The Americanization of All Values: Part I

But don’t call that city happy which gathers its citizens randomly from all ends of the earth, but only that one which best preserves the race of its founders.

— Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897)

If a thousand years ago a Viking and his wife moved from Scandinavia to Arabia and lived there for the rest of their lives, and had a child while living there, and the child learned Arabic and studied the Qur’an and began dressing and acting like an Arab, this in no way ‘made’ the child into an Arab. Both the child and his parents remained Scandinavian. If, today, an Aboriginal Australian man and his wife move to China and live there for the rest of their lives, and have a child while living there, and the child learns Mandarin and goes to a Chinese school and becomes a Confucian or a Maoist, and acts Chinese in a variety of other ways, this in no way ‘makes’ the child Chinese. The child is, and always shall be, just like his or her parents, an Aboriginal Australian. In these cases, as in countless others, immigration and/or citizenship do nothing to change the essential being of the humans in question. Merely moving their bodies to new locations does nothing to magically transform either the Scandinavians or the Aboriginal Australians into the types of humans that already, natively, live in these locales. Nor does it magically alter their genetic structure, nor their genetic inheritance, nor reduce the rightness of the customs and habits of their ancestors — what they have inherited from them — which all have shaped the entire being of the individuals in question in countless, often not evident, ways. The individuals in question remain what they are after they immigrate, and so do their descendants for many generations, dependent upon whether the genetic strain is maintained and the genetic memory remains intact. They remain peoples of particular nations which are based upon particular traditions and particular genetics, individuals who, for however many generations, are sojourners in alien lands.

The case of the nationhood of America, the United States, is unique. We must strongly stress, however, the virtue of perspective, which is sorely lacking among moderns, in saying this. For, just because one currently prominent nation, the United States, is thought of and defined propagandistically as a ‘nation of immigrants,’ as the United States often is, in no way entails that all other nations should possess this form of being or identity. All previous nations still extant, in fact, did not exist as such and, we contend, never should. There is no reason to believe that ‘diversity’ of skin color, or of customs, or of belief systems — things resulting today largely from irresponsible, culture-disintegrating levels of immigration — are intrinsic goods. Why should they be? It seems the case, however, that many people today have forgotten that all such beliefs — lately encapsulated in the braindead slogan ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ — are opinions. They have not, in fact, been given directly from the gods to humans — far from it. Such slogans are merely evidence that, for weak-minded individuals, it is not reason that is most persuasive in life, but rather repetition and subtle shaming.

Nations in general — true nations, that is — for nearly all of human history, were, and are, not ‘nations of immigrants.’ They were, and are, peoples. They were, and are, the products of kinship relations that are based overwhelmingly upon lifeways stemming from groups of individuals of overwhelmingly similar genetic background who have lived together for very long periods of time in specific, large or small, locales. There are, of course, in true nations, some immigrants and some individuals who ‘look different,’ speak a different language natively, and have insinuated comparatively insignificant ideas and art forms into their new environments, which were previously absent. But these are few and far between. They, such individuals, only become dominant in a significant way in their adoptive nation when their values and lifestyles are artificially imposed, tyrannically, ‘from above’ by central government regulations and subliminal forms of shaming and conditioning (television advertising, for example). Peoples — not collections of immigrants ‘melted’ together (à la the ‘melting pot’ philosophy) by means of rehearsed slogans kept in perpetual view by artificial power structures — have much more in common than: 1) currently living on the same land, 2) ‘believing’ in the same artificially constructed laws, and 3) accepting implicitly (or else!) an indefinite idea of ‘diversity’ as an ethical imperative or absolute good. It is peoples that constitute true nations.

The Israelites, as well as the Jews (as these are likely two different peoples, who, although linked historically, are only connected essentially by means of widely disseminated and popular texts), have always instantiated the idea of what a nation actually is. Three hundred years in Egypt, if such was really the historical case, did not magically ‘make’ the Israelites into Egyptians. As Moses allegedly said, “I have been a stranger in a foreign land.”1 That is, even if the Egyptians accepted Moses, he (the Bible version of Moses) never really accepted Egypt.2 And nor did a shorter period of time in Babylon ‘make’ the Israelites into Babylonians. Nor has a significantly longer period in Europe made Jews into Europeans. For Jews are, as they’ve always themselves claimed, a ‘separate people,’ a nation in the truest sense of the term, and not in the bogus modern sense that is based upon changeable laws and fluctuating political borders. It is a very strange thing indeed that, among many non-Jews of European descent today, there are large numbers of individuals who can, for whatever reasons, recognize ‘the Jews’ as a distinct people (a nation), based upon genetics and tradition, but not recognize other peoples (other real nations) based upon the same factors of genetics and deeply felt feelings about the nature and purpose of such primary realities as family, struggle, and existence itself. It is especially so with respect to those persons of European descent who do not recognize these facts about themselves. This, we suggest, although it will not be pursued here, is indicative of a particular disorder that today afflicts a large percentage of Europeans and those of European descent, and which causes them to deny what they are while being elated about what other ethnic/racial groups are. Fundamentally, the affliction is founded upon a projection by Europeans of the being to be themselves upon strangers, a distancing of Europeans’ true selves from their own reality, a spiritual suicide that is founded upon both irrational guilt, as many other authors have pointed out, but also lack of self-awareness and moral cowardice.

Why has it suddenly become so popular (‘necessary’) to believe with all one’s heart and mind that erratically blending cultures, races, and ethnicities to the point of their individual disintegration is the ‘greatest good’? Why this mad dash colored with unlimited corny moralisms for genetic and cultural suicide? For we are all constantly told (instructed) for a number of years now, by news sources, advertisers, heads of state, and other assorted figureheads, that this accelerated blending of historical identities is ‘good,’ it’s great — BELIEVE US OR ELSE! But, if it is so evidently good, then why do these ‘authorities’ threaten us all so often and so vehemently when we doubt their evangelism? Many individuals — hundreds of millions at the least and perhaps billions — believe that this widely marketed ‘feel good’ philosophy is a self-evident truth — although they likely don’t know why they believe it to be a self-evident truth. It has become, in the minds of many, a ‘natural good,’ like marriage between a man and a woman and their having many children was/is considered a natural good in all normal societies. This ‘new natural’ has become, in the minds of those skating on the thin ice of modern life, an incontrovertible ‘Truth,’ an apodictic certainty. In the last thirty or so years, for example, simply because a few generations of Arabs and North Africans have lived in Germany, France, and England, many individuals believe that this habitation has somehow, magically it would seem, ‘made’ these ‘immigrants’ German, French, and English. But why, and how? It seems that we, again, are simply to believe, and never have the temerity, like free individuals, to question, that a new set of laws created by a relatively small set of persons can, and should, somehow transform a human’s essence, negate his traditions, and render unimportant his genetic inheritance. And the reason that these things are seen in such a way — as even possible — I argue, is ‘Americanization.’ For, in the backs of their minds, the millions or billions of individuals who ‘think that,’ for example, Muslims actually are German or English, or that North Africans actually are French, there is a vague concept of ‘America,’ the melting pot: our age’s ultimate, inarguable, ‘good.’

Order Dr. Charles William Dailey’s The Serpent Symbol in Tradition here.