The United Kingdom and Multiculturalism: Some Lessons from Eastern Europe

By Frank Ellis

The following article was delivered as speech at a Right Now conference.

Abstract: Multiculturalism is based on what amounts to an article of faith, namely that race is a social and political construct; that nation states and the races that created them can be readily transformed in order to achieve certain ideological goals chief of which is the creation of a multicultural society. In this article, based on his knowledge of the former Soviet Union and other Eastern European states, the author examines the attempt to impose racial and ethnic solidarity on large and racially and culturally differentiated populations. The main conclusions are, firstly, that multiculturalism does not work and, secondly, that the Soviet experiment’s attempt to solve the nationalities question has lessons which we in the West cannot ignore.

Key words: Beria, Commission for Racial Equality, Commission on Integration and Cohesion, Dostoevsky, free speech, Lenin, Mao, multiculturalism, nationalities, political correctness, race, Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Union, Stalin, Tito, Yugoslavia.

© Frank Ellis 2006

A man who will not use his freedom to defend his freedom does not deserve his freedom, Reverend Carl McIntire (1906-2002)

Introduction

As a scholar who has devoted a great deal of time to the study of World War Two and especially the war on the Eastern front, the celebrations to mark the 60^th anniversary of that war’s ending were of the greatest academic and personal interest: academically because more, hitherto classified, material has been placed in the public domain; personally because these anniversaries, and others like them, remind me of what my country has been through and how my nation and people have been made and tempered by history’s trials. Exhausted and impoverished in May 1945, Britain was nevertheless triumphant and could look back on a job well done. Sixty years later Britain is a far more prosperous country yet faces an acute threat to national survival which our politicians, openly, at least, refuse to admit. Painful questions assail us. Why does a nation, which has been racially homogenous for hundreds of years, permit itself to be invaded and overwhelmed by legal and illegal immigration? And why has this collapse of morale and spirit happened so quickly? How can it be that our nation, so resolute and successful in defending our island home from invasion in 1940, which then resisted the Soviet threat, fails to see, or refuses to see, the current danger? What is the nature of this dreadful malaise of mind and spirit that makes a people surrender when all their past history bears witness to their defiance in adversity? That 2005 also marked the 200^th anniversary of Trafalgar, the great defining battle which did so much to secure our freedoms and prosperity, and which should have been a celebration characterised by due solemnity, reverence and pride in our naval history but was corrupted by considerations of political correctness, makes my point.

The aetiology and interaction of these themes – the loss of civil courage, organised lying on the part of our political class, the conspicuous cowardice and hypocrisy which undermine our universities – have a long and complicated history. Many of the problems which beset a liberal democracy were recognised by Plato and are as germane today as when they were first explicated by him in The Republic (c.385-380 BC) and The Laws (c.350-340 BC). Plato’s solution to the chaotic danger inherent in democracy is to ensure that the state is ruled by philosopher kings, with the impossible mandate for mortal men, however talented, to arrest all change. Plato, like Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, attached exceptional importance to the institution of censorship, believing that only constant control over all intellectual endeavours, especially the arts, would prevent the state from collapsing into anarchy. It never seems to occur to Plato and some of his harsher imitators that the measures needed to protect their political enterprises might suggest that any such enterprise itself is deeply and irredeemably flawed.

Indeed, if required to summarise my opposition to multiculturalism, the latest assault on our freedoms, I think I would be hard put to characterise it as anything other than “deeply and irredeemably flawed”. As with Plato’s blueprint for a stable utopia ruled by a caste of philosopher kings, so multiculturalism cannot under any circumstances dispense with censorship. In fact, Plato provides an important insight into why education at all levels in the UK has become a high priority for the ideologues of multiculturalism. In Book 7 of The Laws, Plato in a section headed “The Dangers of Innovation in Education”, warns of the evil of change:

If you control the way children play, and the same children always play the same games under the same rules and in the same conditions, and get pleasure from the same toys, you’ll find that the conventions of adult life too are left in peace without alteration. But in fact games are always being changed and constantly modified and new ones invented, and the younger generation never enthuses over the same thing for two days running. They have no permanent agreed standard of what is becoming or unbecoming either in deportment or their possessions in general; they worship anyone who is always introducing some novelty or doing something unconventional to shapes and colours and all that sort of thing.

Now, if Plato overstates the dangers of change, and fails to recognise the impossibility of arresting change, he certainly recognises the dangers of intellectual and moral relativism when he sees them. What applies to toys and ‘the conventions of adult life’ is true of language. Change the way, or rather compel children to change the way they (and adults for that matter), use language and you can cause havoc to ‘the conventions of adult life’.

Unlike Plato’s fictional republic, however, multicultural zealots have managed to implement their ideas, translating and modifying the various programmes of Lenin, Anton Makarenko, Nadezhda Krupskaia, Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. Moreover, availing themselves of the techniques of mind terror deployed by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, they have achieved dominance in key areas of Western societies – public sector bureaucracies, the print and broadcast media, immigration, the police and all levels of the education system - that is utterly bewildering. There is no doubt that agencies which are committed to multiculturalism, universities for example, do harbour those who dissent from multicultural orthodoxy but such is the pressure to conform that dissenters express their misgivings only to a trusted few or keep their own counsel. The consequences of this are that people say one thing in public and another in private. In their working lives and their interaction with colleagues they resemble actors in a socialist-realist play. Real and meaningful communication concerning multiculturalism does not take place. Sloganeering is all that is acceptable (“diversity is our strength”). The would-be, or actual dissenter, experiences a deep sense of intellectual isolation and would immediately recognise the state of mind of a Soviet citizen described by Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward: ‘If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians’.¹ It is this state of mind, natural in a totalitarian state, but hardly desirable in what purports to be a liberal democracy, that compels me to conclude that the cult of multiculturalism is based on the same anti-intellectual and anti-rational infrastructure as totalitarian communism.

The Soviet Experiment

Russia’s descent into the madness and the slavery of Bolshevism which began in 1917 has a long pre-history. The seeds were probably sown with the growth of literacy and the unique role that Russian writers took upon themselves in the nineteenth century, but the most significant development – I would say – is the transformation of some of the ideas of Western utopian socialism into something much more sinister. Socialism with its global aspirations and promise of a global empire of communism embodied in the ideological construct of the international proletariat – “Workers of the world unite” – was implacably hostile to any form of national or racial identity. Well before Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they understood that Russian national identity, the ancient Russian folk culture, Russia’s vast, impenetrable, rural hinterland, and for the Bolsheviks, its equally impenetrable rural culture, and, of course, Russia’s ancient church, were obstacles blocking the road to communist control. And so they set about to destroy them or to weaken them to the extent that they were rendered inert or suited for purely decorative purposes. In our own time and place, following its moral and intellectual collapse the Church of England fulfils a similar role. The demands of the Russian radicals in the 1860s and 1870s, their hatred for their own people and their contempt for Russia’s history and culture anticipate to an extraordinary degree the left-wing radicalism which attacked our country in the 1960s and 1970s, the period known collectively as “the 60s”.

Two novels, The Devils (1871-1872) and August 1914 (1971&1989), by Fedor Dostoevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn respectively are brilliantly perceptive works regarding our own time.² Writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century when radical ideas were subverting Russian society, Dostoevsky penetrated the revolutionary mind and predicted the rise of the twentieth-century’s totalitarian movements with terrifying accuracy. Solzhenitsyn who experienced the Lenin-Stalin experiment on his own flesh argues that such by the start of World War One was the moral and intellectual damage done to Russia, especially to a critical mass of those charged with her stewardship, that nothing less than a miracle would save Russia from the dreadful Soviet century.

Both Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn examine the radicals’ hatred and contempt for Russia. Dostoevsky’s devils, the revolutionaries, want to enslave her – they call it liberation – by imposing socialist rule on Russia and eventually the world. Their method is revolution, murder and the total destruction of the old order. What strikes the contemporary reader as so prophetic is the fact that Dostoevsky identified the cultural treachery and cowardice of the professional and intellectual classes who colluded with the radicals out of fear or out of self-interest well before Julien Benda wrote Trahison des Clercs­ (1927). Here, from the mouth of one of Russia’s haters, is a vision of the future socialist anthill:

Every member of the society spies on the others, and he is obliged to inform against them. Everyone belongs to all the others, and all belong to everyone. All are slaves and equal in slavery. In extreme cases slander and murder, but, above all, equality. To begin with, the level of education, science, and accomplishment is lowered. A high level of scientific thought and accomplishment is open only to men of the highest abilities! Men of the highest ability have always seized the power and become autocrats. Such men cannot help being autocrats and they have always done more harm than good; they are either banished or executed. A Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes gouged out, a Shakespeare will be stoned - there you have Shigaylov’s doctrine! Slaves must be equal: without despotism there has never been any freedom or equality, but in a herd there is bound to be equality...³

and:

We don’t want education [...] The thing we want is obedience. [...] The moment a man falls in love or has a family he gets a desire for private property. We will destroy that desire; we’ll resort to drunkenness, slander, denunciations; we’ll resort to un-heard of depravity; we’ll smother every genius in infancy. We shall reduce everything to one common denominator. Full equality […] ⁴

And in what is a horrifyingly accurate portrayal of our own time:

[...] the teacher who laughs with their children at their God and at their cradle is ours already. The barrister who defends an educated murderer by pleading that, being more mentally developed than his victims, he could not help murdering them for money, is already one of us. Schoolboys who kill a peasant for the sake of a thrill are ours. The juries who acquit all criminals without distinction are ours. A public prosecutor, who trembles in court, because he is not sufficiently progressive, is ours, ours. Administrators, authors - oh there are lots and lots of us, and they don’t know it.⁵

Dostoevsky obviously grasped the nature of what we now refer to as the Stockholm syndrome. And surely the following describes the corrupt ethos of our television and entertainments industry:

But one or two generations of vice are absolutely essential now. Monstrous, disgusting vice which turns man into an abject, cowardly, cruel and selfish wretch – that’s what we want! And, on top of it, a “little fresh blood” to make them get used to it.⁶

Whereas Dostoevsky offers us brilliant prophesy, Solzhenitsyn tries to make some sense of the flow of history, the red wheel that crushed Russia. His discrete narratives try to break down the complex miscellany of historical incidents. There are many reasons, according to Solzhenitsyn, why Russia eventually succumbs to the Bolsheviks: the Russian military high command is complacent and incompetent and has failed to keep abreast of the technological and tactical changes in modern war; Stolypin, the one statesman, who, Solzhenitsyn believes, could have saved Russia, is assassinated; the growth of revolutionary ideologies of the left; the concomitant loss of will on the part of the ruling class; and its failure to understand the nature of Marxist subversion and so deal with it. Exhausted and demoralised by a succession of military defeats, Russian in 1917 was only too vulnerable to the Bolshevik seizure of power. However, as in Britain, France and Germany, the national Russian response to the outbreak of World War One is a devastating ideological defeat for the Marxist and later the Soviet-Leninist myth of the solidarity of the international working class. Lenin and other Bolsheviks were confident that the workers of the belligerent nations would not kill each other. Drums, flag and national pride proved to be far stronger than the abstractions of Marx and Lenin. As one of Solzhenitsyn’s more professional officers puts it in August 1914: ‘The only sentiment the masculine heart can fittingly cherish is love of country’.⁷ Unfortunately, the consequences of this ideological defeat proved to be profound and far-reaching. It convinced the post-World-War-One generation of leftists – Marcuse and Gramsci - that in order to implement their programme in the West, they had to gain control of what one might loosely term as culture. Today, the results of this intellectual and cultural subversion are ubiquitous and pernicious.

Love of Mother Russia, as understood and advocated by Solzhenitsyn, has nothing in common with “workers of the world unite”. Nor indeed is Solzhenitsyn’s interpretation of patriotic duty consistent with the teachings of Tolstoy, which are relentlessly attacked in August 1914. The essence of Solzhenitsyn’s complaint is that Tolstoy is irresponsible to encourage pacifism. I suspect that Solzhenitsyn had Tolstoy in mind when, interviewed on the BBC’s Panorama programme in 1976, he lambasted Bertrand Russell for his shameful advocacy of “better red than dead” in the face of the Soviet threat to the West.⁸ When Russia is under attack it is the duty of her sons to defend her not to abandon her. Moreover, when Stolypin responded to terrorist attacks carried out by the revolutionaries with the death penalty, Tolstoy, preaching his bizarre and idiosyncratic cult of “rational love”, condemned the hangings. In effect, he claimed that the terrorist acts of middle class revolutionaries and the response of the authorities were no different; that Stolypin, the defender of law and order, and a terrorist bomber, were one and the same thing. Tolstoy, the wealthy and internationally famous author, clearly anticipates the response of many twentieth-first century celebrities and politicians to contemporary problems. They use their fame as actors, pop stars or radio and television show hosts to promote causes, multiculturalism being chief among them, which are demonstrably harmful to the rest of us, while they remain largely insulated from the joys of “diversity”. They do this, I suspect, not necessarily because they believe that having their neighbourhood – or rather our neighbourhoods - swamped by illegal immigrants is inherently a good thing, but because the music industry with its global reach and global profits requires that its artists and rock bands keep on message.

The Nationalities Question

By the mid 1980s when Gorbachev launched perestroika and encouraged a policy of openness (glasnost’), the Soviet Union consisted of fifteen republics organised on the principle of ‘socialist federalism’ (Article 70, Soviet Constitution, 1977).⁹ In addition to the 15 constituent republics there were autonomous republics, such as, for example, Chechno-Ingush and Karelia, which were part of the Russian Federation. The constitution also recognised various autonomous districts and regions. Despite the relentless propaganda of fraternal solidarity, many of these republics harboured grievances with regard to Moscow. Some of them pre-dated the Soviet period (Chechnia, for example); others arose from Soviet policies in the 1920s.

Between 1923 and 1927 the State Political Directorate, a precursor of the NKVD, was engaged in a major campaign to suppress opposition to Soviet rule and Sovietization in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. These were not minor police raids but major operations involving the deployment of regular troops, heavy artillery and planes. Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Lavrenty Beria, the latter eventually became the head of the secret police, played the lead role in the Sovietization of Georgia. Measures taken by Stalin and Beria with regard to national minorities during World War Two were savage, with long-lasting consequences. Between November 1943 and May 1944 the NKVD, with the use of American lend-lease Studebakers, organised and carried out the mass deportation of Chechens, Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans because they were suspected of having collaborated with the Germans. After 1945, the Red Army replaced the Wehrmacht as the occupying and imperial power in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. The Soviet occupation zone in East Germany became the German Democratic Republic in 1949. Yugoslavia must be reckoned a failure for Stalin. Tito resisted all attempts by Stalin to bring Yugoslavia within the Soviet fold. The result was a permanent and bitter split between the two states.

Moscow’s struggle to impose its will on Georgia and Central Asia in the 1920s taught those conducting such operations a very important lesson. In a report analysing Soviet operations against rebels in Turkestan and Ukraine, an official in the State Political Directorate, concluded that ‘military repression is effective only when it is followed by an intensive process of Sovietization in the core of the country’.¹⁰ Sovietization is the key concept here. It meant the elimination of all opposition, especially those who articulated a strong sense of national identity and their replacement with people who had so thoroughly internalised the Soviet worldview that they could be relied upon - though always watched very carefully by their minders - to do Moscow’s bidding. Not only did Sovietization mean the physical extermination of so-called “class enemies”, but it also involved a total assault on all manifestations of national culture, history and traditions. The common denominator in all three is language. The Soviet commissars fully understood the need to suppress the teaching and use of native languages in favour of Russian.

While Moscow appeared to make concessions to the Soviet republics – Article 72 of the Soviet Constitution (1977) guaranteed the right of secession from the union – the reality was that the party mechanism bound the republics to Moscow and any attempt to secede would be met with tanks. That Moscow exercised such control bears witness to the fact that within the republics there existed, even among the so-called loyalists, fissiparous tendencies. These were not necessarily all based on outright hostility to Moscow but on the realities of having to deal with practical problems that required the exercise of local judgement and local solutions. However, as far as Moscow was concerned, even an assertion of initiative based on purely pragmatic considerations contained within it the seeds of an assertion of political independence. Moscow’s position is consistent with the ideological worldview of Marxism-Leninism. All power is ideological. All acts stemming from the exercise of power are by definition ideological. To pretend otherwise is counter-revolutionary and such behaviour must be purged. And, indeed, the history of Moscow’s relations with the Soviet republics is one of relative stability punctuated by purges of Republican Party cadres, who started to assert a republican, nationalist identity rather than an all-union, Soviet one. For example, during Stalin’s Great Terror one of the accusations frequently levelled at the leadership of the republican parties was ‘bourgeois nationalism’. In our own time, if you object to England’s being devoured by the United States of Europe, Europhiles will dismiss you as a “little Englander”.

In Ukraine today many regard the collectivization of agriculture and the Stalin-made famine as deliberate genocide which was intended to destroy the roots of Ukrainian nationalism forever. The invading Germans were well aware of the massive resentment in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states towards Soviet power, especially the bitter legacy of collectivization. One reason why so many Red Army units surrendered en masse to the Wehrmacht in the summers of 1941 and 1942 was because these soldiers and officers were totally disaffected from the Soviet state. Had the Germans not been so blinded by theories of racial superiority and played the liberator-from-communism card more effectively and much sooner, it is a good bet that the Soviet Union would have lost the war. It is often assumed that the war in Europe ended in 1945, yet the Red Army and NKVD units fought a major counter-insurgency campaign in Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states against nationalist groups that only petered out in the mid 1950s. And the message from the Poles who rose up against their Nazi oppressors in August 1944 only to endure the imposition of Soviet tyranny is the same. As long as a hard core of patriots survive, then the nation can survive and can be reborn. All is not lost.

This is surely the lesson that we must take from the fate of the Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. No matter how harsh the Sovietization of these countries after the Nazi defeat that spirit of independence endured the post-1945 purges and the suppression engendered by the Brezhnev doctrine. In June 1953 workers in East Berlin rebelled, Hungary following suit on a much bigger scale in October 1956. In 1968 reformers in Czechoslovakia tried to abolish censorship and in August of that year the reform programme was crushed. The Poles ever ready to assert their independence rioted in Gdańsk in 1970. By 1980 Solidarity emerged as a serious threat to communist party rule in Poland. Despite Gorbachev’s best intentions, glasnost’ facilitated the break up of the Soviet Union by focusing so clearly on the sins of the past. The nationalities question returned with a vengeance. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, justifiably aggrieved by the consequences of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact (1939), now sought to rectify this fifty-year old injustice. One of the decisive moves occurred in Hungary where in September 1989 it opened its borders with Austria. East Germans were now able to get to West Germany. On 9^th November 1989 the hated wall – what Honecker’s regime called the “anti-fascist protection barrier” – was breached. Then followed the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. In Bulgaria, Zhivkov was ousted and in Romania, Ceauşescu’s mafia turned against him and he died in a hail of machine-gun fire. So what went wrong? To quote Martin Malia:

His [Gorbachev] whole policy had been based on the mistaken belief that the East Europeans would eagerly respond to a genuine reformed socialism if it were offered to them, and that there were many lesser Gorbachevs out there to do just that. He woefully underestimated the people’s loathing of Communism and the power of national sentiment in the External Empire, just as he underestimated these same forces within the Internal Empire.¹¹

Gorbachev’s own words on the nationalities question support Malia’s assessment. In Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987), Gorbachev tells his readers that the multinational status of the Soviet Union strengthens the union, that it is not a source of ‘weakness or disintegration’.¹² Despite all the historical evidence, and not a word about the savagery of Stalin and Beria towards national minorities before and during World War Two, Gorbachev insists that:

If the nationality question had not been solved in principle, the Soviet Union would never have had the social, cultural, economic and defence potential as it has now. Our state would not have survived if the republics had not formed a community based on brotherhood and cooperation, respect and mutual assistance.¹³

Here and elsewhere in his discussion of the nationalities question Gorbachev preaches the standard Soviet position. Lenin, he tells us, laid the foundations for ‘a harmonious multiethnic state’.¹⁴ His final plea for the continuing advocacy of ‘Soviet patriotism’, even as the whole Soviet edifice was about to collapse, bears witness to the intellectually debilitating consequences of censorship and the fact that like so many Soviet leaders he was largely insulated from what was going on beyond the walls of the Kremlin. Gorbachev reminds us of the multicultural zealots in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the European Union, who insist, regardless of any empirical evidence to the contrary, that “diversity is our strength”. The nationalities question mounted then a double threat to the survival of the Soviet Union. Internally, the constituent republics, sensing that history was moving their way, asserted themselves. Externally, the states, which had been tied to the Soviet Union since 1945, exploited the lack of will to impose the Brezhnev doctrine, and broke free.

An appendix to the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the fate of Yugoslavia is profoundly instructive for the attempt to impose an alien multiculturalism on discrete groups of people. Josip Broz Tito died in 1980. The ensuing ten years saw the republics asserting their various identities which then erupted into genocidal violence in the 1990s. Yugoslavia offers a special warning for the rainbow warriors. Alija Izetbegovic, the Croatian Muslim, who became president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, rejected the Yugoslav version of a multiethnic state. In his Islamic Declaration, written in 1970, his vision of what Islam means is uncompromisingly clear:

There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions. And by claiming to order its own world itself, Islam obviously excludes the right or possibility of action on the part of any foreign ideology on that terrain. There is therefore no lay principle.¹⁵

Now we were assured that Tito, like Lenin, had solved the nationalities question; that, in many ways, Yugoslavia was a model, multiethnic state. As with Moscow’s internal and external empire, the fiction of Yugoslavia was held together by force, and in the case of Yugoslavia, was ended by force. National and ethnic (racial) differences can be suppressed but not indefinitely and when they eventually do reassert themselves violence is not necessarily inevitable, just highly likely. Iraq reaffirms this lesson. In a brief article published in The Daily Telegraph it was reported that Sunnis were learning Shia customs and modes of behaviour so as to be able to pass themselves off as Shia Muslims. They do this in order to fool the death squads. The need for such deception in order to survive reveals the inherent weaknesses of multicultural societies. The two journalists who wrote this article observed:

Just two years ago the suggestion that relations between the two sects in the country [Sunnis and Shia] could ever reach such a nadir was ridiculed by Iraqis, who would describe how for generations Shia and Sunni Muslims had intermarried, lived on the same streets and worked beside each other.¹⁶

Multiethnic societies can only be held together by a strong centralised state and a leader who is prepared to use force to subdue the competing rivalries (racial, cultural or religious) in order to secure stability. Once the power apparatus has been removed, those rivalries will assert themselves. In other words “the brotherhood of man” scenario so beloved of multicultural extremists is a façade. Moreover, people on both or many sides of any racial, cultural or religious divide, will themselves act as if this is the case when there is no chance of any change but as soon as an opportunity arises to assert their own racial, ethnic or religious identity at the expense of rivals, regardless of how long they have apparently been living together in harmony, then they will do so.

Some Lessons for the United Kingdom

Since 1991 a number of explanations have been advanced to explain the reasons for what in historical terms was the sudden and dramatic collapse of the internal and external Soviet empires: imperial overstretch; the failure of an economy based on the common ownership of the means of production; the personal role of the late Pope John-Paul; the determined leadership of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; and the relentless erosion of belief in the system among those charged with making it work. It seems to me that all these explanations do tell us something about the end. But one factor, censorship, is especially important in trying to understand the end and why it came so suddenly. The reason, I believe, that censorship deserves to be taken so seriously as a major, and possibly decisive, factor in the Soviet collapse is that censorship affects all the other factors.

Gorbachev believed that his policy of glasnost’ would gain him the support of the intellectuals. To a certain extent it did, both at home and abroad. However, the moment the censorship regime was eased (being finally and formally abolished on 1st August 1990); it brought masses of damaging revelations into the public domain for the first time. Indeed, so damaging were many of these revelations that the effect was not restorative of Soviet fortunes, as Gorbachev hoped, but catastrophic for his hopes of saving the Soviet Union. Timing did not help either. The period 1989-1991 marked a whole series of 50^th anniversaries associated with the beginning of the Second World War. The Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact was a permanent source of bitterness between Poland, the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia regarded their annexation as act of aggression, which it was. The logic of Polish objections was clear. The pact laid the basis for the Red Army to invade Poland which it duly did on 17^th September 1939. Six months later the NKVD murdered just under 22,000 Polish military and civilian personnel at Katyn and other sites. It was only as late as 1991 that Gorbachev finally acknowledged that the Poles were not murdered by the Germans but by Beria’s NKVD. How anything like normal relations could ever be possible between Poland and the Soviet Union while this festering grievance remained unsolved is inconceivable. In 1991 the Soviet regime’s defenders had to endure savage and prolonged criticism of the way Stalin had handled the war. There were revelations about the Terror Famine and the Great Terror. And so the revelations kept coming, like a high-speed glacier. I would go so far to say that without the institution of censorship the Soviet Union would never have endured as long as it did. And here is a lesson for those who are opposed to multiculturalism. Trevor Phillips, Bhikhu Parekh and the vice-chancellors of British universities are terrified of free speech. Free speech makes it possible to gather together to exchange ideas, to highlight the failures of the grand experiment. This is the context for the legal and administrative assault on the British National Party (BNP) and similar patriotic parties and any number of non-affiliated individual dissenters throughout the European Union.¹⁷

In the years following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power tens of millions of people were slaughtered. Genocide and mass terror gave way to selective terror and harsh administrative measures against dissenters. I have argued before that we may be experiencing this process in reverse. No, I am not implying that the government plans to build concentration camps for those who attack multiculturalism but the relentless erosion of our liberties, especially the attacks on free speech, coming from within the United Kingdom and the European Union, means that problems that can only be addressed by openly and honestly confronting them are not being addressed. On so many issues – the future direction of the European Union, the numbers of illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom, race and the dire consequences of multiculturalism – we are the victims of organised and systematic lying. In the former Soviet Union they could at least get the truth from Western radio stations. To whom shall we turn for the truth? The Home Office? The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE)? Or perhaps David Cameron? No, we are on our own.

To read Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to study the Soviet nightmare from the perspective of someone who is living through the soft totalitarianism of multiculturalism and political correctness is to understand far more clearly the nature of the people and their institutions that seek to destroy us. And it is our destruction that they most certainly do seek. Organisations such as the CRE talk of “integration” and “cohesion”, as does Ruth Kelly’s latest creation, the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, but to the extent that the CRE wants to compel the white indigenous majority population to accept policies that most of us instinctively reject as wrong, consider to be possibly insane and immoral, and certainly against the best interests of our ancient land, and then seeks to terrorise any articulated opposition, the CRE’s goals become clear. It seeks nothing other than the transformation of the UK into a multiracial society in which, on present trends, whites will become a minority in their land. “Integration”, “cohesion” and “diversity” are the mendacious and ugly euphemisms of those who are actively working towards the racial and cultural dispossession of whites. The aim is to eliminate the English by destroying (“deconstructing”) any awareness among a critical mass of them that they, the English, are a great and proud people and one that has been disproportionately and highly successful across the entire spectrum of human endeavour. The CRE should properly be referred to as the Commission for the Racial Elimination of the English People (CREEP).

Why is it that the major political parties in Western states, many of which identify themselves as “conservative”, collude in the racial and cultural dispossession of their own states and people? In 1968, Enoch Powell warned us about the dangers of mass immigration. Forty years on Powell has been completely vindicated (as has the former, Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford) yet today no conservative politician, whatever his private opinions and the globally conspicuous and gruesome failures of multiculturalism, would dare to articulate such sentiments. In May 2001, during the general election campaign John Townend muttered briefly about the fears of his East Yorkshire constituents and then quickly capitulated when Hague publicly denounced him. The loss of patriotic spirit in a party which if it stands for anything must stand for love of home and hearth has been especially sudden and dramatic. It is also baffling.

Russia and the Soviet Union have travelled this path before us. Russians were quite willing to exterminate other Russians in pursuit of the internationalist goals of Soviet communism. Trotsky, one of the architects of the Red Terror, was supremely indifferent to the fate of Russia’s Jews. Stalin and Beria crushed fellow Georgians when necessary. Without a substantial minority of Quislings in the Soviet republics they, too, would not have endured as long as they did. The growing secularization of Western societies and the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks may also be related. When a nation denies God, its past, its culture, its heroes and its many folkways, patriotism cannot long survive. As the Germans closed in on Stalingrad, even Stalin saw the need to awaken and to unleash Russian patriotism. Stalin realised that Russian soldiers would die for Mother Russia, for Rodina (Motherland), but not for the hated collective farm. The internationalism of the Soviet Union and the pan-Europeanism of the European Union occupy, temporarily, the void created by the rejection of any divine authority, or the status of the nation. The ideology of class war and the would-be builders of a super corporate state assert a claim to something higher, to something altogether more worthy than narrow, selfish, national interest.¹⁸ That otherwise large numbers of quite intelligent people are especially susceptible to these sorts of universalistic appeals is obvious from the way so many Western intellectuals were seduced by the promises of communism. Even though it is a secular perversion, building paradise functions as a powerful substitute for the loss of any divine significance, giving meaning to the otherwise empty lives of the builders. Man’s Search for Meaning, the English translation of Viktor Frankl’s Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager (1946), an account of his time in a Nazi concentration camp, goes a long way to understanding the almost millenarian fervour with which people embraced Soviet communism and, currently, embrace multiculturalism and its dictionary of bitter and noisome lies. It also helps to explain the genocidal intolerance towards enemies on the part of Soviet communism and the repressive measures which have been introduced by the European Union to criminalise any opposition to multiculturalism.

In The Devils, one of the revolutionaries realises that accusations of being insufficiently liberal are an effective way to secure the obedience of his followers. Terrified of such an accusation, his ovine adherents will believe anything they are told and engage in, or support, any abominable act or deviant behaviour, in order to enhance their standing within revolutionary circles. Having proved (debased) themselves as dedicated to the cause, they reward themselves by making savage attacks on the bourgeois society they have left behind. Multiculturalism also bestows small pleasures on its followers which are not to be ignored. There is nothing more intoxicating for a sizeable chunk of the British middle classes than to be able to demonstrate their commitment to multiculturalism by denouncing any rational opposition thereof as racist. These supporters of multiculturalism also demonstrate a magnificent spirit of self-denial. Truly, no greater devotion to the brotherhood of man and the love of his neighbours has a practising diversophile than that he, selflessly and nobly foregoing the many and undisputed blessings of “diversity”, so that others can enjoy exclusive rights thereto, drags himself and his family away from London to suffer the cruel indignities and eternal torments of rural exile among the fox-hunting savages and bestial racists who inhabit the benighted wastelands of Hay-on-Wye, New Radnor and the Somerset levels. Is this white flight from the city and the dishonesty on the part of those who engage in it just a manifestation of the heroic hypocrisy of which the white middle classes in this country are capable, or does it hint at something more worrying? Is it another example of the loss of moral and cultural confidence?

Two new factors enter the calculus in the twenty-first century: mass immigration (legal or illegal); and the presence of a large, disaffected and growing Islamic minority. The logic imposed upon us by this Islamic presence must be apprehended. We can pretend that it is not a long-term problem; that it is just a question of a “few extremists” and confine ourselves to reacting when there is an explicit threat of violence. This will not work since it is essentially a defensive posture both in policing and in security terms, and as an intellectual and cultural response to clear, present and future danger. Do we really believe that if we keep our heads down the menace of multiculturalism in any of its variants will simply go away? It will not. I meet lots of people who, even now after the Islamic terrorist attacks of 11^th September 2001 and 7^th July 2005, seem to think that immigrants, hostile to this country and its institutions - but who nevertheless enjoy its prosperity - can and will be assimilated. All we, the indigenous population, have to do, apparently, is to make a few concessions and all will be well. This is called appeasement and it does not work. From where does the pressure emanate for these people to assimilate? Indeed, why should they when they are incessantly told that they bring some wonderful, enriching gift called “diversity” for which we, the indigenous population, should be grateful?

The worst of Enoch Powell’s vision has, I believe, still to fall upon us. I have no doubt that at some stage the leaders (self-appointed or otherwise) of what the BBC likes to call the “Muslim community” will demand the creation of an independent, Islamic state on the territory of the United Kingdom. The prelude to these demands would be a long and well organised terrorist campaign, or the threat thereof, designed to weaken our will. If any British government permitted this to happen or if we do nothing to stem the tide of hostile immigration, we face the real possibility of a return to the religious wars of our distant past. What would Alija Izetbegovic’s Islamic Declaration or some variation thereof mean for Britain? Eventually, the government, any government, will have to confront the problem of illegal immigrants. How many illegal immigrants there are in this country is not clear, a million, possibly two million. Any responsible government would order that all illegal immigrants be rounded up and deported. This would make a huge difference to the pressure on housing and water in the South East of England. Unfortunately, governments have consistently failed to behave responsibly and honestly. There exists a real temptation for government to declare an amnesty for all illegal immigrants, with an assurance – about as valuable as the ones Hitler gave to Chamberlain and Stalin - that new laws would be enacted and enforced to stop more illegal immigrants entering the country. This is simply a variation on the theme of amnesty. It would be a catastrophe for our country. The British seem to think that because they have enjoyed exceptionally long periods of stability and prosperity that they always will. No country, no state on earth has a God-given right to remain stable, prosperous and most important of all, free. Our constitution and polity confer no permanent immunity from civil unrest, or in the future, large scale racial unrest. It is folly and arrogance on the part of the British to believe otherwise. It may well be that the British are so benumbed by multicultural agitprop that they just do not care and that a majority will acquiesce to the relentless destruction of Britain by a combination of Quisling politicians and immigrants.

Conclusion

The Soviet empire and its end show that harsh measures taken against dissenters cannot work indefinitely and that they provoke resistance, sometimes violence. I have already noted the dreadful example of Yugoslavia. If free speech can be progressively weakened by governments, then why not other liberties long taken for granted? Just how far will any British government in the future be prepared to go, in order to destroy well organised and lawful resistance? I repeat: we cannot take ancient and hard-won liberties for granted. The brave men and women who resisted the Soviet state also teach us that we must find the moral and civil courage to stand up and be counted. If Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Irina Ratushinskaia, and Vladimir Bukovsky, and all the many others I have not mentioned, could find it in themselves to challenge the powerful Soviet state with its arsenal of concentration camps, psychiatric hospitals, and secret police, then what do we in England have to fear? Solzhenitsyn understood the power of truth more clearly than most, realising that communism could not endure forever: ‘And I sat there’, he wrote in the Gulag Archipelago, ‘and I thought: if the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth? And they will burst forth. It has to happen’.¹⁹ Well, we need to make it happen.

Notes

1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1968), trans, Nicholas Bethell and David Burg, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p.492.

2 Andrei Platonov, Evgenii Zamiatin, Vasilii Grossman, Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bulgakov are all profoundly instructive regarding the methods of Soviet organised lying which are so relevant for our own time.

3 Fedor Dostoevsky, The Devils, Trans, David Magarshack, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1982, p.418.

4 Fedor Dostoevsky, The Devils, p.419.

5 Fedor Dostoevsky, The Devils, p.421.

6 Fedor Dostoevsky, The Devils, pp.421-422.

7 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 The Red Wheel 1: A Narrative in Discrete Periods of Time, trans., H. T. Willets, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990, p.100.

8 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the Western World, The Bodley Head and BBC, London, 1976, p.20.

9 They were: Armenia; Azerbaijan; Belorussia; Estonia; Georgia; Kazakhstan; Kirgizia; Latvia; Lithuania; Moldavia; Russian Federation; Tadzhikistan; Turkmenistan; Ukraine; Uzbekistan.

10 Stéphane Courtois et al, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans., Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer., Harvard University Press, London, 1999, p.140.

11 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, The Free Press, New York, 1994, p.463.

12 Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987, p.118. In a study of the nationalities question Valerii Chalidze noted that: ‘if the policy of glasnost’ continues, then national problems, including the demands of separatists, will be a painful test of that policy’. See Valerii Chalidze, Natsional’nye problemy i Perestroika (Nationality Problems and Perestroika), Chalidze Publications, Vermont, USA, 1988, p.8.

13 Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987, p.118.

14 Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987, p.119.

15 Mervyn Hiskett, ‘Islam and Bosnia’, The Salisbury Review, volume 11, Number 4, June, 1993, p.5.

16 Ahmad Ali & Oliver Poole, ‘Sunnis learn Shia customs to bluff Baghdad death squads’, The Daily Telegraph, 9^th October 2006, p.14.

17 Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code declared a whole range of behaviour to be “counter-revolutionary” and liable to punishment. Very large numbers of those who were arrested and sentenced during the Great Terror were charged under Paragraph 10 of Article 58 which covers “propaganda and agitation”. Paragraph 10 specifically criminalises any expression of religious and nationalist sentiment aimed at the “masses”.

18 In his study of James Burnham’s thought, James Burnham (1984 & 1999) and more recently in an essay, ‘Why the American Ruling Class Betrays its Race and Civilization’, the late Sam Francis, analysing theories formulated by Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels and Georges Sorel, has argued that white élites promote multiculturalism and hostility to any form of national identity because they consider it to be an obstacle to their transnational interests. These élites no longer have any concept of “their people”. To quote Sam Francis: ‘Just as the managerial ruling class rejects independent nationhood and national sovereignty as organizational forms, so it will also reject ideologies such as nationalism that justify and reflect national sovereignty, independence, and identity, as well as any ideology or belief that justifies any particular group identity and loyalty – national, regional, racial, ethnic, cultural or religious’. See Sam Francis, ‘Why the American Ruling Class Betrays its Race and Civilization’ in Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time, edited by Samuel Francis, with a foreword by Wayne Lutton, The Occidental Press, Mt. Airy, Maryland, 2006, p.393.

19 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1 trans., Thomas Witney, Harper Collins, London, p.298.