"The Problem Of Ethnic Diversity Is Insoluble" — Malaysia’s Tunku Abdul Rahman In The 1960s

08/14/2017

At VDARE.com, we repeatedly remind readers (e.g. here) of some potent wisdom from Lee Kuan Yew, the "founding father of modern Singapore":

In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.
[SPIEGEL Interview with Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew: "It’s Stupid To Be Afraid", August 8, 2005]

Interestingly, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the founding father of Malaysia (of which Singapore was a state, briefly, during the 1960s), had apparently come to a similar conclusion decades earlier. Discussing the White Australia Policy in the now-defunct National Observer (Australia) in 2005, R.J. Stove wrote:

Sometimes the Policy won support even from those non-whites who, by modern criteria of identity politics, should have been most hysterical in condemning it. Sir Garfield Barwick, in extreme old age, recollected a meeting he (as [Australian] Foreign Minister) held with Malaysia’s leader Tunku Abdul Rahman during the mid-1960s: “I remember the Tunku saying to me that he understood Australia maintaining a European population: ‘Why should you have my insoluble problem? The problem of ethnic diversity is insoluble. I have Malays, Indians and Chinese and it is insoluble’.”
[Goodbye To All That: Keith Windshuttle on White Australia, Autumn 2005; link added]

Actually, hysteria over such tribalism in recent years seems mostly limited to virtue-signaling whites. In contrast to them, for example, Obama’s first Attorney General Eric Holder blithely referred to black Americans as "my people." And during 2008’s Democratic presidential primaries, the Washington Post got California’s political colossus Willie Brown (past mayor of San Francisco and past 15-year Speaker of the California State Assembly) on the record as follows:

That black voters have so embraced Obama, even against the legacy of the Clintons, is not surprising to Brown. “I think most white politicians do not understand that the race pride we all have trumps everything else.”
[Obama Wave Stuns Clinton’s Black Supporters, by Kevin Merida, February 19, 2008]

Not to be outdone, prominent Hispanics, too, have been notably frank about their own race consciousness and perceived self-interest. For some you-can-hear-it-now examples of this, check out my 2009 article here, CCIR’s Greatest Hits: The Reconquista Rant Audio Clips.

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