The Fallacy of Total Tolerance
Total tolerance is the Achilles’ heel of the West and at the heart of a brewing cultural war that is about to explode.
A commentary on “Riot in Leeds as police car overturned, bus torched and fires in Harehills” (published in The Independent on July 18, 2024)
Leeds, England. On July 18, 2024, the people of Harehills saw parts of their neighborhood go up in flames as violent rioters overturned a police car and set a double-decker bus on fire. Crowds filled the streets, attacking a completely overwhelmed police force, smashing windows of police cars, throwing around objects and vandalizing the neighborhood. According to different sources online, the riots erupted after Leeds Social Services had tried to take away five children from their Roma family. The perpetrators were, not only but overwhelmingly, people of certain immigrant background, as can be clearly identified in the video footage.
On X.com, one account posted a video of the riots asking “What happened to England?”, to which one user answered succinctly: “Too much tolerance!” Indeed, the word “tolerance” is thrown around quite a lot these days. It has become part and parcel of an all-encompassing Western zeitgeist that constantly tells people to celebrate multiculturalism and open all borders, while entertaining a naively romanticized idea of beautiful compatibility between vastly different cultures, which simply doesn’t exist.
The rioting in Leeds is only one of countless examples of how decades of mostly uncontrolled immigration have been changing the cultural fabric of the West and how the accelerated mass migration of recent years has reinforced this process. In 2023 alone, an estimated 1.26 million people immigrated to the UK, of which a whopping 82% were nationals of non-EU countries.1 In Germany, immigration numbers hit an all-time high in 2022 – not least due to the Ukraine War – of 1.46 million foreign people coming to the country, which led to a massive 1.3 per cent growth of Germany’s overall population in only one year2 and cost German tax payers no less than €28.4 billion.3 Apart from Ukraine, most immigrants came from Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey. Meanwhile in France, nearly two thirds of the 6.6 million immigrants living there are from Africa and Turkey4 and every tenth person declares themselves to be Muslim.5
While these numbers are staggering, they are only the tip of the iceberg. The data on illegal immigration – now rebranded as “irregular migration” by the European Union, mind you – is hard to obtain, but the official Frontex numbers according to which there were 330,000 “irregular border crossings” into the EU in 20226 seem ridiculously low. In Spain, for instance, authorities registered an influx of nearly 20,000 illegal immigrants between January and April 2024 alone. Popular entry points such as the Spanish Canary Islands and the Italian island of Lampedusa are flooded with illegal aliens arriving from Africa on ships.
Whether it be the locals on Lampedusa or in Leeds, all across Europe (and the United States for that matter) people have been confronted with droves of foreign people coming to their home in unprecedented numbers. Meanwhile, governments and NGO-funded social activists tell us to be tolerant, to be accepting and to be compassionate. Though the political elite certainly doesn’t operate out of pure benevolence (and much less for their own citizens), the underlying notion of giving assistance to those in need is, in theory, noble and true. In reality, however, the West’s charity is shamelessly exploited by placing migrant boats with babies off Europe’s shores, thus extorting help and entry into the continent.
The unsustainability of open borders and poverty migration is blatantly obvious and yet anyone who dares say so is immediately branded as a racist fascist. Of course, demanding tolerance of the “far-right” plebs who are on the best way to becoming a minority in their own hometown is easy to do for the political elite comfortably residing in their ivory towers. As I have outlined before, the Left’s willful ignorance of the migration problem is predicated on a set of luxury beliefs about multiculturalism that is simply naïve. Not all cultures are compatible. Not every culture values tolerance in the same way that Western cultures do. And where a tolerant culture faces an intolerant one, you might as well guess which one of those two cultures will prevail. To cite the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper here: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”
Watching the video of the riots in Leeds, if you didn’t have any information about the location and didn’t see the red-brick houses typical of Northern England in the background, you wouldn’t think this is England. Neither would you think, at first glance, that the newly elected councillor of Harehills is English. After being elected to Leeds City Council in May of 2024, Mothin Ali loudly proclaimed “Allahu Akbar” and dedicated his win to the people of Gaza, flying the Palestinian flag and proclaiming “shame on this country [i.e. England], shame on the Western governments.” How people can look at this and talk about successful integration is beyond me. Granted, on the night of the Harehills riots, Mr. Ali did try to stop looters from causing more violence in his neighborhood. But it didn’t take him long to declare that the British government was to blame for this outburst of vandalism and destruction, and not, well, the actual mob who was vandalizing and destroying the place before his eyes: “Our community has been let down for so long, whether it’s by the local government, the national government […] This sort of thing was just bubbling under the surface,” he said.
Something is indeed bubbling under the surface. Look at the streets of Europe: the dogma of diversity has backfired. Leeds is not an exception; it has become the rule. I’m hardly a believer in the British Conservative Party, but Tory MP Suella Braverman did make an excellent point on the matter in a speech she gave in September 2023, arguing: “Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades. Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society. And, in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society.”7
Councillor Ali’s electoral win is a case in point that these parallel societies have grown to be incredibly powerful, so powerful that the immigrant Muslim population has become big enough to vote for a man whose first impulse is to shout “Allahu Akbar” and wave a foreign flag after winning an English City Council election. Never mind that Mr. Ali has been living in Harehills for over 20 years and, as far as information on the internet serves, was actually born and raised in England. As Ms. Braverman says, he is in the society but not of the society. You will probably never see this man raise the English flag.
Those who say that demanding effort from immigrants to integrate is somehow racist or fascist are clearly oblivious to the rapid and profound changes that Western societies have been undergoing in the last two decades. And they are equally oblivious to the fact that no culture is as tolerant as the cultures of the West which is the cradle of Democracy, the home of the Enlightenment and the birthplace of Humanism. Total tolerance, as paradoxical as it may sound, is actually the very Achilles’ heel of the West and at the heart of the brewing cultural war that is about to explode. This wording might sound overdramatic, but just look at the status of women’s rights in many of the Muslim and African countries that immigrants hail from, and you get an idea of their cultural mindset. It is worth reading what women like Darya Safai, a Belgian MP of Iranian origin who fled her native country in 1999, or Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali have to say on the matter.
It has become clear that the tolerance and compassion of Europeans has come to an end – as it eventually must. Just as your own home only has a certain capacity to house people, so does a country only have a certain capacity to absorb incoming immigrants. Just as you would expect a new roommate to adapt to your terms and house rules, so does a country have the right to expect cultural adaptability and adherence to the rule of law. But the house is full and too many don’t respect the rules. So if people protest on the streets of Britain and Europe against mass immigration, it isn’t because they are all fascists and racists and horrible hatemongers.8 It is a sign of pure despair, of wanting to preserve their own cultural values in the face of what can only be called an onslaught of foreign masses entering Europe, most of whom come with a set of values that are incompatible with the values of Western democracy. The case of Leeds exemplifies this lack of cultural compatibility: Even after decades of living in the country, even after one or two generations have passed, certain immigrant groups refuse to be of the society.
To conclude, I feel obliged to give the obvious disclaimer that seems to be necessary whenever the touchy topic of immigration comes up, even though I’m reluctant to indulge the ridiculous idea that criticizing immigration should have anything to do with racism, discrimination or bigotry: I am not against immigration per se. My own mother immigrated from the Philippines to Germany in the 1980s when this was still quite unusual. I myself have emigrated to another country. Many family members and friends have immigrated from or emigrated to a different country. And integration can absolutely work out, provided that there is a willingness to adapt to the new culture, an effort to contribute to the host country and a capacity for some gratitude and curiosity towards your new home. And yes, the responsibility to do so lies in the hands of the immigrant more than it lies in the hands of the host country. Just like when you’re invited to somebody’s home, you are expected to be civil and respectful towards your host who has opened the door for you.
However, we cannot open the door for everybody and we cannot leave it open indefinitely. If we do that, it will completely overwhelm the already strained health and welfare system, unfairly strip national citizens who have worked and paid for this system of the benefits they deserve, leave actual asylum seekers who do need shelter from war and persecution out on the street, and enable random foreigners (and potential criminals) to come into the country. This is utterly unsustainable, extremely perilous and will, eventually, lead to the disappearance of European cultural values and democracy. Multiculturalism has turned out to be an airy idea, a social construct based on the erroneous assumption that all cultures are they same and value the same, but this, I’m afraid, is wishful thinking.
Karl Popper already knew that “if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. [...] We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” Make sure to know exactly who the tolerant and the intolerant are.
About the author: Born 1987, with roots in Germany and the Philippines, living in Spain. Constantly curious and eager to learn new things. Freedom > safety. Your own opinion > groupthink. Coffee > tea. Currently reading: “Mania” by Lionel Shriver.
Sturge, Georgina. “Migration Statistics.” Parliament.uk, 31 May 2023, www.researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06077/SN06077.pdf
Restelica, Bleona. “Immigration to Germany Hit an All-Time High in 2022, Mainly due to Refugees from Ukraine.” SchengenNews, 29 June 2023, www.schengen.news/immigration-to-germany-hit-an-all-time-high-in-2022-mainly-due-to-refugees-from-ukraine/.
“Kosten Des Bundes Für Flüchtlinge Und Asyl Bis 2027.” Statista, www.de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/665598/umfrage/kosten-des-bundes-in-deutschland-durch-die-fluechtlingskrise/.
“Immigrants by Country of Birth.” Ined - Institut National d’Études Démographiques, www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/data/france/immigrants-foreigners/countries-birth-immigrants/
“Religious Diversity in France: Intergenerational Transmissions and Practices by Origins − Immigrants and Descendants of Immigrants.” Insee.fr, 2023, www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/7342918?sommaire=7344042
“EU’s External Borders in 2022: Number of Irregular Border Crossings Highest since 2016.” Frontex, 13 Jan. 2023, www.frontex.europa.eu/media-centre/news/news-release/eu-s-external-borders-in-2022-number-of-irregular-border-crossings-highest-since-2016-YsAZ29
Ms. Braverman, herself a descendant of Kenyan and Mauritian immigrants, was of course labeled anti-immigrant and racist by most left-wing media outlets after said speech.
Will there be some fascists among them? Certainly, just as there are extremists on every side of the political spectrum. Should we condone them? Of course not.