Londistan...

...from an interview in Front Page Magazine on 5/12/06


Jamie Glazov: Can you talk a little bit about the collapse of traditional British identity and of the destructiveness of multiculturalism?



Melanie Phillips: This is absolutely a key issue. Multiculturalism has turned Britain’s values inside out – and the root cause of the problem is the deconstruction of Britain’s identity. For decades, the British elite has been consumed by loathing of its national identity and values which it decided were racist, authoritarian and generally disagreeable. Much of that was due to our old friend, post-colonial guilt. The elite was therefore vulnerable to the predations of the left, which had signed up to Gramsci’s insight that a society could be suborned by replacing its normative values by the mores of those who transgressed them or were on society’s margins.




This gave rise to multiculturalism and minority rights, which held that all cultures were equal to each other and which thus provided minorities with an enormous weapon with which to force the majority to give in to their demands. One of the consequences of this was moral inversion, which holds that since minorities are weak they must always be victims of the majority because it is strong. So even when minorities behave badly, it’s always the majority’s fault. Translate that onto the world stage, and you arrive at the view that even when third world people commit terrorist outrages against the west it must be the west which is to blame. That’s why multicultural Britain said, after 9/11, that America ‘had it coming to them’ – and why, after the London bombings last July, it said the reason British Muslim boys had blown up the London transit system was because of Britain’s support for the US in Iraq.



Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist.



Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, commentator and author, whose columns appear in the UK in the Daily Mail and who writes a blog at www.melaniephillips.com. She is the author of the new book Londonistan.