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Thursday, January 31, 2002
02:42 - This Time For Sure...
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/01/fog0000000253.shtml

(top) link
Over the past several weeks, USS Clueless has posted a series of essays in defense of America as a concept true to its founding ideals; some posts have been more provoked than others, and den Beste's challenge throughout the period has been to word his feelings in a way that gets the point across without sounding overly jingoistic or defensive. The resulting series of essays are exactly that, in the original French sense: essais, or "attempts" to convey the point in the most effective way possible.

Well, here's the latest essay.
The United States is made up of people whose ancestors hated Europe. They came here to get away from what Europe stood for; they came here because they wanted something different. And they were resolved not to let this nation become another Europe, because they'd seen the worst Europe had to offer.

...

Some of them revolted against European domination and created a nation built on a different philosophy. Others came later and joined it because they liked what it stood for. The most patriotic Americans have always been its first generation immigrants.

...

It is no wonder that the Europeans are bewildered by the US, and vaguely frustrated. They expect the US to be New Germany, or New France, or New England. But even New England isn't actually; Boston is not New London, and New Hampshire isn't Hampshire recreated on American soil. New York bears no resemblance to York. New Jersey is nothing like Jersey. Those are only names; the reality is that America is now alien.

The point here that he's trying to get across would be just as well aimed at white supremacists and their ilk within the US: America is not, and never has been, the Land of the WASP. It's not less so now than it was at some point in the past, nor is it more so. Only at the very beginning, when the mother country that we were fighting was Britain-- purely by accident of colonization-- was a European (or English) ascendancy evident. Almost immediately afterwards, as soon as it became clear what the Constitution was promoting, the US in its current form began to emerge: the Coalition Culture.

The only reason America looks like a white, European nation-- to those who expect to see it as such-- is that within the greater framework of the country, cultural groups do still insularize to a remarkable degree. White people living in San Marino don't go into Compton or the Pasadena Arroyo, except in very fast cars on the freeways. So it's very easy to pretend that those pockets of culture don't exist, or are irrelevant. But to the people living there, the WASPs are just as remote, and just as removed from their everyday concept of "America" as they are to the WASPs.

This effect of insularity is amplified each time a WASP ignores the reality of the Sikhs making his Subway sandwich, the Chinese guy to whom he pays his rent, the Indians and Pakistanis programming with him at work, the Vietnamese running the successful PC hardware shops where he buys his office's computers, and the newly-ascendant Black culture that has finally begun to penetrate to all levels of social management from unskilled labor all the way up through corporate management and political office.

(Sure, I'm generalizing-- but I also mean to point out that many cultures do gravitate towards certain professions. It's a stereotype to suggest that Jews work the financial system, but there's historical and cultural support for such a statement, like it or not-- niches are only pejorative if someone decides to craft them that way through hateful propaganda.)

The KKK can keep those blinders on all they like and go on pretending that America is Meant for the European; but just as we look back at 1955 and see Marty McFly and Doc Brown rather than Joe McCarthy and people getting fired over the suspicion of associating with someone who was suspected of being a Communist, people who think the United States were ever "purely" comprised of one particular cultural group are worshipping a fantasy world that never existed. History wears blinders just as well as people do.

...So anyway, that's what America is about. You could put all the cultures in the world onto a wheel and rotate them one to the left, and then take North America and fill it with people from the rotated culture wheel-- populating it from 1750 with Vietnamese settlers and statesmen, importing British and Irish and Russian slaves to pick cotton in the South, with Blacks and Hispanics and Chinese and Muslims pouring voluntarily into Staten Island over the years and Indians entering through San Francisco to build the railroads and pan for gold-- and the concept of the nation would be exactly the same.

In fact, that alternate America of 2002 probably wouldn't look all that different from what we have today.

We're a country built upon an ideal, not upon a people. The people come here for the ideal, and the ideal is what makes them Americans. Europe expects a country to be an aggregation of people who speak the same language and share a common ancestry, whatever the country's government and social structure might be like. But to us, the government and social structure are all-important, and language and ancestry are incidental.

This is not jingoism or patriotic bluster. These essays from den Beste and his contemporaries are just trying to set the record straight for the benefit of the European politicians and columnists who just don't seem to get it.

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