Motus Mentis

Among the topics I passed by during our August hiatus was the story about Rotherham, England, in which it was revealed that groups of Muslim men had been using young white girls as sex slaves. This had been going on for many years, over which time there had been at least 1,400 victims, some of them only eleven years old.

The crimes did not go unreported; they were reported early and often. Nothing was done, however, because the officials who might have taken action were afraid of being accused of racism.

There’s been a great deal of commentary about this already, and I’m coming in late. John O’Sullivan posted a good piece, for instance, over at NRO:

The motives of the exploiters, though vile, are not hard to understand. They plainly include both racism and sexism alongside the lust and cruelty enabled by their misogynistic culture. But what explains the silence, the acquiescence, even the cooperation of the authorities? Their motives seem to derive from the rich stew of progressive absurdities that constitute official attitudes in modern Britain. The first is the fear of being suspected of racism. Again and again the police and the social workers shrank from intervening or responding to complaints because to do so would invite the accusation that they were “racist”… To uncover such scandal would be not only racist, it would commit a sin against the ideal of multiculturalism that now actuates much official policy.

…Another element in official attitudes is hostility to the family and a hatred of the notion that families might instill traditional moral values in their children. Such hostility proved very convenient for the criminal gangs, who probably had to overcome a weaker moral resistance on the part of their grooming victims. To be sure, this hostility arises from a very different source than sexism or contempt for the white working class: a sense among progressives in the public sector that intact families undermine equality and that even etiolated Christian beliefs obstruct multiculturalism. If that sounds a trifle paranoid, recall that it was the same Rotherham social-work department that wanted to remove children from foster parents whose support for UKIP indicated an impermissible hostility to multiculturalism. You couldn’t make it up.

There are a lot of essays out there saying more or less the same thing: political correctness has gone too far, we’ve been blinded to reality by the dormitive spell of multiculturalism, by surrendering too much of our liberty and tradition to the utopian fantasies of “progressive” ideologues, and so forth. All of this is true. I have yet, however, to hear anyone (other than the usual lepers and pariahs) say what really needs saying: that mass importation of Islam to the West has been a blunder of incalculable magnitude, and that it should be arrested at at once, and reversed as humanely and expeditiously as possible.

Instead, what we have in Rotherham is perhaps the clearest experimental confirmation yet of Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society, which can be expressed as follows:

Once the equality of all human groups is accepted as a given, any facts that make a minority or foreign group seem worse than the majority native group must be either covered up or blamed on the majority.

The First Law has a corollary:

The more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group behaves, the more evil whites are made to appear for noticing and drawing rational conclusions about that group’s bad behavior.

I miss Lawrence Auster. He saw so many things so clearly, and he saw them long before most of the rest of us did. Go and browse his archives.