18 / 2003
Jurij Zalokar

ON MULTICULTURE AND ON SIGNIFICANCE OF HETEROGENEITY OF NATIONS, LANGUAGES AND CULTURES



ABSTRACT
The author deals with the development of multicultural relations in Australia after World War II, which various racisms and the right wing anti multiculture activity opposed. The revival of Australian ethnocentrism obstructed the actual rise of multiculture, which the author noticed already in 1989 when leaving Australia. An increasing gulf was occurring between the principal declarativeness and the actual life in the spirit of multiculture. The author made parallels between the fate of black coloured population in the U.S.A. and the European integrational processes. On the one side, there is the rhetoric, and actual relations on the other side that are far from the principles of multiculturalism. He is pointing out the harmfulness of national and language discrimination, which leads to destruction of a nation or a national community, and consequently to dilapidation of morals and the system of values, and to self-destructive dispositions. The author considers preserving of nationality, culture and language the most important social tasks, in the fields of emigration and immigration as well. Preserving language and ethnic identity definitely is not some maintaining of obsolete social circumstances as some anthropological and sociological schools want to present; such preserving bases on the fact that every human carries in oneself genetic elements of one’s development.


Jurij Zalokar is doctor and psychiatrist.