Immigration as ideological weapon

Peter Hitchens admits what was always obvious: the reason the Left has favored mass immigration is because they believed, correctly, that they could use it to politically transform the nation:

The greatest mass migration in our history has taken place…. Our leaders only had to go to Boston, any time in the past five years, and they would have known.

But all our leading politicians were afraid of knowing the truth.

If they knew, they would at least have to pretend to act.

And the truth was, they liked things as they were.

And it was at least partly my own fault.

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.

It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’.

If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn’t come from such ‘vibrant’ areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).

We might live in ‘vibrant’ places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.

But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients – not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.

When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as ‘racists’.

What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as ‘racist’.

And now the pro-immigrant Left belatedly discovers they have a tiger by the tail that doesn’t give a damn about their careful distinctions between what is useful to them and what is not.  This is par for the course for the Left; the Mensheviks always end up being cast aside by the Bolsheviks. The Richard Dawkins of the world are always happy to foolishly embrace Islam as an attack on Christian culture, if they weren’t too short-sighted to grasp that Islam would prove every bit as implacable a foe as Christianity, they wouldn’t be Leftists in the first place.

Many, if not most, white progressives, libertarians, and conservatives who bought into the Myth of Ellis Island are going to come over to the nationalist side in the next ten years, frightened by the realization that what they celebrated and advocated has come to pass in a very different way than they expected.  But those of us who have always valued nationalist culture and traditions need to always keep in mind that they are, at best, modestly useful allies of demonstrably inferior judgment on such matters.

The Right has a long and sordid history of elevating those who have “seen the light” to be its opinion leaders.  National Review and Pajamas Media is chock full of former progressives, ex-Democrats, and reformed socialists, which is why their positions are so reliably meek, ineffective, and apologetic.  They still want to curry favor with the Leftist institutions they once revered; they simply do not regard the Left with the contempt such organizations and people merit.  Look, for example, at Hitchens’s attack on Enoch Powell in the very article in which he belatedly comes around to accept the essence of Powell’s
position on immigration.

That is why this rush of newly reformed transnationalists cannot ever be trusted or taken very seriously.  They are still the same traitors to their cultures and traditions they have always been, all that has changed is that they are now frightened of what their own actions have wrought and alarmed at the extent to which the transformations they sought are destroying even the aspects of their society they expected to retain.

Even now, the transnationalist right is still trying to finesse an irrelevant difference between illegal immigration (bad) and legal immigration (good).  This is a fool’s game. The fact is that ALL immigration beyond a small and readily absorbed amount is invariably destructive and will always transform the invaded nation into something different than it was before.  Whether the transformation is desirable or not is a separate and debatable matter, the point is that the transformation is definitely going to take place.