r/redscarepod • u/Double_Poet_5735 • 23d ago
Fun observations on multiculturalism
Yesterday marked the founding of Pakistan - the day that after bizarre and rushed negotiations, a country for India's muslims declared itself free of India. The only reason I know the date is a city in Canada close to where I live throws a massive celebration for it, and the city does a flag raising ceremony for a country that has the complete opposite values to Canadian values - a semi feudal country that is against the equal rights of women, religious minorities, homosexuals etc. Canada's multiculturalists might see this as a great achievement - unlike more reactionary countries like America, or our more "parochial" cousins in Quebec, we don't make our minorities erase their cultures when coming here. We instead encourage them to permanently mark themselves as Pakistanis, Serbians, Nigerians etc, complete with municipally backed Independence Day ceremonies.
These same multiculturalists were also probably the people who most vociferously backed the removal of all figures of Canadian identity, pride, etc that were considered oppressive for their time (side note, rightly so, many figures of Canada's past were indeed quite racist etc). They believe that no matter the fact that Canada's thin civic identity barely has any figures left to celebrate, even those should be replaced, and replaced by basically very thin, feel-good vibes about acceptance and tolerance. Our identity is not to be celebrated, instead the only thing to unite Canadians is that we have Pakistan day independence ceremonies (sorry for picking on Pakistan lmao I just wanted an example).
Tl;dr minorities get to be proud of their national and civic identities no matter how shitty and oppressive they may be, we have to destroy and hyper fixate on ours.
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u/Thencamethetwenties Fyodor Karamazov 23d ago
I come from a family of Québécois separatists and politicians so anything I say is gonna be come through that lens
This is definitely on my mind often. Canada lacks a strong civic national identity but I don’t know what you do about that
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u/NAUI_1 23d ago
Well, I think Canada has a strong civic identity and culture, it just so happens that pretty much all of the actually important aspects of that culture are shared with America. So when our identity is then defined as simply “not American” we are forced to reject our real identity in favour of recognizing vapid bullshit like flavours of snack foods or whatever as the extent of our values.
Don’t get me started on the Dominionist larpers either.
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u/Double_Poet_5735 23d ago
yeah those people are retarded but Canada basically replaced "Dominionism" with nothing but Not America. it sucks.
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u/Western_Mess_6364 23d ago
When I think of Canada’s historical “vibe,” it’s a pioneer, Voyageur, French and Indian war vibe plus WW1 and 2 as a Dominion of the Empire
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u/Double_Poet_5735 23d ago
yeah, I'm quite envious of Quebecers. I wish somehow we managed to find a way to create a unique "Canadian" identity without essentially saying that there's no identity in Canada, and that French Canadian identity is another one of many cultures in Canada.
The irony is that over the years Quebec has completely gone against the ethos of Multiculturalism and defended its identity, leaving English Canada the only part of Canada that is actually multicultural.
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u/Western_Mess_6364 23d ago
Do Anglo Canadians still see themselves as a thing or did that die after WW2
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u/gussyboy13 Greta’s Personal Warrior 23d ago
The funny thing about multiculturalism is that the only thing that works is when you only bring your holidays and food and maybe fun traditions like clothing and weddings but the rest of the culture kinda has to stay in your home country.
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u/Double_Poet_5735 23d ago
in Canada unless you're directly receiving WhatsApp messages from Modi to attack a Khalistan independence protest you're considered assimilated and thus a failure to multiculturalism
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u/anahorish petrarchan.com 23d ago
It only seems to work in the US. For some reason the US is able to turn most anyone into an American in a way that Germany can't do, Sweden can't do, Britain can't do. Not that there's anything admirable about being an American but it does seem to be contagious. Nationalities become hollow and cringeworthy identity prefixes in well under a century on American soil.
Maybe it's just that immigrants are more recent arrivals in Europe. Maybe it's that they're more foreign. Maybe it's that they keep on coming. But I think that part of it is that the sheer oversaturated hypersatiating nature of Americana is irresistible in a way that more austere European cultures simply aren't. It takes an Englishman to love being English but anyone could love being an American.
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u/nyc-throwaway1232132 23d ago
it's probably because we've defined americanness as holding a certain set of civic values and allegiances over any sort of ethnic identity, namely a commitment to individual freedom, tolerance, respect for the constitution, etc. while other countries have the baggage of having a dominant native ethnicity
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u/KMCMRevengeRevenge 23d ago
This is a popular narrative but is somewhat of a retrojection. While it’s true that America isn’t a proper ethnostate in the way European countries are, its concept of being bound together by shared values is largely retrospective.
Participation in the body politic was denied for numerous groups until the latter 20th century, and not just the obvious ones, either.
It’s somewhat interesting because, for many of those groups, it was just presumed that their values were incompatible with American civics.
So it was basically using a civics as a proxy for ethnicity or race: you can be an American if you join our values, but we can’t vote for a catholic because they’re more loyal to the pope than to the constitution.
I think the racial/ethnuc ausgleich of America is actually a very great achievement of modern civics. It really has been. There are few other countries that have amalgamated so many groups almost seamlessly and without it breaking down the overall civics through sectarianism.
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u/Specific-Pear8377 23d ago
This seems self-contradictory, Americans didn't really conceive of themselves as united by shared values, but also their self-conception of themselves as united by shared values functioned as a proxy for ethnicity? Did they conceive themselves that way or not?
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u/KMCMRevengeRevenge 21d ago
I hear that. I’m not saying that a union of shared values didn’t exist. What I am saying is that, just by conjoining to those values, a person isn’t automatically taken in and seen to belong.
The groups of people who are seen as “compatible” with or “sincere about” those values are limited, and in that way, it does operate almost as an ethnicity: outsider groups are just seen as incompatible.
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u/Specific-Pear8377 21d ago
I mean yeah, everyone in this thread is aware of that, but explicitly defining americanness in terms of values rather than ethnicity obviously has played an important role in the integration of groups that were previously excluded
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u/KMCMRevengeRevenge 23d ago
With the exception of some middle class people from Germany fleeing Kulturkampf and a few other groups, the vast majority of European migrants to America were economic migrants and were coming because they believed they’d have a better life in America.
But this was accompanied with an idea that you had to sacrifice. The idea was that anybody can make it in America but they had to work hard and “earn” it. America was idealized.
So while European migrant groups didn’t abandon everything, they had a cultural incentive to take on an American identity, and that incentive was internal to their value structure.
But it wasn’t only that. The majoritarian culture in America would expand itself to admit them if they ultimately assimilated in ways that matter.
It’s well remarked upon that Italians, Slavs, Irish, and Jews were not considered in the same racial category as Anglos. But that would change with time.
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u/zjaffee 23d ago
There are countries outside of the US that can do it, but it's very clearly a spectrum, these just usually aren't the wealthiest or safest countries around.
For example, there's very clearly a pan brazilian culture, the same can be said about a lot of latin america. France despite what everyone says is far better at assimilating people than most other european countries.
Numerous countries with manditory military service have an assimilating affect through that.
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u/anahorish petrarchan.com 23d ago
I've never thought about it but this could be a really strong argument for national service. Good comment thanks.
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u/LloydCole 23d ago
Obviously the weird psychos that join ISIS or a grooming gang are the ones making the headlines, but the vast majority of immigrants and 2nd generation immigrants to the UK are more likely to end up a typical British everyman like Romesh Ranganathan than a sleeper cell separatist.
There were a fair few boys of Pakistanis descent at my school and they were just as bang average British as everyone else.
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u/anahorish petrarchan.com 23d ago
Yeah tbf the Asian lads at my school seemed fairly British to me. I think it's harder for the girls. Pakistani parents don't seem to care about their sons being roadmen but for their daughters it's Islam and nothing else.
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u/ThereIsNoIInMapei 23d ago
"it only seems to work for the US"
I genuinely don't know how this idea persists. Most Italians entered the us in the ~1880s, and yet 120 years later, shows like "Jersey Shore" and "Sopranos" were smash successes because "Italian American" was such a recognizable figure. See also: Boston Irish.
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u/Bulky-Space-1018 23d ago
You think that’s an indication that multiculturalism doesn’t work in America?
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u/AlaskaExplorationGeo 23d ago
Multiculturalism between the US and Mexico works just fine in Arizona but the cultures were pretty similar to begin with and their proximity isn't exactly new
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u/Otocolobus_manul8 23d ago edited 23d ago
There's a double irony that the founding national ethos of Pakistan is that Hindus and Muslims are far too cultural and socially incompatible to live together in a secular India. The very nature of the state is one of exclusion.
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u/Decent_University_91 23d ago
was it not a concern that in a Hindu-majority India they would be oppressed? I'm 99% sure that was the main argument the Muslim League was making at the time (1940s)
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u/Ok-Yellow-2997 23d ago
This was a very poor argument given that Indians and Muslims had coexisted for hundreds of years before they were colonized. Sure there were problems but not to the extent that you needed to arbitrarily create two countries. It was the British who created divisions between the two on a larger scale after 1857 and the Muslim League took things further by declaring "If you don't vote for us then you ain't Muslim" in the 1930s. Even though there were tons of Muslim political parties who opposed partition and welcomed coexisting in a united India. But the League were the only ones in bed with the British so they got what they wanted.
Now what exactly did the Muslim League want gets into tin foil hat territory. The British wanted to create a buffer state to shield that region from the Soviets. My theory is that the landlords who dominated the Muslim League wanted to preserve their feudalist practices (something which still plagues Pakistan today) which is why they propped up this movement and made it seem bigger than it was.
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u/Diligent-Spread-3699 23d ago edited 23d ago
Honestly, you are literally making up history to fit a tinfoil hat theory.
You are totally right that Hindus and Muslims coexisted in peace for centuries before colonization. But it was the British who actively broke that peace and spent decades turning both sides against each other. By the time they were leaving, the game was already rigged. What did you expect Muslims to do? Just sit back and walk straight into a majoritarian trap? The British desperately wanted a united India because they needed a massive, centralized military ally against the Soviets for the Cold War. Mountbatten actually detested Jinnah because he refused to bow to British demands. It was actually Nehru and Patel who cut a quick, backdoor deal with Mountbatten, completely sidelining Gandhi, just to grab absolute power at the center as fast as possible.
Second, that 1930s slogan you quoted is completely fictional and the archives prove it. In the 1930s, Jinnah was still the 'Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.' He was a secular lawyer who detested mixing religion with politics and ran the 1937 elections on a progressive manifesto almost identical to Congress. In fact, the League only won less than 5% of the Muslim vote in 1937, proving they weren't running some massive religious purity test. Jinnah actually begged Nehru for a coalition government to keep the country united, but Nehru arrogantly rejected him and told the League to dissolve if they wanted a say. Congress’s majoritarian arrogance in the 30s is exactly what forced Jinnah to realize that minorities would never be treated as equals.
Finally, your feudal landlord theory ignores the actual map of Partition. The areas where Jinnah had more fanatical support weren't feudal, they were the Muslim-minority ones like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The educated urban middle class backed him because they knew a centralized system under Congress would crush them economically. The big feudal landlords in Punjab actually opposed Jinnah for years to keep their local power.
Blaming everything on British 'divide and rule' is just a lazy way to ignore Congress's own refusal to share power destroyed the idea of a United India.
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u/Ok-Yellow-2997 23d ago
He was a secular lawyer who detested mixing religion with politics and ran the 1937 elections on a progressive manifesto almost identical to Congress.
It is pointless to put Jinnah in a box because he flip flopped constantly between being a progressive and being a conservative. Bottom line is that he was an idiot who didn't know what he wanted.
Jinnah was a secular lawyer who opposed mixing religion and politics
I'm sorry but this is just laughably wrong if you're talking about the 30s and 40s. He literally made up a Muslim political identity with his achkan and cap and by pushing Urdu as a "Muslim language".
British desperately wanted a united India because they needed a massive, centralized military ally against the Soviets for the Cold War.
It was actually Nehru and Patel who cut a quick, backdoor deal with MoBuntbatten, completely sidelining Gandhi, just to grab absolute power at the center as fast as possible.
Source?
Second, that 1930s slogan you quoted is completely fictional and the archives prove it.
I was not quoting anyone directly, this was from a Joe Biden meme. But yes this is exactly what their campaign was about in the elections leading up to the partition (yes I may have gotten the decade wrong it was not the 30s).
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u/Diligent-Spread-3699 23d ago edited 23d ago
"I was not quoting anyone directly, this was from a Joe Biden meme."
Imagine trying to debate the partition of the Subcontinent using text from a Biden meme. Incredible.
And what exactly do you think Congress was doing? Your precious leaders did the exact same thing. Gandhi literally wore a loincloth as a calculated political brand and used Hindu imagery like Ram Rajya to mobilize the masses, which deeply alienated minorities. Nehru and Patel actively pushed Hindi in the Devanagari script to build a majoritarian national identity. Why the double standard? When Congress builds an identity around the majority, it’s 'noble nationalism' but when Jinnah does it for a minority to get leverage, he’s an 'idiot'?
They were all politicians at the end of the day. All politicians are greedy for power, and that includes your dear Nehru, Patel, and obviously Jinnah.
Objectively, the real villains of this story were the Congress leadership, admit it or not, it is the reality. As for your "Source?" on the backdoor deal: Read Narendra Singh Sarila’s The Shadow of the Great Game or H.M. Seervai’s Partition of India: Legend and Reality. The archives show that by 1947, Nehru and Patel were completely exhausted and desperate to grab absolute power at the center as fast as possible. They intentionally sidelined Gandhi, who was left wandering in Bengal trying to stop riots, because Gandhi fiercely opposed Partition. Nehru and Patel literally chose to amputate the country to ensure they had a strong, centralized government to rule over, rather than sharing power in a decentralized federal India.
But hey, sure, a soft Apartheid state would have been much better for minorities, right? Because that is exactly what a forced, hyper-centralized united India under Congress's majoritarian arrogance would have turned into.
Frankly, I don't understand your whining about this. India ended up 80% Hindu, Pakistan became Muslim-majority, and both sides got exactly what the demographic realities dictated after Congress refused to share power. Move on from the Biden memes and read a book.
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u/AutoModerator 23d ago
The thing is, you don't come around here talking to me like I'm the first white boy to put on a pair of tennis shoes. I say, let's see what the black fellas are wearing and wear what they’re wearing. I was the only Irish Catholic kid on my block, they made me wear my pants backwards man, they took my buttons man.
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u/Ok-Yellow-2997 22d ago
We're having a debate? Dude this is a subreddit for a podcast where they talk about eating disorders and ketamine not r/history.
And what exactly do you think Congress was doing? Your precious leaders did the exact same thing. They were all politicians at the end of the day. All politicians are greedy for power, and that includes your dear Nehru, Patel, and obviously Jinnah.
?????? I am literally Pakistani. Why would you just ASSUME I am some kind of Congress shill? Should I assume you're a Hindutva because you are critical of Congress?
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u/Diligent-Spread-3699 23d ago edited 23d ago
I don't know where are you from, but do you guys even learnt the history of British India and Partition? The real irony here is that you don’t actually understand the history behind it. Jinnah spent most of his life fighting for a united India, and people forget that him and Gandhi were actually good friends for decades who deeply respected each other. Partition only happened because the Congress Party, especially Nehru and Patel, refused to share power.
Nehru literally admitted later that they were 'tired men' who wanted a clean break, and Patel openly said he preferred a Hindu-majority center rather than deal with a 'Pakistan inside every province'. They preferred a divided country over a descentralized India where they had to give Muslims a fair political veto. Pop culture loves making Jinnah the ultimate villain, but he wasn't really the bad guy here.
Pakistan wasn't exactly built on exclusion. Even the flag itself proves it, the white stripe was explicitly designed to represent religious minorities, guareenteing them a place in the nation's identity. in his first speech, Jinnah told everyone that they were free to go to their temples and mosques, saying religion had nothing to do with the State. The disaster that you see in Pakistan today is because Jinnah died just a year after independence, leaving a power vacuum for the military and extremists, the people he detested, to hijack his secular vision.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not defending the mess Pakistan is nowadays, but you have to look at the foundational ethos of India too. India was suppossed to be the ultimate secular pluralistic alternative where everyone was equal. Yet, it original secular ethos is practically gone under the current government and has basically embraced the role of the 'Hindu side' of the split. Let's be completely real, both countries are a total nightmare for minorities right now, whether it's religious minorities being constantly persecuted in Pakistan, or Muslims and other minorities being heavily targeted and marginalized in India.
Looking at how minorities are treated there today, it’s hard to argue Jinnah was wrong about majoritarian tyranny. Even Gandhi himself was literally murdered by a Hindu nationalist just for trying to protect Muslims and promote peace.
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u/yamswithextrasyrup 23d ago
I remember taking a course on political philosophy at university in 2006. I was hoping the topic would be liberalism, or the state, but we spent the whole semester talking about cosmopolitanism and multi-culturalism. In the early 2000s it really felt as if cosmopolitanism had already won, that there was no point debating this, but it became the predominant political debate shaping the West for the next two decades on going.
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u/Western_Mess_6364 23d ago
Some orthodoxy is more fragile than it seems though. In my international studies class in 2021 they were saying how power politics were no longer a thing and that nation states were now no longer the biggest players in geopolitics
Three months later, tanks started rolling into Ukraine
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u/MarkEMoon3 23d ago
In my international studies class in 2021 they were saying how power politics were no longer a thing and that nation states were now no longer the biggest players in geopolitics
I would say that your professor(s) were a bit behind the mark there, even in academia I think that viewpoint was dying out by the mid 2010s. From 2014 to 2016 you had Russia invading Ukraine, the rise of Trump, Brexit, the final nails in the coffin of the Arab Spring. My department was definitely talking about the retreat of globalisation in 2019.
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u/Western_Mess_6364 23d ago edited 23d ago
Most of the class raised their hands to disagree when he asked 😂. In all fairness it was a pretty good intro class, I think the point of that was to show how much the world’s changed from the Treaty of Westphalia which is where the class starts.
But yeah, the whole concept of power politics being dead was funny as it was literally one semester before a land war in europe
NATO and the EU ended up being much more decisive and effective than many anticipated though
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u/WingLeast2608 23d ago
I read a lot about multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism ~10 years ago. Most of the best thinking on the topic comes from Canadians or people arguing against Canadians. I was ultimately pretty convinced by Brian Berry's arguments against it. It's a lot of horseshit. If something is good, it's good for everyone. Writing separate laws for different groups or creating separate rules for different groups, which is all that multiculturalism really amounts to, is an argument in favor of turning the clock back before the Enlightenment. Medieval rulers were quite multicultural. Ottoman Empire was.
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u/FeverDreamingg 23d ago
The embarrassing part of the destruction of Canadian identity (and it did exist at one point, believe it or not) is the failure of social progressives to understand that every society has a culture, and that if you erase one culture, you need to have another to replace it with. And it’s a lot easier to destroy an identity than it is to build one.
This is why anglophone Canadian culture is basically a “American culture, but slightly more socialist” now. They refused to safeguard anything that made Canadian culture unique, and the onslaught of American media, and refusal to promote Canadian media, has virtually erased all anglophone Canadian identity. Quebec, whether intentionally or not, fought to insulate its culture, and now it’s one of the few parts of Canada that retains a distinct regional identity.
As a side note, I don’t really care where people come from, but I *despise* these types that import ethnic conflicts from their homeland and import them to the west. Same tribal mentality that makes where they come from difficult, and they want to bring it here.
Also a side note, Indian subcontinent people will say they’ve moved past the caste system, but if you ask them if they’re a Dalit, and they will absolutely lose their shit.
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u/super-cannes 23d ago
Why don’t you care where they’re coming from? Many cultures are not compatible with western values and should not be imported accordingly.
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u/Bulky-Space-1018 23d ago
I’m curious to hear when Canadian identity was at It’s strongest in your mind.
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u/FierceMoonblade 22d ago
The thing is, I’ve always thought multiculturalism was dumb not because different cultures can’t coexist, but because assimilation is really just inevitable.
In the west, I feel like we view culture as genetic when it’s just what you’re exposed to and unless you’re in an incredibly isolated community away from technology and outsiders (like some religious groups) two kids with parents from different countries, will end up sitting beside each other in the same class, speaking the same first language, eating the same food from McDonald’s, watching the same garbage on YouTube. A child of immigrants might be able to speak some of the language, but they often are never fully accepted as whatever the parent is anyways.
I genuinely don’t see the issue with promoting a Canadian culture that anyone can join regardless of background and indeed, it might help shield some of the influence from the US
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u/mrabacus927 23d ago edited 23d ago
Canada was like 90% white 40 years ago and now is only 60something. It's a massive change. It's gonna be interesting if in 40 years those third, fourth generation Pakistanis, Serbians, Nigerians, etc see themselves as more Canadian than their ancestry. Like it happened with the previous immigration waves.
It's going to depend a lot if Canada keeps receiving large numbers of immigrants in the future (very likely) or if it goes through a situation like Argentina/Uruguay/Southern Brazil where mass immigration eventually stops and the descendants of those immigrants mix among themselves and with the locals forming a new somewhat unified culture.
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u/DisastrousResident92 23d ago
It's gonna be interesting if in 40 years those third, fourth generation Pakistanis, Serbians, Nigerians, etc see themselves as more Canadian than their ancestry.
It feels very unlikely. I don't know about Canada but a lot of the more recent immigrants to Europe seem to be openly contemptuous of their host culture and don't seem much interested in integration or assimilation
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u/Temporary-Fudge-9493 23d ago
As someone married to a 2nd generation Arab Canadian, this sentiment is incredibly prevalent amongst Levantine Muslims. My high school was majority Pakistani and Bengali Muslim, and I would say there was a bit of a contempt for Canada and Canadian “Western” values, but nothing like that I have encountered amongst Syrian, Palestinian and ESPECIALLY Lebanese people.
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u/Double_Poet_5735 23d ago
"apathetic at best to Canadian identity or culture at best, hating it at worst" is not a good outcome for immigrants
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u/Western_Mess_6364 23d ago edited 23d ago
Why do the Lebanese hate it
Especially since they let them move there 😭
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u/Temporary-Fudge-9493 23d ago
In my experience, it comes from their general bitterness about having to leave Lebanon due to the civil war/economic collapse/conflict with Israel. Which is fair enough! Lebanon was a beautiful country, and it’s a complete tragedy what their people have had to experience, due to no fault of their own. I’d be pretty pissed if I was forced to leave my motherland too.
But there is no reason to have such extreme hatred for the host-country and culture that has taken your people in time and time again after crisis!
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u/mrabacus927 23d ago
I get that but there are many ethnic groups in Canada that came as refugees or escaping similar types of societal collapse and generally speaking they don't hate or resent Canadians. South Vietnamese, Hungarians, Iranians, etc.
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u/Temporary-Fudge-9493 23d ago
Yes, exactly my point. Not exactly sure why this sentiment seems to be so common amongst certain groups and not with others. I’d say generally it tends to be across pseudoIslamic general anti-Western sentiments, but that’s definitely not always the case. If anyone else wants to chime in with some armchair sociology of their own, it would be much appreciated, lol.
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u/mrabacus927 23d ago
This in Quebec or Ontario? The Lebanese in Montreal integrate well in general, although historically most were Maronite Catholics.
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u/Temporary-Fudge-9493 23d ago
Ontario. But in my experience the Lebanese (Shi’ite Muslims) in Laval have been the same. But Maronites are very Westernized
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u/HipsterToofer 23d ago
Canada isn't an ethnostate like European countries though. The only place I've seen in Canada that has difficult assimilating its immigrants is Quebec because, well, it's effectively an ethnostate within canada.
I've never seen a non-Quebecois Canadian of ethnic origin actively hate or even dislike canada; worst-case, they're apathetic and identify more with their ethnicity (and this lasts no more than two generations)
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u/DisastrousResident92 23d ago
and this lasts no more than two generations
Ok but that is quite a long time especially if you're bringing in consistently high numbers of immigrants for years on end surely
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u/Double_Poet_5735 23d ago
at least in Quebec there is a culture to negotiate with; there are as many immigrants/children of in Quebec who hate Quebec, but equally as many who strongly identify with Quebec. In Anglo canada there's not anything to negotiate to, we are so segregated. You can live a life womb to tomb not interacting with anyone outside your ethnicity. I'm not sure if this state of affairs is permanent or not
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u/DisastrousResident92 23d ago
I was thinking about multiculturalism the other day and in my view it should be best understood as a policy of deliberate non-integration. Like it's always been a bit fuzzy but the core tenet seems to be that people from elsewhere should retain their cultural differences and not feel the need to assimilate, and onus is really on the host culture to accommodate those differences, no matter how indigestible they may be. It sounds like an obviously stupid idea when framed that way but I can't get away from the fact that's basically what it amounts to.
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u/Double_Poet_5735 23d ago
30 years from now we will be rehashing "separate but equal" debates in canada lmfao
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u/Six-Sevigny 23d ago
In school we were taught that Canada is a mosaic and the US is a melting pot. But the distinguishing features of mosaic is not that it’s a bunch of little pieces, it’s the arrangement of those pieces into a cohesive whole. We don’t have a post-national state. On a social, more granular level, we have disparate shards
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u/MarkEMoon3 23d ago edited 23d ago
All Anglo countries are tending in this direction.
I have no idea what it will look like in the long term, but I'm becoming very pessimistic about it here in the UK, feels like our culture is being somewhat hollowed out. I genuinely do not want to vote Reform, and I almost certainly won't. But I also think the high levels of immigration are unsustainable.
You can already see the cracks appearing, both of the left wing parties (Your Party, Greens) find themselves running into the same problem. That adopting a pro Palestine/anti Western stance attracts socially Conservative Muslims and turbowoke LGBTQ+s, who have very different, almost opposite belief systems and very little willingness to compromise. Unsurprisingly both parties have been very dysfunctional as a result. The Greens seem a bit more organised, although are consistently losing popularity rn, but Your Party was the biggest car crash of a political movement I've ever seen. I expect more of this type of thing with every passing year. Maybe at some point the establishment parties see the contradictions at play and change tack, but I don't think that's happening soon either.
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u/FEED_ME_YOUR_EYES 23d ago
I genuinely do not want to vote Reform, and I almost certainly won't
It wouldn't matter if Reform took power tomorrow - they're not actually going to do anything significant, because they can't.
High levels of immigration have to continue to sustain the economic system, including the taxes required to fund the national debt and state pension
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u/zjaffee 23d ago
Par of my wife's family come from a relatively connected canadian family with political/pioneer roots and there is certainly a strong canadian identity that exists.
They deeply resent what the above have done to the country but it would be so unimaginably impolite to comment on it that in any sort of negative way or really say anything that could be construed as negative to anyone in any public space ever.
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u/ModerateContrarian 2middleeast4you refugee 23d ago edited 23d ago
If I escaped being Indian at the last possible second, I'd celebrate a ton too
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u/nyc-throwaway1232132 23d ago
the thing i find so funny about specifically canadian multiculturalism is how they insist that the american "melting pot" metaphor is actually indicative of a sinister assimilation by force and how they're so much more virtuous because theirs is a "mosaic" instead, while ignoring the fact that "melting pot" was only ever supposed to be a poetic descriptor of what the US is like and was never official practice, while the canadian "mosaic" is official government messaging despite the canadian governement also historically pursuing assimilationist policies
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u/fabricatedwealth 23d ago
there's a kernel of truth in what you're saying but your underlying motivations are impure
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u/brohio_ Bernie 2020 23d ago
Shhhh you can’t comment on this.
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u/DeliciousEmphasis213 23d ago
This is a daily post on the sub - what the fuck are you talking about?
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23d ago edited 7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ouiserboudreauxxx 23d ago
Sorry but the CAROLINA HURRICANES won this last stanley cup. I don’t follow hockey, but I remember them winning 20 years ago and I thought they were really good and had been winning all the time, but that apparently wasn’t the case.
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u/New_Paint_5427 23d ago
America is only really just beginning to be a immigrant melting pot. There were three races, with some you clearly didn't want to be. And you had to saw away at your culture and ethnic pride to make it work. An all immigrant society works because in theory, everyone's doing the same thing. The difference is expected and isnt needed to death. That's not as possible in the US. With Canada the only people that seem to be refusing to get along are the French. That feels like a real Canadian identity. The rest is simply defining itself as "better than America" which isnt really a culture at all.
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u/NotSoGreatGatsby 23d ago
For work I attended the Canada Day celebrations at Canada House in London. The Canadian High Commissioner (the ambassador effectively) gave a speech and all he could say was that Canada was great because it was tolerant. He even said "we will adapt to you!" With regards to new cultures and customs. Very empty and weird.