- Nov 21, 2007
- 10,015
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I have to say, first of all I am drinking and have been for a while and secondly I'm not got to reference anything, so this is not going to be brilliant.
Multiculturalism, cultural diversity and social class:
For a while I've been thinking about something. People who you might called liberals within the middle class often like to distance themselves from both the poor and reactionary people by associating themselves with some other culture, be that through dining in restaurants serving foreign food, spending time abroad, or simply through wearing the latest fashionable clothes by the latest foreign labels. They may not consciously decide to do all of those things for that reason but they will likely be following trends that are broadly part of attempts at creating status symbols. Now, this is all pretty obvious, but the point is that in some ways, things that are seen as part of multiculturalism are really just class dividers between the old hat peasants who still feel that they are all "in it together" with a party that represents them as a cultural block as well as their economic interests and the new school of modern people who distance themselves from anything that seems out of party line but without any kind of ideology coming into it. So in other words, the later group don't give a damn about absolute freedoms or cultural inheritance, only immediate self interest and the ability to appear to be in with the proper sort. My generation is mostly comprised of people like this. It's not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination, European tribes would surely have distinguished themselves through having some little stretch of Roman style road or more definitely jewellery made from imported materials. Surely when man has reached a point where this kind of behaviour has been replaced with a more solid, group based thinking that is less stratified and more enveloped in a sense of collective manifest destiny towards a goal, with shared culture being part of that, then man has found a greater point.
Pretty much most theory on multi-ethnic and multicultural societies tends to analyse them without baring in considering the collective history of the groups within it and is now always going to be done from a post world war II Western apologist frame. One of my lecturers once mentioned the Armenian Genocide with his two fingers on each hand up and twitching, to make inverted commas, the reason? He was speaking to a mostly British Pakistani lecture hall. I remember him looking a little worried when I was talking about the problems with politically influenced historical revisionism and quoted Hitler, saying "again one might ask, who remembers the Armenians". The point is that if, for the sake of appeasing some Turks and other assorted Muslims, we arrest those Bulgarians who try and publicise the historically credited accounts of the massacres the Turks committed against them or fail to recognise the Armenian genocide for the sake of not upsetting state relations with Turkey, then what were are saying is that keeping some arrogant idiots happy, not giving them the no doubt much wanted excuse to go and riot or whatever, then we are saying that the attempted destruction of a people or a nation is something that can be forgotten for the sake of small scale political ease. Surely that is a disgusting thing to say. With the likely demographic changes in Europe being the way they are, this is dangerous for our society.
I have read a little bit about life for Christians under Islamic rule and I fail to see how, from a truly neutral viewpoint, rather than a Western apologist, self loathing view, it can be seen as more comparable with the lives of Muslims living in the contemporary Western world than with Jews living in Medieval Europe.
I might continue this and cover drugs, sex and masculinity later, we'll see.
Multiculturalism, cultural diversity and social class:
For a while I've been thinking about something. People who you might called liberals within the middle class often like to distance themselves from both the poor and reactionary people by associating themselves with some other culture, be that through dining in restaurants serving foreign food, spending time abroad, or simply through wearing the latest fashionable clothes by the latest foreign labels. They may not consciously decide to do all of those things for that reason but they will likely be following trends that are broadly part of attempts at creating status symbols. Now, this is all pretty obvious, but the point is that in some ways, things that are seen as part of multiculturalism are really just class dividers between the old hat peasants who still feel that they are all "in it together" with a party that represents them as a cultural block as well as their economic interests and the new school of modern people who distance themselves from anything that seems out of party line but without any kind of ideology coming into it. So in other words, the later group don't give a damn about absolute freedoms or cultural inheritance, only immediate self interest and the ability to appear to be in with the proper sort. My generation is mostly comprised of people like this. It's not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination, European tribes would surely have distinguished themselves through having some little stretch of Roman style road or more definitely jewellery made from imported materials. Surely when man has reached a point where this kind of behaviour has been replaced with a more solid, group based thinking that is less stratified and more enveloped in a sense of collective manifest destiny towards a goal, with shared culture being part of that, then man has found a greater point.
Pretty much most theory on multi-ethnic and multicultural societies tends to analyse them without baring in considering the collective history of the groups within it and is now always going to be done from a post world war II Western apologist frame. One of my lecturers once mentioned the Armenian Genocide with his two fingers on each hand up and twitching, to make inverted commas, the reason? He was speaking to a mostly British Pakistani lecture hall. I remember him looking a little worried when I was talking about the problems with politically influenced historical revisionism and quoted Hitler, saying "again one might ask, who remembers the Armenians". The point is that if, for the sake of appeasing some Turks and other assorted Muslims, we arrest those Bulgarians who try and publicise the historically credited accounts of the massacres the Turks committed against them or fail to recognise the Armenian genocide for the sake of not upsetting state relations with Turkey, then what were are saying is that keeping some arrogant idiots happy, not giving them the no doubt much wanted excuse to go and riot or whatever, then we are saying that the attempted destruction of a people or a nation is something that can be forgotten for the sake of small scale political ease. Surely that is a disgusting thing to say. With the likely demographic changes in Europe being the way they are, this is dangerous for our society.
I have read a little bit about life for Christians under Islamic rule and I fail to see how, from a truly neutral viewpoint, rather than a Western apologist, self loathing view, it can be seen as more comparable with the lives of Muslims living in the contemporary Western world than with Jews living in Medieval Europe.
I might continue this and cover drugs, sex and masculinity later, we'll see.
