0 comment Sunday, September 28, 2014 | admin
I came across this discussion at a traditional music forum which is frequented by many people from the UK.
English culture -- what is it?
If you read through the thread, (scrolll down the linked page), you will find many exasperating responses which illustrate vividly how far the leftist/globalist/multicult agenda has penetrated into people's thoughts and feelings about their own country and heritage. It ain't pretty.
I have to say, sadly, that if you posed a similar question among a group of American 'folkie' or trad music types, that the responses would be just as dismal. Still, I suppose there is a case to be made, however weak and politically correct, that America has no native culture, but is merely a patchwork of various immigrant cultures. I disagree vehemently, of course, but still there's no denying that for the last 150+ years, America has absorbed a lot of immigrants from various places, and that some melding of cultures has occurred. But the UK, or Great Britain to use an older name, has not been a magnet for exotic immigrants until the latter half of the 20th century. I am aware that various smaller waves of immigrants have come to England, but their effect on the overall way of life there was negligible, unlike the present wave of Third World interlopers.
The media, the government, and the educational establishment in the UK are much more dominated by hard-core leftists and multiculturalists than even our institutions, and they seem to have accomplished their aim of mostly obliterating the sense of a national identity and culture.
The original poster on the thread simply asked a question, and was greeted with an incredibly hostile and venomous group of responses. What a plague on Western society leftism and ''liberalism'' are. They have truly left our Western countries sick unto death with their pernicious and malevolent ideas, and we have to work to find an anti-venom for this societal toxin or it will be the end of us.
A sampling of the comments, for those who don't want to wade through a very long and obnoxious thread:
If you want to "know" about "English" Culture I suggest you join the BNP...
****
What might be marvellous is England as the first culture free nation. Done with our reformation, civil wars, slavery, industrial revolution, class division we free ourseles [sic] of the burden of culture for a voyage of new discovery without a backward glance.
Heady stuff that.
*******
"My prob with the whole kulture game is it assumes there are shared resonances which elicit a unified response"
I'd disagree with that. I think we should celebrate the diversity and eclectic nature of our culture and fight against the uniformity that is creeping in - especialy [sic] the Americanisation and the threat to our wonderful family high street shops and small food-producers posed by the big supermarkets and ludicrous EU regulations.''
A question: why is everybody ready to see the threat from ''Americanisation'' and the EU (which is indeed a threat) but unable to see the threat posed by mass immigration and cultural Marxism? They have been schooled to believe that 'fascism and racism' are the only threats.
Back to the comments - beginning with a post by what seems to be a third-world immigrant:
Is it only English people who can comment on what English Culture is? I should think that, for people living in a sizeable proportion of the globe, "English Culture" is a mess of lies with which Public Schoolboy colonizers tried to replace numerous indigenous cultures.
[posted by a 'Guest with no English connexion']
Followed by a raving multicultist:
"Okay, let's put this in some sort or rational context. There is a vast difference in being interested in one's heritage and wanting to select through rose-tinted spectacles a romantic image of a Merrie Englande. The critical word here is 'select'!
I repeat my first post. In answer to the question the simplest and most accurate response is DIVERSE. In other words every bit of England (and everywhere else) has its own culture that is unique to that area, and the influences on those cultures are manifold and frequently not English in origin. For god's sake let's celebrate the diversity!
And a programmed lefty:
''The BNP are such a load of congenital idiots they can't even get the flag right. If it's British it should be the Union Flag and not the English Flag.
The whole lot are complete arseholes and - yes - I want my flag back please, and I want it to be looked on as a proud symbol for ALL who live in England.
Next, a dedicated multiculturalist:
"English culture as opposed to what other culture?
Do you mean something intrinsically English that doesn't occur anywhere else? You won't find anything, neither will you in any other culture.''
The original poster makes a valiant effort to counter the responses she gets, which are mostly hostile to her personally and to her question. And as you can see, the BNP are special targets of opprobrium. The leftists have done a bang-up job of marginalizing and (to use an obnoxious leftist word) 'demonizing" the BNP, and any kind of national feeling at all.
Sadly, though, she yields to the race-baiting and protests more than once that she is ''not a racist'' and that she, too, loves diversity. Bad mistake. Never give in to their game and never give any credibility to their name-calling and their 'racism' nonsense. That's letting them define the terms and create the rules of the game. They must be somehow put on the defensive. But why are we on our side so lost when it comes to doing this? Too often even the more politically incorrect at some point give in to PC and begin to protest that they are not ''racist'' or ''haters.'' Or worse, they start sniping at others farther to the right as a way of showing that they are not ''fascists'' or ''racists." This needs to stop.
There are a couple of common-sense responses that at least defend the existence of an 'English culture' which is identifiable. One such post seems to come from an American:
I think there is a definitive English folk music culture. I think this maybe the point of this
discussion. Certainly you could define the North Country Border rural music as "English" or areas such as Cornwall. There is an English ballad singing style. A.L. Lloyd or Ewan McColl has popularized it. Louis Killen as well. There seems to be a fiddling style that's unique to England.
I think Elizabethan Pro-Musica defines a tradition of Campion and Dowland which is
definitively English.
There is a Cockney music culture which as analogous to the city music halls of early America such as early Broadway or Second Avenue.
As in any country, there are regional styles that are a composite of the overall "culture".
As an outsider, I find that an English culture tends to be more subdued than the American one which is more bombastic like the German culture. These are gross generalizations, of course.
In the personalities on the stage, eccentricities of comics such as Monty Python,
the Goon Show, Spike Milligan, and even America's Danny Kaye seem to define a different emphasis on humor which tend toward the oddness of the characters. I think that English humor is different than in America which has more of a wise-cracking approach. The English appreciate the role of the clown in comedy. It's no accident that Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin instituted a brand of humor that is uniquely English in my opinion. I find the English Brit-coms equally reflective of British humor unlike the stuff from Stateside.
Ralph Vaughan Williams could not have originated in America, I believe. His music has
a distinctly English character as does Percy Grainger.
The tunes of Henry the Eighth typify an English musical approach. "Pastime with Good Company" could not have been written anywhere in the world except England.
Then there's the poets.
I think a strong case can be made for English culture citing these examples for a start.''
To me this is beyond obvious, and it is almost spooky how the British posters are so angry and aggressive in denying their own culture exists.
This behavior is groupthink at its most blatant, and is evidence of brainwashing. It really goes against all common-sense expectations for people to respond with hostility to the idea that their own people have a culture, that their ancestors created a distinct way of life. For people en masse to deny such things is just bizarre. It is not natural.
And lest anybody think I am criticizing British people too much, I can say we have more than our share of such brainwashed zombies in our country, sadly. If I am critical of the British in this context, it's only because I feel a strong affinity to them, based on common ancestry and history. All of us in America, even those who have no actual British ancestry, have partaken of a culture which has its origins in Great Britain, most specifically in England, so in a sense we are all a part of the extended family. So all of us should feel some distress over what is happening to Britain and to our cousins there, even though they seem not to want to own us as their kin.
I realize the commenters at that forum may be atypical; the 'folkies' I have known here and on the other side of the Atlantic are often, for some reason, rabid leftists. I posed a question before about why this is true, and I can't explain it fully. It makes no sense, on the face of it, to claim to love the traditional music of your people and country, and to care enough about preserving old songs, dances, and stories if you think that your country has in fact 'no culture of its own'. But leftists and liberals, it seems, are adept at holding many contradictory and nonsensical ideas at the same time.
The original poster is accused repeatedly of promoting a nostalgic view of 'Merrie England', which these cynics say never existed, or perhaps never should have existed. Why are leftists so cynical and hateful when it comes to the past? They seem to have declared all-out war on the past, and on memory, as I've said before. I am sometimes accused too of invoking an America that 'never was', a glamor-lensed view of old America. I realize the past is gone, and that no era or place is ever perfect. But by invoking the old America, I am not simply wallowing in teary nostalgia, but trying to awaken amnesiacs and try to bring them to their senses. Suppose an individual has amnesia (maybe it does happen outside movies sometimes) and has no recollection of who he is, where he comes from, where he belongs, and what he has accomplished? Our memory is a big part of who we are from moment to moment. Our memories define us to a great extent. We can't willfully forego our memories, erase our history, and still fully function as we are meant to be. So it is important to evoke the past in a warped world which denies and distorts that past.
I've quoted the following passage since the earliest days of this blog:
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.
Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. " - Milan Hubl, quoted by Milan Kundera in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'
English culture -- what is it?
If you read through the thread, (scrolll down the linked page), you will find many exasperating responses which illustrate vividly how far the leftist/globalist/multicult agenda has penetrated into people's thoughts and feelings about their own country and heritage. It ain't pretty.
I have to say, sadly, that if you posed a similar question among a group of American 'folkie' or trad music types, that the responses would be just as dismal. Still, I suppose there is a case to be made, however weak and politically correct, that America has no native culture, but is merely a patchwork of various immigrant cultures. I disagree vehemently, of course, but still there's no denying that for the last 150+ years, America has absorbed a lot of immigrants from various places, and that some melding of cultures has occurred. But the UK, or Great Britain to use an older name, has not been a magnet for exotic immigrants until the latter half of the 20th century. I am aware that various smaller waves of immigrants have come to England, but their effect on the overall way of life there was negligible, unlike the present wave of Third World interlopers.
The media, the government, and the educational establishment in the UK are much more dominated by hard-core leftists and multiculturalists than even our institutions, and they seem to have accomplished their aim of mostly obliterating the sense of a national identity and culture.
The original poster on the thread simply asked a question, and was greeted with an incredibly hostile and venomous group of responses. What a plague on Western society leftism and ''liberalism'' are. They have truly left our Western countries sick unto death with their pernicious and malevolent ideas, and we have to work to find an anti-venom for this societal toxin or it will be the end of us.
A sampling of the comments, for those who don't want to wade through a very long and obnoxious thread:
If you want to "know" about "English" Culture I suggest you join the BNP...
****
What might be marvellous is England as the first culture free nation. Done with our reformation, civil wars, slavery, industrial revolution, class division we free ourseles [sic] of the burden of culture for a voyage of new discovery without a backward glance.
Heady stuff that.
*******
"My prob with the whole kulture game is it assumes there are shared resonances which elicit a unified response"
I'd disagree with that. I think we should celebrate the diversity and eclectic nature of our culture and fight against the uniformity that is creeping in - especialy [sic] the Americanisation and the threat to our wonderful family high street shops and small food-producers posed by the big supermarkets and ludicrous EU regulations.''
A question: why is everybody ready to see the threat from ''Americanisation'' and the EU (which is indeed a threat) but unable to see the threat posed by mass immigration and cultural Marxism? They have been schooled to believe that 'fascism and racism' are the only threats.
Back to the comments - beginning with a post by what seems to be a third-world immigrant:
Is it only English people who can comment on what English Culture is? I should think that, for people living in a sizeable proportion of the globe, "English Culture" is a mess of lies with which Public Schoolboy colonizers tried to replace numerous indigenous cultures.
[posted by a 'Guest with no English connexion']
Followed by a raving multicultist:
"Okay, let's put this in some sort or rational context. There is a vast difference in being interested in one's heritage and wanting to select through rose-tinted spectacles a romantic image of a Merrie Englande. The critical word here is 'select'!
I repeat my first post. In answer to the question the simplest and most accurate response is DIVERSE. In other words every bit of England (and everywhere else) has its own culture that is unique to that area, and the influences on those cultures are manifold and frequently not English in origin. For god's sake let's celebrate the diversity!
And a programmed lefty:
''The BNP are such a load of congenital idiots they can't even get the flag right. If it's British it should be the Union Flag and not the English Flag.
The whole lot are complete arseholes and - yes - I want my flag back please, and I want it to be looked on as a proud symbol for ALL who live in England.
Next, a dedicated multiculturalist:
"English culture as opposed to what other culture?
Do you mean something intrinsically English that doesn't occur anywhere else? You won't find anything, neither will you in any other culture.''
The original poster makes a valiant effort to counter the responses she gets, which are mostly hostile to her personally and to her question. And as you can see, the BNP are special targets of opprobrium. The leftists have done a bang-up job of marginalizing and (to use an obnoxious leftist word) 'demonizing" the BNP, and any kind of national feeling at all.
Sadly, though, she yields to the race-baiting and protests more than once that she is ''not a racist'' and that she, too, loves diversity. Bad mistake. Never give in to their game and never give any credibility to their name-calling and their 'racism' nonsense. That's letting them define the terms and create the rules of the game. They must be somehow put on the defensive. But why are we on our side so lost when it comes to doing this? Too often even the more politically incorrect at some point give in to PC and begin to protest that they are not ''racist'' or ''haters.'' Or worse, they start sniping at others farther to the right as a way of showing that they are not ''fascists'' or ''racists." This needs to stop.
There are a couple of common-sense responses that at least defend the existence of an 'English culture' which is identifiable. One such post seems to come from an American:
I think there is a definitive English folk music culture. I think this maybe the point of this
discussion. Certainly you could define the North Country Border rural music as "English" or areas such as Cornwall. There is an English ballad singing style. A.L. Lloyd or Ewan McColl has popularized it. Louis Killen as well. There seems to be a fiddling style that's unique to England.
I think Elizabethan Pro-Musica defines a tradition of Campion and Dowland which is
definitively English.
There is a Cockney music culture which as analogous to the city music halls of early America such as early Broadway or Second Avenue.
As in any country, there are regional styles that are a composite of the overall "culture".
As an outsider, I find that an English culture tends to be more subdued than the American one which is more bombastic like the German culture. These are gross generalizations, of course.
In the personalities on the stage, eccentricities of comics such as Monty Python,
the Goon Show, Spike Milligan, and even America's Danny Kaye seem to define a different emphasis on humor which tend toward the oddness of the characters. I think that English humor is different than in America which has more of a wise-cracking approach. The English appreciate the role of the clown in comedy. It's no accident that Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin instituted a brand of humor that is uniquely English in my opinion. I find the English Brit-coms equally reflective of British humor unlike the stuff from Stateside.
Ralph Vaughan Williams could not have originated in America, I believe. His music has
a distinctly English character as does Percy Grainger.
The tunes of Henry the Eighth typify an English musical approach. "Pastime with Good Company" could not have been written anywhere in the world except England.
Then there's the poets.
I think a strong case can be made for English culture citing these examples for a start.''
To me this is beyond obvious, and it is almost spooky how the British posters are so angry and aggressive in denying their own culture exists.
This behavior is groupthink at its most blatant, and is evidence of brainwashing. It really goes against all common-sense expectations for people to respond with hostility to the idea that their own people have a culture, that their ancestors created a distinct way of life. For people en masse to deny such things is just bizarre. It is not natural.
And lest anybody think I am criticizing British people too much, I can say we have more than our share of such brainwashed zombies in our country, sadly. If I am critical of the British in this context, it's only because I feel a strong affinity to them, based on common ancestry and history. All of us in America, even those who have no actual British ancestry, have partaken of a culture which has its origins in Great Britain, most specifically in England, so in a sense we are all a part of the extended family. So all of us should feel some distress over what is happening to Britain and to our cousins there, even though they seem not to want to own us as their kin.
I realize the commenters at that forum may be atypical; the 'folkies' I have known here and on the other side of the Atlantic are often, for some reason, rabid leftists. I posed a question before about why this is true, and I can't explain it fully. It makes no sense, on the face of it, to claim to love the traditional music of your people and country, and to care enough about preserving old songs, dances, and stories if you think that your country has in fact 'no culture of its own'. But leftists and liberals, it seems, are adept at holding many contradictory and nonsensical ideas at the same time.
The original poster is accused repeatedly of promoting a nostalgic view of 'Merrie England', which these cynics say never existed, or perhaps never should have existed. Why are leftists so cynical and hateful when it comes to the past? They seem to have declared all-out war on the past, and on memory, as I've said before. I am sometimes accused too of invoking an America that 'never was', a glamor-lensed view of old America. I realize the past is gone, and that no era or place is ever perfect. But by invoking the old America, I am not simply wallowing in teary nostalgia, but trying to awaken amnesiacs and try to bring them to their senses. Suppose an individual has amnesia (maybe it does happen outside movies sometimes) and has no recollection of who he is, where he comes from, where he belongs, and what he has accomplished? Our memory is a big part of who we are from moment to moment. Our memories define us to a great extent. We can't willfully forego our memories, erase our history, and still fully function as we are meant to be. So it is important to evoke the past in a warped world which denies and distorts that past.
I've quoted the following passage since the earliest days of this blog:
"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.
Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. " - Milan Hubl, quoted by Milan Kundera in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'
Labels: British Culture, Cultural Marxism, English Culture, Folkways, Gramscianism, Multiculturalism, National Identity, National Memory, Propaganda, Traditional Music
0 comment Monday, June 16, 2014 | admin
There's a discussion at Audacious Epigone about racial self-identification, by ethnic group, including a table showing the percentage of people from each group who consider race or ethnicity as one of the most important means of self-identification.
The results for minorities (including Asians, that ever-popular model minority) show that they have higher levels of racial self-identification, with Hispanics having the highest, and blacks next. Anyone surprised?
Guess which group is last?
British-descended Americans, with Scandinavian in the next-lowest category.
The people who identify strictly as 'Americans' are just a little lower in the rankings than the minorities, and this is not surprising, since many of those who call themselves simply 'American' are often Southron people and even when not from the South, tend to be the proud patriot types.
Others say that many of these who say they are 'just Americans' are in fact those stereotyped Scots-Irish or those of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman descent. The latter groups are usually of colonial stock, and their ties to the ''old country'' are so remote that they tend to think of themselves as Americans, with no hyphen.
My problem with studies like this (and I am no scientist, nor do I claim to be) is that I think most people's self-identification is hazy or inaccurate, with the exception of the later immigrant stock, those who have held to their European identity from, say, Ireland or Italy or Eastern Europe.
Many people who are mixed colonial stock/ethnic immigrant stock don't count their old-stock (usually English) ancestry because it's too remote, whereas they have heard stories of an immigrant great-grandfather -- hence they identify with that ethnicity, because it's the only one they know with certainty,
There are any number of charts and maps and census records which show America as being populated mostly by German-stock people, and that never seems credible to me. The dominance of English surnames or British Isles surnames seems, according to common sense, to indicate that there is quite a bit more British ancestry here than German.
Absent any real documentation of one's ancestry, many people are just guessing, or mentioning the only ethnicity in their background that they are aware of.
I've found in doing genealogy and communicating with many people about family history that many Americans seem to have ancestral equivalents of 'urban legends' or myths which they believe, but which are proven false when the research is done, and records examined. What I am saying is that relying on self-reporting is not a good way to determine who is who, or how many people of a given ethnicity there are in America.
Genealogy is becoming more popular, but many people still don't know their family history or lineage, except in the vaguest sense. I think this is a sad situation that contributes to White Americans' relatively low levels of racial/ethnic consciousness. If you don't know very much about who your forebears were, or how they came to this country, there's little basis for pride or racial consciousness. Neither is there a strong attachment to this country or your neighbor if you think of yourself as just a generic 'American' whose allegiance is to vague things like 'freedom' and 'democracy' rather than to a kin group or ancestral soil.
One thing that becomes very clear when you research your colonial-stock ancestry is that you find that you have many collateral relatives who are of Jamestown founding stock, or Massachusetts colonial descent. You learn just how many living Americans you are cousins to. We are not a nation of random, unconnected , rootless, individuals, but those of us who have been here for a few generations have unimagined connections to many Americans.
Of course, with the mass immigration now being engineered by our rulers, the connections will be broken down and we will truly become deracinated and isolated. That's the intention. The lack of cohesion is becoming painfully evident.
Until Americans either make an effort to learn their own family histories, and until the ''proposition nation'' and ''nation of immigrants'' propaganda weakens its hold, White Americans will be this deracinated and put-upon people who let others walk all over us, while we play genial nice guys with low self-respect.
The comments on the AE article bring up a number of popular notions, such as the idea that Protestantism contributes to a low racial consciousness while Catholicism does the opposite. Someone mentions that the northern European countries which were historically Protestant have the worst immigration problems. But it seems that historically Catholic countries (Spain, Ireland, Italy, and France) have their share of problems with immigration and multiculturalism, although the problem in Ireland is more recent.
One thing that seems always to be ignored in these attempts to link religion to low racial awareness is the fact that few people in Europe, relatively speaking, have a real Christian faith. Though these countries may still be called 'Protestant' or Catholic, they are in fact post-Christian. That fact has already been publicly acknowledged in the UK.
In all European countries (except perhaps for Eastern Europe) the Christian faith is more or less vestigial, with no widespread belief among the populations. Secularism and liberal/Marxist/leftist beliefs have displaced Christianity, or corrupted what is left of it into a parody of itself.
Does the individualism which is popularly said to characterize the northern Europeans, especially Anglo-Saxons, predispose them to be deracinated and hyperindividualistic? I would say these traits were much less common in the days when the Christian faith was still a living faith in Europe. Despite the popular idea that communism or leftism are communally oriented and anti-individualistic, I think there is a paradox there. While many leftists emphasize the ''community'' and 'the people'' at least nominally, the mindset is at least as much influenced by philosophical ideas gleaned from people like Nietzsche and Sartre, which focus on the individual. The average liberal or leftist believes he is a blank slate on which he creates himself. Having an ethnic or racial identity is too constricting, too limiting. The liberal likes to believe he is his own creation, and that any ascribed identity is false or imprisoning. And besides, race is a social construct, and we all bleed red, and there's only one race, etc. etc.
If you ask me, much of what is wrong with the West comes from those toxic ideas, rather than from a feeble and hollowed-out Christianity.
I will never understand why so many keep looking to a long-abandoned religion to explain the attitudes of today's muddled and addled White liberals. Christianity is anathema to them; they probably grew up in secular, or even anti-Christian homes, and today's Western liberals have certainly been indoctrinated with secular dogmas and media propaganda. America still has some faithful Christians, but we can see the rot setting in even in some traditionally conservative churches.
Why then are northern European-descended people so lacking in racial consciousness? The subject has been discussed many times, and the answer is not clear-cut. There's no single answer.
Perhaps one seldom-mentioned possibility is that for a long while in the early days of this republic, the Anglo-Saxons who formed the core of the population, and the majority, were unselfconscious because there was little ''diversity''; the groups who were here at the beginning, such as English, Scots, Dutch, and some Germans, were all close kin, and all assimilated to Anglo-Saxon ways. There was no need for forming a strong identity in competition with others who opposed the majority.
In fact, up until the mass immigration of the Ellis Island era, Americans of Anglo descent were the dominant group with no one to seriously challenge their power. Of course that all changed in the last 60 years or so, and I think many old-stock Americans have only now begun to notice, so secure did they feel in control of this country.
We can argue about whether there is some genetic tendency (or flaw, really) among Anglo-Saxons that makes them more individualist and less racially conscious, However I would say there isn't much evidence of that. Anglo-Saxons, wherever they've lived, used to have a very strong and assertive identity which enabled them to conquer and dominate just about wherever they went. They also had good group cohesion in an ethnic and racial sense when they settled this country, else there would have been widespread mixing with other races, as in Latin America. It looks as though that stereotype is turned on its head, as the conquistadores left mixed offspring everywhere they went, and not just here and there, while the English preserved their own people and customs and faith when they came here.
It's also noteworthy that the English colonists brought families with them when they crossed the Atlantic; they intended to found communities here, and not just to explore or plunder. Jamestown at first had no women, but earlier efforts at settling Virginia did include women. But Jamestown eventually included women who came over from England to marry the colonists.
So the English and the Dutch and the Huguenots tended to bring women and children with them to America, and to found families and communities, while the supposedly more family-oriented Southern Europeans did not do so when they came here, for the most part.
My point is, the idea of English 'Protestant' hyper-individualism is exaggerated. So much of what is said in these discussions is based on cliche and stereotype. Sure, stereotypes have a basis in fact, but in this case, so much of what is said about the founding stock of this country is based on an oversimplified image of Englishmen or Anglo-Saxons.
In fact, I'd say many Americans know too little about the country and people which in essence created America. And this won't change as long as so many of the real-life ''Albion's seed'' don't even know who they are, and are content not to know.
Part of the mission of this blog, since the beginning, has been to awaken some of the dormant racial memory of who we are, where we came from, and then to decide where we are going.
So I will keep returning to this subject of the ''vanishing American', especially the neglected and overlooked and stereotyped Anglo-American.
The results for minorities (including Asians, that ever-popular model minority) show that they have higher levels of racial self-identification, with Hispanics having the highest, and blacks next. Anyone surprised?
Guess which group is last?
British-descended Americans, with Scandinavian in the next-lowest category.
The people who identify strictly as 'Americans' are just a little lower in the rankings than the minorities, and this is not surprising, since many of those who call themselves simply 'American' are often Southron people and even when not from the South, tend to be the proud patriot types.
Others say that many of these who say they are 'just Americans' are in fact those stereotyped Scots-Irish or those of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman descent. The latter groups are usually of colonial stock, and their ties to the ''old country'' are so remote that they tend to think of themselves as Americans, with no hyphen.
My problem with studies like this (and I am no scientist, nor do I claim to be) is that I think most people's self-identification is hazy or inaccurate, with the exception of the later immigrant stock, those who have held to their European identity from, say, Ireland or Italy or Eastern Europe.
Many people who are mixed colonial stock/ethnic immigrant stock don't count their old-stock (usually English) ancestry because it's too remote, whereas they have heard stories of an immigrant great-grandfather -- hence they identify with that ethnicity, because it's the only one they know with certainty,
There are any number of charts and maps and census records which show America as being populated mostly by German-stock people, and that never seems credible to me. The dominance of English surnames or British Isles surnames seems, according to common sense, to indicate that there is quite a bit more British ancestry here than German.
Absent any real documentation of one's ancestry, many people are just guessing, or mentioning the only ethnicity in their background that they are aware of.
I've found in doing genealogy and communicating with many people about family history that many Americans seem to have ancestral equivalents of 'urban legends' or myths which they believe, but which are proven false when the research is done, and records examined. What I am saying is that relying on self-reporting is not a good way to determine who is who, or how many people of a given ethnicity there are in America.
Genealogy is becoming more popular, but many people still don't know their family history or lineage, except in the vaguest sense. I think this is a sad situation that contributes to White Americans' relatively low levels of racial/ethnic consciousness. If you don't know very much about who your forebears were, or how they came to this country, there's little basis for pride or racial consciousness. Neither is there a strong attachment to this country or your neighbor if you think of yourself as just a generic 'American' whose allegiance is to vague things like 'freedom' and 'democracy' rather than to a kin group or ancestral soil.
One thing that becomes very clear when you research your colonial-stock ancestry is that you find that you have many collateral relatives who are of Jamestown founding stock, or Massachusetts colonial descent. You learn just how many living Americans you are cousins to. We are not a nation of random, unconnected , rootless, individuals, but those of us who have been here for a few generations have unimagined connections to many Americans.
Of course, with the mass immigration now being engineered by our rulers, the connections will be broken down and we will truly become deracinated and isolated. That's the intention. The lack of cohesion is becoming painfully evident.
Until Americans either make an effort to learn their own family histories, and until the ''proposition nation'' and ''nation of immigrants'' propaganda weakens its hold, White Americans will be this deracinated and put-upon people who let others walk all over us, while we play genial nice guys with low self-respect.
The comments on the AE article bring up a number of popular notions, such as the idea that Protestantism contributes to a low racial consciousness while Catholicism does the opposite. Someone mentions that the northern European countries which were historically Protestant have the worst immigration problems. But it seems that historically Catholic countries (Spain, Ireland, Italy, and France) have their share of problems with immigration and multiculturalism, although the problem in Ireland is more recent.
One thing that seems always to be ignored in these attempts to link religion to low racial awareness is the fact that few people in Europe, relatively speaking, have a real Christian faith. Though these countries may still be called 'Protestant' or Catholic, they are in fact post-Christian. That fact has already been publicly acknowledged in the UK.
In all European countries (except perhaps for Eastern Europe) the Christian faith is more or less vestigial, with no widespread belief among the populations. Secularism and liberal/Marxist/leftist beliefs have displaced Christianity, or corrupted what is left of it into a parody of itself.
Does the individualism which is popularly said to characterize the northern Europeans, especially Anglo-Saxons, predispose them to be deracinated and hyperindividualistic? I would say these traits were much less common in the days when the Christian faith was still a living faith in Europe. Despite the popular idea that communism or leftism are communally oriented and anti-individualistic, I think there is a paradox there. While many leftists emphasize the ''community'' and 'the people'' at least nominally, the mindset is at least as much influenced by philosophical ideas gleaned from people like Nietzsche and Sartre, which focus on the individual. The average liberal or leftist believes he is a blank slate on which he creates himself. Having an ethnic or racial identity is too constricting, too limiting. The liberal likes to believe he is his own creation, and that any ascribed identity is false or imprisoning. And besides, race is a social construct, and we all bleed red, and there's only one race, etc. etc.
If you ask me, much of what is wrong with the West comes from those toxic ideas, rather than from a feeble and hollowed-out Christianity.
I will never understand why so many keep looking to a long-abandoned religion to explain the attitudes of today's muddled and addled White liberals. Christianity is anathema to them; they probably grew up in secular, or even anti-Christian homes, and today's Western liberals have certainly been indoctrinated with secular dogmas and media propaganda. America still has some faithful Christians, but we can see the rot setting in even in some traditionally conservative churches.
Why then are northern European-descended people so lacking in racial consciousness? The subject has been discussed many times, and the answer is not clear-cut. There's no single answer.
Perhaps one seldom-mentioned possibility is that for a long while in the early days of this republic, the Anglo-Saxons who formed the core of the population, and the majority, were unselfconscious because there was little ''diversity''; the groups who were here at the beginning, such as English, Scots, Dutch, and some Germans, were all close kin, and all assimilated to Anglo-Saxon ways. There was no need for forming a strong identity in competition with others who opposed the majority.
In fact, up until the mass immigration of the Ellis Island era, Americans of Anglo descent were the dominant group with no one to seriously challenge their power. Of course that all changed in the last 60 years or so, and I think many old-stock Americans have only now begun to notice, so secure did they feel in control of this country.
We can argue about whether there is some genetic tendency (or flaw, really) among Anglo-Saxons that makes them more individualist and less racially conscious, However I would say there isn't much evidence of that. Anglo-Saxons, wherever they've lived, used to have a very strong and assertive identity which enabled them to conquer and dominate just about wherever they went. They also had good group cohesion in an ethnic and racial sense when they settled this country, else there would have been widespread mixing with other races, as in Latin America. It looks as though that stereotype is turned on its head, as the conquistadores left mixed offspring everywhere they went, and not just here and there, while the English preserved their own people and customs and faith when they came here.
It's also noteworthy that the English colonists brought families with them when they crossed the Atlantic; they intended to found communities here, and not just to explore or plunder. Jamestown at first had no women, but earlier efforts at settling Virginia did include women. But Jamestown eventually included women who came over from England to marry the colonists.
So the English and the Dutch and the Huguenots tended to bring women and children with them to America, and to found families and communities, while the supposedly more family-oriented Southern Europeans did not do so when they came here, for the most part.
My point is, the idea of English 'Protestant' hyper-individualism is exaggerated. So much of what is said in these discussions is based on cliche and stereotype. Sure, stereotypes have a basis in fact, but in this case, so much of what is said about the founding stock of this country is based on an oversimplified image of Englishmen or Anglo-Saxons.
In fact, I'd say many Americans know too little about the country and people which in essence created America. And this won't change as long as so many of the real-life ''Albion's seed'' don't even know who they are, and are content not to know.
Part of the mission of this blog, since the beginning, has been to awaken some of the dormant racial memory of who we are, where we came from, and then to decide where we are going.
So I will keep returning to this subject of the ''vanishing American', especially the neglected and overlooked and stereotyped Anglo-American.
Labels: American Identity, Anglo-Americans, Ethnocentrism, Ethnonationalism, Individualism, Liberalism, National Memory, National Question, Racial Consciousness