Last month journalist Peter Whittle wrote an article for The Sunday Times titled “How my neighbourhood was lost to the multiculture”.
It’s the story of the transformation through foreign immigration of the London suburb of Woolwich. Whittle writes eloquently of how such immigration undoes a sense of community and undermines the particular attachments which individuals have to the places they inhabit.
According to Whittle, in the 1970s the area,
“had something that amounted to a collective identity.
“Now it appears to me fragmented, with different ethnic communities existing side-by-side, sometimes uneasily, sometimes violently and always with a sense of nothingness in the air ...
“Sometimes now, in streets I’ve used since my Sixties boyhood, I’m struck by the sense that this place no longer provides my identifiable roots, that now I am simply one of many who happen to live here, with no greater claim to it sentimentally or historically than the next man.”
Such anonymity might be what people are looking for when they choose to live in the teeming metropolitan centre, but in a suburb that has shaped much of your life, it’s a hard feeling to negotiate.”
Whittle then adds an important point, that this is a process which people feel they have no choice about (so much for liberalism giving us unimpeded individual choice!),
“the golden elite who run the country still don’t hold much with the idea that there might be millions throughout the country who are tolerant in their approach to these issues and detest extremism, but who are deeply concerned about the way in which their neighbourhoods might be affected by such far-reaching social and cultural changes, over which they have no control.”
He ends by noting that diversity in everyday life often triggers feelings of alienation,
“The truth is, if you celebrate difference enough, eventually nobody will feel the same about anything. London, for example, is home now to more than 150 different languages – a fact evidenced on my regular crowded train journey home.
“While for some this might flatter a sense of cosmopolitanism, is it not possible that for others, in an everyday context, it can lead to an unconscious alienation? ...
“We may congratulate ourselves endlessly on the creation of a melting pot, but we should be careful that it’s not achieved by the estrangement of many.”
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 04 Feb 2006 13:32 | #
I read it when it was published. But beyond actually mentioning the subject of dispossession and cultural anomie, which it does I suppose, I couldn’t see much merit in it.
First, the stick: if one is going to explain these things to a brainwashed public it is absolutely necessary to cease making apologies for English national consciousness by conflating it, in effect, with “extremism”. That’s just driving the brainwashing in.
Second, the carrot: he’s wrong in his general description of the issue, and won’t venture outside the moral rules established by the enemy class. Only fanatic Marxist white-haters and race replacers celebrate “difference” and congratulate themselves “on the creation of a melting pot”. For the English it is genocidal and the source only of the deepest foreboding and woe. Words like “tolerant” and “cosmopolitanism” aren’t neutral in this anti-English war. If they are used they need always to be morally and/or politically qualified. Otherwise we offer readers no sense that they can, indeed must, freely contemplate the dispossession, deracination and even extinction of their own people, and think on a way to curtail it.