A great example. The drive for Quebec's independence from English Canada took place at a time when the province, as part of a larger cultural change, went from deeply practicing Catholic to deeply anti-religious secularist, its "Quiet Revolution". The arrival of oral contraception enabled this newly liberated population to follow the now familiar pattern of plummeting birth rates. And Canada also decided that its new religion was multiculturalism, and strange immigrants from the Third World arrived. Almost 7% of this once wholly white region is now African, Asian and Middle Eastern; French will become a minority language on the island of Montreal in a few years.
But when it came to voting for independence, a desideratum of liberated women, liberated nationalists, liberated secularists, liberated multiculturalists, it failed. For one reason: not enough separatist French Quebeckers to counter the other residents of the province --including all those foreign immigrants-- who wanted to stay in Canada.
The only force in population in Quebec is foreign immigration, yet the province's overall numbers continue to decline, making its position in Canada's parliament less powerful. So part of the cultural package which aimed at the dream of a free Quebec has turned out to mean its very opposite: permanent belonging to Canada, less power within Canada, and for the native French Quebeckers, a smaller share of the demographic of their homeland.
Talk about unintended outcomes.
Mark Steyn, whose 2005 column on Birthrights and Birth Rates inspired this post, puts it with his customary acuity and aplomb:
In the sixties, Quebec separatists made the strategically disastrous decision to reject both the Queen and the Pope, the Crown and the cross - and, because they disdained the latter, they’ll never be rid of the former. Had Quebec couples of the early seventies maintained traditionally Catholic birthrates, Parizeau would now be Monsieur le Président. Instead, his Republic of Quebec recedes a little further with every census.
2 comments:
Mark Steyn: »What seems obvious is that an explicit rejection of one’s patrimoine religieux is hardwired into the Canadian project, even if, as in the case of Quebec, it ultimately destroys your political ambitions.«
I suppose that sums up a project of fail'd will-to-power: religious patrimony of the ancestors is rejected and accordingly political I am bitions come to zilch.
Unless the explicitly rejected Jansenist Catholicism patrimony ("je me souviens" occurs in a poem about "growing [will-to-power] the rule of the English white rose") was replaced by the founding of "multiculturalism" as a serious religious patromony -- in Québec and everywhere in the West. ... But what is the politics intended to result from the 'empty husk' [bohu skoo (school)] of such religion? er
Mark Steyn: »During the 1995 referendum, you may recall, Lucien Bouchard wandered a little off-message during one stump speech and urged Quebec women to have more children because they had one of the lowest birthrates of any “white race” on the planet. This may have been indelicately phrased, but it was, in point of fact, correct.«
Such appeals might still be deem'd hate speech, but they would be much more accurate if they targeted white *men.* There might not be a birth dearth even in the educated class if marry'd or relationship'd women in this class could have all the children they wish'd to have.
Men are much more into the convenience for career and lifestyle of no children.
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