OPINION
Westerners, what the hell is wrong with you? seems to be the question that Indian-Australian author Ramesh Thakur would like to shake into the addled heads of the left-elite. Having witnessed first hand the suffocation of democracy in first India, then Fiji, Thakur is perplexed by the growing disdain for democracy among Western elites. Not to mention the suicidal self-flagellation of elites convinced that their countries are irredeemably racist.
If that is so, Thakur asks, and if India really is a booming, rising power, then why are millions of Indians flooding into the West?
Many explore how to bring over more family members; few are planning to return to the supposedly booming country […]
My commitment to democratic governance, civil liberties and citizens’ rights is thus grounded in ‘lived experience’. Hence the despair at Westerners’ growing loss of self-confidence to defend their values, heritage, institutions and contributions to net human welfare. The fossil fuel-driven industrial revolution and the Enlightenment freed peasants from the land, women from the home and workers from the village to destroy feudalism, emancipate workers, democratise citizenship and liberate creativity. Europeans’ military superiority enabled them to colonise many peoples. The colonial legacy is mixed rather than uniformly evil or virtuous. Every culture and civilisation has stains in its history. Most borders today are the result of the use of force in the past. That said, is there a country that contributed more to the end of slavery than Britain? How many people from developing countries owe gains in life expectancy, education, income, political rights and life opportunities to intellectual and scientific revolutions in Europe?
The US, once the Light on the Hill of the West, is sinking into self-inflicted chaos and despair. Even the very idea that America can be ‘Great Again’ is met with sneers from elites that it never was great in the first place. Meanwhile, the US is fast sinking in global happiness rankings, not even reaching the top 20. This decline is mostly due to the ‘self-focussed and social media-obsessed under-30s’, who wallow in 62nd place in the world.
Reasons for this include the relentless climate catastrophising and attacks on their ‘privileged oppressor’ identity. Holly Valance describes Greta Thunberg as a ‘demonic little gremlin high priestess of climatism’ who is treated ‘as a goddess in the classrooms’ despite contributing to the epidemic of ‘depression and anxiety’ in children. At an appearance in parliament on 20 March, Rebecca Knox, Chair of Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Authority, said she agrees with a report that her force is ‘institutionally racist’. Asked if white people had any unfair advantages in her force, she said ‘No’. ‘Then how can you be institutionally racist?’ ‘Um, sorry, I might have to get back to you’, she stammered. In New Zealand, the progressive embrace of all things Maori is so deeply internalised that in cross-national group discussions, Kiwi colleagues unthinkingly resort to Maori greetings to start and end messages (kia kaha katoa, kia ora koutou, arohanui). They forget this is gross bad manners because it’s rude and discourteous to speak in a foreign language that excludes some in the group from the conversation. Maybe I should respond in Hindi, including the foreign script?
At the same time, the elite, from New Zealand to Britain, fawn over male fetishists in women’s clothing. Even quite correctly pointing out that they are, indeed, men, can lead to criminal prosecution.
Trans-activists are erasing the word woman even from motherhood and sexual assaults […]
New-age feminists attack alleged male privileges but support men who claim to be women under the banal slogan ‘transwomen are women and trans rights are human rights’. The push for more women in boardrooms, meant to redress gender imbalance, is subverted when transwomen are included in the female category in gender-specific lists of CEOs.
In the recent gender gap report on Australian businesses, measured by the median earnings of men and women, gender equity – that is, equality of outcomes – is in practice anti-choice. For most pay differentials today, when paying differently for the same work to men and women with similar qualifications and experience is illegal, are better explained by lifestyle and life balance choices that women make, and very sensibly too.
Spectator Australia
At the same time that Western elites damn the West as racist, sexist, homophobic and so on, they fetishise the repressive ideology of Islam, which elevates all three to the status of the unquestionable Word of Allah.
Meanwhile, the West stamped out slavery across the globe and invented the very concepts of feminism and human rights.
The West really is the best: anyone who doubts that needs only consider the millions of non-Westerners voting with their feet.