America's "exceptionalism" is just this--while most nations at most times have claimed their own history or culture to be exclusive, America's foundations are not our own--they belong equally to every person everywhere. The truth that all human beings are created equal in their natural rights is the most "inclusive" social truth ever discovered as a foundation for a free society. "All" means "all"! You can't get more "inclusive" than that!
That's not a helpful position to take if you want to maintain your own distinct national identity. It means that an American identity is so inclusive that it applies to everyone. Open borders follow as a logical consequence - and Paul Ryan has supported legislation that would make the US borders more porous:
Ryan has cosponsored five amnesties, including the misnamed Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, which was identical to a bill introduced by Ted Kennedy and John McCain and would have granted amnesty to virtually every single illegal alien in the country and massively increased legal immigration.
In a book published last year on Ryan and two other Republicans (Young Guns: a New Generation of Conservative Leaders), Fred Barnes writes:
In short, Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy would like to fill the ranks of House Republicans with members, like themselves, committed to policies and legislation infused with the principles of limited government, free markets, and individual freedom. Young Guns is not for "me-too" Republicans, those comfortable with a scaled-down version of the Democratic agenda.
Limited government, free markets and individual freedom. That might be a better option than large, intrusive government, and it might express one part of an American tradition, but by itself it is not adequate as a conservative formula. How can the historic American nation conserve itself on such terms?
That formula is really an expression of a right-liberalism, i.e. a belief that a liberal society is best regulated by the free market rather than by a state bureaucracy.
If the Republicans are ever to be taken seriously as conservatives they need to extend their formula, to include a defence of a particular historic tradition and people.
About the one issue where I differ majorly from libertarians.
ReplyDeleteSmall govt is a good thing, but not for the reasons most right libs seem to think it is.
It isn't really possible in the United States, though. The idea of being a particular historic tradition and people isn't very tenable in a society that has been based for a very long time now on immigration waves. It just doesn't fly in the US.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't really possible in the United States, though. The idea of being a particular historic tradition and people isn't very tenable in a society that has been based for a very long time now on immigration waves. It just doesn't fly in the US.
ReplyDeleteUntil 1970 the USA had at least 90% European population. The USA can frame itself in a historical nation from a combination of the traditions of the European immigrants it came from (British, German, etc). It can also focus on the Native American traditions that are endemic to it. It would be ridiculous to concentrate on say African or Asian customs in the USA as what binds the nation. Now the fact that mass immigration is changing the USA maybe it will be a combination of Latino and European customs in the future.
Knightblaster said,
ReplyDelete"The idea of being a particular historic tradition and people isn't very tenable in a society that has been based for a very long time now on immigration waves. It just doesn't fly in the US."
What are you saying? America was made by Anglo Europeans and you should have pride in your history. You make yourself sound like a contested migration route, and whilst you may have incorporated different groups, you have retained an overarching monoculture since your founding.
"European population" isn't that meaningful as a unifier and never has been outside of the Old South, which was relatively ethnically homogeneous for whites (mostly Scots-Irish). Whites are not that unified, and never have been (and even in the EU today they are not, as between the various countries with different languages, histories and cultures).
ReplyDeleteThe US has always been a mish-mash. It's true that the addition of large numbers of Latinos in a non-assimilative pattern is disruptive to the culture, but falling back on a "European/white tradition" as the basis for a new American ethno-state is not realistic. Americans have never viewed the US as an ethno-state -- the idea of being a diverse place has deep roots. Today, in light of the pace and nature of recent Latino immigration, people may want to view whites as sharing a common heritage, but throughout the history of European immigration to the United States, the waves of "new" whites were treated as outsiders and interlopers, often stigmatized for being "ethnic", and not brethren joining a common white destiny ethno-state. The fact of history is that white Americans who were here treated/view newcomer whites of different white ethnicity as outsiders and with not insignificant disdain until these groups assimilated. It distorts the history of the United States to suggest otherwise.
The issue with Latino immigration is its scale, pace and the lack of integration/assimilation. That's where immigration concerns need to be placed. But the US isn't Australia, and has a very different history regarding immigration. We have never been a "white ethno-state" and seeking to become one basically destroys the fundamental idea behind the United States.
I'm sounding like a liberal here, but I'm not. I just strongly believe that in the American context the idea of conjuring up a new "white collective consciousness" to support a new concept of a "white ethnostate" is a walk in the dark and a betrayal of the entire American idea. We need to slow down Latino immigration and demand assimilation rather than the terribly stupid policies of multiculturalism, yes, but, no, we don't need to become a nouveau white ethno-state.
By the way, this is Novaseeker's new handle. For privacy reasons I have changed my Blogger handle, but wanted to let you all know that I am not sock puppeting, as Novaseeker no longer exists as my handle, and that's all I'm going to say about that.
ReplyDeleteSorry I composed a reply but my comp crashed and its after 1am. Basically I said that there are national American traits that are recognisable to the rest of the world, and these are heavily influenced by the white population. This occurs without America being a solely white ethnostate. To ignore these characteristics is to focus too heavily on diversity.
ReplyDeleteJesse –
ReplyDeleteI agree in principle, yes. That's why I think the problem is assimilation, and not immigration itself.
This will be a long post (I apologize for that in advance … if you find it boring, just skip it) which I will probably have to chop into parts due to Blogger's limitations.
Mass immigration has happened in the US before, and runs back to the second half of the nineteenth century here. The earliest waves were mostly European, but mostly not Anglo. Italians, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs – all came in substantial numbers (Anglo immigration during this time was mostly going to Canada, NZ and Oz, and to lesser degree, India and South Africa). They were not liked, generally, by the Anglo establishment (we call them WASPs here, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) for a long, long time. It wasn't until the 1960s, almost 100 years after Irish immigration began to the US, that America could bring itself to vote for a non-WASP as president, despite the, by that time, huge numbers of non-Anglo whites in the US. And we haven't elected one since. We've elected a half-black man as President before we elected another non-WASP white. This isn't because WASPs make up the majority of whites – they do not. However, in large swathes of the country outside the Northeast and old Midwest, whites tend to be “generic”, which means they think of themseles in a non-ethnic way and find “ethnic” whites (people with too many vowels in their names, for instance) to be “other” – something I learned much to my surprise when I attended university on the West Coast, where white identity is more generic and less “ethnic specific” than it is in the historic centers of white immigration (places like NY, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and so on … not Washington, however). The white population in the US is not really ethnically unified, and never has been. That's okay, because it works for other reasons, which I'll explain next.
My own parents were immigrants to the US from the UK (mother is Irish, father is English and grew up in India during the Raj). I grew up in a neighborhood in New York comprised of various kinds of ethnic whites and, as we called them at the time, hispanics. Most of these families were headed by parents who grew up outside the US, a few were one generation down from that. The kids, however, were all assimilated Americans. We recognized our ethnic differences, but we were still assimilated Americans who had the same pastimes – baseball, video games, whiffle ball, comic books. If we attended a holiday at a friend's house we had food different from what we were used to, but that was actually a feature, not a bug. Some of my closes friends growing up were hispanic guys who were totally assimilated into American culture – sure they prefer Jennifer Lopez, while I might prefer a Scarlett Johansson, but that's fine as well. We were all Americans, and the differences between us were enriching rather than dividing. That was long the genius of American mass immigration – we were (proudly at the time) a “melting pot”. We were diverse, and loved the richness of the diversity in many ways, without making that an end in itself, because assimilation of the people from these wildly different cultures is the glue that created America, really. And it isn't and never was all Anglo. Pizza is as American as baseball, really, in our eyes. Burritos are now an American staple, too – everywhere, not just on the Mexican border. We are a country founded by Anglos, but we are not an Anglo country (and I say that as someone who IS an Anglo-American). This is, again, a feature, and not a bug.
ReplyDeleteThe villain in this story is the ideology of multiculturalism, which disdains assimilation and the melting pot model in favor of diversity as an end in itself. This is no doubt yet another outgrowth of the overweening individualism that rules the roost in the West, as Mark has pointed out here many times quite well. Multiculturalism hates the concept of the melting pot, because it sees in this the sublimation of all other cultures to the white/Anglo culture. This is a fallacy. Where I grew up, all the whites referred to themselves either in ethnic white terms (“I'm Italian” even though his grandparents were immigrants) or, in some cases, hyphenated terms. On the school playground, a common question when meeting the new kid was to ask “what are you?” (meaning what ethnicity). This was in the context of the melting pot. The melting pot did not require one to check one's ethnicity at the door – people did not do that. It did require, however, that one assimilate to the values and culture of America in most ways, while retaining one's own specific ethnic identity. This sounds complicated, but America managed it brilliantly well for a long time through wave after wave of mass immigration. (And this wasn't all European immigration – Asians began coming in the nineteenth century, too, and Latinos were always present in the states along the border with Mexico in significant numbers). NY still has ethnic white neighborhoods like Astoria (Greek), Brighton Beach (Russian) and so on, and yet most of the folks you'd meet at a Greek Orthodox church in Astoria are totally assimilated Americans without having to forget about or sublimate their Greek identity either. It's a balancing act with some tension, to be sure, but for the most part it was incredibly effective at sewing together a nation with a remarkably diverse population into a loose cultural unity of sorts.
Multiculturalism seeks to destroy this model and replace it with one of divergent, largely isolated “communities” which are, internally, much more homogeneous and, externally, much less integrated or knit into an assimilated whole. The whole idea of assimilation is loathed, and instead the emphasis is placed on diversity for its own sake – which is a mistake. Diversity is, in fact, a feature of the American “program” and not a bug, but not for its own sake, and and not as end in itself. Multiculturalism disturbed the delicate balance that had been forged by generations of American immigrants and trashed it, creating in its place walls and barriers between the newer immigrants and the broader culture. This was new. It had nothing to do, really, with mass immigration. It had to do with a new way, a new ideology, of dealing with immigrants who came to the country.
ReplyDeleteMulticulturalism has been an unmitigated disaster everywhere it has been tried. Europeans are now waking up to their own mistakes in this area, but the ideology still runs strong in the US, because here it's referred to as “diversity”, which is a selling/propaganda technique that has been particularly effective. Effective because the US is, in fact, obviously a diverse place. So being against diversity paints one rather quickly as being against the whole American project. In fact this “diversity” that is being peddled today is, in substance, nothing at all like the diversity that America has had since its foundation – it is a newfangled “diversity as an end in itself” which has no roots in the American experience and is fundamentally disruptive to an American way of handling immigration which has, for the most part, worked brilliantly well historically.
So, no, the problem isn't immigration in itself. Nor is the problem Latinos – I grew up with many of them, and they are all assimilated Americans living productive lives as members of the broad culture – i.e., they are Americans, full stop. The problem is multiculturalism – something which makes recent immigration different in kind to the immigration we had in the past, because the state and the culture have gone a long way towards abandoning the melting pot model in the name of favoring diversity as an end in itself. This is the culprit, not non-Anglo immigration, at least not in the American context.
That was long the genius of American mass immigration – we were (proudly at the time) a “melting pot”.
ReplyDeleteMass assimilation and multiculturalism feed each other rather than oppose one another. America started with the policy of assimilation and due to it's failure (mostly due to the civil rights movement) has adopted multiculturalism and the opposite has happened to Europe. Europe began with multiculturalism and now is seeking to adopt the policy of assimilation due to the problems it has caused. Diversity should not be the aim for any country and only limited beneficial immigration should be allowed.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018636.html
The villain in this story is the ideology of multiculturalism, which disdains assimilation and the melting pot model in favor of diversity as an end in itself.
America has always been explicitly liberal and implicitly conservative but now that the balance has been lost liberalism is running the show. America is not a idea or a proposition nation as neoconservatives would like to believe.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001631.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001679.html
This is the culprit, not non-Anglo immigration, at least not in the American context.
You should know the consequences that large numbers of Africans and Latinos bring (crime rates, academia performance, family structure, etc). Perhaps Latinos do not bring the same effects as Africans to the table but they have their own ills. Now if you are talking about Latinos whom have at least 50% European descendence and connections to European or American culture (as you have done) then I understand your point.
I grew up in a neighborhood in New York comprised of various kinds of ethnic whites and, as we called them at the time, hispanics.
Then defend a culture that your ancestors whom were Irish, Italian, German or what not contributed to create.
Americans have never viewed the US as an ethno-state -- the idea of being a diverse place has deep roots.
They may not have viewed themselves as united whites and were a loose tribe of various European groups but until recently (indeed a few decades ago) they all viewed themselves as descended from Europeans (and even Native Americans on a few cases).
I'm biracial and while I believe that race isn't a social construct and indeed real I believe that no race is 1000000% pure. Nevertheless I cannot throw down so many centuries, so many decades of racial descendence down the line. My mother's family has a rich country's history and so does my father's. If I don't preserve even a bit of it all of it will be lost.
For many decades Americans have been stripped of their heritage and due to this they may even agree that multiculturalism and other ideologies are all that existed because there is little remotely left to defend.
On the other hand America is truly a chestnut because from it's founding it has been explicitly liberal and implicitly conservative.
On the school playground, a common question when meeting the new kid was to ask “what are you?” (meaning what ethnicity).
ReplyDeleteHow cute.
Europeans are now waking up to their own mistakes in this area, but the ideology still runs strong in the US, because here it's referred to as “diversity”, which is a selling/propaganda technique that has been particularly effective. Effective because the US is, in fact, obviously a diverse place. So being against diversity paints one rather quickly as being against the whole American project. In fact this “diversity” that is being peddled today is, in substance, nothing at all like the diversity that America has had since its foundation – it is a newfangled “diversity as an end in itself” which has no roots in the American experience and is fundamentally disruptive to an American way of handling immigration which has, for the most part, worked brilliantly well historically.
Contrary to popular opinion Nationalism is fairly complex. The truth is multilayered and multi-faceted yet one. Humans are complex and like Lawrence Auster has written there is the biological/natural order, the social/cultural order and the spiritual/transcendent order. All of them are different and inhabit different spaces yet all of them are essential for the proper and healthy functioning of a system and tend to combine and lend a hand to one another.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001631.html
ReplyDelete"The deeper problem this phenomenon points to is that Christian faith, though it is the center of the West's historic and spiritual being, cannot by itself provide the enduring structure of Western society or of any other concrete society. As indicated by Jesus in his all-important distinction between the things of Caesar and the things of God, religious faith must work in a proper balance with worldly values—among which are the values of culture. Without a particular earthly culture to ground it, and an articulated Church tradition to give it lasting form, Christianity can easily spin off into utopian universalist notions, such as the open-borders ideology, that spell the death of any existing culture."
The religion present since the founding of America has been Christianity. The same way Christianity needs to be restrained by wordly influence to not wander into the deep end is the same solution for America. America needs to find it's heart. It possesses an explicitly liberal, implicitly conservative ideal.
Mass immigration was not a failure. It was a tremendous success under the assimilationist model. Civil rights was primarily about black people. That is a different problem, unrelated to "immigration" in itself. And African immigrants are a tiny minority in the US and do not share many cultural characteristics with American blacks, because they do not have a similar history and are often elite Africans.
ReplyDeleteAnd frankly I can't take seriously references to Christianity coming from someone who wants to marry and have kids with another man for ethnic reasons. That has no support whatsoever in Christianity, inculturated or not.
Should natural rights for men and women be different?
ReplyDeleteIf the nature of men and women is different, it should follow that their rights should reflect their respective natures and therefore be different from each other.
Elizabeth Smith said,
ReplyDelete"On the other hand America is truly a chestnut because from it's founding it has been explicitly liberal and implicitly conservative"
Good quote.
Mass immigration was not a failure. It was a tremendous success under the assimilationist model. Civil rights was primarily about black people. That is a different problem, unrelated to "immigration" in itself. And African immigrants are a tiny minority in the US and do not share many cultural characteristics with American blacks, because they do not have a similar history and are often elite Africans.
ReplyDeleteMass immigration was a failure. The civil rights movement has some connections to immigration and to deny it is an error. Africans and African-Americans may be different in many instances but they also share some cultural and even genetic similarities (African-Americans are mostly descended from West-Africans from what people have told me).
And frankly I can't take seriously references to Christianity coming from someone who wants to marry and have kids with another man for ethnic reasons. That has no support whatsoever in Christianity, inculturated or not.
I'm going to marry a man of the right racial descent whom is also a Christian. I believe it would quite unwise and foolish to simply marry an man of the right racial descent whom is not a Christian or a Christian man whom is not of the right racial descent.
And frankly I can't take seriously references to Christianity coming from someone who wants to marry and have kids with another man for ethnic reasons.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing within Christianity which suggests that it's wrong to want to continue your own ethnic tradition or to have children in whom you can see yourself and your family.
I think Christians are being short-sighted in endorsing mass immigration.
First, it means that the Western countries will no longer be culturally Christian. So a religious person in the West will no longer be enculturated into the Christian tradition but might become a Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim. Christianity will struggle to retain its place in society.
Second, when people no longer have their own longstanding tradition to uphold, they have less to sacrifice for. Why go to work for so many hours a day? Why make such sacrifices for a family? Why care so much about what happens to those living 500km away in another city, if everyone is a discrete individual not connected together by a common tradition?
It will be harder, then, to motivate the kind of moral self-discipline that a serious Christianity requires.
People will be much more likely to live hedonistically for themselves; those that find this unsatisfying might just as likely become a Muslim or Buddhist as a Christian.
If you think that Christianity expresses the truth, then why allow Christianity to be marginalised by mass immigration?
Mass immigration was not a failure. It was a tremendous success under the assimilationist model.
ReplyDeleteThe question has to be asked, was assimilation a success because those being assimilated were mainly white?
Mass immigration was a failure. The civil rights movement has some connections to immigration and to deny it is an error.
Nah, immigrants were only a tiny fraction of the population at the time.
First, it means that the Western countries will no longer be culturally Christian.
In the US case, this is not true. Most immigrants come from Latin America and are Catholics. The downside of this is that a lot of stupid conservatives think Hispanic immigrants will be naturally conservative, when in fact there is no reason to think this. The Catholic church preaches a lot of liberal drivel and Hispanics have every reason to vote for liberal wealth-stealing schemes.
I didn't even bother reading NovaSeeker's or KnightBlaster's comments. They are pointless intellectual rubbish.
ReplyDeleteThere are things above intellectualism.
Do you have to have an intellectual reason to fight? No!!!
I say that America was not based upon immigration! I say that America is in the strong tradition of Christian Anglo-Saxons and that the government and the people represent that!
If all the white people in the United States come to believe this fact...That they have a Culture to Preserve...A Culture Rooted in English History (Nordic European) then by God I don't care How many Reasons You Give Me to Think That is Wrong.
I will still fight for it!
HOORRAH!!! and Fuck Off!
If you think that Christianity expresses the truth, then why allow Christianity to be marginalised by mass immigration?
ReplyDeleteMark, you're aware, I think, that most of the "flood" of immigrants into the US are Latinos and Catholic, yes? The U.S. isn't Europe or Australia where we have overwhelming numbers of Muslims or non-Christian Asians streaming in.
I'm going to marry a man of the right racial descent whom is also a Christian. I believe it would quite unwise and foolish to simply marry an man of the right racial descent whom is not a Christian or a Christian man whom is not of the right racial descent.
ReplyDeleteAh, I see, so you've revised the game plan. That's good.
Knightblaster: Just a few thoughts on what strike me as questionable premises in your comments:
ReplyDelete*The United States essentially has a shallow, incoherent culture whose deepest expression has something to do with pizzas v. burritos - in other words, that it really has no culture at all, as its most venomous critics have always averred. It also has a genius for assimilating all comers into this nothingness while at the same time allowing them to maintain their own culture, which, again, appears to have little to do with anything but food. (Hey, maybe that explains why Americans are so fat.)
Comment - I don't recognize this wasteland, this a-topia, didn't grow up in it, and sure as hell don't know why I should feel any loyalty to it. I submit to you that the idea of America that you present here is itself a product of the latter-day multicultural mindset. All countries have regional cultural differences. Just as all countries were forged over time out of disparate and conflicting groups. These are not defining properties of the putative "propostion nation".
*The melting pot was "brilliantly successful" in assimilating disparate yet overwhelmingly European and Christian groups under a unique set of historical conditions, therefore the "melting pot" mechanism, if only applied the old-fashioned way, will work in all times in all historical circumstances on any possible human group. An Englishmen is to a German is to an Irishman is to a Pole as an Englishmen is to a Somali or a Pakistani or a Chinese.
Comment - So counter-intuitive an analogy should place the burden of proof for its aptness on the asserter, not the skeptic. A human being lives in the center of nesting concentric circles of identity. There is nothing unusual or dispositive, re immigration and assimilation, about mutual distrust between brothers, among cousins, among co-ethnics, outward through the expanding set of concentric circles. There are degrees of "otherness" and identity, and they matter.
*The animating assumption underlying the above analogy is the lack of "white identity" among white Americans. I think that's true, as far as it goes. People identify against an "other", and the United States was overwhelmingly white until yesterday. White Americans didn't think about white, like fish don't think about water - if they lived mainly among whites. (Though there sure is a remarkable amount of talk about white/Caucasian racial identity in 19th/early 20th-century American social commentary, for people who are supposed to have identified only with their ethnic sub-group.)
And after all, an attentive reading of American history does reveal some evidence of racial hyper-awareness between those of European and those of African descent, in case you missed those insignificant little bits of American history. (Good thing the Magic Assimilation Machine has put paid to that unfortunate divide!)
There was no "white identity" because the United States was a white nation. The idea that it wasn't firmly and self-consciously a branch of Western civilization would have been news to both Americans and non-Americans even as recently as 30 years ago. And btw, "Hispanics" and Asians were, until very recently, small minorities, so their assimilation patterns in the past, by your own understanding of the importance of numbers, is irrelevant. If the numbers are small enough, it doesn't much matter if a group assimilates or not. (If your position is defensible there is no need to fuzz up the historical fact that for most of its history the U.S. was ~90% white.)
Mark Richardson: "If you think that Christianity expresses the truth, then why allow Christianity to be marginalised by mass immigration?"
ReplyDeleteI don't believe Christianity expresses the truth. I think it pretends to be a good shepherd, but it will actually feed all the White lambs to the wolves.
Because:
1. The Popes have in fact come out for open borders and mass immigration. If you have endless mass immigration into an island, ultimately all local gene lines terminate. The end, no more us.
2. The Church is in fact now non White, and is reflecting and will over time more reflect the attitudes of its majority non-White constituency. These attitudes include grievances and hostility, lack of any concern for our welfare, and stubborn beliefs about how wealthy Whites are. When Whites come under Black rule, as in Haiti and Zimbabwe and South Africa, it's all downhill for Whites.
I see no reason that Whites putting their trust in Black majority spiritual institutions will work out well for Whites in the long run. Spiritual leaders responding to the sensitivities of their non-White flocks will tacitly decide that Whites have no collective need or right to survive, and that whatever impedes the aspirations of the non-White majority is wrong.
3. Christianity, lacking strong legitimacy in modern society, hungers for what legitimacy it can get from the system. Political correctness is, for a variety of reasons, anti-White, so clergy who want to be respectable will also adopt tacitly anti-White positions.
4. Jews occupy an extraordinary position in modern liberal society, because they have an uncontested right to marry their own kind and continue as a people, which other White people do not; because they have great wealth and media control; and because after the Holocaust (and before) they have strong, deeply held grievances against non-Jewish Whites, and specifically Christians, and above all the most conservative types of Christians.
Jews also hold a special position in Christianity. Salvation is from the Jews. (And not from the Whites.) They and only they as an ethnic and genetic group have a contract with God and a special right to live. True, Christians also have a new contract - but "Christian" has no genetic content. Particular groups such as Whites can perfectly well go.
In other words, in religious terms, Whites have accusers with endless harsh grievances, special holy standing and a big megaphone, and Whites have no defender at all, even as to their right to not be wiped from the world.
It's very sad that Whites gave up their own gods, perfectly nice gods such as Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and put themselves under the spiritual authority of an alien god who has no regard for them as a continuing people.
I think it's because if this that Whites have no answer when they are challenged, as they are increasingly as to why they should live. So what if mass immigration and infertility will end Whites? What's wrong with that? Whites are guilty of (insert long list of accusations here), and the world will be well off without them. I have noticed that Whites don't have much of an answer to that.
Jews are not even challenged like that, because it's so easy for them to reply. They have a healthy and proper religion, one that supports their dignity and will to live as individuals and as a people called to exist for all time and entitled to make that happen. Their god loves them and bids them live, and obediently they do live.
Whites lack that, which is killing us. Some Whites think that the universe is random atoms, and when the community dies nothing is lost. Others turn to the god that supplanted the gods of Europe, and who as good as tells them: as an individual I might accept you, but as a race: DIE! And obediently...
Knightblaster' s argument that America's founders intended America to be a diverse place with no unified ethnic character is simply false.
ReplyDeletebefore the war for independence, benjamin franklin wrote an essay on the "natural increase" of a nation, in which he vigorously protested the immigration of darker completed europeans to the colonies.
After independence, john jay wrote thankfully in federalist paper # 2 that "providence" had blessed the states with one common people, descended from a common ancestor, speaking a common tongue, and processing a common faith. He cited these facts of course to argue for a closer, federal union between the states.
Later, speaking of the blacks in the US, Thomas Jefferson wrote that nothing was more certain than that that people (and notice that he considered them a separate people) would one day be free and that the two free peoples, white and black could not share the same country.
In1790, the new united states determined that citizenship would be open to free white persons. Aside from the major exception of freed blacks, this criterion held up until the Hart-Keller act of 1946. In 1917 the Supreme Court upheld the statute in the US vs Bhaghat Singh Thind, defending the European makeup of the US from Hindu admixture (read the summary from Justice Sutherland, cited in wikipedia: racial coherence was the basis for the court's decision).
Up until the 1965 immigration bill, the US was considered by founder and citizen alike to be a European nation in the Americas. Advocating that the US regain its predominately European character is simply advocating a return to its roots and the vision of its founders. My ancestors didn't choose to settle in Mexico for a reason.
Mark Richardson: "There is nothing within Christianity which suggests that it's wrong to want to continue your own ethnic tradition or to have children in whom you can see yourself and your family."
ReplyDeleteThat's true when you don't fill in which ethnic tradition it is, or what you look like, but I've given reasons above white Whites are a special and negative case for Christianity in an era when:
1. Christianity is global and majority non-White.
2. Political correctness dominates White countries and is anti-White.
3. A group held in special and nowadays positive regard in Christianity holds the megaphone and accuses Whites as an ongoing collective.
4. Whites have no alternative to turn to, no other god or religion up and ready to run (again) that would treat them less harshly as a real community worthy of life.
Mark Richardson: "I think Christians are being short-sighted in endorsing mass immigration."
Perhaps you're not thinking of a post-White world. Unless we change things radically, and I mean from the root, we'll go the way of the thylacine.
Mark Richardson: "First, it means that the Western countries will no longer be culturally Christian. So a religious person in the West will no longer be enculturated into the Christian tradition but might become a Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim. Christianity will struggle to retain its place in society."
No. The old societies will be gone, with the people that made them and sustained them.
The new masses will be converted. That's the long term. And it's fine for Christianity.
4. Jews occupy an extraordinary position in modern liberal society, because they have an uncontested right to marry their own kind and continue as a people, which other White people do not; because they have great wealth and media control; and because after the Holocaust (and before) they have strong, deeply held grievances against non-Jewish Whites, and specifically Christians, and above all the most conservative types of Christians.
ReplyDeleteLiberals have been turning fairly anti-Jewish lately --- amnation.com/vfr/archives/019541.html
What is the Kingdom of Heaven? The kingdom of heaven is like this. A bunch of white mice thought that they were the special pets of a man that came and scattered grain in their cage every day. But one day it turned out that he had only been keeping them for a while, to be a treat for his snakes, which were his real pets.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth Smith, you have a point there, but:
ReplyDelete1. I list several considerations. The special standing of Jews is only one and not even at the top of the list.
2. If that leftist trend continues, and it may not, it will still take time to filter through the churches.
3. The standing of White communities as such within Christianity remains negative, or at best nil. There is no hint of any right for them to continue.
They have accusers and no defenders. This goes only one way.
(Sorry if this double-posts. First attempt seems to have disappeared.)
ReplyDeleteKnightblaster: Just a few thoughts on what strike me as questionable premises in your comments:
*The United States essentially has a shallow, incoherent culture whose deepest expression has something to do with pizzas v. burritos - in other words, it really has no culture at all, as its most venomous critics have always averred. It also has a genius for assimilating all comers into this nothingness while at the same time allowing them to maintain their own culture, which, again, appears to have little to do with anything but food. (Hey, maybe this is why Americans are so fat.)
Comment - I don't recognize this wasteland, this a-topia, didn't grow up in it, and sure as hell don't know why I should feel any loyalty to it. I submit to you that the idea of America you present here is itself a product of the latter-day multicultural mindset. All countries have regional cultural differences, just as all countries were forged over time out of disparate and conflicting groups. These are not unique defining properties of the putative "proposition nation".
*The melting pot was "brilliantly successful" in assimilating disparate yet overwhelmingly European and Christian groups under a unique set of historical conditions, therefore the "melting pot" mechanism, if only applied the old-fashioned way, will work in all times in all historical circumstances on any possible human group. An Englishmen is to a German is to an Irishman is to a Pole as an Englishmen is to a Somali or a Pakistani or a Chinese.
Comment - So counter-intuitive an analogy should place the burden of proof for its aptness on the asserter, not the skeptic. A human being lives in the center of nesting concentric circles of identity. There is nothing unusual or dispositive, re immigration and assimilation, about mutual distrust between brothers, among cousins, among co-ethnics, outward through the expanding set of concentric circles. There are degrees of "otherness" and identity, and they matter.
*The animating assumption underlying the above analogy is the lack of "white identity" among white Americans. I think that's true, as far as it goes. People identify against an "other", and the United States was overwhelmingly white until yesterday. White Americans didn't think about white, like fish don't think about water - if they lived mainly among whites. (Though there sure is a remarkable amount of talk about white/Caucasian racial identity in 19th/early 20th-century American social commentary, for people who who are alleged to have identified only with their ethnic sub-groups.)
And after all, an attentive reading of American history does reveal some evidence of racial hyper-awareness between those of European and those of African descent, in case you missed those insignificant little bits of American history. Good thing the Magic Assimilation Machine has put paid to that unfortunate divide!
There was no "white identity" because the United States was a white nation. (The idea that it wasn't firmly and self-consciously a branch of Western civilization would have been news to both Americans and non-Americans even as recently as 30 years ago.
And btw, "Hispanics" and Asians were, until very recently, small minorities, so their assimilation patterns in the past, by your own understanding of the importance of numbers, is irrelevant. If the numbers are small enough, it doesn't much matter if a group assimilates or not. For you position to be defensible it must accomodate the fact that the U.S. was ~90% white for most of its history.
Daybreaker, I do agree with you on this criticism of the churches:
ReplyDelete3. Christianity, lacking strong legitimacy in modern society, hungers for what legitimacy it can get from the system.
I disagree that Christianity is incompatible with the existence of distinct peoples. In its Christian heyday the West was made up of a patchwork of nations. It was accepted as part of the natural order.
Mr. Richardson wrote,
ReplyDelete"I disagree that Christianity is incompatible with the existence of distinct peoples. In its Christian heyday the West was made up of a patchwork of nations. It was accepted as part of the natural order."
This is true.
It's also true that the New Testament does not contain any explicit defense of race and nationality, which is probably Daybreaker's problem.
But the defense is implied, e.g. if God created the body, then he created the differences between kinds of bodies. If he created the differences (or the mechanism--parent-child resemblance--by which those differences arise) between kinds of bodies, then he must have wanted those differences to exist. If he wanted those differences to exist, then it is rebellion on our part to want those differences to cease to exist, let alone to work toward erasing them. If rebellion against God is sin, then erasing racial and ancestral differences is sin.
Also, as Lawrence Auster has pointed out, Christianity was never meant to supplant native cultures like Islam, for example, but to purify them. Any native culture, race, ethnos, etc. that has survived has found some way to define itself and defend those boundaries. There is nothing in the Christian purification process that would expunge that system.
Daybreaker,
ReplyDeleteI think your post put forward many important posts. I was at a university debating meeting recently and the executive was being voted for in a general meeting, with each candidate getting up and making a short speech. One of the candidates was from the sub-continent and he said in a half joking manner:
"Also I feel I should be on the executive because I don't see too much colour there"
He was immediately strongly booed and laughed at, albeit in a fairly good natured way, by the audience. His face after that was interesting to see because, although he acknowledged that he was joking, he also wasn’t entirely, and the "script" of non-white special status was clearly something he was relying on and absolutely fell flat. A debating society at university is fairly left and even in that environment people were sick of non-white special pleading (this is no doubt due to the very large number of international students at our uni).
The point is that even left wing whites can get sick of the watering down of their group. Whilst being “white” may be a broad identity, being of European Western decent is nonetheless a concrete thing and it’s in our natures to want to preserve or associate with our own. Remember that even arch lefties usually live in predominantly white communities.
I believe that a lot of this immigration was supported by a misguided sense of western “fairness”, a liberal attitude that it wouldn’t really affect us (ie individuality counts for more than national identity), and a desire to make quick money. People today, however, are beginning to look at this issue with fresh eyes and so I don’t think its time to totally despair.
I was at a university debating meeting recently and the executive was being voted for in a general meeting, with each candidate getting up and making a short speech. One of the candidates was from the sub-continent and he said in a half joking manner:
ReplyDelete"Also I feel I should be on the executive because I don't see too much colour there"
He was immediately strongly booed and laughed at, albeit in a fairly good natured way, by the audience. His face after that was interesting to see because, although he acknowledged that he was joking, he also wasn’t entirely, and the "script" of non-white special status was clearly something he was relying on and absolutely fell flat. A debating society at university is fairly left and even in that environment people were sick of non-white special pleading (this is no doubt due to the very large number of international students at our uni).
I would not conclude from this that non-white special pleading is falling flat and people are sick of it. I would conclude that South Asians can't get away with such special pleading because everyone knows that South Asian immigrants are, in the main, intelligent and accomplished and need no affirmative action any more than East Asians do.
If an African-descended person (and especially if it were a woman) got up and demanded more color on the executive, no matter what the whites actually thought about it, I very much doubt the whites would have booed and laughed. In America, at least, the idea that a black person demanding more "diversity" should be jeered at and laughed at is totally unthinkable.
Also, as Lawrence Auster has pointed out, Christianity was never meant to supplant native cultures like Islam, for example, but to purify them.
ReplyDeleteWhat? Islam came after Christianity, so how could Christianity as originally conceived have any intentions towards Islam?
Christianity from the very beginning most certainly always intended to supplant all existing native religions. As Islam and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible it is hard to see how Christianity could ever hope to "purify" Islam. If you convert from Islam to Christianity, you are not following a "pure" form of Islam, you are a Christian -- and Muslims will accordingly seek to take your head.
Mark Richardson: "I disagree that Christianity is incompatible with the existence of distinct peoples. In its Christian heyday the West was made up of a patchwork of nations. It was accepted as part of the natural order."
ReplyDeleteAccepted, the way the galvanized iron shacks of squatters are accepted on a rich man's land, for a while. But then the bulldozer comes, and it turns out that what has no rights has no defense.
Political correctness with state power is bulldozing White people out of existence. White people, having long ago signed over their moral and religious "power of attorney" to Jesus can only look to Christianity for what is necessary, namely their title deed. But there is none.
Bartholomew: "This is true.
It's also true that the New Testament does not contain any explicit defense of race and nationality, which is probably Daybreaker's problem."
Yup.
White people can be wiped away like the dodo and the moa bird, and all their nations and works too, and it's unproblematic for Christianity.
This wasn't too relevant as long as there was no anti-White ideology in the air.
But now there is.
Congressman Ryan's positions, which sign over the nation of his ancestors to be the property of all (and you can't get more 'inclusive' than that!) have the utmost respectability in Christianity.
Woe unto a people when their god and their religion raise no objection to wiping away their nation and their entire race, and the challenge comes, as it has.
Bartholomew: "But the defense is implied..."
ReplyDeleteYou think it is implied, the Popes think it is not. And mainstream Protestantism is more politically correct again.
Bartholomew: "Also, as Lawrence Auster has pointed out, Christianity was never meant to supplant native cultures like Islam, for example, but to purify them."
Perhaps to purify, but if so, not to defend.
Bartholomew: "Any native culture, race, ethnos, etc. that has survived has found some way to define itself and defend those boundaries."
Yes, by definition. This is like saying that any cell that continues to exist has managed to maintain its cell walls. If it had not, it would not be a cell any more.
Bartholomew: "There is nothing in the Christian purification process that would expunge that system."
This is where we differ.
I stand on my parable of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The white mice may have loved the (Son of) Man, but if so it wasn't mutual. No matter how "purified" they were, no matter how painfully clean they were scrubbed, they never had a right to a collective future and a real defender of that right.
We can see in the thousands of brutal "farmer murders" in South Africa what the future looks like, unless we manage against all odds to change things radically.
Political correctness, unopposed or ineffectively opposed, has mild and even prissy beginnings but brutal conclusions.
I should address your point more directly.
ReplyDeleteBartholomew: "There is nothing in the Christian purification process that would expunge that system."
No, that's exactly what Christianity does. It wipes out all the tribal gods and and their sacred people and lands as such.
That's sort of all right as long as collective entities are challenged on a level where Christianity doesn't defend or really permit a defense. But that time is over.
You can get a way with it also with intensely ethnocentric and unintellectual people who don't care about justifications and making things add up. When assent to Christianity is notional (for example, when it is professed because it gives you charity and input into well-funded official systems, but the people professing it are still taking multiple wives and living as though the gods of tribe and land still held sway) then the problem of Christan non-defense of race and nation remains potential.
But the history of Europe and of the European-descended peoples shows that we are not like that.
Bah!
ReplyDelete"That's sort of all right as long as collective entities are NOT challenged on a level where Christianity doesn't defend or really permit a defense. But that time is over."
I think it is a great part of the success of political correctness that it attacks at a level that is absolutely vital for the defense of social collectives, but where the previous legitimating system makes no defense, and the character of the people is such that if they are attacked on that level, they need a defense.
Jesse_7, interesting anecdote.
ReplyDeleteBut when lawyers get involved, and threats are made and implied, and the hostility of moral liberalism stills laughter and wipes the smiles off people's faces, then the defenders need to have words beyond a bemused "You've gotta be kidding!"
They need title deeds, doctrines of legitimacy, or as infuriating as it may be they lose their rights and they are displaced.
Anonymous: "In America, at least, the idea that a black person demanding more "diversity" should be jeered at and laughed at is totally unthinkable."
American Blacks are known for levels of aggression, menace and racially-entitled hostility that instantly wipe the smiles of everyone's faces, and for having extremely potent, aggressive and punitive legal backup. (Generally Jewish legal backup, historically.)
That's more than enough to wipe away the ethnic resistance of nice kids who can't articulate any claim of right beyond gentle laughter.
Anonymous at Tuesday, 7 June 2011 1:02:00 PM AES, I think Bartholomew meant: "Christianity was never meant to supplant native cultures like Islam [does], for example, but to purify them."
ReplyDeleteIslam certainly does aim to wipe away previous cultures, regarding everything before Islam as merely a time of error. That's a horrible thing. Saudi Arabia's systematic destruction of pre-Islamic archeological sites or the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas should inspire disgust and contempt for an anti-civilizing force.
Christianity is better in this respect. I think politically correct multiculturalism is wiping away more ancient Western culture than Christianity ever did, because of the way political correctness both debases mass culture and renders anything outside the profaned White and Christian commons into a sacred "other" which is not to be investigated and understood, merely deferred to.
Christianity has destroyed a lot of previous culture. Often that has been good. (Does anyone really want to argue for the cruel religion and culture of the Aztecs?) Occasionally it's been bad. Usually the trade-off has been reasonable, as in Iceland.
Yes, a lot was lost, but a lot would never have been written down (and even added to) except by literate Christians. We can thank Christians that we still have Beowulf. And if religion in the Beowulf poem is more muddled than "purified", so what. I haven't encountered a lot of cultures absolutely free of muddle.
My beef with Christianity is not cultural destructiveness in general but that it destroys (and provides no adequate substitute for) something specific: that sacred title that people could hold on to, to preserve their tribe, nation and race. Not to keep them pure, because that never happens, but just to hold on, to have a future, to live.
ReplyDeleteIn Christianity's defense, it took a peculiar attack to show up the full, potentially genocidal cost of the moral weakness that creates. But here we are, with Paul Ryan insisting like just about everyone else with power, in historically White countries across the world, that "America's foundations are not our own--they belong equally to every person everywhere."
That (with the chronic mass immigration agenda that goes with it, and that Paul Ryan supports) renders America and Australia and all our nations morally a commons.
The future of the commons is to be enclosed or be destroyed.
And since a particular race and a particular set of nations has been marked out to be a commons, and since we are forbidden to enclose, to own and to preserve our nations for our own collective posterity, we cannot in the long run escape dispossession and eradication without radically changing the moral and religious order.
Jesse_7: "People today, however, are beginning to look at this issue with fresh eyes and so I don’t think its time to totally despair."
ReplyDeleteLet's not despair. We agree on that.
Anonymous: "Now the fact that mass immigration is changing the USA maybe it will be a combination of Latino and European customs in the future."
ReplyDeleteThat's a Mexican future, and the Mexican future is dynamic, not static.
After all, Mexico was also established with a dominant European (Spanish) population. However that's become much more mestizo / native than European. The trend is not slowing down, and Mexico is not ceasing to get worse.
In the absence of explicitly articulated and effective ethnic defense for European descended peoples, there is no natural balance point.
...but throughout the history of European immigration to the United States, the waves of "new" whites were treated as outsiders and interlopers, often stigmatized for being "ethnic", and not brethren joining a common white destiny ethno-state.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, and fully 40% of them returned home. For those that stayed, abuse provided a very strong incentive to assimilate. Today, the Italians (arguably the most-abused group apart from the Irish) are among the most outspoken immigration restrictionists. Those whose families left the Eastern seaboard and came out to my neck of the woods seem to have abandoned all of their Italian-ness, excluding religion and surnames.
Now the Italians are simply Americans. Despite your assertions, this full-assimilation is impossible with nonwhites because they will always stand out as the Other, regardless of the "culture" that libertarians love to preen about. Mexicans who have been here for generations proudly identify as Mexicans; that's non-assimilation defined. For every Latino friend of yours who is as American as apple pie (and you'll forgive me if I doubt that they were completely unconscious of their race and heritage, particularly when you left room), I can name five I know personally who take every opportunity to talk up the mother country. Blacks have been here since Day 1 and their culture is still uncompatible.
We were all Americans, and the differences between us were enriching rather than dividing.
Do you still wish to insist you're not a liberal?
Daybreaker,
ReplyDeleteI agree that it would be better if Christianity more explicitly defended a connectedness to ancestry and ethny as part of the spiritual life of man.
But the bigger picture is that the assault on collective identities has not come from Christianity. Christianity never demanded that people give sole allegiance to itself.
The assault has come from those who are averse to the idea that they have a created nature which helps to define their existence. They, instead, want to be self-defined or self-created. They are in a kind of rebellion against God (Bartholomew argued well along these lines earlier).
Finally, I don't see why what is implicit within Christianity can't be made explicit. Why not have prayers as part of a Christian service giving thanks to those who contributed to our particular tradition? Or calling for respect for the existence of all such traditions? Or asking men to act wisely and honourably as stewards of their tradition?
There are Anglican churches in Australia with very beautiful stained glass windows showing the St George Cross and Anzacs and other themes relating to a wider cultural identity.
Mark Richardson, that's an interesting answer, in combination with what Bartholomew said.
ReplyDeleteI think I'll just let those ideas rattle around in my head for a while, maybe for hours, maybe for years.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDaybreaker said,
ReplyDelete"American Blacks are known for levels of aggression, menace and racially-entitled hostility that instantly wipe the smiles of everyone's faces, and for having extremely potent, aggressive and punitive legal backup. (Generally Jewish legal backup, historically.)"
You and Anonymous both made strong points. I'd like to say, using and example, that if you look at Australia the Aborigines are the most "prized" minority group. They get token jobs aplenty, everyone is expected to treat their issues with official reference and they are given many symbolic concessions. However, all they receive these things the giver is really the pc left leaning state and intellectual class. If these groups were to turn on the Aborigines soon it would be seen that the Aborigines have no or very little inherent power on their own. So in that sense a focus on the intellectual class and state, who use them as a symbolic issue, can have far greater results than a focus on the people themselves. I can understand it might be different in the US where blacks are more numerous and possibly more politically active.
So if we weaken or turn the left against their favorite minorities you'll see I believe the minorities as not being that strong after all. This I believe is quite possible if the left start to see themselves as seriously put out by minority claims. Already the Greens in Australia are officially opposed to immigration, on environmental grounds of course, and leading left wingers are coming out against Sharia.
Also if the left start to distance themselves from minorities, the minorities claims will be on much weaker ground when they confront more direct criticisms by us.
The US has always been a mish-mash.
ReplyDeleteWhich country has not always been a mish-mash? Britain has been a mish-mash of Scots, Welsh, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and Norman-French for a very long time.
>knightblaster> the US isn't Australia, and has a very different history regarding immigration. We have never been a "white ethno-state" and seeking to become one basically destroys the fundamental idea behind the United States.
ReplyDeleteThat's odd, because this is the "fundamental idea" behind the United States.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
And that does not even hint at your multi-racial utopia.
The U.S. isn't Europe or Australia where we have overwhelming numbers of Muslims or non-Christian Asians streaming in.
ReplyDelete"We"? Are you an American? Living in America? You sound a lot like an American ex-pat living abroad.
So, no, the problem isn't immigration in itself. Nor is the problem Latinos – I grew up with many of them, and they are all assimilated Americans living productive lives as members of the broad culture –
ReplyDeleteThe assumption here is that there exists some "broad culture" for them to assimilate to. Back when you were a child in NYC, America was still an overwhelmingly white country, with an overwhelmingly white culture. But that reality is vanishing before our eyes, courtesy of those Latino immigrants you like so much. Why should any Latino want to assimilate to a dying culture? (On an emotional level, that is)
Good topic of conversation.
ReplyDeleteIn short, Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy would like to fill the ranks of House Republicans with members, like themselves, committed to policies and legislation infused with the principles of limited government, free markets, and individual freedom.
I agree that this is nowhere near enough. When one allows his homeland to be swamped by vast numbers of foreigners who do not share his language, culture, religion, heritage or values, and couples this problem with a welfare state and removes incentives toward assimilation, one has on his hands a disaster of his own design.
It's not a question of "Will the ship founder?", but rather, How much time do we have before it goes under?" Because it will go under.
Once the deluge finishes swamping our nation, such niceties as limited government, free markets, and individual liberties become moot.
American right-liberals claim the 'brilliant success' of pre-1924 immigration as a mantra. But it brought Irish political corruption - Tamanny Hall, machine politics, the Kennedys - Sicilian organised crime, and many other ills which are swept under the carpet.
ReplyDeleteBTW the USA ceased to be majority founding-stock only some time in the 1990s.