If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts have their own menu page above.
Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway
Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway
This post picks up the globalism in the arts around World War I theme that got set aside for entropy and the Fallen world (part 1, part 2, coda). 20th century America was the consequence of inherent contradictions in its identity - a nation subverted by a state into an empire with a fake mythology built on imaginary cities and magic dirt. This is civic nationalism, a marriage of post-Enlightenment fake faiths: blank-slate human fungibility (click for post, Roots of Globalism section especially) and Progress! based on infinite growth.
Edward Lamson Henry, The Country Store, 1885, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Lithograph of Broadway, New York City, c. 1880s
We have to stay general. The details are too much for a post. 19th century America was a period of imperial growth, increasing political and economic centralization, and dilution of the posterity through waves of immigrants with different values and divided allegiances.
This beneath an official mythology built off a denatured misreading of the Revolution where a coalescing nation's break from empire becomes a vague notion of "freedom" that can be twisted to mean anything.
Non Serviam litho print from the "non serviam" section at etsy.
Taken to its extreme, freedom is chaos, entropy, and the abandonment of logos. The primal statement of freedom from the structures of reality is the Satanic declaration of non serviam - better to rule in Hell than "serve" in Heaven. Click for a post on satanic inversion. Freedom is not a virtue in itself, but a necessary condition for virtue. Coerced acts of virtue are not moral - one must choose to follow the true, the beautiful, and the good to lead a virtuous life.
The print is unexpectedly honest. The skull and halo and rays symbolize death and reverence respectively. Given that the turn from reality is misplaced reverence for fallen world of death and entropy, it is an excellent representation. The crown of thorns is used as a symbol of Christ's suffering - a declaration of enmity that inverts the meaning of the Crusader's cross.
A line by Kris Kristofferson made famous by Janis Joplin is an unusual admission of truth from the generation that changed everything (image source).
The unintentionally comic embrace of this chorus by solipsistic Boomers perfectly captures the intellectual depth of my g-g-generation. Reagan's use of Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen's simplistic critique of American society, is similarly obtuse.
And the meaningless "nationalistic" version. Try and apply this to a national identity.
More irony - it is classified under "God Bless America T-Shirts". A declaration of non serviam is not the best way to secure this blessing.
This is one case where the economists do have it right:
In practical terms, one fights for freedom from something - our mortality and physical limitations tells us that the there is no absolute freedom in the material world. The Puritans wanted the freedom to set up a theocracy. The Founders wanted freedom from British political and economic control, the Irish wanted freedom from starvation and British predation, various others wanted freedom to avail themselves of American prosperity while changing the culture that made the prosperity possible. In the 20th century, freedom became completely inverted into a hollow totem to justify cultural degradation, invasion, and foreign war.
Next time you hear some shill blather
about freedom, ask yourself "from what"?
about freedom, ask yourself "from what"?
Start with clarifying the distinctions between nation, empire, and nation-state. Political entities call themselves different things and are shaped by specific historical relationships. This can make their identities murky at times. The empirical solution is to consider the historical patterns and see how different entities actually developed before drawing categorical distinctions.
Critics of nationalism often point out that a nations can't be precisely defined and change over time meaning that they're not actual things, but man-made "constructs" and therefore not "real".
So the challenge they pose isn't the quality of their reasoning but the symbiosis between liars and idiocy.
An inability to distinguish signs from the things they represent is common in primitive cultures and among the the more "thoughtful" of the globalist mouthpieces. But the truth is obvious to a child. Whether we can succinctly translate a phenomenon into words is utterly irrelevant to the reality of that phenomenon. If you can't precisely define "nation", the problem is with the limitations of your sign system, not the lived experience of countless nations.
Ion Theodorescu-Sion, Ovid in Exile, 1915, oil on cardboard, 36.5 x 43.5 cm, location not known
Nations always have fringe cases. But whether an individual is a poor fit, or the population of an area is mixed doesn't change the organic development of collective identity that can be observed historically.
Of course nation and empire are constructs. They're words that people constructed - made up - for something that they observed. But the empirical world is complex, and only an idiot Postmodernist blames reality for not perfectly fitting a word people invented. All terms, symbols and other forms of communication are constructed. That is beyond obvious. The question is, what was the blueprint? It is a good faith attempt to put a label on something that can only be known by experience, or a made-up word to further an agenda.
Volume Rendering with Octane Render for Cinema 4D – Foggy Bridge #1
The human world is imprecise and man-made classifications are generalizations. What is important is how closely that generalization aligns with empirical reality. If the fit is poor, the fault is with the generalization.
The alternative is the belief that man-made classifications are more truthful that objective observation. That they take ontological precedence, in philosophical terms. If I make up a term and assign it a definition, and that concept proves empirically false, it is reality that must somehow be wrong. This is the common theme or pattern behind the webs of deception that blanket the contemporary West.
3D Seaside Door Mural Sticker.
In simplest form, putting man-made classifications above objective reality the essential definition of lying. You are to believe - to respond and act going forward - as if something made up really happened.
Your understanding is separated from the truth. Walking into the picture still hurts your face. Your future outcome was changed because a man-made creation was prioritized over reality.
Look at how often this happens around you. All the fake news, fake science, controlled opposition, open hypocrisy, elite agendas, linguistic inversions like reproductive health for infanticide - all of it - is prioritizing man-made constructs over empirical reality. When the construct is a narrative, it's fiction.
Rob Gonsalves, Bedtime Aviation
Construct implies construction. Construction requires a creator. It is a conscious, willful act. So if a sign system or a story is more truthful than what really happened, the will of the creator comes before reality!
Lying, Satanic inversion, Postmodernism, the occult all come from the same place.
They put what we made up over what is.
Nation describes the result of an organic historical process. In purest form, it flows out from family through tribe to nation, and resembles faith in that it is felt internally as much as shown. Collectively, the traditions and expectations that define a nation take time develop, but the pattern is as old as civilization.
Map of the Fertile Crescent in the late prehistoric era.
Agriculture provided the resources to build permanent towns. The first transition from tribal confederacy to nation begins here.
Sumer is the first historic civilization that we know anything about and during the Uruk Period (4000-3000) introduced written language, record keeping, boat trade, centralized administration and other apparatus of the state. Its cultural influence naturally spread, but so did empire building.
The early nations become warring empires and the Bronze Age ended with a relative balance of power. But most of the region was tribal territory without a historical "civilization".
The Iron Age brought a new pattern - dominant conquerors creating a succession of empires where one people ruled over the surrounding nations. We still have large areas without historical civilizations and some smaller territories on the margins.
The Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, and Persians dominate the cradle of civilization in sequence. The last was the largest empire the world had seen. The Persians established a system where conquered nations continued on as provinces under Imperial rule. Governors had considerable independence, so long as they paid their taxes and provided their troop levies.
Alexander basically flipped out the ruling structure of the Achaemenid Persian Empire and introduced Greek influences across the ancient world.
The Romans were the first to extend an ancient empire westward, conquering tribal territories that were occupied by peoples lacking the infrastructure and written culture associated with historical civilization.
The difference between empire and nation is as old as civilization. The nation is a people or a culture that develops over time in a geographic area. It is not system of government. This is really important, because lack of clarity on this is a major problem today. Government is simply codified social organization. It emerges from a nation, rather than defining it. Whether a people is ordered by an absolute monarch, a republican democracy, or a tribal confederacy build around oral rituals is irrelevant to their existence as a people.
This was obvious in the West when the Germanic "new Romans" attained sufficient power and numbers to dispense with Rome and set up... Germanic social orders. Kingdoms based around tribal nations.
Empire can change cultures by introducing new ideas or imposing new social orders, but shifting imperial boundaries does not determine "nationality". Importing new people or destroying the old isn't transforming a nation, it's replacing it. Cultural change through new structures or ideas is much more gradual.
Change the nation and you change the culture
Giovanni Paolo Panini, Roman Capriccio: The Colosseum and Other Monuments, 1735, oil on canvas, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Roman concrete meant huge structures that were impressive even as ruins. Roman culture remained accessible too - sculptures and texts continually resurfaced. So while the culture of the medieval West was radically different from Imperial Rome, the idea and image of Rome never went away.
We could call it the afterimage of empire - the lingering corona that inspired centuries of imperialists.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne, 1806, oil on canvas, 260 x 163 cm, Musée de l'Armée, Paris; Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, 1806-08, Paris
Consider the aftermath of the collapse of the Western empire. The cradle of civilization was split between two imperial powers - the Eastern Roman then Byzantine Empire and the Persian Sasanian Empire. There was steady conflict along the border without lasting advantage, but both were drained and vulnerable to their own tribal invasion.
Spread of Islam after 622. The Arab Muslim armies that exploded out of Arabia swept the depleted Sasanians away in a matter of years. The Byzantine heartland held, but most of the empire was lost. Conquest extended from India to France. A sobering reminder that "peace" can be interpreted in different ways.
The Mohammedans had their own empire/nation divisions. As an ideology, Islam was a sort of proto-globalism based on radical equality - part of the appeal was the rejection of priestly hierarchies. But the leadership structure was implicitly Arab tribal organization which led to conflict as the religion spread beyond Arabs.
Consider the current situation between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Persians and Arabs have been battling for control of the Muslim world for as long as there has been a Muslim world.
These are nations.
This nation/empire split shook out differently than in the West - "national" entities kept popping up, but dynastic empires were the norm. A quick duckduckgo search of maps shows that there was always a major imperial power. In Europe, things unfolded in the reverse - the political organization fragmented while the religion was centralized.
Europe in 1100; Europe in 1700; Bahri Mamluks and the Ilkhanid Caliphate (c. 1250-1382); The Islamic World in 1700. While Europe gradually fragmented into national groups, the Muslim world moved from dynastic empire to dynastic empire. The maps make a historical fact clear - the development of a large number of small nations in close proximity but with clearly distinct languages and cultures is a uniquely European phenomenon. It is different from the Muslim world.
To be more accurate, European political history can be described as a tug-of-war between nation and empire. On one hand, distinct nations with their own languages and cultures coalesce over time. On the other, the elite dream of renewed "Roman" centralization never dies. We can see this impulse in the notion of Christendom - a higher, spiritual unity among Western Christians manifested in the Universal Church.
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, 10th Anniversary Revised Edition, Blackwell, 2013.
Christendom differed from the Muslim caliphate in political ideology. Islam proposed a complete fusion of religion and politics in a single state, only to have competing national and tribal ambitions repeatedly tear it apart. Christianity differentiated between "secular" and sacred authority - most famously with "render unto Caesar".
The Bible affirms the presence of nations at the end. On the scriptural level, Christianity is a religion of nations, not empires. Subsequently, power-mad tyrants have claimed otherwise. The idea of an undifferentiated blob of a caliphate is not only inhuman, it is potentially blasphemous. This isn't a debate.
The idea of Christendom as a political reality evaporated with the Catholic / Orthodox schism.
Schism always sharpens ideology. An undifferentiated state has to have some flexibility to accommodate everyone to some degree. Once divided, precisely defining the self and the group against the rival is essential. Western Christendom was distinguished by its Church as a supernatural unifying body. A lot of medieval history is shaped by conflict between pope and kings.
The Church/Christendom was one unifying impulse pushing against national division - a sense of Christian unity distinguished Europeans from the rest of the world to some extent. The reality is messier - competing national interests made Christendom a fractious place - but common faith was a key ingredient in the development of the larger idea of a Western culture. It works, because Christianity was not founded on a presumption of secular empire.
But there is also a unifying drive that is decidedly political - an imperial impulse, or what we called the afterimage of Rome.
The Carolingian Empire
Charlemagne was the Christian image - the proto-"Holy Roman Emperor" who actually united Europe in a huge Frankish empire. In 800, the pope crowned him Emperor of the West, reviving the dormant Roman title.
Charlemagne's empire dissolved into the forerunners of the European nations - we can see the rough outlines of France and Germany in the 843 partition. But the dream of reunification never really died.
Any legitimate notion of "Christendom" is based on a spiritual unity, not a political one. Common religion, geography, and history means that there will be cultural overlap, but that is a component of national cultures, not a substitute for them. The idea of a Christian empire is a category error among other things - misplacing spiritual unity in the political.
The pattern is actually the same as the modern EU, only the faith is in post-Enlightenment materialist globalism. Same man-made idol, less alignment with reality.
The history of European boundaries is continuous division and coalescence around national lines. Some maps through the centuries:
But the ideal of Christendom was no match for elite reality, and the Church itself became increasingly politicized and worldly before irrevocably fragmenting in the Reformation. When the ensuing Wars of Religion finally wrapped up in the 17th century, the long contest between secular and sacred authority had finally been resolved in favor of the former. Religion was formally recognized as a national prerogative, and international relations were the new social order.
Not that anyone respected them, but the growth of an international order meant lines on the map had unprecedented formal significance.
The conquests and border shifts of early modern Europe resemble a game of Risk.
The Napoleonic Era. The closest thing to the imperial dream since Charlemagne.
It is noteworthy that Napoleon did not claim kingship, but declared himself an emperor in the Roman fashion.
And afterwards, there is a restoration of the principal nations, with adjustments.
Which comes to the third entity in the nation/empire discussion: the nation-state. If there is ever a 'self-immolation through pretending impossible things are real' hall of fame, this non-sequitur is in the pantheon.
Gerard ter Borch, The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 1648, oil on copper, Rijksmuseum
The nation-state is an artifact of a Post-Westphalian Europe - order based on agreements between formally-recognized countries. Assigning historic peoples fixed borders allows a central authority spoke on behalf of the whole. This becomes a problem when the central authority does not serve the national interest.
The nation-state is not so much a contradiction in terms so much as the overlap of two completely different types of thing. We've seen what a nation is. A state is a legal creation, a governing structure imposed on a designated territory. A nation can form a state, but is not the same thing as one. A good analogy is a family home. The family and the home, like the nation and the state, both exist. But no matter how long the family lives there they do not become interchangeable with the home. Time strengthens the association between them, but they don't morph into a new hybrid entity. If they move out, they remain a family and the home is a home, just to a new family. The same is true with nations.
Anonymous American cartoon, The Devilfish in Egyptian Waters, 1882: John Bull makes a grab for Egypt, initiating the “Scramble for Africa”.
It isn't England the nation scrambling for Africa. The English people were not clamoring to experience The Heart of Darkness. Empire is by and for the elites that run the political and financial structures of the state. Globalism in all its forms is an elite creation that hollows out national culture for the benefits of an increasingly powerful, detached, and self-serving cosmopolitans.
The nation-state is a powerful formation because it co-opts the natural sentiments of an organic national culture. It gets its appeal and historical identity from the nation that inhabits it, but harnesses this to a completely separate legal-juridical-governmental institution of the state. In theory, the state is a creation of a nation and reflects its culture and will - that's the family home analogy - but the practice is quite different. An earlier post looked at the divergent interests and identities of the aristocracy and the people, and how the state part of the nation-state actually served the internationalist interests of elite culture.
And while the Church waned in influence as a supra-national body, international commerce - trade, then industry, and most importantly finance - waxed. The elites have always bridged political and economic power. Medieval aristocratic families always had members in the clergy to further their interests - today's globalists oscillate between international banking and politics.
The forms change but the pattern is consistent. The nation state subordinates the nation - the languages, customs, values, folkways, and cultures of a people - to the aims of a detached elite culture. This is difficult to see when the elites pay lip service to the interests of the nation and times are prosperous. It becomes clearer as the collision between globalist satanic inversion and reality nears. The elites of the 19th century were just building the international systems that today's version serves. This includes international corporate elites.
Nicholas Pocock, A Fleet of East Indiamen at Sea, 1803, oil on canvas, National Maritime Museum, London
The British East India Company was essentially an empire of its own. A prototype of the modern global corporation, it was one of the first commercial enterprises to offer limited liability partnerships.
One of the great globalist deceptions is the myth that the public and private are opposite. The reality is that they have been joined at the hip since the first trader bribed the first official.
Francis Hayman, Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757, circa 1760, oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, London
Clive rose to Commander-in-Chief of British India. This quote captures the non-existence of public/private lines: "We are sensible that, since the acquisition of the dewany, the power formerly belonging to the soubah of those provinces is totally, in fact, vested in the East India Company."
William Skeoch Cumming, Drummer James Roddick of the 92nd Gordon Highlanders, defending Lieutenant Menzies during hand-to-hand fighting in Kandahar, 1880, 1894, pencil and watercolour, private collection
Personalize it - a Scotsman shooting Pashtuns in Kandahar - and you see the lunacy. Globalist forces are still shooting Pashtuns in Kandahar. .
Empire-building is a form of internationalism. It lacks the all-encompassing scope of contemporary one world madness, but it does impose an alien order on national determination. And the nation-state or equivalent concept is the intermediate step.
Arthur William Devis, Portrait of a Gentleman, Possibly William Hickey, and an Indian Servant, circa 1785, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
A nation-state is system where a culturally detached or even foreign elite subverts the interests of the nation to their own ends through legal and administrative structures. It is a system by which government + territory replaces nation as the "national" identity. Expanding the borders requires no essential change - empire is simply government + bigger territory.
Trade the family home for a mansion and you'll need some staff.
The driving force is always elite greed and worldly ambition - the will to power that characterizes our fallen world. The same impulse that leads to the top of the nation-state pushes for the bigger prize of empire. In ancient times, conquest brought wealth for grander monuments and bigger cities and land to reward followers. In post-Enlightenment Europe, Progress! added different dimensions. Industrial economic competition drove an insatiable appetite for markets and resources and fake faith in human "reason" led idealistic simpletons to try and enlighten the world.
Victor Gillam, The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling), Judge, April 1, 1899, Ohio State University, Columbus
Look! "England" and "America"! International economics and "universal" civilization. Nations don't choose this. But detached, power-seeking elites can't stop.
In the less dense ancient world, ascendant nations carved out empires by conquest, but this wasn't possible in a Europe balanced between Great Power nation-states. Here, the rush to empire took different forms.
On the periphery, the Ottomans attempted to conquer territories in the manner of the ancient Romans, while the Russians spread into one of the last great expanses of tribal land. The bulk of their land mass was outside of Europe, where there was not division into a contiguous quilt of formal nation-states. The Ottomans were the latest in a string of Middle Eastern empires, while the Russians were the first unifying Imperial power since the Mongols.
European powers like Spain, France, and England were unable to acquire these sorts of contiguous empires, Napoleonic hiccup aside. So they leveraged the organizational and technological advantages of an industrial nation-state to build colonial ones. This is one of the few things that critiques of "colonialism" get right - the European nation-states built impossible wealth off exploitative relations with less sophisticated regions. Where they go astray is assuming this impulse is historically noteworthy. Elites seek empire. What changes are the means.
There is more than one imperial impulse in nation-state Europe. Conquering colonies is the obvious one. But there is also the old dream of empire - essentially "Christendom", but reimagined without Christianity in a typically materialist satanic inversion. While the nation-states were building colonial empires, pan-European structures were slowly arising. Webs of treaties and notions of international law with countries as actors, webs of royal marriages, and most importantly, the controlling power of borderless finance.
So what's America?
North America was partitioned by European powers during the Colonial Era. Notice how a vast portion of what is now Canada was under the direct rule of another charter company: the Hudson Bay Company.
The country begins as a formal state with a mixed population and an Anglo-colonial dominant culture. The ideals of that culture and the posterity of that population were written into the constitution. An earlier post pointed out that the initial union was something of a confederation, which allowed for a degree of regional distinction under a federal partnership. But the existence of a central government brought the drive for nation-state then empire.
George Washington as a Freemason,
Strobridge & Co. Lithographers, Cincinnati
The problem is that Anglo-Christian values were assumed, not explicit. There is a "Creator", but the identity is undefined. The deist God represented by the Freemason's G is one candidate, but rumor has it that it could be Judeo-Christ.
Fake secular mythologies transfer allegiance from God and nation to man-made things - institutions, offices, and constitutions.
Constitutionalism is remarkably compatible with Postmodernism. Both assume discourse - human symbolic communication - is the basis of reality and pretend that manipulating the symbols changes what it.
The War of Northern Aggression confirmed this in blood sacrifice, but the centralization since has been primarily political and economic - transcontinental railways, telegraphs, and interstate commerce.
Henry Bacon, Lincoln Memorial, 1914-1922; Daniel Chester French, Abraham Lincoln statue, designed 1920, Washington, DC
A Doric temple where the cult statue is the president that oversaw the imposition of an imperial administration by force. How does this align with constitutional values or Jeffersonian democracy?
Punitively crushing restive provinces was just one example of the imperial drive and idolatrous worship of elite self-interest, though a very clear one because it was so bloody and remains shrouded in wizardry. But American empire gets its distinctive character by combing several forms of imperial expansion into one big ball of national subversion.
The westward expansion involved purchase transactions and seizures from other colonial empires on paper. On the ground, the situation resembled the growth of the Russian empire - steady incorporation of informal tribal territories - but with a twist. The American elites were all in on Progress, and as we saw in the last post on the topic, early American economic growth was a function of population. So unlike Russia, America aggressively filled in the new land and growing industrial cities with waves of immigrants.
Mayer, Merkel & Ottmann Lithog. after Bernhard Gillam, The Bugaboo of Congress, Puck, 1885, color lithograph
Like the Irish.
A harsh critique of Irish block voting and its sycophantic Congressional dependents.
This piece paints the typical lie of American "intolerance" in the name of an imposed obligation to open borders to foreign victims. But it is useful in pointing out the fundamental incompatibility between the invaders and the nation that they occupy. This is the opposite of a nation. As tragic as the plight may be, a nation chooses its own well-being over aliens. A state desperate for cheap, easily exploited labor on the other hand...
The Homestead Act and other policies gave vast quantities of free land to anyone claiming to be willing to settle it. This drove agrarian immigration from northern and central Europe while providing opportunities for corporate interests to acquire resource rights at minimal cost.
Growth was rapid, the frontier was settled quickly, and the west was won. But there was no plan for what came next.
Burlington & Missouri River Railroad Co., Millions of acres. Iowa and Nebraska. Land for sale on 10 years credit... Buffalo, NY, 1872, Library of Congress, Washington DC. .
It wasn't just free land. Corporate interests like railroads encouraged settlement with cheap tracts to build markets for their services. Speculators interposed themselves for profit.
19th century American elites generated growth by grabbing land and filling it with foreigners. The labor was cheap. It wasn't American in the historical sense, but nothing a little slight of hand can't fix. "Universal principles" are universal, and if you pretend that they have metaphysical properties, anyone can be American by encountering the magic dirt. The problem is that no set of cultural values, no matter how well-thought or high-functioning, can rise to the level natural laws or absolute principles. As the empire matures, it is impossible for the realities of a detached globalist elite to live up to the mythology.
And the mythology got vapid.
Vintage Postcard George Washington; Lincoln Centennial Bday Postcard, Portrait, White House & Cabin c.1908
There is secular hagiography - turning political figures into idealized caricatures for public reverence.
Like saints, we get stories of superhuman moral exemplarity, only in the case of a secular figure, the discrepancy with human reality is a bit much to overcome. The general who won the War of Independence told a few lies.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, St. Catherine of Siena, 1746; George Washington Birthday Axe Cherries Postcard, 1912
Religious art identifies saints through iconography - standard symbols extracted from their lives and established through repetition. For Catherine of Siena, it's her Dominican habit and the crown of thorns. For George Washington it is the absurd story of the cherry tree and a self-contradictory motto.
Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Louis XIV of France, 1702, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris
Betsy Ross Making the First Flag with Stars & Stripes, postcard
Heraldry is the aristocratic version - political symbols raised to near-religious reverence transform figures of state into objects of secular veneration.
This wasn't the point of the Revolution.
American Flag over Water, Wreath Memorial Day Postcard, Raphael Tuck & Sons, Philadelphia, 1907
This sort of platitude can't be reconciled with the realities of political and economic imperialism that included false flags and the United Fruit Company.
The same interests promoting the myth of American civic virtue at home was making a mockery of it abroad.
Absurd mythology is the same problem as the fake foundations discussed in a previous post. Globalist narrative engineers can expose the hypocrisy or falsehood and blame the nation for for the rulers' lies. Ordinary citizens aren't engaging in international exploitation or lying about state criminality. But in the nation-state, anti-national interests wear the identity of the nation as a mask, leaving righteous Americans caught between their own naive constitutional faith at home and the consequences of a murderous oligarchy abroad. Many aren't even aware.
For those more prone to feelings than thought, this triggers the self-hate limbo and endless virtue signaling about being not racist to the point of national suicide.
Allow nations their own self-determination and this problem vanishes.
It is telling that the same Postmodernists that push for open borders claim national cultures are learned rather than innate patterns of behavior. They will also tell you that language predetermines thought. The claim that someone driven from their home will replace attitudes and assumptions enculturated since birth because of a statue indicates their fundamental dishonesty. But they realize this. Most nation of immigrant propaganda is produced by immigrants and interprets the fake American mythology to reflect their interests. From that perspective of an occupying nation, appropriating trappings, inverting culture, and exfiltrating wealth is positive and the defenders of the actual nation the opponents.
The few individuals who successfully integrate into alien societies are anecdotal - individual cases with no relevance to general patterns. Mass immigration is akin to invasion - groups looking to impose their cultural norms onto the host nation.
A Happy New Year, offset color lithograph postcard, Hebrew Publishing Company, 1900 and 1920, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Rosa Brothers Grocery & Market calendar with depiction of Portuguese-American immigration, chromolithograph, Warren, RI, 1928
Invaders seek to marginalize the national culture for obvious reasons. It is much easier to pretend that hyphenated American exists as a "nationality" when there aren't actual Americans around as a reminder otherwise. This is not new. Here is a startlingly low-IQ propagandist acknowledging that immigration is the creation of different nations within US territory while condemning those opposed as "nativist". This is unusually honest, but she gets a couple of things wrong. Nation is an extension of family. Defending it is a moral imperative - one abandoned in the West to a crisis level. And the word isn't nativist...
It's nationalist.
Conquering territory, crushing revolt, and importing foreign populations were the three legs of the American imperial tripod. A manufactured secular mythology replaced substantive identity, and as long as there was endless room for progress, things could more or less play along.
The free land running out was a threat to the narrative, but America was sucked into the maelstrom of World War I before that blew up.
But the war was a sign of a deeper rot, not the onset of a new infection. The next post will look at the effect of 1913, and not just privatizing the money supply and income redistribution either. That was the year Modern art made its American debut at New York's famous Armory Show!
Georges Braque, Violin Mozart Kubelick, 1912, oil on canvas, 45.7 × 61 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art