IN the wake of the Martin Place and Charlie Hebdo tragedies, every man and his dog seem to have been gleefully seizing on the carnage as vindication of whatever it was passed for thought in their tiny minds before the bloodletting.
John Griffiths.
If you’ve had the misfortune to spend as much time as I have in internet comment sections that statement rarely bodes well.
It almost always can be translated as: “I have long nursed a baseless prejudice but now, at long last, one tiny shred of evidence appears to confirm it.”
In the darkest corners of the Australian internet, that is the comments on Andrew Bolt’s and Miranda Devine’s News Limited blogs, a tiny number of deaths very far away are the long-awaited proof positive that multiculturalism must immediately be revoked lest we all be rooned.
It has to be admitted that multiculturalism’s boosters rarely do themselves any favours in mealy mouthed and vague definitions of what it’s all about.
So let’s be clear. Multiculturalism is about making Australia as strong as possible.
It’s not just about being nice for the sake of it, or weak through indulgence. Most of the world’s most successful nations are multicultural and this is not by any accident.
When one casts the mind back through history, almost all of the most successful civilisations have been empires – multicultural civilisations.
Yes, all things, in time, come to an end, and the nutters then point and say: “Aha! It was the multiculturalism that did for the Romans!”
However, this ignores long millennia (if one includes the Eastern Romans) of global domination through vibrant multiculturalism.
The crypto-racists of the anti-multicultural lobby might well hanker back to a period when everyone in Australia was white (aside from an excluded indigenous population). We were a cog in the broader British Empire, which sounds like an appealing thing to those who yearn for imagined good old days.
And yet, as with all empires, it was a sprawling construct of languages, faiths, and peoples. With the contribution of Australians, Indians, Fijians, Nepalese Gurkhas, and countless others in two world wars, it’s problematic to think this diversity weakened the empire.
When a thousand Maoris in the Battle of Crete carved their way through 10,000 of Hitler’s aryan elite one might think the other shoe might have dropped. Then again Jesse Owens’ humiliation of the white-priders at the 1936 Munich Olympics with four gold medals was something they managed to turn a blind eye to as well.
So multiculturalism is indeed the right thing to do because racism and racists are awful and ignorant.
But it’s also the right thing to do because it makes us, and by us I mean the bigger idea of the Australian nation (not some tiny fearful group of “real Aussies” beset by thinking best suited for shivering through winter in an Iron Age hill fort), stronger.
If I may finish with a metaphor, a sword made out of pure iron would be a scary thing to face. Heavy and hard and taking a sharp edge.
But to face it, give me steel.
Give me an alloy of iron and manganese, nickel, chromium, molybdenum, boron, titanium, vanadium, phosphorus, sulfur, silicon, oxygen, nitrogen, aluminium and carbon. Lighter, sharper, suppler, and less likely to break.
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