"I'm not sure what's going on in Britain. Let me say this, I don't know what's going on in London because London is no longer an English city...I love having different cultures around but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'What's going on?'"
Samuel Huntington, the Harvard scholar, said much the same thing, albeit in a much more erudite way in his book Who Are We?
Take England for example. Much of the philosophical foundation for the American political and legal systems came from England. The English tradition of civility made its way across the Atlantic too, at least as the ideal in social discourse. Likewise, Adam Smith was a Brit and British economic theory was the basis for American capitalism. In contrast, many of the Muslims in England are pushing for Sharia law that dispenses with all of the above in favor of a rigorous 5th century theology-über-alles approach to life. Pretty soon you have an England that John Cleese notices really isn't England.
Lest you think it can't happen here, think again. If anything, it could more easily happen here because America is a shared aspiration rather than an ethnic culture going back centuries. If America can mean anything, there are plenty of people who will be happy to impose their culture's view of things to the exclusion of what has made the United States different all these years. In our lifetime we too can have a John Cleese experience in our own country. Detroit, for example, which is more like Beirut than a Midwestern city. I for one would like to keep Detroit an isolated experience and focus instead on what made us great. There is still time, but the shadows are growing longer.
www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3791303/John-Cleese-London-is-no-longer-English-city.html
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