In answer to your question, none of them. All of these people have their own cultures and it would be strange if they were disloyal to their own culture. Denouncing one's own culture only appears to be the fashion among white, educated people who think that parroting Internationalist views is an indicator of their presumed moral and intellectual superiority.

The funny thing about trendies promoting multiculturalism as a prop for Internationalism, is that they are demanding the importation of ethnic groups who are usually very loyal to their own ethnicity, religion, and nationality.

There is a lot more than just a vague connection between skin colour and culture. Almost all black Americans have never been anywhere near Africa but they still endorse “their” black African culture.

Your example of Chinese assimilation was a very poor one. The Chinese are noted for never assimilating into their host communities. They always remains separate and apart. Every city in the world has a “Chinatown” and where the immigration of Chinese exceeds common sense the Chinese establish satellite “Chinatowns” within cities. The Chinese have lived in Indonesia for 500 years and most of them still speak Mandarin and read Chinese language newspapers, even though it is illegal for them to do so. The dangers of multiculturalism were even highlighted by the Chinese in Indonesia, who attempted a coup in 1960 to make Indonesia a Chinese led country allied to Communist China. I do not know to what extent the Communist Chinese government colluded with the insurgent Chinese, but Indonesia closed its embassy in Peking and refused to have diplomatic relations with Red China.

The Indonesians solved their multiculturalism problem by marching 500,000 Chines into the jungle and machine gunning them.

The Indonesians would just love Australia to take every Chinese in Indonesia off their hands because they don’t trust them. Chinese government in Peking probably can not believe its luck that those stupid Australian yang guizi’s want to import millions of Chinese. The Chinese know their Sun Tzu. “The best way to take a citadel is from the inside.”

CJ Morgan: "No, but it explains why I know racism when I see it.."

Obviously you idiotically believe that it is impossible for anyone but people of European ancestry to be racist. Why else would you consistently ignore Rainier’s constant spew of egregious vitriol against “white” people?

"you're up at 4am ranting.."

For somebody who espouses an open-borders, post-national “global citizenship” ideology, you can be amazingly parochial. Believe it or not, not all of us live in the GMT+10.00 time zone.

"The nearest I can get is to that single paragraph, originally cited on some nutjob Irish anti-immigration site.."

So Gore Vidal was quoted out of context? Or is the quote a complete fabrication? Or is Gore Vidal simply a racist?

The author of the article in which Vidal is quoted is a British journalist by the name of Anthony Browne. His crime is that he has written a series of articles and a book for the UK think-tank Civitas on immigration. This apparently makes him a “nutjob”, but I guess it takes one to know one.

Whatever the validity and context of Vidal’s quote, Browne’s point seems unambiguous:

“This is an issue of almost total, mind-numbing hypocrisy among western governments and political elites. They defend the inalienable right of other peoples – the Palestinians, Tibetans, native Americans – to defend their culture, but not the right of their own peoples.

It is vital to emphasise that mass immigration and the remarkably intolerant ideology of multiculturalism are exclusively western phenomena. Indeed, the striking thing about the global immigration debate in the west is its determined parochialism. If people in India, China, or Africa were asked whether they have a right to oppose mass immigration on such a scale that it would transform their culture, the answer would be clear. Yet uniquely among the 6 billion people on the planet, westerners – the approximately 800 million in western Europe, North America and Australasia – are expected by the proponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism to abandon any right to define or shape their own society.”

"Interesting how readily you respond to those whistles.."

You should really should get some new catchphrases - the old ones are tedious as well as meaningless.

"how did you get on with the Anderson and Kapferer books that I suggested.."

I’m sure there are a great deal many books discussing the relationship between ethnicity and the nation. The “national question” which is being asked right across the Western world at the moment is perhaps the most contentious issue facing the West today. But I’m specifically interested in your views. So, unless you happen to be either Anderson or Kapferer, those books have little relevance. Or are your views so ‘dense’ that they simply cannot be understood unless you’ve read a myriad of books on the topic?

"your error concerning Kosovo's historically dominant religion."

You mean, after Kosovo served as the cradle of Serbian nationhood and the centre of its Orthodox faith?

Islam only became the dominant religion after the Serbs were defeated by, and their lands annexed to, the Ottomans. The forced migration of Serbs from Ottoman-ruled Kosovo, which left a vacuum filled by Albanians, undoubtedly aided the Islamification of the region. But the current unassailable Albanian majority occurred more recently - the result of Axis occupation, which involved the killing of an estimated 10,000-40,000 Serbs, the expulsion of another 100,000, and the arrival of more Albanians.

You can keep obfuscating and equivocating all you want, but the point is clear. You cannot expect to switch populations and demographic majorities through mass immigration - as Jennifer Clarke is advocating - and not expect also to switch civilisations. You cannot expect millions of migrants from vastly different cultures to enter a country and displace the founding population without radical consequences.

Yes, it makes the Third World immigrants very happy to move into a ready-built developed country (at least those nasty, racist Anglo-Celts were useful for something, right?). And yes, it makes the big end of town very rich. But why would the citizenry, the ordinary folk who are being disenfranchised and displaced, favour mass immigration on such a scale?

redneck,

Whilst it is off topic, your understanding of the Indonesian military coup is incorrect in a number of regards. For a start, it happened in 1965 and not 1960. This is the first time that I have heard that it was a genocidal massacre of ethnic Chinese.

My understanding was that it was a massacre of approximately 500,000 members of the Indonesian Communist Party, which included ethnic Chinese as well as ordinary Indonesians. This occurred during a military coup. The pretext given by the military for the coup and the massacre was that it was to prevent an attempted coup by the Indonesian Communist Party, but this has been shown to have been a fabrication

Because any member of any 'communists' organisation is still widely depicted as necessarily being a bloody minded extremists bent on establishing a Stalinist police state, or worse, a Khmer-Rouge-style killing-fields regime, many people see the murder of such people as morally acceptable. One such person seems to have been Australia's current Governor General, former SAS commander Sir Michael Geoffrey, who in 2003 stated that both the 1965 Indonesian coup and the Vietnam War were justified as necessaryto stop the spread of communism.

I strongly disagree with that view, and the view that genocide is an acceptable way to resolve ethnic differences should have been put to rest with the Nuremburg trials following the Second World War.

However, if we continue to increase the numbers on this dry continent, then we are greatly increasing the prospects for future conflicts over our dwindling supplies of natural resources as shown in Divergence's quote of Ted Trainer above, will become ever more likely and what we have witnessed in Indonesia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda or even Nazi Germany may well be what is in store for this country.

At the very minimum we have to stop high immigration immediately, at least until some harmony and commonality is re-established between the different groups that now comprise this country.

---

Dresdener, very well argued. Thank you.

Divergence, I was using the exact words Daggett used: "strongly opposed to immigration". Even if he had said "strongly opposed to current levels of immigration", I would want to see proof. I would accept that a majority is "somewhat concerned about current levels of immigration". Personally I've never met anyone (other than on this forum) who rates current levels of immigration as a critical issue for Australia.
Yes, I've read Ted Trainer's stuff, and frankly, if he's right, we're pretty much doomed as a species anyway. I suppose I have a little more faith in human ingenuity and adaptability, and don't particularly see why I should rank his expertise over the CSIRO's.

redneck, saying "None of them" is not an answer. Personally, as I suggested in another thread, I think *your* beliefs pose a greater threat to Australia's social cohesion and cultural identity than some examples on that list.

And I'm not sure where you're living, but I live in an area that is very much a mix of long-ago dispersed Italians and Greeks, and more recently dispersed Chinese. No-one would seriously consider it a ghetto. Yes, there are still areas in our capital cities with heavy concentrations of more recently arrived Chinese, but few would classify even those as ghettos. Most "Chinatowns" in Australia are primarily commercial rather than residential areas, and are rarely hotbeds of crime or poverty. Other countries around the world have not necessarily embraced multiculturalism, hence any issues they may with Chinese integration is not particularly relevant to Australia.

Dresdener – re “switching civilisations”: Australia has been accepting immigrants from “vastly different cultures” for over 200 years, and I don’t see us “switching civilisations”. No doubt our cultural identity is slowly morphing, but the core values that define our civilisation have not yet been under serious threat (actually, they have, but from *white* politicians, not from immigrants). But all civilisations grow and evolve – we just need to vigilant that it’s for the better.

Mr Daggert, the exact date of the Chinese Communist Insurgency in Indonesia I did not know, but I knew it was during the sixties. This insurrection, meant to establish the local Chinese as the government of Indonesia, followed the similar situation which occurred during the early fifties when the Chinese minority in Malaya also attempted to seize control of that country.

To what degree the Chinese in Malaya were acting on behalf of the Chinese government in RedChina is something I can not answer. But the degree of support that the Chinese gave the “Indonesian” Chinese can be gauged by the fact that Indonesia closed its Peking embassy for (if I remember correctly) 25 years. People like Mr Wizofaust/Nichols who take it for granted that ethnic minorities divest themselves of their ethnic or national loyalties the instant they are granted citizenship obviously do not bother to read history.

The ethnic cleansing of Chinese in Indonesia did occur and if the mass executions involved Indonesian Communist Party members, they were probably all Chinese anyway. You might remember that the Malayan Communist Party had a military wing called “The Malayan Races Liberation Army” which not surprisingly was composed almost entirely of Chinese. The British won that war because they kept the loyalty of the majority of “Malayans” (Dalits. Malays, and Indians) who had no intention of bending the knee to the Chinese.

On the subject of building a socially cohesive society, there are only a few options. You either demand that minorities accept your culture and religion and become one of you, but this is probably impossible when skin colour and ethnicity is a factor. Or you drive them out of the place and take over the joint yourself. Or you force them to accept minority status and then keep tabs on their birthrate. Or you exterminate them. Thinking that people from opposing cultures with diametrically opposed value systems can live together by singing "Kumbaya" and ignoring each others presence is “dancing with the fairies” stuff.

As for your comment on opposing immigration on environmental grounds, you and I are in agreement.