England population transformed

Quote from Semigoodlooking

are you just making a wider point about Muslim immigration and the religon's unwillingness to assimilate, or are you linking it to the UK/US and saying any Muslim immigration is wrong, and as such the UK and US are already lost because the mass immigration is in full swing?

Neither. Maybe a little of both.

I don't know the solution, or better put, I don't know how this movie ends.

What I do know is that there is linkage, that to deny it is absurd.

I don't know the history of US citizen Nazi sympathizers during WWII, or people who were willing to go to Germany and fight on the opposing side against US troops. But my gut feeling is that in terms of the blurring of lines of "us" vs. "them", of the existence of an entire class of "us" whose sympathies may at any moment switch to "them" and which the current framework is not equipped to handle, I'd guess this era is absolutely unique.

Is the solution banning all Muslims? I don't know, and would hope that not, sounds bad. Is it too late for the US? Is it too late for some European countries? I don't know.

But I don't even see much honest discussion in the public space that these are challenges which the current legal, political, and philosophical framework is simply not equipped.

Quote from ben

Neither. Maybe a little of both.

I don't know the solution, or better put, I don't know how this movie ends.

What I do know is that there is linkage, that to deny it is absurd.

I don't know the history of US citizen Nazi sympathizers during WWII, or people who were willing to go to Germany and fight on the opposing side against US troops. But my gut feeling is that in terms of the blurring of lines of "us" vs. "them", of the existence of an entire class of "us" whose sympathies may at any moment switch to "them" and which the current framework is not equipped to handle, I'd guess this era is absolutely unique.

Is the solution banning all Muslims? I don't know, and would hope that not, sounds bad. Is it too late for the US? Is it too late for some European countries? I don't know.

But I don't even see much honest discussion in the public space that these are challenges which the current legal, political, and philosophical framework is simply not equipped.

Display More

Thanks Ben, I agree with you and see it as a societal crisis that no one has real answers for.

Splinter - didn't you say on the last page that the UK has not lost its "Britishness" , but you do think it has changed more than the US?

Nothing is forever. Cultures work like other living organisms: some change quickly, some adapt slowly, some are eaten by others. All eventually wither and die.

That said, the desire of a given organism - or culture - to not be eaten, or otherwise subject to a hostile takeover, is not evil. It is healthy and but natural.

This is the very best kind of discussion: one from which we can all learn, as it encourages us to look inward and examine our attitudes. Bravo to all contributors!

Quote from Splinter

yet still retained its core values.

What are those? The accent (for those that do speak English)?

Tea and crumpets? The greatest talent for insult on Earth?

Or some general universal values?

I'm not being facetious, I'm curious what values are you referring to.

I've been reluctant to enter this discussion because I have strong views and it's very difficult to communicate them clearly. But I'll try, in a condensed version.

Immigration, in most cases in the last couple of hundred years, has been mainly for economic reasons - some for religion, but the waves of Italians, Irish, Poles, and others to Northern Europe and the New World unquestionably came to better their and their childrens' lives. However rocky this process was for both the newcomers and their not always welcoming hosts, there was a basic assumption: the immigrants are coming to our country to become part of our culture. If not the incoming generation, the children and grandchildren will become fully assimilated into the new country's mores and customs. They will become next-generation Argentines, Chileans, "Estadounidenses," Englishmen, etc.

The concern, very much shared by me, is that the Muslim immigrants often have no intention of becoming anything but what they've always been - but in a new place. Please don't misunderstand this comment - we can never say all Muslims do this or that, any more than we can know what an individual might do because he/she is Lutheran. But the evidence is clearly pointing to an anomaly in the old rules: way too many of those who are coming to England have no intention of changing their ways, but are moving to convert England into a Muslim culture. The scary part is that it seems to be multi-generational: quite a few of the terrorist perpetrators have been born in their host countries.

This is a real concern, and trying to wish it away with rhetoric about how immigrants have enhanced their host countries in the past won't work. Not if those immigrants work directly to undermine the societies they've joined.

Quote from EJLarson

I've been reluctant to enter this discussion because I have strong views and it's very difficult to communicate them clearly. But I'll try, in a condensed version.

Immigration, in most cases in the last couple of hundred years, has been mainly for economic reasons - some for religion, but the waves of Italians, Irish, Poles, and others to Northern Europe and the New World unquestionably came to better their and their childrens' lives. However rocky this process was for both the newcomers and their not always welcoming hosts, there was a basic assumption: the immigrants are coming to our country to become part of our culture. If not the incoming generation, the children and grandchildren will become fully assimilated into the new country's mores and customs. They will become next-generation Argentines, Chileans, "Estadounidenses," Englishmen, etc.

The concern, very much shared by me, is that the Muslim immigrants often have no intention of becoming anything but what they've always been - but in a new place. Please don't misunderstand this comment - we can never say all Muslims do this or that, any more than we can know what an individual might do because he/she is Lutheran. But the evidence is clearly pointing to an anomaly in the old rules: way too many of those who are coming to England have no intention of changing their ways, but are moving to convert England into a Muslim culture. The scary part is that it seems to be multi-generational: quite a few of the terrorist perpetrators have been born in their host countries.

This is a real concern, and trying to wish it away with rhetoric about how immigrants have enhanced their host countries in the past won't work. Not if those immigrants work directly to undermine the societies they've joined.

Display More

Good points, and I think most would agree that Muslims in general are uninterested in integrating in a host nation. However, I think class comes into this again, at least in the UK. Middle-class or well off Muslims tend to be far more integrated into communities and have been for years. Low income or benefit class Muslim areas tend to be far more segregated and there is an invisible wall put up around Muslim communities. Of course, this I think is what Ben has been pointing out. As the mass immigration continues, the amount of Muslims living behind the invisible wall in Western countries will grow and societies will become increasingly divided.

Personally, I can separate the positive impact of immigration in the past and even European immigration to the UK now, which has been largely positive. It contrasts with immigration from Islam nations.

Quote from Splinter

Yes, you are being facetious Ben and you want to draw me out.

Core British values are very hard to define as perhaps would core US values be for an American to define.

We're not overly patriotic because we don't feel the need to be, but when push comes to shove we will push back. And yes, I do believe in the essential understatement of the way we are and if that means insulting people with our tongues in our cheeks, then so be it. The Americans on the other hand are much more open.

I love tea and boy do I love crumpets with loads of butter, but I also love a good Indian meal, the hotter the better. Having said all this, we're pretty adaptable in what some may see as apathy, but maybe that's us just being flexible.

I don't like the fact that we have mosques all over the place and that many supermarkets now have special Polish sections, but perhaps that's pragmatism.

Where do you hail from by the way Ben?

Display More

A few things:

1. OK, maybe I was being a leeetle bit facetious. ?

2. You took my mentioning of British insults as criticism - it wasn't.

I absolutely love it.

While in New York, I saw in someone's house a comprehensive collection of insults uttered by historical figures, and just knew it was published in Britain. It couldn't have been published anywhere else.

3. I'm from Canada (notwithstanding my avatar). Our values are simple: 1. In Flanders Fields; 2. hockey; 3. We're NOT the US, whatever that means.

Oh yeah, and we're really multicultural and polite and all that.

Regarding the prior posts:

Look, I'm not all gung-ho about assimilation myself. Look, I am an Orthodox Jew, and there are vast parts of Western culture that I have no desire for my children to even know about, let alone adopt.

We don't have a TV at home, Internet use will be severely restricted (if we don't throw it out of the house altogether), our dietary laws mean we can purchase about 5% of what's on sale at the supermarket (20-30% in the US), I can go on for a while.

Our dress customs will also come as a shocker to anyone who hasn't spent some time in Brooklyn or Israel.

Nor are Jews the only group which maintain their way of life even as they move elsewhere.

There is a difference, though, between not wishing to assimilate yourself (all in all there are some parts of US culture that no sane person should wish to be exposed to, and if there's a way not to, all the better), and what we are discussing here. What other culture has produced rhetoric and action comparable to Black September, to 9/11, to Charlie Hebdo (whose words were deeply, deeply, offensive to many cultures, and who everyone else sucked up because we don't go murdering people for that)?

Carlos, to answer you, I will go on a tangent.

I was in Argentina for a few weeks, a month tops, when someone asked me my opinion of the country.

My reply was, "I don't know, it seems to be a very weird mix of Europe and third-world".

I remember people at the time liking the response, and over time it seems to have held up.

My assessment of the country's anti-Semitism will be similar.

You are both right and not right, at the same time.

There is a big element of what you say - Jews did have equal access to places that they did not for many years in others. In 1930's Toronto, there were still beach signs and golf courses that read "Gentiles Only" and the like; in 1970's Harvard Law School, there was still stiff resistance to senior faculty including Jews; etc. Argentina's history seems to be much more egalitarian.

That said, there is a strong undercurrent of what semigoodlooking refers to as "casual racism" which is alive and well. It is stronger in some quarters, weaker in others, and is some may be entirely absent. But it is by no means a difficult-to-find phenomenon. And it exists on both the left and the right.

Also: Luis d'Elia gets (or at least got) to say a lot of crap, without getting lynched. (And by lynched I mean politically and in the press, not Charlie Hebdo style). Reading up on his record is enough to make the jaw drop. This is the David Duke (or Louis Farrakhan) of Arg politics. And for a long time, he was for all intents and purposes all but part of the government.

Quote from Semigoodlooking

I find Argentina the most casually racist country I have ever visited.

I want to thank Semigoodlooking for inventing the phrase "casually racist" because it set off a whole lot of introspection for me.

I'm old enough to have entered the US workplace when it was still mostly segregated. It was perfectly all right for an employer to tell an applicant "Sorry, but we don't hire Negroes. We're not prejudiced, but some of our customers ..." The Negroes (later Blacks, later African-Americans) that I worked with as an electronics technician in the aerospace industry were few. I even developed what I call a reverse-racism attitude over time, in that if an African-American had a job at my level he (and it was always "he" in those days) had had to work twice as hard and take ten times the crap to get there as I had. I came to admire those few and came to be friends with many of them out of that admiration.

Official segregation is beyond ugly. The only meaningful economic promise of a supposedly-free society is equality of opportunity - and African-Americans were denied that opportunity. Even worse: there was no equality under the law. A black person could find little justice or recourse in the judicial process, where justice was decidedly not blind: the system saw your color and ruled accordingly. And education? Look up the name James Meredith for a primer on how things were.

Maybe the greatest thing that's happened in my lifetime is the functional disappearance of that institutional, legal racism. African-Americans today can and do compete with equality in the workplace (barring anomalous still-standing barriers like union rules, but that's another subject) and education. Not every bar is down, nor is every door open, but no one can claim that the workplace, the courts, and the schools are not open to all, and that, for those who strive for it, equal opportunity has been achieved, as measured by the old standards - of just fifty years ago. (Many point to the disparity in incarceration rates. True, but that also has a strong economic-level element: it's not just about race.)

So, for me, the phrase "casual racism" describes the residual racism existing in individuals after the institutional racism is gone, but that doesn't rise to any meaningful societal element. I have heard Argentines make disparaging comments about racial or national groups. I've never known one to actually do anything about it or even suggest that any action be taken.

That, for me, defines "casual." Annoying, but not meaningful.