A striking feature of this edition of The Salisbury Review is the number of articles by writers from overseas – especially from Europe, and above all from France. This might seem out of place in a magazine founded to promote English conservatism in the Burkean tradition, and English culture and civilization. Unfortunately, there are precious few English writers, journalists, philosophers and intellectuals who are prepared openly to defend our national culture or address why it is under mortal threat. Those on the right, along with some brave figures on the left, have engaged in the fight against ‘woke’, but laudable though this is, it fails to address the existential issue: the combination of mass immigration and the new state religion of multiculturalism and diversity. For the mass immigration of whole peoples makes it impossible for newcomers to assimilate and therefore amounts to colonization; and multiculturalism enjoins us to celebrate minority cultures, while alternately denigrating the host culture (which is declared ‘racist’, ‘colonialist’ etc) and denying it ever existed (we have ‘always been a nation of immigrants’).
There has been some veiled recognition in conservative circles of the illogically ‘asymmetric’ nature of the multicultural dogma – that minority cultures are celebrated while the majority culture is banished. But even Eric Kaufmann, who has gone further than most in his remarkable book Whiteshift, treads carefully, and in the end resorts to tortuous formulations like ‘the nation can be multicultural, civic, and ethnic, all at once’ and ‘people can focus on their common multi-vocal nationhood’. For the notion that there exists, or ever did exist, a distinct national culture, a host culture, a shared common culture into which past immigrants were assimilated; or that in these islands, this role is, or was, played by English culture and civilization; or that this culture is, or was, the dominant culture of the indigenous population of these islands; or that the perceived loss of this national culture is felt deeply by the English people; all of this is deemed heresy and any reference to it remains taboo. Indeed, the fear of being branded ‘racist’ and summarily cancelled is all too real in a country where even asking a person ‘of colour’ the question ‘Where are you from?’ now qualifies as a possible hate crime.
Even the word ‘culture’ is dangerous. Unless prefixed by ‘multi’, or preceded by ‘minority’, it signifies what the British government’s Prevent strategy terms ‘cultural nationalism’, an ‘extreme right-wing ideology’ that incubates racism and white supremacist terrorism. The terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘colonize’, when applied to European populations and mass immigration, are judged even more dangerous; yet when applied to non-European populations ‘colonized’ by Europeans, who are accorded the status of ‘first settlers’ and ‘original custodians’, they are judged not only acceptable but obligatory.
Instead, the English, who unlike the Scots and Welsh do not enjoy the status of an honorary oppressed minority, must make do with the concocted terms ‘British culture’ and ‘British values’, a vacuous civic nationalism consisting of legalistic abstractions – democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, and respect for minorities – that are admirable in themselves but confer no cultural identity or shared sense of belonging. Sam Bidwell exemplified this in the April edition of The Critic (‘What really makes us British’), when he argued that ‘the real roots of our national character’ lay in ‘an individualised, mobile population, which prefers meritocracy to nepotism and which conducts itself to pre-agreed norms’. But as Philippe de Villiers observed in his recent book (see ‘The Art of Saving a Nation’), the essence of a nation is that it furnishes its people with a shared imagination, shared memories, and a shared manner of ‘feeling at home’. As Lamartine remarked, ‘A people without a soul is just a vast crowd.’
Which brings us to the French writer and literary figure, Renaud Camus, who was refused entry to this country, where he was to make a speech on immigration, because his views were deemed by the Home Office to be ‘not conducive to the public good’. The Free Speech Union offered to fight his case, but Camus has declined, for the reasons he explains in his interview with The Salisbury Review (see ‘Confessions of an Internal Exile’). Of course, there is the issue of freedom of speech. As John Stuart Mill wrote in his great essay ‘On Liberty’, the ‘peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion’ is that we are denied ‘the opportunity of exchanging error for truth’ (if the opinion is right) and ‘the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error’ (if the opinion is wrong) – words that cannot be cited too often.
Yet few dare acknowledge the underlying cause of the problem: that in a diverse multicultural society, ‘cultural sensitivities’ make censorship inevitable. Which is why Canada and Singapore, and increasingly Britain, are resembling totalitarian states. Even an ‘off colour’ joke can land you in jail in Singapore, where words uttered with ‘the deliberate intention of wounding the racial feelings of a person’ and acts deemed prejudicial to ‘the maintenance of harmony between different religious groups’ are punishable with imprisonment of up to three years. Camus’s views on ‘The Great Replacement’ (which he insists is not a ‘conspiracy theory’, merely an observable phenomenon), the existence and rights of ‘indigenous’ European peoples, and the ‘colonization’ of Europe (for ‘if you change a people, you change the culture’) are inflammatory in a multicultural society because they challenge the very foundations of that society.
Camus has been criticised, even by friends and admirers, not so much for his robust views on immigration, but rather the ‘sulphurous’ language he uses to express them. Perhaps the British authorities feared a repetition of Enoch Powell’s seminal ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968. Readers can judge for themselves. But the real question is this: Should we be able, freely and openly, to express our opinions on the sacrifice of our ancestral national culture in the name of multiculturalism and diversity? Many will think that the question answers itself.
