Striving Against Opposition

Mark Steyn tees up on the self loathing of the British Left

The Telegraph


Britain has been in denial for too long

By Mark Steyn

Steyn starts off by dimissing the Queen's geunflection towards multiculturalism as a rehash of past Canadian speaches and as baselss as ever. Then turns his guns on The Guardian.

For example, last week the Guardian forced itself to consider the awkward fact that many young black males are "homophobic". This would be a disadvantage if one were hoping to make a career in the modern Tory party, but, on the other hand, if one's ambitions incline more to becoming a big-time gangsta rapper, it's a goldmine. Don't blame Jamaican men, though.

After all, who made them homophobic? The "vilification of Jamaican homophobia", says Decca Aitkenhead, is just an attempt to distract from the real culprit: "It's a failure to recognise 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation.

"Slavery laid the foundations of homophobia," writes Miss Aitkenhead. "For us to vilify Jamaicans for an attitude of which we were the architects is shameful. Jamaicans weren't the architects of their ideas about homosexuality; we were."

I should have known. It's our fault: yours, mine, the great white Queen's, for all her shameless attempts to climb aboard the diversity bandwagon.

Steyn rather commically goes on the disprove the Jamaican slave sodomy hypothesis. He points to how tolerant the African motherland is of homosexuality.

If we hadn't enslaved these fellows and taken them to the West Indies to be our playthings under the Caribbean moon, they'd have stayed in Africa and grown up as relaxed live-and-let-live types like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, who's accused Tony Blair of a plan to impose homosexuality throughout the Commonwealth; or Kenya's Daniel arap Moi, who attacked the "gay scourge" sweeping Africa; or Zambia's Frederick Chiluba, who has said gays do not have "a right to be abnormal"; or Namibia's Sam Nujoma, who accused African homosexuals of being closet "Europeans" trying to destroy his country through the spread of "gayism"; or Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, who proposed the arrest of all homosexuals, though he subsequently moderated his position and called for a return to the good old days when "these few individuals were either ignored or speared and killed by their parents".

I really can't help but break up laughing at a return to the 'good old days' of homosexuals beeing spitted by their parents. Its a rather perverse usuage of the term, but then again I supose it was the white man's fault for getting those Zulus all riled up.

As for the notion that even the randiest plantation owner could sodomise so many male slaves that he could inculcate an ingrained homophobia enduring for centuries, that's a bit of a stretch even for advanced Western self-loathers.
....

There are a few other assorted pot shots at the lunancy of blaming the attitudes of a colony that was freed from slavery relatively early on and treated by all accounts fairly decently on their "colonial masters" more than a century later. Steyn ends his polemic rather strongly stating

But "multiculturalism" is really a suicide cult conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that's particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.

This isn't merely a question for the history books, but the issue that underpins all the others facing the country today, not least the European Constitution: at a time when the benefits of the Britannic inheritance are more and more apparent everywhere else, how come Britain has no use for them?

posted by Chris @ 1/11/2005 11:05:00 p.m.