Of all the weird problems for our age to have oikophobia is probably the most bizarre.
Throughout history humans called their tribe “human” and everything else “the others” and bizarre ceremonies/sacrifices/rites developed out of keeping that distinction clear.
Our people hurray-good. Your people not even human. This is the beginning of human associations, and the basis of tribalism, which to an extent is the curse of mankind.
For all that I’m the first to say things like “Government, what is it good for? Killing its own people and enslaving them!” and loathe the over-extended nation-empires of the 20th century, the truth is that things are complicated when it comes to nations and empires.
Nations as a thing, governed by a distant centralized government suck rotten fish bits. But then again, it’s better than tribalism.
The dumpster fire that was the Roman Empire on many levels, with all its brutal colonial policies was much better than the tribalism before, and for that reason alone the Romans should be blessed, if nothing else. Because they invented nationality that transcended tribalism.
But how did we get from nation states where the leaders might perhaps be a little too proud of and chauvinistic about their own nation and their own people to governments — most of those in the West — that loathe their own people and want to destroy them?
Well, the short one word answer is “Marxists” which is actually hilarious because Marx loved Britain and was actually a nationalist.
Except that Marxism, being a totally effed up theory keeps going through a series of retcons to make it sort of work. And one of them was the Soviet retcon. As in “We’re international socialists, but international really means Russian.”
As the Soviet Union was the beau ideal of their fantasy, they thought of course it would lead the world to communism, and they idolized and wrote paens to this barbaric country at the edge of Asia. For… reasons. Their own countries must be run down and unfavorably compared to the splendors of the Soviet Union.
The wedge between reality and their love affair with Russia (the Soviet Union was a convenient mask Russia wore) just kept widening, but they kept clinging to it like a teenage girl with her first crush.
And when it all fell apart, they retained fury at Reagan who caused their beloved to fall. (As in the reason Obama wanted to be the Anti-Reagan, and said so. He managed it too, the traitorous little bastard.) AND they retained the certainty their own countries were evil for causing Russia to collapse. (“The good guys lost” being the catch phrase through the mid 2ks.)
They fanned out into the colleges carrying their open hatred and disdain for their countries, and taught it to a new generation, which was pushed into positions of power and–
Now, the oikophobia was there before. I know because I grew up with it all around me, directed at Portugal, and I saw it in the early eighties in the US, where everyone who was a leftist was anti-America, because America was the enemy of the USSR and therefore evil, and also so inferior to their ideal country.
I come across references, sometimes, in books of the era. And it’s startling. Like on a book talking about stargate, (the American psychic-research conducted by the military, not the TV series), apropos nothing, in the middle of it, the author tells us about this pill of some kind of natural compound that the USSR issues to all its citizens, which has been proven to extend life. Heaven alone knows if that was even true — I mean, if they issued a pill to all their citizens, let alone I’m sure the supply wouldn’t support that –and what it contained, but it was an article of faith to the bien pensant of the west at the time that the USSR not only could but would do this kind of thing, out of the goodness of its heart, for the good of all, while the US wouldn’t, because it was “capitalist” and “backward.”
You catch it too, in a lot of science fiction books of the period, that weird certainty that the USSR was more advanced and prosperous.
It is to our very great shame that we never publicized how bad things were behind the curtain when it fell. We thought of course the truth would out. Forgetting that the pictures of the concentration camps were essential in exposing Nazi horrors, and that without them the denial of what happened would be even more rampant.
Also we were hampered by the fact that by the time the USSR fell, the institutions of the west had been taken over by USSR sympathizers.
I could, here, adduce many reasons for this. There is the fact, for instance, that Marxism, as a simple, just-so story appeals to the type of sheltered, intellectual elites who don’t fit in very well in the real world but know they should be in charge because they’re “so smart.” Marxism with their “the intellectuals will lead the revolution” feeds their sense of unearned superiority. In that sense “who goes commie” is very similar to “who goes Nazi.”
But most of all, and overarching everything is the fact that commies hire only commies. They will forget everything else, and hire the ideological comrade (eh) over competence, over minority status, over connections, over in fact everything. That kind of selection bias, played hard, will replace all positions of any importance with the factor selected for more rapidly than you can imagine.
So, by the time the USSR fell all the centers of communication in the west were controlled by USSR-devotees and if not communists, communist sympathizers. This led to the misery behind the curtain never being exposed, but also to the utter fury of that class against their own countries for destroying their precious, which is how they experienced it.
As a result, what we have is elites who now not only favor a foreign country (or as they view it “internationalism”) but also hate their own countries and want to punish them.
This has led to their encouraging the outright invasion of their countries (the Gramscian retcon of Marxism said that third worlders are righteous and natural communists) by what they perceive as the dispossessed of the world. But which are in face the result of dysfunctional cultures. And also to their trying to curtail energy supply to the industrial societies of the west, because, of course, if they are rich other countries will be poor. (Amid the many sins of Marx his bloody stupidity about economics is paramount. That sh*thead never understood that it was not a finite pie.)
So, they need and want to achieve control of their countries, and then seek to destroy them in revenge.
This in turn is growing a strong nationalist trend, which is good and bad.
No, I don’t want us to get to the point we take no immigrants. In the US, at least, we will attract any number of people who WANT to become Americans. We should always choose the best of those, not by color or even perhaps formal qualification, but by a perceived willingness to work to be Americans. The “how to decide” can be solved by demanding they have some period of waiting and not requiring help before they become citizens. (We had all of those. They are fudged in various ways.) And by requiring assimilation. No Oprima dos para Espanol. Just… Fit In or f*ck Off. And weird as it might seem to you guys, there are people who consider themselves “naturally” some other nationality. French, or Italian, or English. And before the “refugee” bs, those countries had hard enough entry requirements to work on that.
I definitely don’t want humans to get to where if you’re another tribe you’re not human. Tribalism is a scourge.
But I also think internationalists are enemies of humanity. Some of them idealistic, unwitting, enemies of humanity. They don’t understand and never processed “culture” as anything more than colorful clothes and different food, and maybe skin color, which they think is somehow connected to all of that and language (which they don’t understand, most of them being linguistically slow and weird.) So they think it is possible to treat all cultures as “equally valid”, the ones that stone gay people and the ones that permit gay marriage, the ones that allow women to study physics, and the ones that insist women wear sofa covers all day everywhere, the ones that encourage people to experiment and learn how the natural world works, and the ones for whom knowledge consists of memorizing the accepted passages of a curated holy book, the ones that consider all humans as humans, and the ones that treat humans as “only those who are related to me” and everyone else should be exterminated.
Throwing all humans together in those conditions is a recipe for the most barbaric to come out on top and for the rebarbarization and retribalization of humanity. And it is precisely what it is doing, in reality.
Also, the internationalists never understood seemingly that one government, far away, who cares nothing for local conditions, is a recipe for disaster. Heck, the US is too large and too diverse for that, and we need to get back to a primacy of local authority tout de suit if we want to survive and remain civilized. The world as a “nation”? Bah. It’s a fantasy for stupid, illiterate children.
So that is the onslaught the West is under. Each nation is under the control of an “elite” who, for all intents and purposes, might as well be a hostile foreign group.
The good sign is that people, on the ground, are starting to wake up and fight back. And though it’s not widely reported, they have the “elites” treed and cornered in many places, and even here, we’ve been able to stop some of their worst excesses.
Can we win this?
As grim as it looks, yes, I think so. In fact I think it’s inevitable. The only question is how much of a mess we’ll allow them to make before patience is exhausted to the point fighting back is palatable, let alone inevitable.
Look, technically, the USSR should never have fallen. It was being propped up by the elites in our country, and they never lost faith.
And yet it fell.
Because their own system was so completely messed up that it would fall, sooner than later. With just a little less propping. It is the same now, nationally, regionally, locally.
And the push back has begun.
The only question is whether we allow nationalism to devolve to tribalism and factionalism. And how far into it.
It is my (and your) unenviable task to keep treading that fine line, and try to keep the ricochet from hitting too hard because a hard ricochet will only set us up for the next turn.
Steady as she goes. Love your country, but be aware other people are also human.
Keep at it, and be not afraid.
