Multiculturalism Always Leads To Authoritarianism

Rioting that began late last week in the suburbs of Paris has now spread across France. This week there have been riots in Marseille, Lyon, Dijon, Lille, Bordeaux, Nantes, Strasbourg, and elsewhere. Every corner of the country, it seems, is beset by a coalition of violent left-wing activists and second- and third-generation immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.

These rioters are not calling for education reform or protesting poor classroom conditions, despite what the corporate press has reported. These are not “school riots” but rather an intifada. The rioters themselves are the footsoldiers of a “Red-Green alliance” between the radical left and pro-Palestinian Islamist activists, whose shared goal is to clear the ground for a “New France” that will replace the actually existing French nation.

This “New France” is largely a Third World horde, imported in successive waves beginning in the 1970s, when France scrapped its immigration regime and adopted a family reunification system similar to the United States’ Hart-Celler Act of 1965. In the ensuing decades, and especially since 2000, France has seen a massive influx of migrants from its former colonial holdings in North Africa and the Middle East. These people have for the most part refused to assimilate, and instead have formed discreet Muslim enclaves, retaining the ethnic and religious identity of their homelands. They are not French in any meaningful sense, and do not wish to be.

The consequences of this failure of assimilation and acculturation are now apparent on the streets of French cities. For more than a week now the unassimilated children and grandchildren of migrants from the Third World have been  attacking police and firefighters (and teachers in some cases), burning schools and public buildings to the ground, and calling for the overthrow of the French Republic. They have done so in many cases while waving Palestinian and Algerian flags, and chanting Antifa and pro-Hamas slogans. 

However, they are not doing this all on their own. French authorities said last week the riots were being organized by proxies of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), or LFI, which is, in addition to being a communist front organization, is also France’s “Great Replacement” party. Indeed, Mélenchon, who is running for president in next year’s national election, has been rather explicit in his desire to erase the French people and replace them with foreigners. On a recent panel, echoing remarks from Britain’s Jacob Rees-Mogg on how the English are a “mongrel people,” he derided the very concept of “native French people,” declaring that a “process of creolization has already taken place” in France, and that those wanting a “static world” are dreaming of something that is gone for good.

No wonder, then, that Mélenchon has publicly supported the unrest, or that LFI politicians have been notably visible during the riots, in some cases appearing at the barricades around schools and urban centers, even as the party has officially denied fomenting violence. Simply put, there is broad crossover between radical-left political activism and pro-Palestinian, Islamist mobilization in France.

Most of this is fairly well known, and follows a pattern we see in other western countries, most notably the United Kingdom, where one in every 30 people is a foreigner who arrived there in the last five years. Mass immigration on this scale doesn’t just destroy a country and a people, it also ushers in forms of authoritarian government that become necessary as a way to manage an unassimilated multiethnic, multicultural population.

This is why we now see the political leadership of these countries making hard turns toward authoritarianism, and especially against free speech, which is the one thing you cannot tolerate if the state is going to enforce multiculturalism and impose a large foreign population on a native one. Indeed, managing tensions between disparate ethnic groups, and each group’s relationship to the state, is a hallmark of imperial rule. It’s how the millet system of the Ottoman Empire operated.

In our day, it means the liberal leaders of France and Britain are openly arguing that their societies must become less free, more controlled, more monitored. Recently French President Emmanuel Macron said the American idea of free speech is “the opposite of free speech,” and that freedom can only exist within a “common framework” created and managed by the state. In his view, freedom is a privilege granted to individuals by the state, which defines the range of acceptable discourse in accordance with “public order.” He compared limits on speech to prohibitions on assault or the destruction of public property — essentially declaring that speech is violence and must be suppressed by the state, if necessary. 

Macron then called for state-funded fact-checkers to decide what is allowed online and what isn’t, and said the EU’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act, should be used “much more, much faster, much more forcefully.”

It’s the same in Britain, where the Labour Party prime minister, Andy Burnham, recently announced the creation of something called the National Centre for Information Defence —essentially a Ministry of Truth straight out of 1984. The pretext for this new censorship regime is of course the supposed safety of the British people, who, according to Burnham, must be protected from Russian disinformation and “far-right narratives.” And of course, this protection will come in the form of limits on free speech, anything that contradicts or calls into question the prevailing worldview or policies of the Labour left.

Of course we already know what that will look like, because an informal version of it is already in place in Britain. Thousands of Britons are arrested and jailed every year for expressing their views online. Police literally knock on doors and haul British citizens away in handcuffs for expressing skepticism about immigration, or dislike of Islam, or complaints about Palestinian flags flying in public. The authorities do this under the cover of laws against harassment and incitement, but in reality it’s nothing more than a thin justification for speech codes or blasphemy laws. 

This is an aspect of mass Third World immigration to the West that tends to get less attention than crime or rioting or the imposition of Islam in the public square. To deal with all these things, to manage the tensions that arise from having unassimilated ethnic and religious communities residing in a nation, requires authoritarian measures that are incompatible with a free society.

When the smoke clears from the riots now underway in France, we will see not just emboldened Third World ethnic enclaves, but an emboldened and increasingly authoritarian state. Multiculturalism and authoritarianism are a package deal that the global leftist leadership of the West is foisting on their native populations. There is only one way to avoid such authoritarianism, and it requires a total rejection of multiculturalism. What that means, in concrete terms, is mass deportations, denaturalization, and remigration. Anything less will not be enough to save these countries, assuming it’s not too late already.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.