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"The West believes in nation states, composed not so much of ethnicities, though these are often the genesis for those states, but citizens united by constitutions and principles. Russia is appealing to something older, cynically invoked perhaps, but spiritual and genetic - a unity that rolls over borders and crushes reason. The parallel is with Taiwan, a country that is ethnically consanguineous with China, yet which has a right to exist because it wants to exist and which defines itself by ideals that the West sees as inalienable rights: to vote, to speak your mind, to change those in power. Beijing, a Taiwanese diplomat once patiently explained to me, isn’t communist anymore. It has reverted to an earlier ethnic imperialism. This can be hard for Westerners to process because we’ve been raised to think of life as a contest of ideas, between left and right, prim socialists and cavalier conservatives, but much of the rest of the world operates according to the logic of blood."
I agree with the rest of the world. A nation is not made of values. Values have nothing to do with nations.
The idea that they have is a hasty generalisation from the USA but the USA is not a real country in the way that European countries are and anyway it is based not on values but on seventeenth and eighteenth century British culture and maybe even Anglo-Scottish blood.
Nations are nor made of ideas or even individuals. They are made of families and bloodlines.
I can't imagine a better proof of the decline of Europe than its inability to do anything in foreign policy.
Correct, I say this as Englishman who likes and admires the US.
ReplyDeleteAll the stuff about “values” is complete humbug, of course. And what the people who talk that way mean is broadly the ethos of the BBC and the Guardian, certainly not the principles of Christianity or conservatism.
ReplyDeleteMost people in the west do still believe in nation states, but the globalists have the western world by the throat and they clearly don’t.
I completely agree.
DeleteBlood matters here, whether spilled at birth or later. I am a fan of letting some such assertions be made at the polls - means of a faith, by law or else, as they were... [approx. nts.]
ReplyDeleteGnomic. By here do you mean in Romania?
DeleteNo. I am referring to where ever people get born & get killed, and make a big deal of either - enough to merit voting on.
DeleteNations may have an ethnic basis, but there is too much admixture and stranded minorities to make that the exclusive basis of belonging. A strong nation, like Israel or Japan, for instance, demands allegiance to the state based on the values, and committed to the survival, of the founding ethnos, but extends all of the privileges of citizenship to minorities - while watching them like a bloody hawk (especially the Islamic ones, and that goes double for Japan).
ReplyDelete