Dear Mr Freedland,

 

What you seem to forget when you compare Britain (or Europe) with America in today's Guardian ("The Identity Vacuum") is that America is a very young country (not yet two and a half centuries old) whose population is almost entirely immigrant. Less than 2 percent, I believe, are Native Americans. Conversely, in Europe the vast majority of the population are native Europeans, sharing at least two and a half thousand years of history and culture (starting with the Greeks), as well as millennia of European prehistory. European Jews, I hasten to add, are an inherent, richly contributing and long-suffering part of that history and culture.

 

What is national identity without its history? Yet the history of "multi-ethnic", "multi-racial" and "multi-cultural" Britain goes back just a few decades. You cannot expect ethnic minorities to identify with a history that is clearly not their own. Neither is it reasonable to expect native Britons (or Europeans) to play down their own long and illustrious history (histories) for the sake of racial harmony and not wanting to offend (or exclude!) those of non-European origin.

 

The Left, it seems to me, have made an ideology of multiracial/multicultural society, which - in collusion with an economy that ruthlessly exploits both natural and "human" resources - it has managed to force on the British people - aided by the deep and persisting shock of the Nazi's criminal and insane misuse of national identity and the concept of race, and the slur of "racism" against anyone who objected (reminiscent of Stalin's disastrous programme of collectivisation). I'm sure that it was well meant. But it won't work, and trying to force it to, will (has already started to) cause severe problems and much misery.

 

If we had an economy that was adapted to serve genuine, more enlightened and diverse, human needs, instead of being allowed (in fact, encouraged!) to exploit man's animal nature (fear, greed, competitiveness, our primitive interest in sex, cheap or free lunches, power, social status, etc), very few people would want to come here from their countries and cultures of origin. They are driven here by economic forces rooted in man's animal nature.

 

Far from helping to create a more just and humane society (as the Left naively assumes), in practice, the ideology of multiracialism and multiculturalism, coupled as it is with large-scale immigration, serves the purposes of an inherently unjust, inhumane and ecologically unsustainable economy - which, if we want our children and coming generations to survive, we have to replace anyway, with an alternative economy (and socio-economic order) based on values, attitudes and aspirations rooted in man's more enlightened, human nature.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Roger Hicks

www.spaceship-earth