Multiculturalism’s Culture of Contempt

We were about thirty hours from sending this issue of Quadrant to the printers when the news broke that terrorist attacks in Paris had killed more than a hundred people. It seemed an important enough event, throwing light on both European and Australian concerns, to justify commissioning serious commentaries on it. That in turn pushed us into re-shaping this Quadrant around the concept of France’s emerging civil war.

Chance favours the prepared mind, it is said, and that concept had been planted in our minds the previous week when we received an article from our perceptive cultural critic Michael Connor titled “Paris, at Five Minutes to Midnight”. On a visit to France, Michael was struck by the unstable jostling blend of joyful cultural entertainments, car-burnings in resentful anti-white suburbs, the smart bookshops running out of republished Occupation-era fascist novels, all within a few stops on the Metro. “Nowhere in Paris is far from possible danger,” he writes….