David Lean’s great film, The Bridge over the River Kwai, is about the determination of a straitlaced British Army POW Colonel Nicholson to show the Japanese commandant what the British are made of by building the eponymous bridge on time. At the film’s end, he inadvertently disrupts a British commando attempt to blow the bridge up. Finally realising his folly, he cries: “Oh my God. What have I done?”
The film is about 176 minutes long. This is about 174 minutes and 24 seconds longer than a recent interview in Letterkenny with a Nigerian “asylum-seeker” (collapse with laughter) now available on You Tube. However, those ninety-six seconds will tell you far more about our immigration policy than the 176 minutes will tell you about the River Kwai. This splendid young Nigerian, who has a wife and two children at home, declares that he has been given asylum because as a bisexual he was escaping “persecution”. He cheerfully admits that he is not working and that all his living expenses and accommodation are being paid by the government. No, not the Nigerian one: that is far too intelligent to do anything that stupid.
Now: are the architects of our immigration policies, the politicians and the sanctimonious enablers in the media who so enthusiastically embraced the concept of open-ended multiculturalism and now beholding the ruins it has brought us to, now asking, “Oh my God. What have I done?”
Not a chance. One of the incandescent beauties of doctrinaire liberalism is that its votaries never make mistakes. Whenever their crackpot and immigrational schemes end in tears, they blame everybody else: the locals are either intrinsically racist or they are being by manipulated by sinister “far-right” neo-Nazis, probably under the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the USA. (This bizarre allegation surfaced after the Parnell Square riots of 2023, though even in the old Confederacy, the power of the KKK roughly compares with that of the Orange Order in Crossmaglen).
But Irish liberals are not unique: liberalism is universal in its omniscience, arrogance and disdain for the lesser species that are usually if unknowingly drawn into its deranged projects to improve society. Of course, such daring ventures never involve experiments in their own neighbourhoods. Indeed, the presence anywhere of a Direct Provision Centre or hostel (or whatever the fancy euphemism of the hour) for asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, refugees, war-evacuees, et cet, et cet, merely confirms the powerlessness of the locals. There are no hostels for hundreds of unaccompanied Middle Eastern men of military age along Dalkey’s waterfront or the leafy boulevards of Renla, and likewise, no windfarms off Sandycove or Sandymount. I wonder why.
Twenty years ago, FAS, the state-run training agency, blithely announced that the Irish economy would need 30,000 migrants annually. That was an official prediction. That means that our government fully expected that by 2025, 600,000 legal immigrants would be working in Ireland, not including dependents nor illegals, which would probably double the expected numbers. So where were the plans to build the schools, the hospitals, the houses and the shops for this vast increase in migrant population, never mind the natural growth of the indigenous peoples?
There was none, other than to get the liberal media to denounce as “racist” anyone who pointed to the unavoidable problems that immigration on such a scale would present. As a tactic, it worked: as a strategy, it was a moral and existential calamity, for communities that had known little competition for housing were suddenly faced with richer rivals who could outbid the natives. If the latter complained, they too were branded with the r-word and scolded for behaving like the British with the latter’s signs, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.”
Let me say here: I was raised in Irish family in Britain. Not merely did I never see such signs, I never heard of them or a single word of anti-Irish abuse. Not one, not once. Disappointing, I know. But such allegations remain a favourite cliché of Irish liberals talking about the inferior, racist British, with Irish Times columnists routinely proclaiming that such signs were commonplace. This is simply unverifiable folklore, since all public racial prohibitions have been illegal for nearly sixty years. Though I admit, there were some anti-Irish emotions after the IRA blew the living daylights out of Birmingham and Harrods, murdering nearly thirty people, or well over twice the toll of Bloody Sunday. Yet the Brits were angry! How irrational they can sometimes be.
Since then, Irish liberals have imported various fatuous concepts from their partners-in-crime in the US and London, such as “hate-speech” and “hate-crime”. These were rushed into law by politicians who dared not question the intellectual bases of such baseless concepts. The gibberish of French philosophes was usually weaponised in the non-debate that that followed. Anyone opposing this nonsense could be accused of attempting to “autre” other people. But this crime of “othering” other people is a tautological oxymoron, since all verbs in all languages are conjugated according to the concepts of individual self, group-self and the various categories of others: I, thou, he, she, it, we, you, they (she) they (he).
But not being able to make sense of such nonsense was the real point of the exercise, begging this question: what species has ever chosen the path of voluntary self-eradication? It took a vast meteor strike to destroy the reptile world: it took a few bad ideas to nearly wreck the west, including Ireland.
In short, we are in a pickle, with no obvious way out. In Bridge over the River Kwai, the Japanese prison commandant, Colonel Seiko, upbraids Colonel Nicholson. “I hate the British. You are defeated but you have no shame. You are stubborn but you have no pride. You endure but you have no courage.”
Across Europe, liberals have been roundly defeated in their insane and ruinous immigration schemes, which in England have led to the rape of tens of thousands of underage white working-class girls. Instead of expressing shame and remorse, these liberals routinely reach for dog-whistle clichés whenever anyone raises this issue. They remain stubborn in their pursuit of a multiculturalism that is already brain-dead and reeking through the ears. They lack the courage to admit that they were wrong, while still imposing the burden of their errors on hapless working-class communities. So, they have dealt with this historic wrong not by righting it but by rewriting it, recasting England’s past in television dramas that are peopled with black and Indian faces. The logic is simple. Anyone who attempts to limit immigration is denying the ancient (but actually fictitious) “truths” about English society.
Now, I suspect that most Irish people will not accept such fictions being imposed on Irish history. They know that there were no black women in the 1916 rising, no Africans running soup kitchens or Cherokee distributing Indian corn in the Famine, no Zulus in 1798. Ah, but will the Irish people spiritedly defend the racial reality of our ethnos? Or like Colonel Nicholson, will they be defeated yet have no shame, stubborn but have no pride, and endure though they have no courage?
If the spineless liberals of Renla have their way, they probably will.