiculturalism laws to silence dissent.
The upshot? Another crisis appearing 'out of the blue.'
Nothing in human affairs happens out of the blue. Europe has been in big trouble for at least three years; anyone who has closely followed the Gates of Vienna blog knows that.
As to what it all means for Americans -- it means the fight of our lives against the same kind of multiculturalism laws that hold several EU populations hostage.
The other night CNBC aired a speech by the late economist Milton Friedman; during the Q&A he observed that whatever criticism one might have of globalization people had to remember that it had lifted hundreds of millions of people around the globe out of abject poverty.
But globalization and giving the world's poorest a leg up are not the real issue; the issue is the kind of laws that were created to enforce dictates that globalized trade imposes on democratic societies -- laws that Left-leaning coalitions strongly support for reasons of their own.
Yet when it comes to the point where citizens in a democracy must say and do nothing to offend the global consumer and the immigrant workers employed in globalized industries, you're looking at the death of liberty. Many Europeans have already figured this out and thus, the crisis on the Continent that the mainstream U.S. new media have studiously avoided reporting.
What is the answer? The marriage between mega-corporations that do big global trade and government needs to be ended. The question is how it will end: the BNP way or Phillip Blond's way. I'd advise going for the latter.
1) The Rise of Mordor, Part 1 ...; January 30, 2008
2) The Rise of Mordor, Part 2 ...; February 7, 2008
3) The British National Party Gains Strength; Times Online, April 19, 2007
4) Government rejects charge of 'flabby' response to terrorism; Guardian; February 15, 2008
5) See also Localism, Faux Localism, and the Rise of the red Tories ...; Pundita, February 15, 2009
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