Dilrook Kannangara

Sri Lanka tends to arrive late at the party; often embracing what the world flushes down the toilet. The latest is multiculturalism which failed and doomed the countries that embraced it. The world is dropping it faster than it adopted it. But poor Sri Lanka embraces this failed concept as refuse comes cheap. Instead, Sri Lanka must learn from the failures of the countries that went head in into multiculturalism and avoid it like the plague today. New laws have been introduced to curtail it. Migration is under strict rules to weed out harms to the domestic and native culture. External arrivals are diversified across the large number of different cultures so that no single external culture can establish itself. Unless multiculturalism is dropped, Sri Lanka will be forced to embrace permanent economic collapse, social collapse, lack of legal and values driven collectivism, violence and other ills.

Once upon a time the world scientific community demonized coconut consumption as high-fat food leading to cardiovascular disease. However, subsequent studies debunked this myth and found it contains many beneficial nutrients with protective properties. A coconut craze swept across the world and continues.

The original anti-coconut movement arrived in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s and lasted a long time. During this time people with some western medical knowledge shunned the healthy food over false, old and outdated western claims. Coconut farms slowly divested, demand fell and people moved to palm oil and other extremely unhealthy oils. Good news about coconuts arrived very late in Sri Lanka and by then the damage was done.

Multiculturalism is the same. It is now considered nothing more valuable than body waste in countries that touched it. None of them want it. They flush it down the toilet and unfortunately Sri Lanka picks it up from there.

Nations that did not embrace multiculturalism survived its ills. These include Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, most Nordic countries, conservative European countries, Arabic countries, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, etc. They value their firm historical and cultural foundations and would not fall for every fad that sweeps the world.

Sri Lanka must shed multiculturalism. A population of different ethnic and cultural values is not by itself multiculturalism. Diversity is a normal part of modern nations. However, giving equal importance to all cultures is the evil of multiculturalism. The dominant and native culture must be given exclusive importance. Others must be recognized and respected for what they are – foreign cultures – mostly originated from far less-developed and poorer South Indian and Pakistani sub-cultures. They have their motherlands across the seas, just not Sri Lanka where a far superior culture has taken hold for over two millennia and it must be protected and promoted exclusively. Claiming others’ cultures as ours is also an injustice to the rightful (overseas) owners of those cultures. They rightly enjoy exclusive importance in their native lands.