This Steve Sailer piece on the looming amnesty of 30 million invaders touches on the heart of the amnesty push. Western elites have largely abandoned the notion of citizenship. That’s because they see pride in national heritage as the same as Nazi xenophobia. Seventy years after the end of World War II and the West remains haunted by old Adolph. Perhaps is a matter of projection or fear of their own tendencies.
Another explanation is it stems from self-loathing. These people hate themselves, they hate the society that produced them and they hate the antecedents that make society possible. They busy themselves trying to scrub away anything that looks like nationalism, in the same way someone tries to wash away a stain. Of course, This means your moral standing is then defined by how far one is removed from a national culture.
That’s why dullards like our president insist on pronouncing foreign words with a foreign accent. They think it makes them sound worldly. Obama struggles with English, yet we’re supposed to take pronunciation lessons from him. It really is amazing that a man with so many opportunities to master another language at a young age never learned a word. It’s almost impossible for children raised in other lands to not pick up some of the language.
Anyway, I think it is something else. Americans are always late to the party. For instance, church attendance is still common in America. In Europe, the churches have been turned into museums or turned into mosques as no one bothers to attend. American church attendance is declining here in the liberal strongholds and they regularly make war on the religious. But, we are a few generations from reaching European levels of religiosity.
The same seems to be true of post-nationalism, but we are working hard to catch up to our kinsmen across the sea. The Republican Party still does the flag waving stuff, but the Democrats pretty much hate America. They always have hated Americans, but now they hate the very idea of America. It’s why Obama ran on fundamental transformation. In his mind, America was always a rotten idea, so it needs to be eliminated.
Europe has had a different experience. The reformation and the collapse of Catholicism as the unifying force in Europe resulted in a series of wars, collectively known as The Thirty Years War. The war left much of central Europe in ruins. Parts of Germany were reduced to cannibalism. Noble families were destroyed and vast wealth was squandered, in an effort to either restore the Church or find some suitable replacement to unify Europe.
The fact that the world was set on fire by a lunatic, who ate his own poo, had to resonate with the rulers. What replaced universal Christianity as the organizing ethos in Europe was nationalism. It was given a good Christian coat of paint, thus allowing the hoi polloi to believe they were God’s favorites and their rulers were God’s elect. By the 18th century, The Church was a side show and nationalism was the faith of Europe.
The result was the The Peace of Westphalia that largely ended the wars of religion, but it set the stage for endless territorial wars and wars over monarchical succession. In the 18th century alone there were over 40 wars on the Continent. Then the 19th century brought the Napoleonic Wars, followed by endless wars of rebellion, annexation and consolidation, as the borders of Europe were reshaped. Endless war was the default.
Fast forward to the 20th century and we see the ultimate clash of religions. Within a 30 period, the powers of Europe had destroyed one another, slaughtering tens of millions of people and plundering the West. Like The Thirty Years War, it was a matter of belief that set brother against brother in a near suicidal conflict. Fascism, Nazism, liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism were the driving forces of the world’s first ideological war.
The lesson European elites drew from the bloodbath was that nationalism was no way to run a society. They set about erasing it from their ranks. The slow development of a pan-European super state, the end of trade barriers, a single currency and free movement of people are all about erasing national identity. They are trying to create the unified Europe of Christendom, without the religion, in order to maintain peace on the Continent.
American elites have slowly absorbed these ideas. The trouble is, they don’t fully understand the point of post-nationalism, so their version has become anti-nationalism, which means anti-Americanism. The result is a race to overthrow everything that defines a nation, like language customs, borders. The selling off of the manufacturing base, for example, means they get to buy and use products lacking the words “Made in America.”
Military policy has been warped by this, putting the health and welfare of foreigners ahead of our servicemen. Of course, wholesale immigration is aimed at diluting the population. All of those pesky natives and their demands on government will be replaced with third world peasants happy for the hand outs. More important, being an American citizen will lose its value. The elites can be citizens of the world and the rest of us will just be the peasants.
