Reading Maggie’s Farm I see a link to a religious site’s article on marriage. My first thought was that it still amazes me how fanatics see only that which confirms their fanaticism. I have a lunatic acquaintance who will be out in the streets waving around the latest global warming report. He will not bother to notice that it is 30 degrees below normal or that most of the country is setting records for cold. That’s just weather. The Reason crowd does the same thing with weed and buggery.

My second thought was just how effective mass movements are at winning culture fights. The singular focus on ridding the nation of the white middle class has resulted in some very clever tactics. Homosexual marriage is a good example. By redefining marriage to something like a casual roommate agreement, marriage ceases to exist. Normal marriage is one of the foundation stones of an independent middle class. Get rid of it and you further weaken opposition to the Cult of Modern Liberalism’s jihad on the American middle.

When something means everything, it means nothing.

This post at Sailer’s shop is another example, but from another angle. The point of mass immigration is to get rid of citizenship. Citizenship is the foundation stone of nationalism. We take nationalism for granted, but it is relatively new in human affairs. Most historians place the birth of nationalism with the Hundred Years War. At the start, armies composed of soldiers from all over fought one another in what we now call France. By the end, the armies were ethnically pure, English on one side and French on the other. Both sides fought for God and country, not loot.

The Europeans intellectuals, particularly Jews, blame nationalism for World War II. That’s the main lesson European Jews took from the Holocaust. It’s why American Jews have a lukewarm relationship with Israel. To American and European Jews, Zionism looks uncomfortably like the sort of blood and soil nationalism that gave the world Hitler and National Socialism.

The European Union is a direct response to nationalism. The reason the continental intellectual elite seem berserk about obliterating national borders is because they are berserk about obliterating national borders. It is the sole objective of their efforts. Everything else plays a supporting role to the main project. If the Greeks have to live in squalor or Italians lose the right to vote for their leaders, so be it. The elimination of nationalism and everything that comes with it is all that matters.

As is always the case, American intellectuals look over the sea and try to ape what’s going on in Europe. That means we get a defective form of the whatever trends are popular there. In America, where nationalism has always been mild and directed toward bland ends, the intellectual class is feverishly working to make US citizenship worthless. By flinging open the borders and bestowing special privileges on non-citizens, being an American suddenly becomes a sucker’s play.

Consider what the Emperor has decreed the other day. Foreigners who break American laws get treated different from Americans who break American law. An American who lies on a government form faces jail time. Foreigners now get to lie on those forms without consequence. As Michelle Malkin points out, this is not exactly new. Special rights for foreigners have been going on for decades. Why would anyone want to be an American when that means abiding by a whole bunch of laws?

This is not just the immigration rackets. At the local level, illegal aliens get to drive drunk, assault citizens and commit theft through identity fraud. The states cannot deport these people and the Feds refuse to deport them. So why arrest them? If you are a local cop why would you invite all of these troubles into your life? You’re better off just letting the guy walk and never reporting it.

What’s going on here is what we see from the Cult and marriage. By scrambling the definition, they are rendering the concept of citizenship meaningless. Once something loses its meaning it ceases to exist. In a world without nations there’s no longer a need for national government. You still have men with guns enforcing the rules for the rulers, but they no longer have any loyalty to the people at whom they are pointing those guns. Like the soldiers in the early years of the Hundred Years War, their loyalty is to themselves and the plunder to be gained by membership in their war band.

For the rest of us, you just have to hope you never come to the attention of whatever warlord is running your area.