Goodbye, Australia

Will Australia abolish itself? This is a question that arises with the visit to Australia of the German economist, politician, banker, and freshly minted pariah, Dr Thilo Sarrazin.

Sarrazin became a pariah amongst Germany’s political and intellectual establishment in August 2010 when he published his book, Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany Abolishes Itself"), which explores the failures of Germany’s post-war immigration program and multicultural policy. Despite wide-spread criticism and controversy, it quickly became a best- seller and has sold over 1.5 million copies in less than a year.

His book follows other similarly powerful jeremiads on these issues, including Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (2006), by Melanie Phillips (2006); America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006), by Mark Steyn; The Last Days of Europe, by Walter Laqueur (2007); and Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Immigration, and the West (2009), by Christopher Caldwell.

All of these works focus on the profound implications for Europe of decades of demographic upheaval and social transformation arising from a falling birthrate amongst the native populations of Western European countries, coupled with virtually uncontrolled immigration from non-European sources, especially the Muslim world. They argue that Western Europe is sliding into a social and cultural crisis that may well be deeper and more prolonged than the financial crisis it is also facing.

For decades, very high levels of economic growth facilitated the hypertrophy of the welfare state to support masses of unemployed and under-employed people who were unable or unwilling to integrate into their host societies, while any questioning or criticism of such outcomes was prohibited by an officially enforced taboo, such as that which Sarrazin is accused of breaking.

This persecution reflects the entrenched power of the ‘New Class’ of state-employed bureaucrats and the intelligentsia, and the control and influence they are able to exercise over the political, bureaucratic, legal, educational, academic, and cultural elites in these societies. This bloc is resolutely committed to statist policies involving intervention and regulation of every aspect of economic, social, and personal life, while making a fetish out of promoting ‘difference’ and protecting an increasingly large number of alleged rights enjoyed by ‘the Other’, which consists of an ever-growing horde of people living off the state while making no productive economic contribution.  

Such groups form self-declared victim sub-cultures with their own state-funded advocacy systems, and engage in a process of ‘self-ghettoization’, which allows them to operate parallel commercial, financial, educational, cultural, and legal systems, while still insisting on financial largesse, and political and legal support from the state.

Coincidentally, we have recently seen some excellent examples of these types of self-initiated separatist strategies in Australia. There are suburbs in Australian cities that have been deliberately made into ghettos where outsiders are harassed, abused and even assaulted. They also support bookshops that sell extremist literature and host cells of Islamists and even would-be Jihadis.

Only this month, the international pan-Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, held its annual conference in Western Sydney, attended by some 1000 Muslims. The principal objective of this group is the establishment of the Caliphate, encompassing all lands from Spain to the Philippines that have ever been under Muslim rule, and consequently the theme of its conference was the ‘Uprising in the Muslim World – On the Road to Khilifah’. A feature of the conference was the fierce desire of participants to reject the notion that Muslims desired any form of Western democracy or freedoms, while its website promotes the Caliphate, Jihad, Islamic Politics, Ummah, Unity, Sharia, with a single ruler governing not only the Arabs but the Muslim world as a whole.

Then there is the notorious case of how the burka-clad woman who falsely accused a policeman of racism was able to escape justice, a decision that effectively placed people who choose to wear such clothing literally beyond the reach of the law. When there was a hint of public protest against this the politically correct media leapt forward to play its part, calling for the elimination of ‘racist bogans’, i.e., ordinary Australians who believe that all people should be equal before the law and not be given special dispensations to break and evade it.

Another example of these deliberate separatist strategies is the use by Muslim communities of the hawala system, which uses a huge network of money-brokers located primarily in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, to transfer value in Australia and in­ternationally. Europol has found that such remittance systems, operating outside the conventional financial sector, greatly facilitate the secret transfer of terrorist funds.  

There is also the revelation that Sharia law operates in Australia as part of an officially tolerated system of ‘legal pluralism’, which, e.g., allows polygyny, where the husband has multiple wives, and marriages where one party (invariably the female) is under the legal age. One of the results of this is that not only the first but also the second and third wives and their children are able to claim welfare and other benefits.

Such activities have recently been endorsed by a prominent Saudi cleric who has just issued a fatwa asserting that there is no minimum age for marriage, that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle”, and that they may be subjected to sexual intercourse once “they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the men” concerned.

There has also been the case of the convert to Islam who fell victim to Sharia law. He was seen drinking by members of the local mosque, who then invaded his home at night, pinned him to his bed and lashed him some 40 times with a length of electrical cord, leaving him severely injured and traumatized.

Meanwhile, at the level of state promotion and legal enforcement of these separatist strategies we have the pending decision on the Andrew Bolt case, which may well confirm that it is now illegal to say anything at all about race or certain favoured religions, effectively prohibiting criticism of the central foundation upon which this entire system of race and religion-based economic and political patronage and separatism has been carefully constructed.

Will Australia follow the same path into social and cultural disintegration and decline that Dr Sarrazin sees overwhelming Germany? While there are many economic and demographic differences between Australia and Western Europe, there are also many similarities, especially in relation to the aggressive and intrusive role played by the state and its adoption and implementation of the same range of vastly expensive social democratic and welfare state policies that have brought Europe to its knees – which is, of course, exactly the posture that the New Class and the intelligentsia would like to see us all adopt.