By the way, agree, mushy article. He finishes:

"The real test has nothing to do with citizenship"

Yeah right! The first thing anyone learns in any citizenship course is about rights as well as responsibilities. The glue that holds a society together.

"it has to do with how we see ourselves as a civil society and how willing we are to accept the reality of who we are and what Australian society is."

Sounds great, and that will happen WHEN, not before, we all know our rights/responsibilities. Young-looking writer, and it shows in his writing.

Speaking of Japan, one should eventually remember this land is a thousand year old-at-least craddle of a particular nation as Commonwealth of Australia was established by a land grabbing two hundred years ago and still is not a sovereign political entity.

The reason, Boaz, that I keep harping on about you and your "ONE Nation, ONE Race, ONE culture" sounding so similar to
"Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer" is that they appear to have the same origin and purpose.

You have substituted "race" for "people", which is significant, in that you make no secret of your movement's principle motivating force.

While the replacement of "leader" with "culture" is just a matter of time and place.

>>the danger of NOT taking a pro-active approach to fostering a vibrant Australian culture is that this fear you refer to will explode in another Cronulla<<

As I have pointed out before, Mods and Rockers in Brighton were an order of magnitude more "explosive" than the Cronulla spat,
yet no-one predicted the downfall of UK civilization in 1964.

(Or rather some extremists, conspiracy theorists and vested interests did predict it, but were properly regarded as the lunatic fringe.)

>>I proceeded to develop the idea of a blended society, where racist attitudes are broken down,
such that people of various cultural and racial backgrounds feel FREE (not forced) to intermarry<<

You say this, but your entire arsenal of wordy weaponry concentrates on vilifying Islam.

How can one fail to draw the conclusion that all the soft-soap about intermarriage is merely a smokescreen.

Hey, it isn't even credible - since when do we have a society in Australia where people are forced to intermarry?

>>another motive going on in Pericles mind.. could it be FEAR of your children marrying outside your racial comfort zone ?<<

Another stab in the dark. You stoop ever lower, Boaz, in your attempts to justify the unjustifiable.

>>Public Service Department heads will ... have to submit reports indicating what they have done to promote UNITY and cultural harmony.<<

They already believe that they are promoting the idea that
tolerance is the most powerful unifying force, so how will their reports actually change?

But you and I know that this is just a smoke screen anyway. Your self-imposed task is to promote the strongest possible antipathy between Christianity and Islam.

Isn't it?

Yvonne.. Pericles is right ? hardly, he persistently suggests I stand for things I don't.

Horus picked this up, as have others.

You and Pericles are both going on about 'Imposed Monoculturalism'(Yvonne)and "Dictatorship" (Pericles) when I've said nothing of the kind. You better re-read the article and then realize that I'm walking the walk as well as the talk. I AM in a cross cultural marriage.

Pericles, for your benefit, I have 2 major issues which you are confusing.

1/ Australian Identity. (Purely Cultural issue)
2/ The threat of Islam. (National Security issue + some overlap into Cultural)

They are not synonymous, and speaking passionately about one, does not mean I am in fact promoting the other. Regarding Australian Identity, Islam is just one of a number of cultural threats.

Fukayama's quote mentioned in another thread is exquisite. Sums up all I've been trying to say on the matter. (MC)

Lack of Western Collective Identity+Post modern intellectual elite= Vulnerability to confident alien cultures. That is the whole thing in a nutshell.

If what I am promoting requires a 'Dicatatorship' it would not be worth promoting. As for "Imposed" I see no difference in imposing 'unity' reports on the public service as 'diversity'..you see a difference ? Thats not dictatorship, its democracy and POLICY and at the next election, if it is up enough noses, they government will be turfed out.

No smoke and mirrors here I'm afraid.. its all 'spade=spade' stuff.

Pericles, it must be truly abhorrent to live under the tyranny of monoculturalism. Imagine the very notion of a nation-state underpinned by a common culture where its inhabitants share the same national identity. It makes one feel like shedding a tear for the people of those monocultural Nordic countries which have the highest standards of living in the world. The tyranny of monoculturalism has also had an equally devastating impact on Japan by the sounds of it. Only until these countries embrace multiculturalism and import every foreign culture under the sun will this odious legacy of monoculturalism be completely expunged. United we fall, divided we stand?

Good try, Oligarch, but totally misdirected.

I am not suggesting for a moment that a naturally monocultural society is problematic per se.

Importing multiculturist policies to a natural monoculture, purely for the sake of doing so, would definitely be courting disaster.
In fact, trying to force any alien culture onto an established one is highly dangerous.

But we simply can't help ourselves, constantly trying to change the culture of another country from the outside.
Think about the US trying to force-feed democracy to Iraq. Doomed to fail.
Think of our present attitude towards trade with China - typified by Boaz's rants about slave conditions in their factories.
By what right do we think it is OK to lecture them on the manner in which they approach the challenges of a world economy?
Would we prefer they use the methods perfected by the earlier-developed economies - conquest and economic looting?

But what I do say is that to turn a naturally pluralist society such as ours, built by a long succession of migrants from
a variety of backgrounds, backwards in to a monoculture, is also a recipe for disaster.

The difference is simply whether these cultures have grown naturally, or have been force-fed.

Most of Europe is a mish-mash of centuries of intermixing nationalities until the only thing left is geographic boundaries.
South America is the result of centuries of Europeanisation led by the Spanish and Portuguese.
North America of course has the lot, including the descedents of African slaves.

But back to the idea that we should trade in our multicultural society for a monoculture that reflects the society we "rooly" are.

Prime amongst the my concerns about this backward step is who decides who we "rooly" are anyway?

Having had many generations of people happily living side by side in a multicultural society, exactly whose idea of our culture do we now choose?

Yours? Boaz's? Peter Jensen's? The Wiggles'?

I strongly suspect that the process of deciding which culture would itself take decades.

After all, she'll be right mate.