Death of the Nation?

David has beaten me to this in speed, but I have a link I'd like to present on this. Fulham Reactionary has really hit the nail on the head about this, calling it 'Population Replacement'. Like David's comment about being a 'rainbow nation', I think this is wonderfully descriptive and sound, but I don't know if it goes entirely far enough.

 What we are seeing is, no doubt, the replacement of large parts of the population. What this is, we can be in little doubt, is the 'en-rainbowing' (to throw in a neologism) of the nation. But perhaps this should give rise to the question of how we define a nation.

This is a massive issue, and I hope to have the time to scribble a proper essay on it later, but for now, a few thoughts:

Some time ago I was looking up the definition of the term 'fascist', mostly wanting to know what this term, used so often as an epithet or term of denigration and insult. I was very surprised to find, in the beginning of Wikipedia's definition, the statement that fascism "seeks to forge a type of national unity, usually based on ethnic, religious, cultural, or racial attributes". What puzzles me about this is that, prior to post-war Britain and the opening of the borders, it's my understanding that this was all there was to any understanding of a nation. (Thus, simple common sense becomes thought-crime by being branded 'fascist'. Was there ever a greater gift to the liberal leftist than the fascist phenomenon of Mussolini's Italy?) My admittedly spotty knowledge of history suggests that it shows us that there have been times (and sometimes these times have been quite frequent) in which nations have not only been at war with each other but with themselves over exactly these questions of religion, of culture. And frequently at war with one another over, oddly enough, which race will dominate a certain landmass.

 But even stating it like that, I fear the point may be missed. Until recently, how much was it accepted 'wisdom' that we are all the same really? Tell me, Irishman, (being of the same colour and roughly the same creed) how warm was your reception when you first landed on English shores and lived among us? How different were the Germans considered to be by Milgram and his researchers before they found that, under sufficiently authoritative conditions, most people will do nearly anything if they don't have to get close enough? And how concerned were Kipling and his contemporaries with the issue of, not only the universal brotherhood of man (a question which, to this day, is not so much answered as begged) but of the universal sameness of man when White Man's Burden and the Jungle Book were written?

Somehow this is meant to be liberating. Somehow, in 'discovering' that we are all the same really (clearly, such an enlightened and wonderful notion could never have been made up to further a cause) we are to be made more free in our obligations to each other than we would be in our freedom to be charitable of our own volition to people we know to be different and therefore deserving of unusual consideration. I don't follow the logic, myself.

But we were looking at the concept of nation. Looking at the 'fascist' definition of nation as one of 'national unity, usually based on ethnic, religious, cultural, or racial attributes' , and the historical growth of the nation-state, it isn't hard to imagine a group of tribes, say the Angles and the Saxons, or the Heruli and their neighbours, finding that they are beset with an unfriendly world on all sides and that there are much worse threats than these people with whom they have so much in common, banding together to create a larger unity of people. Eventually a large enough group of people with the same ethnic, cultural and religious background becomes a nation in its own right, sets up borders and boundaries, and is able to operate in freedom and love within a 'them and us' paradigm which, far from necessitating the emnity people would have us believe it inexorably creates, creates a real freedom to be charitable and loving to those both within and without the group. The alternative, as I have mentioned, is simply a top-down imposition of a forced obligation to treat everyone as kith and kin.

 Which leads us back to the kernel of the question. If everybody is meant to be accepted as 'us', what does that leave of 'we'? When the racial question is begged to the extent that the fact of a doubled number of immigrant or immigrant-descended children is met not with 'what about our native children?' but of 'how can we best kowtow to the newcomers?', we have a problem, racially and ethnically, as a nation. When a country with strong Catholic roots has to bend over for those who will force it to accept the promotion of homosexuality in school curriculums, that country has a problem religiously as a nation. When a nation's own cultural lights are forcibly replaced within the education system with foreign cultural lights, simply because they're foreign, that nation has a problem culturally.

We're not the same. Historically, culturally, religiously, we're very different indeed, and it's foolish to claim that we're not. Suicidal to go blindly forth claiming that if we only ignore all differences of all degrees, then all will be well. It won't. Increasingly, people in the overrun nations are looking around in bewilderment and wondering why they're not allowed the simple question. The question that would go right to the heart of their justified concerns and fears. The concerns and fears which are not only unaddressed, but exacerbated and glorified by those responsible for both their inception and for the power to assuage them.

The question, then, is simple:

 "Dude, where's my nation?"

Cross-posted at NC. Hat-tip to Fulham Reactionary, Christianophobia Watch, and Righteous Indignation.