Replies

Great post, C.

How can one add to that?
(especially your closing line)

Unified nations survive.
Balkanized nations do not.

The United States might be the first nation in human history that having once been ethnically/culturally unified, deliberately Balkanized itself — and then failed for having done so.

America was largely founded upon Thomas Jefferson’s egalitarian dream, as written into his Declaration. At the time, during the Enlightenment when gifted men were trying to free themselves of “The Divine Right of Kings”, the notion that all had been created equal became the ultimate credo. The antidote to tyranny and kings.

And we drank that down and lived with it for almost two centuries. It worked for us because it’s easy to proclaim that all are equal when the vast majority (88%) were culturally and ethnically the same.

But what Jefferson could not understand is that you can’t change natural law and human nature by the written word.

And a fundamental element of human nature is that people generally trust and wish to be amongst others who are like themselves. And also that they tend to be distrustful of others who are different from themselves. That is what it is, like it or not.

Up until the mid 1960’s, even those who shaped and enforced the immigration policies of The United States understood this as well. That’s why until immigration was “reformed” in 1965, U.S. immigration policy was (quite frankly) exclusionary and discriminatory. It was designed to maintain a status quo that protected the ethnic makeup of the country, and in so doing, it also indirectly maintained the edifice of the egalitarian dream.

But once that was changed, and the “new immigrant tide” came rolling in, cracks began appearing in that edifice. It hasn’t yet crumbled, but the cracks have become fissures that threaten to take the structure down.

One problem is that the newcomers don’t have any issues with the notion of “identity politics” — they see themselves “as a group”, and have no problems advancing their own group interests. And rather than become part of the traditional “Euro-American” culture, they keep a distance. This is particularly true of blacks, who since the 1960’s seem to have deliberately embarked on a course to separate themselves from the Euro culture (even though at the beginning of “The Civil Rights Era”, Euros made it well-known to blacks that we supported the concept of “integration”).

Thus, we have growing cohorts of non-Euros who seem to have little connection to our traditional old ways (and perhaps who openly denigrate such beliefs), but who have no qualms about utilizing the power of “group identity” to promote their own.

This is the recipe for Balkanization.

As Ayn Rand said:
“We can evade reality. What we cannot evade are the consequences of evading reality”

The seeds we sowed in 1965, the reality we evaded then, is a-ketchin’ up to us!