Twenty-plus years ago I lived in England, had a Sri Lankan boyfriend, an Israeli best friend who shared a flat with a Palestinian guy, and a Persian housemate. This is still my idea of multiculturalism. Yet 20 years later what I read and see about Europe -- and Turkey but that's a different question altogether -- suggests the multicultural model governments have been shoving down people's throats has begun to backfire and it is backfiring spectacularly.
Take the hidden camera film about the encapsulated Muslim neighbourhoods in Paris. This is no spin and no fake news. I have a friend who lives and Paris and she has vouched for the genuineness of these neighbourhoods. There are similar places in Germany, too, if we are to believe none other than Angela Merkel, who said in an interview such encapsulated areas have no place in the German society. Ironic, given she put a lot of effort into taking migration to ridiculous levels.
Then there's Denmark, where I saw (hopefully because I only had three days) multiculturalism still working, probably because the country, as far as I remember, limited its intake of economic (sic) refugees. There I saw people of various colors all smiling and friendly, as befits one of the happiest nations in the world. And then I saw a boy that eyed me suspiciously for several minutes until I felt extremely uncomfortable (I went out to smoke and forgot the keys to the Airbnb, okay? Don't tell anyone). That one single boy is new to the country, I'm sure. I really hope he won't look at this very typical Middle Eastern way at people in five years. Because he will have assimilated.
Assimilation is the only sensible way of actually accomplishing multiculturalism that doesn't give rise to racist extremists. I will here quote Mr. Schwarz, an expat in a country neighbouring his home one, who, after 20 years here says "We" when he talks about the locals and "they" when he talks about his countrymen and countrywomen. The only way to have a decent life in a foreign country even one that is culturally close to your home one, is to assimilate, learn the language and the culture, and make it your own. This emphatically does not suggest you need to give up your own culture or religion. What it does suggest is that if you want to live in a society you need to become a part of it, rather than an appendage that feeds from a society, operates in it, but remains a separate part of that society and, ultimately, does not contribute to the greater good. That's what encapsulation is all about and to me, it is the one single negative aspect of the recent migration waves that can bring the whole European Union down.
How did we get here? We need to thank PC gone mad and congenital human stupidity. The more you force a group of people to accept something new and unfamiliar as normal and familiar without giving them enough time to process this thing, the more they will clench their teeth and refuse to eat it. The pendulum, as I like to say, always swings. The further it swings into one direction, the further it will then swing into the opposite one. it's just one of these laws that can't be violated. And personally, I believe Western Europe is being so stupid because they have no group memory of the Ottoman empire ruling over them. We do although we won't continue to have this memory for long as history is being rewritten. Literally.
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