The England (and America) that has been lost, because of immigration

Jeff writes from England:

I’m watching David Lean’s “That Happy Breed” (from Noel Coward play) made in 1944 about life in a nearly all white suburban (not well to do) Britain between the World Wars…damp rooms, limited diet, low income but I would have loved to have lived then….a real paradise (yes the grass was greener!)….great sense of community…even the Marxists were lovely….a completely different planet to say the least…I’m near tears watching it, we can never get it back…instead I go out in my area to women in burquas, black muggers, no community, drunken louts, etc. etc. great, ain’t it…why oh why did “we” let it change so much….ditto America….God we’re living in s*** now, even the rich areas….sigh….Jeff

Jeff continues:

I just finished “This Happy Breed” and it left me really sad, much more than Proust’s past fictional world for example. that’s because not only do I live in Britain and am at least partially ‘them’ (and partial to them) but because it’s a lot closer than Proust’s world to what we long for and are connected to and to what we almost could have been if born just a bit earlier…. I came to England with dreams of that England and just caught the very very end of that sort of English way of living, a whole civilisation has been destroyed irrevocably in a period of 40 or so years. How can an Asian family (even if they are nice) and/or Asian community evoke those feelings for me, or a single parent black family or the so called black community with gangsta rap blaring and the streets unwalkable due to gun and knife crime, or even the white eastern European families and communities with their endless deceit and thieving and materialism. No, these ‘indigenous’ English had something special the likes of what we will never see again. Ironically all the countries the immigrants come from will keep their homogenous cultures. We in the West produce a prosperous higher culture (even if in decline) and what do we get for it? It’s destroyed by immigrant invaders who are hardly grateful to be here and rarely acknowledge the greatness of the specific Western culture they’ve come to live in (England in this case). I’ve often thought of this. The English worked for thousands of years to get where they are and not have flies on their eyes and rampant poverty and disease and they produce Shakespeare and Newton and Burke and Churchill. Then the Africans and other Third World people come here and reap the fruits of what the English have sown over thousands of years.

Just to repeat, I don’t think all immigrants are bad people nor was I completely against immigration if done in livable SMALL amounts. After all, I am a Jew and an American immigrant in England. But the West has been invaded and overrun. Simple as that. By people who couldn’t care less what English life was like in the 20’s and 30’s, as long as they have their own culture and religion. Did they ever think for one minute that they (in such numbers) are destroying what the English had? They are so busy doing their own cultural thing that they are totally unaware of the effect they’ve had, or don’t care, like small children unaware of how their behaviour affects others. I now know how the Romans felt as they saw Rome fall to various immigrant hordes.

Jeff’s observations are of great interest to me not only because he gets so poignantly at the terrible truth of what has happened and is happening, but because he’s going through the same trauma that I went through in the 1980s, with no one to talk to about it, in New York City.

Stephen writes:

Jeff writes from England, “Ironically, all the countries these immigrants come from will keep their homogenous cultures.”

He can include Mexico in that category. Its Mestizo culture remains mostly untouched, untainted, with no adjustments or adaptations to other cultures required or desired. In many ways, it is indistinguishable from the 1950s, especially towards the interior. Any Mexican who wants to experience the good old days just has to take a long weekend back across the border. It was common to hear illegal Mexican nationals I worked with sigh blissfully and say how wonderful and reassuring are their periodic jaunts back home, because everything is just the same as when they were kids. But where the hell do we go, to get back to the California of our childhood?

I made a similar comment in my 1990 booklet The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism:

Finally, if we want to consider “cultural equity,” there seems to be an extraordinary kind of inequity in the proposition that the United States must lose its identity, must become the “speechless, meaningless country” that Allan Bloom has foreseen, while the countries that the new immigrants are coming from are free to preserve their identities. In a hundred years, the United States will have become in large part a Hispanic nation, while Latin America will still be what it has always been; Mexico has strict immigration laws even against other Latin Americans. China, Korea, the Philippines and India will still have their historic cultures intact after having exported millions of their people to America, while America’s historic culture will have vanished. If the situation were reversed and North Americans were colonizing Latin America and Asia, it would be denounced as racist imperialism. Why, then, does every other country in the world have the right to preserve its identity but the United States has not? The answer, as I’ve tried to show, is that the end of multiculturalism is not some utopian, “equal” society, but simply the end of American civilization.

So much for America; if other Western nations continue their openness to Third World immigration, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of Western civilization as a whole. And this defeat of the West will have been accomplished, not by the superior strength or civilization of the newcomers, not by the “forces of history,” but simply by the feckless generosity and moral cowardice of the West itself. In the prophetic words of social psychologist William McDougall:

As I watch the American nation speeding gaily, with invincible optimism down the road to destruction, I seem to be contemplating the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 20, 2006 12:13 PM | Send