I’m delighted to be able to feature this guest post from Joshua Winston who has interviewed Tom Dupre of the British chapter of the Generation Identity movement. This is an interesting and quite well balanced article by Mr Winston and will provide much needed background information on Generation Identity in the UK and on the beliefs of the wider Identitarian movement. It is certainly a much more balanced article than one would get on GI from either the BBC or from the various Leftist or Islamic grievance mongers.
Generation Identity’s Tom Dupre – Islam and the West. By Joshua Winston
Tom Dupre has recently lost his job as a banker because of his activism, and he has been physically assaulted by antifa for his politics and opinion. He is the co-leader of the UK’s Generation Identity movement, and I had the chance to meet up with him in London for a chat.
Tom Dupre of Generation Identity UK (pic by Joshua Winston)
JW – What is the biggest misconception about Generation Identity or yourself?
TD – That we’re a far-right extremist group, or the new EDL or Britain First. We’re not. We engage in meta-politics, which means that we force media coverage on issues that they are currently ignoring. We do this by draping massive banners off of bridges or buildings, for example. Or by turning up at events with flags and leaflets, and we do all of this in a very non-combative way. We’re all about engaging in dialogue and debate, things that the left are incapable of doing. We’re not antifa and we don’t riot, nor do we try to impose our viewpoint on others. We’re simply looking for a seat at the table.
JW – You front an ethno-cultural movement here in the UK. Regrettably, people conflate ethnicity with race when at no point does a person’s skin tone enter the equation. Muslims who are born in the UK today are labeling themselves with the ethno-cultural identity of their parents. We have people who call themselves Pakistani Brits, or Pakistani Scots, and this is giving rise to new kinds of ethno-cultural groups. What is an ethno culture?
TD – Ethno-cultures cross over and stretch back generations and have nothing to do with race, Instead, it considers a group’s history, core values, cultural habits and practices which people agree on and adhere to, as well as sharing a desire to preserve and uphold a group’s traditions and pass them on to future generations. Islam provides a very strong ethno-culture that people want to connect to, and it offers an identity that can’t be recognized in a person’s physiognomy or skin tone, so it’s perplexing that critics of Islamic scripture are labeled as racists. Muslims have the supranational concept of the ummah (a worldwide brotherhood that transcends geographical boundaries and nation states), and this is why it’s typical for Muslims to identify as being Muslim first, with their nationality coming in behind that. A practicing Muslim’s allegiance and identity is centred around Islam. This is different to a Catholic’s relationship to himself, for instance, where adherents would recognize that they share the same religion but not the same ethnicity as other Catholics. Catholics would be Greek or English first, and their religious identity would be a thing apart from their national identity while remaining a component part of their ethnic identity.
JW – Leftists run with the lie that we, the indigenous Brit, created Muslim ghettos by dumping a load of people in deprived areas, but the opposite is true. Muslims have spent decades creating enclaves where they can live among their own tribe or ethnic group. This, to my mind, is proof that ethno-culturalism is a perfectly natural thing, and it also proves that multi-culturalism is not the way forward. The more differences you have between people simply gives rise to more conflict. Do you agree?
TS -You can see the failure of multi-culturalism by the building of these enclaves. People choose to live by themselves, and this becomes a problem the higher the numbers get. It gives rise to such things as block voting. If enough people vote for sharia then you’ll have to give it to them, and the rest of us will have to live under it. Our democracy was unprepared for a multi-cultural society because voting blocks undermine the whole thing. It’s subversive. Splintered identities is not a sign of a healthy culture. Meta ethno cultures, where people identify as being ethnic Pakistani or ethnic Arab, etc., leads to a loss of ethnicity. When it comes to integration, different groups have different reasons for doing that. No one has a problem with Chinatown, for example. It’s a fun place to visit with no ideological incentive behind it. It’s a business venture, and it’s a welcoming place to visit to partake of food and alcohol. I used to live in Tower Hamlets and I’d see the pubs close down in areas that are heavily populated with Muslims as more and more mosques got opened.
JW – Are demographics important from an ethno cultural standpoint?
TD – Yes. With Islam, you absolutely do need to look at the demographics. Muslims are having two to three times more children than other ethnic groups. The family life is the opposite of what a traditional UK family’s is. Look at the latest PEW reports which state that the Muslim population of the UK and Europe will triple by the year 2050. That is within my lifetime. Obviously, this will have an irreversible impact on the English way of life. Parts of Tower Hamlets, on a street level, already look like a country very different to England. These areas more closely resemble parts of Bangladesh or Pakistan. Some delivery drivers won’t enter Shadwell, and other areas are definitely no-go zones at certain times, especially at night and depending on what type of person wants to enter them. There’s a cultural deadening that happens. When you get a big enough community that has a strong loyalty to their ethnicity, and sufficient numbers to make parallel societies, you’re in for trouble.
JW – As a culture, what does Islam have to offer Europe or the UK? What makes our culture superior? I’m tired of being told that England has no culture, and I’m tired of white culture being presented as something that is synonymous with blandness by the entertainment industry.
TD – Britain has a high culture, a popular culture, and the richest literary tradition of any country in the world. Contrast that with Islamic culture. The history of Islam is quite a sad one; it’s anti-modernity, the go-to thing if you hate America and democracy, and this is why the hard-left flirt with it. The idea that you can share a land or a culture with people who don’t share your core values is crazy.
JW – Muslims and people of colour are being used by the left as a political weapon to beat people over the head with. Regrettably, people are buying into and taking advantage of this nonsensical notion that institutional racism is a major problem in the UK, and that such a thing even exists. I call it whining your way to the top. Studies show that it is now working-class white boys who are the neglected group in today’s UK, thanks to all of these frenzied attempts at inclusion and equality of outcome.
TD – It’s almost like a religious frenzy in today’s politically correct UK, where we are ignoring the successes of other countries and choosing instead to double down on inclusion and make more laws against sexual harassment, while letting rapists walk free because of cultural differences. The BBC have training programs that exclude white people. This is racism. If you tried to set up a charity for white working class boys, this would be racist and someone would find a way to shut you down. By the end of the next century we will see China becoming far more powerful than America, and the reason is because we don’t have a democratic outlook for our future. There’s no incentive to challenge the current politically correct situation.
JW – I keep hearing talk of an upcoming civil war, but I don’t think this will happen. The takeover is happening at too slow and insidious a pace.
TD – There will never be a civil war. Instead, there will be a slow-motion, papered-over cracks failure. We’ll cease to be a functioning democracy and economy, and we’ll stop being a useful country. Look at Singapore or the Far East, Japan or Taiwan as examples. Their infrastructure and technology are ten years ahead of ours because they employ people based on their skill-set and merit only, and they are starting to eat us alive. When we get into this narrow way of thinking, such as it’s Islam vs the West or Islam vs the rest of the world, there’s a tendency to ignore what’s going on in other parts of the world. China is investing billions in AI (artificial intelligence) systems. Putin has stated that whoever masters this will control the world. In Europe, the EU is busy asking how we can make this intelligence work for humans and how can we remove any biases. We will be economically colonized by countries who aren’t politically correct. China has opened re-education camps where Muslims are forced to eat bacon. In some regions, Muslims aren’t allowed to board buses if they are wearing beards or headscarves. China is doing this because they have a zero tolerance approach to religious fanaticism, and they won’t tolerate divided societies. I don’t agree with it, and this is an example of state intervention taken too far, but the difference in approach between China and the UK could not be starker. It won’t be that we will be overcome by Islam, of course there will be more adherents and that will present its own challenges, but we’ll be crippled economically while needing to live alongside people who detest us. Human rights is a valid idea but it is taken to ridiculous extremes by our country.
JW – Any last thoughts on this multi-cultural experiment we’re currently having to contend with?
TD – A multi-cultural society is not going to happen. In that scenario, everything will be homogenized and everything destroyed. The very concept goes against human nature. The government is attempting to sell us a dream that’s not going to work. Other people will start voting in blocks, both black and white, and you’ll see racial politics begin to appear and that will undermine democracy and the multi-cultural myth.
JW – And antifa?
TD – They’re funny, running around trying to beat up working-class people and impose their upper middle-class politics and moral standards onto them in an attempt to dictate how people can act. I don’t want antifa to go away because they will continue to radicalize more people against them. When they marched from Speakers’ Corner down Oxford street setting off flares, I think every single person who was walking past them thought to themselves whatever they are, I’m the opposite.
