By Con George-Kotzabasis
Professor Vrasidas
Karalis of Sydney University, the translator of some of the books of Patrick
White, has come to bury the condottieri of multiculturalism—I won’t call them warriors
as that would give a worthy name to an unworthy cause—that are still fighting
ingloriously and in an enfeebled state to resuscitate a concept that has been
in a comatose state since the late eighties, when Slav Macedonians were burning
Greek churches and when more recently, fanatic jihadists in pursuit of the
seventy-two virgins, I must say, a chimerical, an eluding chase, they will
never find them, were planning to kill thousands of Australians in football
grounds and in public malls. It is in such a deadly milieu that the
multiculturalists are attempting, in a futile and full of zealotry effort, to
breathe life into a ghost. And in spite of the fact that the founding father of
multiculturalism, professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, expressed explicitly his doubts
about the viability of multiculturalism in the face of this tidal wave of
atavism. Also, Gareth Evans, serving at the time as minister of communications,
said to me in a phone conversation, that these conflicts between Slavs and
Greeks, Serbs, Croatians and Bosnians spelled out the burial of
multiculturalism.
It is a great fallacy
to postulate that cultures have an amicable disposition and can live in a
peaceful state of coexistence with each other without conflict. History has
shown pellucidly that cultures, on fundamental issues are irreconcilable, and are
in a permanent state of antagonistic competition and the stronger and more
successful always subdue and supplant the weaker and less thriving. The Romans
appropriated the higher culture of the Greeks and the German tribes, who were
fighting the Romans were, in turn, absorbed by the higher culture of the
latter.
No less a figure
than Karl Marx, many of whose supporters today are puzzlingly upholders of multiculturalism,
expressed, with characteristic force and eloquence, the inequality of cultures and
the irreversible proclivity of the more powerful, in terms of intellectual,
scientific, economic, and political success, to overwhelm and vanquish the
weaker and less successful in the realm of human development and freedom. Without
for a moment supporting or pleading his ideology, I would like, if you allow
me, to paraphrase the great man: The elemental force of capitalism and its great
culture would sweep away, on a vast scale, the dead weight of traditions and
cultures that riveted their peoples to the obfuscation, ignorance, and bigotry
of a hoary past.
After this long, but
I believe relevant diversion, let us return back to the thesis of Professor
Karalis. In a well structured argument delivered with panache, vivacity and
wit, Karalis cogently argued, that with the ascendance of the Liberal-National
Party to power in 1997, and the immediate dismantling of multiculturalism by
the Howard government and the weak reaction of the ethnic communities to this
dismantling, especially the Greek that was the avant-garde of multiculturalism, demonstrated clearly that the
major part of these communities in a short duration were absorbed by a process
of osmosis to the values and mores of a global, cosmopolitan Australian society.
In his own words, the ethnic communities were incorporated within the
political, economic, and cultural institutional framework of the Australian
society. And he asks the question, is there still any reason to advocate
multiculturalism as a nation-building policy or as a political project for the
future? His answer is decisively negative.
Professor Karalis
not only buried multiculturalism, but also inadvertently, fully justified the
position and prognostications of the historian Geoffrey Blainey and that great
Australian John Stone who both of them expressed, almost fifteen years ago, for
which they were pilloried and maligned by the leftist intelligentsia, that
multiculturalism was the design of historically ignorant politicians who could
not perceive that at a critical moment would collide with Australian culture
and would never recover from this crash. And the death knell for
multiculturalism sounds presently in all European countries--especially in the
context of Islamist terror--which had also so naively and un-historically
adapted it as the elixir that would induce different cultures and peoples to
love each other. They had forgotten that amity and congeniality could only
issue from the sharing of common fundamental values that give the opportunity
to all to succeed in the endeavours of daily life and to fulfil their ambitions
according to their individualistic proclivities. It is the great culture of capitalism
and its free enterprise system that provides these invaluable principles that
lead to the comity of nations and peoples and eradicate, to a high degree,
deadly conflict.
I rest on my oars: Your turn now
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