This is my response to a NYTimes editorial, "Europe’s Shared Responsibility for Migrants"(June 5, 2015), encouraging Europe to take in yet more immigrants and asylum seekers. I emailed it to them for publication, which, of course, they didn't do, and is why I'm publishing it here.
If the current wave of immigration into Europe was a one off, I would sympathise with the Editorial Board's attitude in respect to Europe taking the immigrants in, as expressed in last Friday’s editorial, “Europe’s Shared Responsibility for Migrants” (June 5th), but this is not the case. Europe has been experiencing wave after wave of poor-world immigration for decades. We have already taken in millions, and there is no indication that the flood is about to stop anytime soon. On the contrary, all the signs are that the flow of immigrants will continue to grow, as population, poverty and conflict in poor-world countries also grow.
So long as there is a significant wealth-poverty, freedom and opportunity gradient and little to impede the flow, people will move along it in one direction only, just as heat moves from hot to cold, until equilibrium has been reached, i.e. when conditions in the West cease to attract, which, in the fantasy world of most social and political scientists (especially economists), will be when the poor world is as rich and free and full of opportunities as the West is, but in reality will be when conditions in the West have deteriorated sufficiently.
I can’t believe that members of the Editorial Board are being wilfully or maliciously blind to the long-term consequences of mass poor-world immigration into Europe, so I assume that their blindness has other causes, which, of course, they are also blind to and thus unaware of.
Clearly, they want to do right by the immigrants and asylum seekers, as individual human beings, who would be hugely helped - in the short to medium term, at least - if allowed to settle in Europe, but far from being a long-term solution, it is a recipe for conflict and disaster on a scale with the potential to exceed even that of the 20th century. The saying, “The way to Hell is paved with good intentions”, springs very much to mind.
Europe, over the centuries, has had its fill of its own inborn ethnic tensions and conflicts (and these between peoples of very similar race, culture, religion and ethnic origins), but now, following the traumas of WW1, WW2 and the Holocaust, just as Europe’s major ethnic groups (nations) are learning to get along, we are importing en masse from abroad the potential for new and additional ethnic tensions and conflicts (which, in respect to Muslims and “blacks” we are already experiencing). Just as Europeans are finally learning to share their continent peacefully with each other, it is deemed not enough; we are now expected to share our continent with an ever-increasing (and this is the crucial point) number of non-Europeans as well, which is MADNESS.
Europe has a distinctive indigenous population of closely related peoples, just as America does, only instead of making up just a tiny, impotent, proportion of the total population, we still constitute the overwhelming majority. Neither have we been subjugated or dispossessed by foreign invaders, as native Americans were, but by our OWN ruling elites, who are now imposing the madness of mass poor-world immigration on our already overpopulated subcontinent and the DIVERSE, multi-ethnic society that comes with it.
The method to this madness, which it took me a very long time to recognise and develop an understanding of, is only partly economic (the import of cheap foreign labour, i.e. “human resources” into the West) and generally acknowledged. Far more important, but largely unrecognised, is the ideological and power-political role this madness plays, serving, as it does, as an instrument of socio-political intimidation, rewards, punishments, manipulation and control, just as medieval church ideology once did.
Post-racial multicultural society and ideology serves the age-old strategy of “divide and rule”, dividing society into a morally superior, now "colour-blind", ruling elite (supported by their favoured clients) and the morally inferior, naturally less "colour-blind", masses, who must submit to their superiors’ moral authority - and power.
No one is really "colour-blind”, of course, but can only feign it (perhaps without being consciously aware of it), humans being the inherently and intensely tribal animal that we are. Although the issue is complicated by the Paradox of Race Does and Doesn't Matter depending on whether we are dealing with personal relationships between individuals or more abstract relationships between strangers, especially in large numbers.
Race is NOT the "social construct" that the state would have us believe it is (except when you try dividing closely related peoples from the same subcontinent into different races, as the Nazis insanely did), but real and important. Not in the way that racial supremacists believe it is, but because it reflects our ethnic origins and is thus central to any deep and meaningful sense of both personal and group, i.e. genuine national, identity. Which is, of course, why the state, which poses as our nation, in order to legitimise itself, its ruling elites and the immense power they wield and abuse, seeks to deny and suppress this basic truth.
"Celebrating Diversity" is nothing other than Orwellian newspeak for ethnic Europeans (white people) to celebrate our own ethnic displacement (white flight), replacement (we have already been reduced to an ethnic minority in large swathes of our major cities, including my own birth place) and ultimate demise . . .
In place of "original sin" (disobedience of divine, i.e. priestly/state authority) we now have "racial prejudice" (the natural human inclination - like original sin - to identity with members of one's own tribe, race or ethnic group, which absurdly was made responsible for the Holocaust and equated with the evils of Nazi racism), which only submission to priestly/academic/political/state ideology and authority can save us from eternal damnation for, not as heathens and heretics, as in the past, but as "bigots" and “racists".
Why did it take me so long to recognise these simple and now - to me, at least - obvious truths? Why have academics still not recognised them? And why have they resisted all my efforts, thus far, to point them out to them?
It is because POWER (of the state) forbids it, and because academics, like their medieval predecessors and counterparts, are themselves privileged clients and employees of their respective "patron state", with a massive personal self-interest (subconscious more than conscious) in rationalising and defending its role, self-image (as our "nation") and ideologies (social, political, economic and racial, formerly religious), on which the state bases its claim to moral and knowledgeable authority.
Our understanding of ourselves, society and the state is fatally misconceived, because the human brain (including, most importantly, that of academics) evolved to want to maintain the environment on which it depends and has been “successful” in (as everyone who is anyone in society invariably has been), and thus rationalises its view of reality accordingly.
Overcoming this obstacle and developing a more objective and realistic understanding of society and the state is no mean task - a bit like trying to jump over one’s own shadow - but at the moment most academics are not even aware of it, which means that the social and political sciences are still stuck in a pre-Copernican, i.e. pre-Darwinian, dark age, with modern social science academics clinging to their misconceived ideas just as Ptolemaic astronomers and Galenic doctors once did to theirs, and for much the same reasons.
If we are to solve our - increasingly dire - social, political, economic and environmental problems, which the very survival of our civilisation urgently depends on us doing, we need a much better, more realistic, understanding of ourselves, society and the state, which at present is clearly lacking.
As human beings we are ALL prejudiced about EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, including RACE, notwithstanding the huge pressure that state ideology puts us (especially our academic, political and media elites) under to deny and suppress it in ourselves and to demonise it in others. Demonising racial prejudice was an understandable overreaction to the horrors of Nazi racial ideology, and to the injustice and inhumanity of Jim Crow and Apartheid, but instead of allowing reason and good sense to correct this overreaction, it was quickly consolidated into an ideology (post-racial multiculturalism) of socio-political intimidation and control.
Demonising racial prejudice for its role in crimes of racial hatred is like demonising male sexuality for the role it plays in rape. Obviously, the two are connected, and we need to control our prejudices in a civilised fashion, just we do our sexuality, but not deny, demonise and suppress them. The legitimate role of the state is to formulate and enforce laws which ensure that our prejudices and sexuality are expressed in an acceptable and civilised fashion.
I appreciate just how shocking, or absurd - initially, at least - the ideas I have expressed here must appear to you at the NYTimes, including members of the Editorial Board, who will, of course, have to approve their publication in your Op-Ed section. I feel like an atheist hoping to get my views on Christianity published in a conservative Catholic journal.
Like the Catholic church, you at the NYTimes are committed and beholden to an ideology (post-racial multiculturalism) that I am radically criticising. However, you are also committed to seeking the truth through free debate and discussion, by means of which we might arrive at a better understanding of ourselves, society and the state.
It would be naive of me to expect you to publish this offering, but I hope that you will at least read and give some thought to my ideas.
Best regards
Roger Hicks
