I swear on the current endless edit that if I hear one more supposedly smart, normally thinking person talk about our being a nation of “blood and soil” I’m going to go on a rampage.
Now my rampages usually involve a lot of words and explaining to people why they’re out of what passes for their minds, so it might already be too late.
I think part of the problem with this is that we have two camps that are absolutely convinced that the US is “blood and soil”: one is foreigners who have never been here, and have actually not the remotest clue what the US is like, what it looks like and what actually happens here, other than the portraits in our utterly bonkers media; the others are Americans who either have no clue what blood and soil means (I’ve had some explain it to me as having a border and people having died for our territory. Rolls eyes.) OR who don’t realize what profound bullshit “blood and soil” is in ANY modern nation, but PARTICULARLY in the US. Or how dramatically different the US is from every other nation.
So, first let’s speak to the foreigners: you don’t understand the US and won’t unless you move here, and ACCULTURATE at least enough to see what’s around you not through old-country eyes. Put a pin in this, we’ll return to it.
Second, yeah, we are a nation with soil and multiple generations have bled on it. However we are also a nation who pragmatically bought a huge portion of its land, which is not a thing normally done for a blood and soil nation. (Yes, Israel is an exception.) Our best model really is a theocracy: a nation informed by beliefs, which sought and obtained land to be faithful to its beliefs in. Put a pin in that, and we’ll return to it too.
Normally blood-and-soil implies that your ancestors lived there, their bones and blood are mixed with the land. Etc. etc. You are of the land, the land is of you. It also implies — which is what Americans don’t get — that you and your ancestors are part of a genetic, lumpen heritage. That everyone in the country is cousins, so to put it.
This is very rarely true in modern nations. Unless nations are really tribes (and here I don’t know if any of those still exist, because I don’t know enough about Asia and the weirder parts of Africa.) Okay, this is the part Americans born and raised here don’t get:
Nations of unified ancestry are practically non-existent anymore. No, really. Just in Europe, regardless of what the claimed ancestry in, there have been so many continent spanning wars with troop movements, rape, colonization in some form, etc, that there is no “pure” anything nation.
The people here claiming we’re really Anglo-saxon and our heritage of freedom is because of that make me giggle hysterically. Because while there were Anglo Saxons back there, they were already pretty diluted (celts, Romans, heaven knows what, but apparently Iberians — probably Celts) by the time the Norman invaded, and after that… No one shares a nation with another breed for centuries without becoming more or less hybridized. And the answer is always more.
And no, don’t go waving a 23 and me kit in my face. I know what mine says, but what you have to understand is it compares to present day populations and to what people report themselves as. I love making fun of Fauxahontas as much as anyone, and to be fair, her genealogy really seems to be a tissue of lies. BUT her genetic test isn’t proof of anything. Most of you who have Amerindian blood won’t show it on 23 and me, because Amerindians were genetically overwhelmed and tribal leaders don’t encourage members to test, because even they have very little that can be identified as such. Which means almost any Amerindian that shows in a 23 and me test is from South America. (I have…. an irrelevant amount, but more than Warren. I figure great great great great grandad was a traveling man.)
It’s like this: yes, most people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. In peace time. But this discounts war time, armies, refugees in time of famine. Traveling — forgive me — salesmen (mostly sailors and selling expeditions) who might live and die near where they were born but spread their seed with a high dispersion tip. It ignores traveling mendicants, crusades (yes, Portugal and Spain were once crusade territory and were mostly liberated by Proto- French.) It ignores nobility and their marriages and the fact that while Prima Nocta was made up, men with money and property sleeping around wasn’t.
I’ll let you cast a cursory glance at European history and then come back and tell me, with brass face that Europeans are distinct blood-per-nationality nations.
Now we get to the tricky part, though. The tricky part is that THEY THINK THEY ARE. There is a distinct effort ongoing since about the 14th or 15th century where European nations really pushed on thinking of themselves as breeds (before that the divisions were smaller and more complicated) and spent a lot of capital on propaganda to make their people think of themselves as such. There are books, poems, paintings, etc. etc. ad nauseum extolling the “so and so race” where the “race” is the name of the nation.
And it works, kind of. It works, because it slots into the part of the brain who wants to live in a family band like our hominin ancestors. And the problem here is that it’s exactly what modern day Americans are falling for as well.
Now for the European nations believing they are a “race” (I refuse to tell dad about my 23 and me, because he keeps going on about the Portuguese “race.” Friends of mine, I have more Spanish than Portuguese, and both of them are less than 50% together.) is a survival necessity. They have nothing else to hold them together, but their history, their shared sense of a past and this idea they’re all cousins.
Except– It makes it very hard to assimilate other people. And it is part of the reason the idiots importing the rest of the world by the bucket full are doing stupid ass shit like making movies where there are black nuns in England in the middle ages and they’re unremarkable (people, Portuguese, who were commonish immigrants into Great Britain since…. ever were called “Blackamoors” because my level of tan was “black” and remarkable in Northern Europe. (No, it’s not a contradiction. No nation of Europe is pure anything, but the imports might make the tan level slightly darker, but not enough to count as mediterranean unless it were a full blown invasion, as it arguably is now. Think about it, the English messed around in India forever, but Indians aren’t suddenly blond and blue eyed. That’s not how genetics works.) ) or where there is black nobility in regency England, or… They are trying to create the idea that multi-racial society is normal and claiming otherwise is suppression.
This is as much bullshit as “our country is a race.” And it is for Europe, lethal, destroying bullshit. They are equipped to cope with admixture in very small numbers, until they forget it ever existed. Nothing else. Anything more, and they tear themselves apart. Remove the idea that they’re even supposed to be one thing and they…. well, they die, which most of Europe seems to be trying to do, though people are still fighting back.
Which bring us to America. America has never defined itself as “we are all one thing.” Go and read biographies from the time before the revolution. There were enough Germans that it is arguable whether they’re mostly ‘English’ (under which Irish and Scottish often hid) or ‘German’. But there’s also, because the colonization happened at a time of great turmoil, a lot of French (And a lot more were added at the time of the revolution.) Some Spaniards, and I’m sorry, if you are from New England, a lot of Portuguese. Entire villages of them. Mostly because the Portuguese fight, eat and make Portuguese so that they routinely bust the restraints of their altogether too small allotment of land. (Or used to. These days the colonization seems to go the other way.)
Anglo-Saxons? For the love of little fishes. Not a chance. People who thought they were, while everything else had fallen in? To an extent.
Mostly, ultimately they were a stew of Europe. What made them different is that even in fairly intolerant times, the Founding Fathers, within being men of their time were “tolerant.” There were Jews who fought for independence, and at a time where Catholics were the debil, one signed the declaration of independence.
The nation they created is a culture, a creed, and VERY TOLERANT of appearance discrepancies or religious nutbaggery. (Mostly because we’re all religious nutbags. Even the atheists are very vehement, more so than anywhere else in the world by and large. But we’re all nutbags of a different kind.) One of the things I can’t hope to convey to the family is that I have friends from every national/racial background and worse of every possible religion and some fairly impossible ones. And we don’t fight about it. We might pray for each other in the privacy of our hearts, etc, but mostly we just take people for what they do/are, and don’t hang too much on the differences of religion and color. This despite the left’s push to make us care only about it, mind.
Here’s the thing: faced with an invasion of people, facilitated by the leftist nuts after their color revolution, who care nothing for and do not even understand our culture and our basic national beliefs, people are rebounding by screaming “blood and soil.”
This is wrong. Specifically this is wrong for us. What holds us together is our civic religion, our culture, our ability to be a nation despite all superficial differences.
It might be right for Europe where most nations can claim “Our ancestors lived here, and their bones and blood mixed with the soil. We are the land.” Yeah, sure, it’s not even close to as uniform as they pretend, but it is their SOLE REASON FOR EXISTING AND OCCUPYING A PLACE.
Now, are we just a creed or a nation? We’re both. Our nation is where we can exert our creed in peace. In that we are closest to a theocracy, and might in fact be one, albeit a theocracy without a theos. (We wouldn’t be the first or the last in history.) Our borders matter, our soil matters, because without them we can’t live the way we believe we should. Our culture matters, because diluting it by too-fast import of people not in the least interested in becoming of us will destroy us as a nation.
However what holds us together is not a real, or imagined genetic heritage. Most Americans, knowing or unknowing, are mutts. And we’ve lived here too short a time and have too weird burial practices for us to say we live in the remains of our ancestors, as it were.
Going down that path is just stupid. First of all, even if you go by “must have had ancestors here at the time of independence” if you also say can’t have immigrants in the last three generations, you’re going to exclude everyone but three people, who have 15 fingers a piece and love to play the banjo. I mean, my husband and my sons both fail to qualify, despite qualifying for the daughters of the American Revolution scholarships.
If you try to kick 99% — or let’s be generous and a little crazy and say 80% — of the population out of “America” you’re the one who will end up stomped and ignored. So, on the practical level this is crazy.
But let’ say you managed it. Are you going to tell me we have a higher Anglo-Saxon component than England? Some guarantee of liberty-in-the-blood.
The sad news I have to give you is that there is no genetic inheritance of liberty. Liberty is not natural to humans in a state of nature, and we must struggle for it every step of the way.
The good news is if you don’t go looking for it in the blood and soil, you are allowed to say “Our nationality is the culture, so fit in or fuck off.”
Which is also a good counter to the idiots who claim opposition to invasion is “racism.” No race, all culture. Changing cultures is difficult, mind, but it is not impossible, and it should be the basic demand on any immigrant.
Don’t accommodate their language, their quaint customs, their…. Sure, take what you like (food, mostly. Some clothing) but don’t take the rest, and don’t encourage them to keep it. They want to be of us, they have to become American. I’m here to tell you it’s possible, if not painless.
The really good news is that America, as it is, is the only possible model for out-of-Earth colonization.
Yes, I know, science fiction is full of “nation planets” but that’s not how it will work out. Due to the cost and the need for high skills, space colonies will draw from everywhere. Which means a culture like America which believes specific things, but is able to tolerate differences in color, creed and other such discrepancies is the best possible model for a culture that will conquer the stars.
Don’t fall back into Europe. They have nothing we want. Our home has always been in the future, and we’re going there.
According To Hoyt 