Multiculturalism: no identity at all?

DeVore

Go to Amsterdam.
Marvel at what multi-culturism has to offer.

It isnt like giant melting pot where everything is uniformly the same culture, its more like a tossed salad, everything together but each retaining its unique flavour.

DeV.

DadaKopf

I was there DeVore - I met you there

The Dutch have long been known for being a very tolerant people and it shows, definitely. Despite the fact that their political system was staunchly pillarised until the 1960s so Catholics, Protestants and Socialists voted for their own specific parties every time, and they have a huge immigrant problem as well as an increasing crime rate, they do respect diversity. However, It's impossible to know just exactly how they view their own history - maybe they feel guilty about the Dutch colonies, maybe they, too, have eraticated history and so on. I don't know.

The question was kind of relating to Ireland more than anywhere else. I think.

Greenbean

Personally, Irish-ism has always been to me about Myths of the past, screwed up senses of nationalism and a presumption that those before us were more Irish than we.

Overall we have been a farming country for many years, with traditions - but nothing so permanent as we think. I've had to seperate myself from the whole "Irish" thing and start seeing the world in my eyes and its hard to give a damn what someone thinks is their land. You may get used to the multi-cultural world, theres nothing wrong with it, and like every generation before us we shall see changes. How insignificant would our notions of us and them become should an alien race attack earth. We'd suddenly be very happy to see other fellow human beings as friends.

bugler

I hear you.I'm starting to mourn for our own distinctive currency already, I will not like dealing in euros and cents.This may seem a small thing, but culture is made up of myriad small things.I'm sorry but I must take issue(partly) with the Amsterdam example! No doubt it is a great laugh(I will probably drop in sometime this summer ) but I believe it also has plenty that is to be undesired.I suppose its a bit like having red light cities rather than just districts, the day Ireland becomes like Amsterdam is the day I will up sticks and jump ship. Certainly I don't think that things such as keeping our currency and heritage are irreconcilable with allowing immigration et al.

TwoShedsJackson

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by bugler:
.I'm sorry but I must take issue(partly) with the Amsterdam example! No doubt it is a great laugh(I will probably drop in sometime this summer ) but I believe it also has plenty that is to be undesired.I suppose its a bit like having red light cities rather than just districts, the day Ireland becomes like Amsterdam is the day I will up sticks and jump ship</font>

What with Ireland being such a paradise and all Where do you think you'd go?

bugler

Thats a bridge to be crossed when it happens.Lets face it,it won't in my lifetime....I hope.

DadaKopf

The debate's raging in Britain with catchcries like "Save the Pound" and calls for the preservation of Britishness while Labour MPs like Robin Cooke declaring that there was never a 'British race' anyway, it seems like history is being wiped out.

I just feel a little disgusted in one way about the new tide of almost contrived multiculturalism sweeping the Brish Isles - and that includes Ireland.

Declan Kiberd wrote an essay on this very subject but about Ireland - he says that Ireland has always been a diverse, multicultural society, reaching way back to prehistoric times. This is just another installment of what seems to be fake liberalism, "typical third way stuff" as jeremy Paxman called it when talking to a Labour MP last week.

Liberalism used to be a radical movement which held freedom of speech above all else but now liberalism is a buzz word which means very little; politicians won't touch topics that might be perceived as 'dynamite' because it's all about image. It's not som much a de Tocquevillian 'tyranny of the majority' as such but a tyranny of liberalism, of spin, of the image.

Ireland can't help but be sucked into Labour's new way - an apparent deportation of old socialist traditions and an embracing of modernity or, Thatcherism. One commenter noted that Labour hasn't departed from old socialism that much - they have almost eradicated the past and its traditions and have embraced the future, creating what amounts to a Year Zero.

What's happening history?

Theres a sort of liberal iconoclasm occurring, a seedy revisionism, that rewrites history to suit everyone as if barbarity and questionable acts of violence of just unpalatable episodes can simply be covered up or whitewashed over by this tide of false liberalism. If politicians and writers and so on were remotely rational about the whole thing, they'd accept Ireland for what we are NOW as much as what we were because there is an Irishness even if it is changing.

The whole thing amounts to reverse propaganda - are we so scared of insulting our new multiethnic neighbours that we're willing to forfeit our own identity just to make them feel welcome? If you ask me, that's bo||ox.

Everyone knows what damage is done when this happens. Who says you cant be different, have an identity and be welcoming of immigrants? I mean for God's sake, they're allowed to have their own identity, why not us - or the British.

Everyone's getting lost in the mire of missing grand narratives. History's dead they say - no it's not, it's just much more complicated.

Excelsior

To Iceland Castor!

Or maybe Tokyo.

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My Adolescent website:
http://www.iol.net/~mullent

azezil

this is semi relivent...
i was watchin...something, can't remember what, about what it mean's to be 'British' and how its different from being 'English', which makes sence i suppose.

so i was just wondering, should we adopt a similar policy, make up a 'new' name for people, other than natives, who live in Ireland?

cause i know i'd think it'd sound rather funny to hear a guy of abvious forign origins(don't want to start any race riots! ) sayin he /she's irish!

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"just because you're not paraniod, doesn't mean they're not after you!"

Magwitch

I think the truth of new "multi-culturism" is not that estblished cultures are expected to absord other cultural aspect and develop, as had been true in the past. But that other cultures should be allowed to establish themselves without integration within the boundries of another culture. UNHEARD OF IN HISTORY TO DATE.. but that seems to be the rather misguided interpertation of what multi-cultural means.

Britian (in the midst of this arguement) is being asked to accept cultural aspects, such as sharia laws and a muslim parliment by people who have newly emigrated or are established 2nd generation and who fervently anti-british/English. France a few years back had to arrest a women attempting to circumcise her daughter, a questionable and painful practice that leaves the reciepient scared for life, but this is a religious rite.

Real Cultural integration (resulting in multi-culturalism) does not happen in one night or even one generation, it takes time. But unfortunity the media and certain politicians are pressuring for results to bolster their own platform, which suits the impressionable boob tube jockey generation with no realisation of their own cultural identity and the extremists who would import ideals, laws and customs that we left behind a century or more ago.

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Keep your powder dry and your pants moist

DadaKopf

It's their own fault for introducing a rediclous Human Rights Act in the first place - now everyone wants apiece of the action and few people are willing to share.

Clintons Cat

i believe in assimilation rathjer than multi culturalism.
multi cultralism to me means some fat middle age woman teaching school kids how to bake chapatis or some such patronising clap trap.
as for introduction of shear law, i would rather have my eyes poked out before i saw it introduced here,wtf do you think people are fleeing iran and afganistan in such numbers?oh yeah i forgot its because they want to sign on and fill the pockets of their landlords...
<sigh>

ObeyGiant

At last year's Billy Bragg concert in Vicar Street, he launched into a massive tyrade about how the English were inherently a multicultural nation. One of the main points he made was about the fact that the English are the only nationality with a hyphen, "Anglo hyphen saxon". Shortly after the concert, he wrote about it in the Guardian, including the lyrics one of his new songs
Why York should be the capital of England

adnans

multiculturalism has been with us all the time. its only this time its not us that are going to different countries like the irish people do anyway, it's the people from other, and sometimes impoverished countries that are making their way for a better life. and when they do come to a certain country they have to adhere to new laws and change from the old ways. recently, the actions and talk of racism, multiculturalism and even europeanism(is that a word?) is getting everyone a bit hasty and uncomfortable that they end up trying to figure out if they are ready for this sort of culture blending in their country.

im 3 weeks irish today and im still the same person that i was before i became an irish citizen. and untill alchohol is banned throughout the universe there will always be the concept of "irishness" so no1 has to worry a thing anymore.

adnans