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Multiculturalism in the Age of Coronavirus
Multiculturalism in the Age of Coronavirus
ANDREW JOYCE
APRIL 14, 2020
In all genuine crises, the superfluous and the artificial within one’s ecology are abandoned quickly. Consult with any survival expert and he will tell you that the core strategy in any survival situation is to strip all activity back to extreme basics — fire, shelter, water, and food. Anything else, any attempt to divert energy into unnecessary rest or leisure, could prove fatal. When societies encounter genuine crises, the same philosophy prevails. Central infrastructure is protected, and superfluous entertainments and distractions are either repurposed as propaganda for the maintenance of morale or dispensed with entirely. The flow of information, outside propaganda, is streamlined to the essential and the relevant. When was the last time you heard about a “Drag Queen Story Hour” or tranny bathrooms? These things were part of our civilisational decline, but they were also merely a form of cultural ephemera produced by a corrupt, rootless cosmopolitanism. To put it in the new language of our times, these things were examples of viral shedding rather than the virus itself. They were the means by which the ideological virus reproduced itself in impressionable or vulgar minds. It may be some time before we are exposed to this kind of ephemera again, which we can applaud and self-congratulate ourselves about, but what about the real virus at the heart of it? What about multiculturalism under coronavirus?
All dissident circles and political outliers have explained lack of success in recent decades by arguing that the false consciousness of the masses, induced by materialism and the saturation of culture with the prevailing ideology, can only be broken by a crisis of global proportions. For the Far Left, this has involved speculation about identifying “emancipatory opportunities” in events such as the migrant crisis, the 2008 financial crash, and the putative future collapse of capitalism itself. Those on the Far Right have equally made gains through crises such as ethnic riots, Muslim terrorism, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would therefore appear natural, to some extent, to assume that the bigger the crisis, the bigger the possible gains for those outside the mainstream. The assumption would be that a global health emergency ushering in a new Great Depression, would be just what dissidents are looking for. The difficultly thus far, however, is that coronavirus doesn’t seem to be delivering. Why?
Multiculturalism in stasis
Although we are still in the relatively early stages of this outbreak, and a long way from the mass production of a vaccine, the system has taken extremely good care of itself and has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to absorb and deflect damage. I’m not referring here to medical systems, or to the production and distribution of supplies and equipment, which has been problematic and haphazard. I’m talking about the fundamental governmental and financial structure of how we live our lives. My initial impression is that the tensions induced by multiculturalism and mass migration are now under a kind of situational permafrost. Quite simply, just like its manifestations of viral shedding, multiculturalism has itself been quarantined. If multiculturalism was sustained in the past by a vast network of creeping legal, educational, social, and cultural controls, then it shouldn’t be surprising that it should be held firmly in place at a time when government controls are expanding rapidly.
Multiculturalism is a political and economic problem, but it is primarily social in that it involves direct competition and negative interpersonal interactions between races (social groups). With the introduction of social distancing and forms of mass house arrest, there would be a predictable decline in flashpoints and confrontations. Of course, people still need to exercise, and to procure food and medicines. And, unfortunately, even these meagre opportunities have already provided ample opportunities for Whites to be targeted. In England there have been examples of Muslims and Africans harassing elderly Whites by coughing on them, but the butchering of a seven-year-old English girl, who had been taken on a bike ride through a park by her father, by a Somali immigrant is probably the most horrific recent example. Overall, however, with streets emptying and social gatherings all but eliminated, multiculturalism, along with its symptoms, has been largely sidelined by immediate medical and financial concerns.
This is a valuable lesson for those of us, myself included, who had been convinced in recent years that any kind of serious crisis would prove to be a tipping point in Western consciousness about multiculturalism. Certainly I did not foresee a situation in which multiculturalism could be sequestered within a crisis. And yet it has been. Since the imposition of social distancing measures, crime has plummeted throughout the West. In some areas of the UK, crime has dropped by 20% thanks to the almost complete elimination of snatch-thefts and assaults in public spaces, crimes in which non-Whites feature disproportionately as perpetrators. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have witnessed falls in crime of around 25%, with the most marked declines in burglary and assault. Sex crimes have in some areas declined by almost 50%. These falls are almost entirely due to the dramatic reduction, even elimination, of opportunities for such crimes to take place. Whites are safer in their homes than they are in a public saturated with ethnic hostility and criminality. What prevails now is an uneasy peace, a kind of phoney war. Ethnic crime and other forms of interpersonal hostility between the races, something we should unashamedly acknowledge as a propaganda advantage in our confrontation with the broader phenomenon of multiculturalism, is for the time being more or less neutered.
A New False Consciousness
The advice given to the British government by SAGE quite bluntly argues for the manufacturing of a “a sense of collectivism: All messaging should reinforce a sense of community, that ‘we are all in this together.’” This is something that we should all have expected when something like “the crisis” we’d been waiting for finally arrived. That being said, I never imagined it would work. What I have instead observed in the last few weeks is something like the creation of a new false consciousness to mask the cracks in the old one. Yes, economic uncertainty and a daily drumbeat of morbid fear is being disseminated by the mass media. But, for me personally, the more unsettling aspect of what has occurred is the development of a sense of collectivism bred on social media and rooted entirely in fantasy, self-congratulation, and a cloying, ad hoc, insincere, and entirely temporary sentimentality about health workers.
Quite frankly, we aren’t all in this together. Regardless of the insane bathtub ranting of Madonna, the mega-rich have absconded from their city dwellings en masse, in search of private islands replete with “Covid-19 tests abroad, personal medics and subterranean hideouts.” Otherwise normal people have engaged in riotous behavior against one another in order to obtain vast quantities of toilet paper. Competition and tension between nations has increased over access to suppliesfrom China. The old and infirm are more or less at the mercy of younger generations who’ve either failed to take the virus seriously or openly celebrated it as a “Boomer Remover.” Muslims and ultra-Orthodox Jews have proven themselves to be especially prone to spreading infection (see here and here) and dying from COVID-19 (so far, Jews are over-represented in UK deaths by a factor of eight), due to their large families, sometimes with three generations under one roof, and other social habits. Blacks and the disabled have each made the case that they are being uniquely discriminated against in government responses to coronavirus. It’s a psychological free-for-all, and fertile ground for physical disquiet, disguised only by the fact we’re barely allowed out of our homes.
Part of the conditioning of false collectivism is the easily observed widespread employment of the language of warfare. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard politicians and media figures talk about the “battle” against “the enemy.” Donald Trump has declared he is a “wartime president” against “an invisible enemy.” Emmanuel Macron announced that his country is at war with an “invisible, elusive” enemy. Italy’s special commissioner said the country must equip itself for a “war economy.” Prior to becoming infected and entering intensive care, Boris Johnson announced to his fellow Britons that theirs was a fight in which each and every citizen was “directly enlisted.” Doctors and nurses are said to be on the “front line.” One intention of this nomenclature is probably to reinforce the seriousness of the situation, and to encourage a sense of sacrifice. On the other hand, and more subversively, it’s designed to pacify aggression (by encouraging people to accept their losses as part of a “war effort”), to normalise the expansion of emergency powers and the national security state, and to try to manufacture popular unity by positing a common enemy upon which we are supposed to vent our anxieties and psychological aggression."
ulturalism-in-the-age-of-coronavirus/
Multiculturalism in the Age of Coronavirus
ANDREW JOYCE
APRIL 14, 2020
"The above advice was given to the British government in late March, and represents a propaganda strategy designed to stop the flimsy fantasy of multicultural harmony coming apart at its threadbare seams. From a purely strategic point of view, of course, it makes perfect sense. Whether readers believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is a real health crisis or a contrived one, the fact remains that a crisis scenario has been fully realized. Millions are now unemployed, with no immediate prospect of finding new jobs. Many thousands are being taken into hospitals with rapidly diminishing capabilities to treat them. Resources, in terms of jobs, material goods, and services, are becoming scarce. Entire populations have been placed under a kind of house arrest, with some losing their minds and adding their own families to a “string of domestic killings.” A state of emergency now prevails, and the “normal” that we knew isn’t coming back any time soon, and perhaps never will. Multiculturalism, built on the hitherto monolithic foundations of global liberal finance capitalism, and “normalised” by an equally monolithic academic-media complex, is thus subjected to its first “earthquake” from outside the system. One would naturally expect this system to respond by shoring up its more vulnerable structures. And so, I’d been waiting for advice on protecting multiculturalism, like that from SAGE, for about two weeks before it finally arrived. We can be sure it’s been repeated, more or less verbatim, in the halls of every Western government.
In all genuine crises, the superfluous and the artificial within one’s ecology are abandoned quickly. Consult with any survival expert and he will tell you that the core strategy in any survival situation is to strip all activity back to extreme basics — fire, shelter, water, and food. Anything else, any attempt to divert energy into unnecessary rest or leisure, could prove fatal. When societies encounter genuine crises, the same philosophy prevails. Central infrastructure is protected, and superfluous entertainments and distractions are either repurposed as propaganda for the maintenance of morale or dispensed with entirely. The flow of information, outside propaganda, is streamlined to the essential and the relevant. When was the last time you heard about a “Drag Queen Story Hour” or tranny bathrooms? These things were part of our civilisational decline, but they were also merely a form of cultural ephemera produced by a corrupt, rootless cosmopolitanism. To put it in the new language of our times, these things were examples of viral shedding rather than the virus itself. They were the means by which the ideological virus reproduced itself in impressionable or vulgar minds. It may be some time before we are exposed to this kind of ephemera again, which we can applaud and self-congratulate ourselves about, but what about the real virus at the heart of it? What about multiculturalism under coronavirus?
All dissident circles and political outliers have explained lack of success in recent decades by arguing that the false consciousness of the masses, induced by materialism and the saturation of culture with the prevailing ideology, can only be broken by a crisis of global proportions. For the Far Left, this has involved speculation about identifying “emancipatory opportunities” in events such as the migrant crisis, the 2008 financial crash, and the putative future collapse of capitalism itself. Those on the Far Right have equally made gains through crises such as ethnic riots, Muslim terrorism, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would therefore appear natural, to some extent, to assume that the bigger the crisis, the bigger the possible gains for those outside the mainstream. The assumption would be that a global health emergency ushering in a new Great Depression, would be just what dissidents are looking for. The difficultly thus far, however, is that coronavirus doesn’t seem to be delivering. Why?
Multiculturalism in stasis
Although we are still in the relatively early stages of this outbreak, and a long way from the mass production of a vaccine, the system has taken extremely good care of itself and has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to absorb and deflect damage. I’m not referring here to medical systems, or to the production and distribution of supplies and equipment, which has been problematic and haphazard. I’m talking about the fundamental governmental and financial structure of how we live our lives. My initial impression is that the tensions induced by multiculturalism and mass migration are now under a kind of situational permafrost. Quite simply, just like its manifestations of viral shedding, multiculturalism has itself been quarantined. If multiculturalism was sustained in the past by a vast network of creeping legal, educational, social, and cultural controls, then it shouldn’t be surprising that it should be held firmly in place at a time when government controls are expanding rapidly.
Multiculturalism is a political and economic problem, but it is primarily social in that it involves direct competition and negative interpersonal interactions between races (social groups). With the introduction of social distancing and forms of mass house arrest, there would be a predictable decline in flashpoints and confrontations. Of course, people still need to exercise, and to procure food and medicines. And, unfortunately, even these meagre opportunities have already provided ample opportunities for Whites to be targeted. In England there have been examples of Muslims and Africans harassing elderly Whites by coughing on them, but the butchering of a seven-year-old English girl, who had been taken on a bike ride through a park by her father, by a Somali immigrant is probably the most horrific recent example. Overall, however, with streets emptying and social gatherings all but eliminated, multiculturalism, along with its symptoms, has been largely sidelined by immediate medical and financial concerns.
This is a valuable lesson for those of us, myself included, who had been convinced in recent years that any kind of serious crisis would prove to be a tipping point in Western consciousness about multiculturalism. Certainly I did not foresee a situation in which multiculturalism could be sequestered within a crisis. And yet it has been. Since the imposition of social distancing measures, crime has plummeted throughout the West. In some areas of the UK, crime has dropped by 20% thanks to the almost complete elimination of snatch-thefts and assaults in public spaces, crimes in which non-Whites feature disproportionately as perpetrators. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have witnessed falls in crime of around 25%, with the most marked declines in burglary and assault. Sex crimes have in some areas declined by almost 50%. These falls are almost entirely due to the dramatic reduction, even elimination, of opportunities for such crimes to take place. Whites are safer in their homes than they are in a public saturated with ethnic hostility and criminality. What prevails now is an uneasy peace, a kind of phoney war. Ethnic crime and other forms of interpersonal hostility between the races, something we should unashamedly acknowledge as a propaganda advantage in our confrontation with the broader phenomenon of multiculturalism, is for the time being more or less neutered.
A New False Consciousness
The advice given to the British government by SAGE quite bluntly argues for the manufacturing of a “a sense of collectivism: All messaging should reinforce a sense of community, that ‘we are all in this together.’” This is something that we should all have expected when something like “the crisis” we’d been waiting for finally arrived. That being said, I never imagined it would work. What I have instead observed in the last few weeks is something like the creation of a new false consciousness to mask the cracks in the old one. Yes, economic uncertainty and a daily drumbeat of morbid fear is being disseminated by the mass media. But, for me personally, the more unsettling aspect of what has occurred is the development of a sense of collectivism bred on social media and rooted entirely in fantasy, self-congratulation, and a cloying, ad hoc, insincere, and entirely temporary sentimentality about health workers.
Quite frankly, we aren’t all in this together. Regardless of the insane bathtub ranting of Madonna, the mega-rich have absconded from their city dwellings en masse, in search of private islands replete with “Covid-19 tests abroad, personal medics and subterranean hideouts.” Otherwise normal people have engaged in riotous behavior against one another in order to obtain vast quantities of toilet paper. Competition and tension between nations has increased over access to suppliesfrom China. The old and infirm are more or less at the mercy of younger generations who’ve either failed to take the virus seriously or openly celebrated it as a “Boomer Remover.” Muslims and ultra-Orthodox Jews have proven themselves to be especially prone to spreading infection (see here and here) and dying from COVID-19 (so far, Jews are over-represented in UK deaths by a factor of eight), due to their large families, sometimes with three generations under one roof, and other social habits. Blacks and the disabled have each made the case that they are being uniquely discriminated against in government responses to coronavirus. It’s a psychological free-for-all, and fertile ground for physical disquiet, disguised only by the fact we’re barely allowed out of our homes.
Part of the conditioning of false collectivism is the easily observed widespread employment of the language of warfare. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard politicians and media figures talk about the “battle” against “the enemy.” Donald Trump has declared he is a “wartime president” against “an invisible enemy.” Emmanuel Macron announced that his country is at war with an “invisible, elusive” enemy. Italy’s special commissioner said the country must equip itself for a “war economy.” Prior to becoming infected and entering intensive care, Boris Johnson announced to his fellow Britons that theirs was a fight in which each and every citizen was “directly enlisted.” Doctors and nurses are said to be on the “front line.” One intention of this nomenclature is probably to reinforce the seriousness of the situation, and to encourage a sense of sacrifice. On the other hand, and more subversively, it’s designed to pacify aggression (by encouraging people to accept their losses as part of a “war effort”), to normalise the expansion of emergency powers and the national security state, and to try to manufacture popular unity by positing a common enemy upon which we are supposed to vent our anxieties and psychological aggression."
ulturalism-in-the-age-of-coronavirus/
