Douglas Murray in The Strange Death Of Europe argues that ‘Europe is committing suicide’ as a result of enemies within and without.  The first involves Europe having ‘lost faith in its beliefs, traditions and legitimacy’ as the cultural-Left’s political correctness movement sees nothing beneficial or worthwhile about the history, institutions and values on which Western civilisation is based. The second involves Islamic fundamentalism associated with the influx of millions of Muslim refugees as a result of war and dislocation in the Middle East and northern Africa. Along with importing customs and beliefs antithetical to Western culture, the death and chaos caused by Islamic terrorists is common place.

While not as extreme, the reality is that Australia is also facing an existential threat involving a virulent and powerful political correctness movement and, similar to Europe, the adverse impact of immigration and Islamic terrorism.

While examples like Qantas asking its flight attendants to stop using ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, Sydney University’s debating club enforcing gender diversity and Israel Folau being attacked as homophobic for criticising gays are recent examples, the political correctness movement has been active for years. The late 60s and early 70s was not only the time of Vietnam moratoriums, flower power, Woodstock and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch; it was also a time when the cultural-Left began its long march through the institutions.

Especially influential, as argued by the conservative British politician Michael Gove in Celsius 7/7, was the German based Frankfurt School where academics argued the Left could only overthrow capitalism by engaging in the culture wars. Gove writes ‘In place of anger at traditional capitalism, scorn was directed at the reigning value systems of the West’ and as a result ‘politics changed from an argument about economic organisation to a series of assertions of identity’. Since the instigation of the culture wars, institutions fundamental to the survival, peace and prosperity of Western nations like Australia, including universities, schools, the media and the church and family, have been infiltrated and undermined. Surveys in England and the USA demonstrate that the majority of those in the media and education are left-leaning and hostile towards conservatives and the grand narrative associated with the rise of Western civilisation. On the ABC, conservative commentators are rare as supposedly impartial and balanced current affairs shows including Q&A, RN’s Breakfast and Insiders showcase a never-ending parade of cultural-left acolytes including Paul Barry, Virginia Trioli, Jon Faine, Fran Kelly and Phillip Adams.

Week after week such commentators critique mainstream values and act as apologists for a litany of cultural-left causes involving: identity politics, victimhood, virtue signalling, global warming, environmental destruction and the foolishness of the ‘deplorables’ in electing a supposedly incompetent President.

As argued by Australia’s preeminent historian, Geoffrey Blainey, instead of acknowledging the achievements of European settlement, universities and schools indoctrinate students with a black armband view arguing that Australia was invaded and that Aborigines suffered genocide. At the University of Sydney academics argue that a liberal-humanist view of education in subjects like history, literature, art and music enforce ‘whiteness’ – defined as privileging a Eurocentric, binary and patriarchal view that inculcates ‘racism, sexism, classism, historical injustice and prejudice based on religion’. Even science is not immune from the charge of ‘whiteness’ with two American academics arguing Western science based on rationality and empiricism imposes ‘a hegemonic racial dominance that… is almost invisible’.

Universities such as Flinders, Sydney and UNSW now have Diversity Toolkits that argue Australia was ‘invaded’, Captain Cook didn’t ‘discover’ Australia and it’s wrong to describe pre-European indigenous cultures as ‘primitive’.

Identity politics ensures so-called minority groups and individuals are privileged in what is seen as a hostile white, binary, sexist and racist environment. In schools, the Marxist inspired Safe Schools gender and sexuality program indoctrinates primary and secondary school students with the mistaken belief that gender is fluid and that they have the power to decide what they want to be. And the alternatives, in the words of La Trobe University’s Roz Ward, are limitless on the basis that ‘Marxism offers both the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinary new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today’.

At the same time the cultural-left and the political correctness movement are destroying pride in Western civilisation, much of the UK, Europe and to a lesser extent Australia are suffering from multiculturalism’s unwillingness to accept that aspects of the Islamic religion are hostile to our way of life.

As argued by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Heretic, Islam is not a religion of peace as proven by the call to carry out a fatwa against unbelievers, to establish an Islamic caliphate ruled by sharia law and to impose dhimmi on those who have been subjugated. Those advocating multiculturalism argue that celebrating diversity and difference is more important than acknowledging and being committed to the values, beliefs, institutions and way of life that makes Australia and other Western cultures unique. If all cultural beliefs and practices are equally valid then on what basis does one condemn female genital mutilation and theocracy as law?

Whether London, Paris, Belgium’s Molenbeek or Western Sydney and Melbourne’s Tarneit, the reality is that immigrants from northern Africa and the Middle East represent a clear and present danger as they have failed to assimilate.

Whether youth gangs trashing property and invading homes or ghettos becoming breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists executing attacks, the evidence is clear that multicultural advocates are complicit in undermining social cohesion and national identity. At the very time Western civilisation is being attacked by Islamic fundamentalism, countries like Australia are being weakened and undermined by the cultural-Left. The irony, like Lenin’s useful idiots, is that those committed to political correctness are destroying the very values, institutions and way of life that guarantee their freedom.