The Americanization of All Values: Part III

Americanization, in the early 20^th century, activities that were designed to prepare foreign-born residents of the United States for full participation in citizenship. It aimed not only at the achievement of naturalization but also at an understanding of and commitment to principles of American life and work.

— Britannica.com

You think it’s impossible? This has all happened before. If the names weren’t Jennings & Rall, they would be names like…the British East India Trading Company. If it wasn’t Ravenwood, it’d be the Hessian Mercenaries.

— Jericho (2006-2008 television series)

In Part 1 of this essay I employ the relatively old term ‘Americanization’ to describe the process of making individuals believe, by various irrational and often non-rational means, that the United States is or should be a model for how every nation is and should be — in today’s propagandistic jargon, a model of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’ But why should it be? Since the United States is one of the youngest of nations, why should such a new thing — any new thing — which has on the long timeline of history not yet proved its correctness, be seen as an exemplar? From its pre-national days, the United States was — and still is, as a great many minds perceive — a Great Experiment. Before it was a legal nation, it was created by individuals who left native lands because of — for the very reason of — what is now called ‘lack of diversity,’ specifically religious diversity. The Pilgrims fled England in the 1620s to escape religious persecution and settled in what is now Massachusetts; they were soon followed by the Puritans for the same reason. This process at the beginning of ‘America’ was essentially different, however, than that which occurred around the same time in other lands colonized by Europeans. European migration to Australia, beginning in 1788 with the establishment of a British convict settlement there, happened not out of a desire to create a place to practice one’s devotion (to ‘promote diversity’). Instead, it was begun in order to jettison undesirables, thereby placing them in a situation more restrictive (culturally speaking) than the one they left. In New Zealand, although the original wave of modern immigration was European, it was, again, not based on a desire for freedom of expression — ‘diversity’ — but economics: booming whaling and sealing industries and the resultant traders and missionaries arriving in the wake of specifically pecuniary thinking and motives. European migration to New Zealand and Australia was not, as in the case of the earliest immigrants to the future Thirteen Colonies, based on plans to create an environment in which different kinds of individuals could realize their human potential. Finally (and there are many other examples), when the Spanish Crown of Castile established the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542, this was, in time-honored fashion, consciously pursued for the purposes of trade, acquisition of wealth, and an unclear form of evangelism.

The United States and its predecessor colonies on the Eastern seaboard of North America is unique in terms of promoting itself as a ‘nation of immigrants’ — a place where foreigners can settle who want to create communities accepting of heterogeneous and/or ‘fringe’ elements. Australia, New Zealand, the Spanish colonies of South America, and various other European colonies around the world — in Africa, Southeast Asia, or other lands — aren’t experiments. Those in charge of their creation knew full well the millennia-old business that they were promoting and carrying out: trade and expanding influence — as did the Phoenicians and Greeks two thousand years earlier. Citizens from the mother countries — England, Spain, and others — immigrated, but this didn’t de facto make their destinations ‘nations of immigrants’ in the way that the United States was, and still is. The destinations, instead, were satellites of empire — derivatives — of Great Britain, Spain, and other mother countries. In general, what many people today have been programmed to ignore is the fact that simply because a large number of immigrants move somewhere doesn’t make that place a ‘nation of immigrants.’ More likely, it makes it a seething pool of cultural chaos in which it is only a matter of time before ancestral, largely unconscious, feelings about what is beautiful and moral become more conscious and powerful enough to eject or destroy the disguised virus.

How does an experiment become a norm? For, properly speaking, the United States is not a real nation at all — it was constructed in modern times. All real nations, however, develop, for the most part, as consequences of ancient genetic forces (unanalyzed inclinations, ancestral experiences, and ethnic ‘habits’) in the collective unconscious of a people, best communicated in that people’s ancient myths, legends, and heroic imagery. The United States didn’t, as is natural with all real nations, emerge by such means — by the perennial forces of religion, myth, and ethnic solidarity that, although they may be lost on individuals, are never lost on the group. Contrary to this, the United States was planned by a few generations of men. It was a ‘rational project,’ a consequence of a particular idea of ‘Enlightenment.’ But that is not how a real nation comes to be. One might want to say similar things about other modern nations, such as Germany, Italy, and France. Germany, Italy, and other modern nations, however, only became nations in the modern sense in the nineteenth century — after the United States became a (modern) nation in the late eighteenth century. France, around the same time, also morphed into a modern ‘nation.’ Unlike the United States, however, Germany, Italy, and France already existed as nations before they became specifically modern nations. Their new nineteenth century identities were only legally new — new on paper. Germany and Italy, specifically, became nations in the nineteenth century by changing their external forms; for, the same cultures inhabited roughly the same lands far before then. The specifically modern versions of Germany and Italy, like the United States, were thus consciously constructed. In these two Europeans nations, in spite of immigration over centuries and millennia from other parts of Europe, the two lands were inhabited, for the most part, by the genetic and cultural ancestors of modern Germans and Italians. The humans living in these lands, unlike those living in the United States at the same time, were scions of humans who had also lived in the same places, and were essentially linked to their ancestors both genetically and culturally. All political differences were of relatively little matter to the general socio-religious disposition — the Spirit or Volksgeist — that was maintained. Only much later did significant changes in art and other cultural forms indicate substantial ‘progress’ in these nations.

Unlike ‘America,’ which was and is a completely New World for Europeans, the lands constituting modern Italy and Germany were not mindfully selected as ‘blank slates’ — they naturally evolved into their modern versions in a native environment. Unlike the English and Dutch colonists in North America between 1600 and 1800, peoples who were surrounded by an alien environment and an essentially different Volksgeist constituted by the Native American nations, the peoples of Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century were surrounded by very familiar, innately adored, art and architecture of what most of them knew to be the creations of their forebears. The history of these peoples’ ancestors permeated, and still permeates, everything about these lands. A truly new Constitution wasn’t formed or invented in Italy or Germany as it was in the United States, totally new cities weren’t built from scratch en masse as in the United States, and, most significantly, a hodgepodge of humans from around the world didn’t come to European nations and simply begin to call themselves ‘German’ or ‘Italian,’ as they did ‘American’ in the United States. Later, yes. But this later reality was produced by the nefarious, unconscious for the most part, ‘Americanization’ I have already spoken of: the conditioning — the cultivating of a specific attitude in the mass of unthinking humans — of individuals to believe that all nations should be genetically diverse, should have so-called ‘democratic principles,’ and should ‘overcome’ all earlier forms of government — like the model nation of ‘America’ allegedly has.

Before 1776, and since time immemorial, nations have grown out of the soil and gene pools of peoples living on particular lands for particularly long periods of time — thousands of years. With all of the variety of constitutions that Aristotle discusses in Politics, it was still the case in ancient Greece that there were particular forms of ethnic rule underlying these differences. Not only was it clear to the Greeks that they and the Persians were completely separate types, even Spartans and Athenians were seen by Spartans and Athenians as relatively separate types. And, yes, this assessment takes into account ancient and medieval migrations in other parts of the world — the Indo-Europeans into India and the Mongols into eastern Russia, for example. In these cases, as in others, there was no substantial dissolution of the previous cultures and races existing in the lands receiving immigrants. There is, to this day, a clear cultural distinction between South Indians and North Indians, just as there is a clear distinction between European Russians and Asian ‘Russians.’ This, again, is common sense for those who haven’t been indoctrinated into the nebulous idea of ‘diversity’ as some purported ‘highest good’ — the Great Blending. The fact that true Russians are descended from Scandinavian Vikings and Eastern Europeans doesn’t take away from the impressive heritage of the Mongols in Siberia and Central Asia — they simply are not Russian. Nor should they desire to be. They are their own people. And every people should be proud of its unique identity. There is no inkling of ‘supremacy’ here — merely recognition of natural diversity.

The argument which I present in this essay allows for a variety of invasions and migrations of limited extent throughout history and around the world. China, with its many kingdoms and dynasties over several millennia, is a perfect example. Although the Silk Road brought all sorts of peoples to China for over a thousand years — completely in premodern times — the modern nation of China is still overwhelmingly composed of ethnic (genetic) Chinese. How absurd, then, to call a European man ‘Chinese’ simply because he is the product of a few generations of European scholars or missionaries who in the 1800s moved to China! Similarly, today, some will dare to call a Muslim of North African extraction who is presently living in Germany ‘German’ as if this is an obvious fact — a person whose parent(s) moved to Europe one or two generations ago at most. Who, also, with a straight face, can say that someone not of proper stock can simply ‘become’ an Aboriginal Australian by moving to Australia’s center and transforming himself into a hunter-gatherer? However, for some reason, an Aboriginal Australian can become English, French, or German — but a European cannot become an Aboriginal Australian! Such is the stuff of mass programming of a dumbed down public which has lost all honor.

For all of history before the creation of the United States, the nation was, and is in the true sense of the word, an ethnos — and let us not dishonestly confuse nations with empires. The native peoples of Italy, Germany, and China — also Aboriginal Australia — have common traditions that stretch back into the mists of time: a common heritage, a common religious disposition, a common physical look, and perhaps most controversially (and as Hegel argued at length in Lectures on the Philosophy of History), a common mentality. Anyone who claims that there are not essential differences in the looks, manners, and very ways of understanding the world, of Australian Aboriginals, Scandinavians, traditional Chinese, or Arab Muslims, one must state, is a liar. For, again, a child can see otherwise. And, those who believe such ridiculous claims with their sickly sweet secular religious aura under the auspices of ‘diversity’ are fools. It is only because of recent homogenization of the youth’s thought patterns and pervasive dumbing down of public education that individuals can blithely claim, in some ridiculous attempt at profundity, “Everyone is really the same.”

It is significant, and I mean this in a relative sense (pagans shouldn’t jump up from their seats), that Christianity naturally caught on among most Europeans early on in the history of Western civilization — with some scattered violent impositions, as with Charlemagne and the Germans — while it has been necessary in the last generation or two to deceptively import Middle Easterners into Europe so that Islam may ‘gain traction’ — if one sees the silence resultant from totalitarian restrictions on speaking out against an alien mindset as traction. Let us not forget, in the face of this comically imposed veneer, how many times Islam has failed, over millennia, to ‘share’ its abstract and legalistic belief system with Europeans — an incongruity that is still not (but soon shall be) learned by Europe’s endangered ruling class. It is, again, ‘Americanization’ — applied to modern Europe. It is ‘tolerant’ and ‘democratic’ and ‘plural’ — absolute goods from the perspective of a grasping and bloated ontology — to make Europeans embrace alien religions, make them appreciate alien cultural practices as ‘equal’ to their own, and make them commit spiritual/ethnic (Are they not intimately connected realities?) suicide on behalf of the drug which now has billions of addicts: ‘Progress.’ Other natives around the world strangely aren’t subjected to such cowardly, underhanded, manipulation — Native Americans, Africans, or Indians, for example. These peoples, Westerners are told ad nauseum by idea shysters who have captured the Academy, have the ‘right’ to liberate themselves from their ‘historical oppressor’ — Europeans, of course. Europeans have likewise been told, in so many words, that they don’t have this ‘right’ — and the weak among them nod in bovine agreement at the instructions from their distant (or nearby) overlords.

Americanization is the process of subliminally converting people — unscientifically ‘fixing’ the belief in them, the pragmatist C. S. Peirce would say — to the worldview that because the United States fairly early in its history had not only Englishmen, Germans, and French as its citizens, but also Chinese, Africans, and Indians, all nations ‘should’ be this way. All nations ‘should’ be ‘diverse,’ with diversity defined in a very narrow sense as an ‘obviously’ greater value than all other values that have held together all other nations for millennia — as with the Israelites/Jews discussed in Part 2 of this essay. This, however, from the perspective of knowledge and common sense, is ‘putting the cart before the horse.’ For, the United States is decidedly an exception in nation-forming — a derivative rather than a rule in terms of what a nation actually is. It is an invention recently imagined concerning what a nation ‘could’ or ‘should be’ — not a model for universal nationhood. More recently, this is even more so. But, we realize, even this invention has morphed into an even “newer and more improved” kind of ‘nation’: the international corporation. As the character Jake in the 2006 TV series Jericho states, when he realizes what has happened to the United States, “Open your eyes. It’s not a country, it’s a company!” And who, today, has not realized this? In film, we were warned even earlier, in Norman Jewison’s 1975 masterpiece Rollerball, that corporations are displacing modern nation-states. The Americanization of all values, therefore, is the Americanization of nations, for each true nation has its own unique set of values. But this top-down project is simply part and parcel of the larger project of making — that is, conditioning the weak-minded among us to believe — ‘the future’ appear always superior to the past: ‘Progress,’ the religion of the future, where the future itself is the deity, always distant, always beyond scrutiny, always better. Believe U.S.