Amerika

So far, just a trickle of news, but it finally spits out the vital phrase:

Support for Norway’s Progress Party rose this month, with one pollster ranking it the country’s biggest political group, as voters backed its anti-immigration stance less than six months before parliamentary elections.

“People are losing their jobs, the economy seems to be going into recession but people are focusing on these issues instead,” said Torkel Brekke, professor of culture studies and oriental languages at the University of Oslo. “It tells you how important issues of identity are to small European countries and how people feel insecure about immigration.”

A survey by Opinion, published by news Web site Hegnar on March 18, gave the Progress Party a backing of 30.9 percent after gaining 6.4 percent in March, making it the country’s largest party.

Bloomberg

Let’s catch that on the instant replay:

“It tells you how important issues of identity are to small European countries and how people feel insecure about immigration.”

OK, stop. This is what nationalists have always said — here’s their argument, briefly.

1. Countries need a consensus and goal in order to move ahead. Otherwise, they become facilitative states that are basically open markets.
2. The best way to pass on this consensus is not government, but culture, customs, language, values and heritage. Because genetics encodes abilities and traits, culture shapes genetics/ethnicity and vice-versa.
3. Therefore, one people (ethnicity) should form one nation; this is the nation in contrast to the nation-state, or political grouping based on a social contract formalized by the values of the government.
4. This organic state, formed of the same customs, language, culture, values and heritage, is the best way to resist being assimilated by commerce (rampant Capitalism) or social pressures (Socialist revolution, as in 1789, 1917, etc).
5. Because the ethnostate guarantees a consensus and goal, people do not mind doing selfless altruistic acts that better the state, instead of engaging in competitive altruism to look good while secretly doing things against the interests of the people.
6. Culture unites us on a goal, and therefore lets us delegate that goal to those who have the aptitude to apply it; not every citizen needs to be engaged in a constant internal argument as is the case in democracies.

Nationalists don’t want to just change laws — they want an entirely different type of civilization. We haven’t heard much from them since 1945, since nationalist groups have been the province of mostly violent losers with a few disaffected intellectuals, but now nationalism seems to be coming back.

Because it was marginalized, and because people who take on the world with losing “but correct” causes are idolized by those who did not adapt to the current social order, nationalist movements have been cross-associated with hate groups, with few nationalist movements escaping the epithets, violence, anti-Semitism and similar brouhaha within their ranks.

However, that is changing, as nationalist movements make alliances with Zionists and vice-versa and nationalist movements grow across Europe as they drop violent orthodoxy for a coherent vision of an organic society that is both cultured, green — and monocultural.

Of course, nationalists are quick to point out that globalism, and its counterpart ethnic and cultural diversity or multiculturalism, creates a de facto monoculture in which each nation on earth, stripped of its native culture and people, adopts the same mix of ethnicities with a cultureless lowest common denominator of values, generally those of free markets and televisions.

What of “monoculture,” then? Extending the crop-related definition, there are analogs everywhere: tract housing; commercial strips; people at ballgames; 12-lane highways; rows and rows of pointless merchandise. In nearly all of these cases an observer can point to all the diversity: “there are four types of house in that subdivision,” or, “but the product choices are infinite,” or perhaps can describe the barely detectable minutiae that make every person special in the crowd.

We are lead to believe that all this represents a marked improvement in history and in our lives. An astute observer might wonder about systemic consequences, the validity of the claims themselves, and the seemingly intertwined paths of the things we might describe with such a word. For instance: those homes sure do shelter a lot of folks, but they are an ugly, destructive blight on what may have been a vibrant natural or human landscape; or: the commercial strip down the road really does sell a lot of neat gizmos, but the sore eyes from having it there, the infrastucture needed to build, maintain, and access it, and the fate of most of the eventually discarded, unnecessary products it sells really make it seem like an act god-awful planning and not worth all the energy.

“Monoculture,” like so many other abstract, modern catchphrases (“freedom,” “equality”) is truth merely in principle. De facto “monoculture” is, of course, what we are subject to every day, everywhere, visually far from those endless acres of soybeans but in reality no different, and no less destructive. Inverting the meaning of the word is to ignore the rootedness of component parts and to deny the interconnectedness of the same – something undoubtedly not understood to the woman only applying the term as cleverly as she could to what she, as an author, does get, which is the fragile grammar of the modern condition.

CORRUPT

This generalized realization is causing far-right, New Right, third front, National Anarchist, conservative, neo-Nazi, White Nationalist and Nationalist movements to blur the lines between them, creating free nationalists, or small cells without allegiance to a party but with allegiance to one cause that in their view unites all other issues into a single vision of an organic society: nationalism.

What’s bringing nationalists together, despite their inherent desire not to work together as each ethnicity relates well only to itself in their worldview, is a common threat. Usually it is disguised as Islam, but it is more complex. Worldwide, third world populations are immigrating to first-world nations where they work as manual laborers, and this is causing upset on two levels: first, the lack of integration of the newcomers; second, the threat it poses to national identity, which nationalists see as a necessary precursor to the cultural values that hold rampant commerce, consumerism, media culture, globalism and de facto monoculture at bay.

Italy said Thursday it is pulling out of a U.N. conference on racism — the latest blow to a meeting seen by many Western governments as marred by Muslim attempts to attack Israel and shield Islam from criticism.

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Italy has withdrawn its delegation from the preparatory negotiations ahead of the so-called Durban II conference due to “aggressive and anti-Semitic statements” in the draft of the event’s final document.

Reuters

Muslims do not like Jews. The two Semitic groups have had a fight going for so long it requires quantum physics to pinpoint its origin. Their ideals conflict; they are sworn enemies; and worst of all, the Jewish population has Europeanized itself while the Arab and Persian populations remain wholly middle-eastern.

This means that in Israel, the first-world population are Europeanized Jews, and the third world population are Palestinian Arabs who want to out-breed them and vote them out of power. In Europe, the situation is the same: indigenous Europeans and Europeanized Jews are finding themselves in conflict with immigrants who, often angry at the host nation for failing to embrace them, are becoming increasingly violent in protest.

The number of anti-Semitic incidences in Europe through the first three months of this calendar year exceeds the total number of such occurrences from all of 2008, according to a report issued by the European Jewish Congress.

The findings were announced by EJC president Moshe Kantor during a special session of the European Parliament which was devoted to the subject of anti-Semitism on the continent.

The report cites the reaction to this past January’s Israel Defense Forces operation in Gaza as one of the key triggers of anti-Semitic attacks against Jewish communities in Europe. In addition, the current financial crisis is giving rise to age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes suggesting “Jewish control of the global financial system.”

Ha’aretz

Now, the first world nations pride themselves on being “progressive,” which since 1789 has meant a gradual liberalization — or making egalitarian, a state in which all people have political and social equality — of policies. However, some oppose that; to gain power over them, the left has traditionally embraced minorities and immigration as a way of creating a permanent voting base that can smash not only entrenched interests but any right of moderate voting bloc.

This process peaked in the 1990s, and is slowing down, but has taken on absurd dimensions at times:

There is no justification for conservationists to defend particular species because of their “ethnicity”, Professor Christopher Smout writes in a new book, Exploring Environmental History.

Campaigns against “alien invaders” such as the cull of American ruddy ducks to prevent them from breeding with European duck species have no basis in science, he argues.

“Conservationists are up in arms because they fear the ducks will all get turned into some kind of mishmash,” he told The Independent.

“The conservationists would say: ‘We’re doing this because it’s endangering the genetic integrity of the white-headed duck.”

“I don’t think that’s a scientifically valid point of view. The concern with genetic integrity seems almost quasi-racist.”

The Telegraph

If the roles were reversed, nationalists say, we’d see this as racist: white people pouring into Africa and demanding the indigenous population not throw them out, even as they bred the purest strains of black into a comfortingly middle of the road cafe au lait. Since the first world has the cash, and the third world does not, it’s unlikely we’re going to see this migration.

As this uneasy situation dawns on the average person, normally too busy raising a family and running a business and making sure the tags on the car are renewed to notice politics much except as a topic of polite conversation, they are becoming drawn to this idea the nationalists propose, of an organic society:

I think it’s possible to want a traditional order, including ethnic nationalism, without hating others. It isn’t “we’re excluding you because you’re inferior.” It’s that we want to live among our own, and that requires we exclude everyone, whether they claim to be superior or inferior.

That’s only one part of the social order we’d desire. One of the neat things about feudal societies like those in The Hobbit is that everyone has a place, and there’s a clear social order. You don’t just plop down a McDonald’s anywhere you feel like it, or ignore reality. Society is an organic framework that works together.

I think we all avoid talking about differences between people to keep the peace. We extend that to ethnicity, and endorse multicuturalism, as a result. We think that supporting pluralism, or the coexistence of many different viewpoints at once, is healthy and not chaotic.

My readings of history suggest exactly the opposite: these things are an absence of order and a desacralization of life, and all societies that have adopted them are heading downward into disorder and eventually, third-world status. (This third world status is not related to ethnicity, but the kind of corruption, disorganization, apathy, etc. you find in failed states, always accompanied by third-world poverty and development levels.)

Slashdot poster

Interestingly, one of our era’s most vaunted political thinkers has been indicating that a shift toward nationalism — or at least a state defined by a unity of religion and politics, or culture and politics, which nationalists would say requires an ethnic component — is inevitable following what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history” as the world standardized on liberal democracy and consumerist utilitarianism, enabling us to have a global economy and political agenda.

Samuel Huntington, the thinker in question, stated that we were approaching a clash of not nation-states, but civilizations, where the civilization was defined by its values and organic traits more than the political symbols used to represent them:

Three possible American futures beckoned, Huntington said: cosmopolitan, imperial and national. In the first, the world remakes America, and globalization and multiculturalism trump national identity. In the second, America remakes the world: Unchallenged by a rival superpower, America would attempt to reshape the world according to its values, taking to other shores its democratic norms and aspirations. In the third, America remains America: It resists the blandishments — and falseness — of cosmopolitanism, and reins in the imperial impulse.

Huntington made no secret of his own preference: an American nationalism “devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding.” His stark sense of realism had no patience for the globalism of the Clinton era. The culture of Davos Man — named for the watering hole of the global elite — was disconnected from the call of home and hearth and national soil.

But he looked with a skeptical eye on the American expedition to Iraq, uneasy with those American conservatives who had come to believe in an “imperial” American mission. He foresaw frustration for this drive to democratize other lands. The American people would not sustain this project, he observed, and there was the “paradox of democracy”: Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.

WSJ

None of this would be a shock to Plato, the Greek philosopher who wrote The Republic 2400 years ago. In it, he described a civilization life cycle with several stages: aristocracy, rule by military elite, rule by commercial elite, democracy, a conflict between bourgeois and the masses, and finally, tyranny as they elect a protector who demands absolute power to protect himself.

Plato predicted that democracies, by splintering the consensus that founds a civilization into atoms formed of individual wills, become so chaotic that at some point, tyranny is desired by the citizens and so comes to pass.

Every civilization has a life cycle, from birth to death, says Plato. At birth, it has the simplest form of rule, which is aristocracy, or a hereditary group of its morally best and smartest people. When they run down or are overthrown, in comes military rule. After that, it’s oligarchy, which roughly corresponds to a libertarian ideal — those who have money rule, like a Southern Plantation culture. But that gives way to democracy, he says…

In that final step, you have reached a Soviet/French Revolution style state. These in turn collapse because, since all of their goals like freedom are negative, they have no actual plan and end up dividing up the wealth and infighting while the country collapses around them.

However, since the tyrant already has the power — well, there’s not much chance of him or her being overthrown. In fact, The People have put him in power and for at least the first few decades find it hard to admit they’ve screwed up, which gives the tyrant a free ride to strengthen the centralized power of the state.

Amerika

Nationalists, as they see it, want to re-start the cycle by returning to aristocracy. They do that by isolating the population so it is all the same culture and heritage, then picking the best, and having those lead the civilization according to its values, ignoring all globalist or external influences.

This allows them to pick the best for the purposes of enacting the values of that civilization, and requires that they have their own group to pick from, or the process will seem discriminatory. From this we imagine hereditary groups of leaders will emerge, a feudal caste system will keep the masses from intervening in politics, and a unification of religion, philosophy, science and politics will keep the civilization in consensus.

That’s the ideal that the organic society seems to lead to: an entirely different form of civilization, one that looks less “free” in the short-term but in the eyes of nationalists, is less moribund in the long-term (and less environmentally destructive) than the self-interest free-for-all of modern society.

They are talking about nothing less than the end of the nation-state and of the empires that grouped nation-states of similar ideals together. In the eyes of a nationalist, the first World War was started by these groupings; the Cold War perpetuated them; and the gradual liberalization of society and grouping us into a global monoculture will bring even worse consequences. This is why nationalists agitate for an end to the nation-state and its replacement with the nation, or a society in which the people, the culture, the heritage and the values are one.

Should make for interesting times. First-world nations face a crisis of epic proportions in overpopulation the consequent lack of clean water, clean air, food and energy; they also face waves of people trying to escape a third world pressured by the same, and squeezed even harder by whatever climate changes lie ahead of us. These are the conditions which bring about dynamic change in our civilizations, and I’m glad to have a front row seat.

Tags: ethnic identity, Ethno Nationalism, ethno-culturalism, nation-state, nationalism