"Fascism" and the foundation of national unity.

The Colonel has been ruminating over the disappearance of the pronouns "they" or "them" from the list of approved words in our culture. Well, disappearance is a bit strong as they still serve ably to refer to neocons, hatemongers, racists, anti-immigration zealots and others who've slipped off the reservation, in a manner of speaking, and dared to wonder if a New Guinea cannibal (reformed) is quite the same thing as an auto body repairperson in Maine.

As Mr. Smith eloquently states it, the related pronouns "we" or "us" are the true unmentionables. Talk about how you want your own ways to be the ways of the nation and it's probably hate speech. But just be a member of a religion whose leading exponents countenance sodomy with dead animals (e.g., here) and Western officials fall over themselves to kiss your robe. We kid you not.

No, these things are unworthy of in depth examination, let alone mere mention. The followers of Islam are esteemed fellow citizens all and make no mistake about it.

Or else.

Some time ago I was looking up the definition of the term 'fascist', mostly wanting to know what this term, used so often as an epithet or term of denigration and insult. I was very surprised to find, in the beginning of Wikipedia's definition, the statement that fascism "seeks to forge a type of national unity, usually based on ethnic, religious, cultural, or racial attributes". What puzzles me about this is that, prior to post-war Britain and the opening of the borders, it's my understanding that this was all there was to any understanding of a nation. (Thus, simple common sense becomes thought-crime by being branded 'fascist'. Was there ever a greater gift to the liberal leftist than the fascist phenomenon of Mussolini's Italy?) My admittedly spotty knowledge of history suggests that it shows us that there have been times (and sometimes these times have been quite frequent) in which nations have not only been at war with each other but with themselves over exactly these questions of religion, of culture. And frequently at war with one another over, oddly enough, which race will dominate a certain landmass.

But even stating it like that, I fear the point may be missed. Until recently, how much was it accepted 'wisdom' that we are all the same really? Tell me, Irishman, (being of the same colour and roughly the same creed) how warm was your reception when you first landed on English shores and lived among us? How different were the Germans considered to be by Milgram and his researchers before they found that, under sufficiently authoritative conditions, most people will do nearly anything if they don't have to get close enough? And how concerned were Kipling and his contemporaries with the issue of, not only the universal brotherhood of man (a question which, to this day, is not so much answered as begged) but of the universal sameness of man when White Man's Burden and the Jungle Book were written?

Somehow this is meant to be liberating. Somehow, in 'discovering' that we are all the same really (clearly, such an enlightened and wonderful notion could never have been made up to further a cause) we are to be made more free in our obligations to each other than we would be in our freedom to be charitable of our own volition to people we know to be different and therefore deserving of unusual consideration. I don't follow the logic, myself.

* * * *

Which leads us back to the kernel of the question. If everybody is meant to be accepted as 'us', what does that leave of 'we'? When the racial question is begged to the extent that the fact of a doubled number of immigrant or immigrant-descended children is met not with 'what about our native children?' but of 'how can we best kowtow to the newcomers?', we have a problem, racially and ethnically, as a nation. When a country with strong Catholic roots has to bend over for those who will force it to accept the promotion of homosexuality in school curriculums, that country has a problem religiously as a nation. When a nation's own cultural lights are forcibly replaced within the education system with foreign cultural lights, simply because they're foreign, that nation has a problem culturally.

We're not the same. Historically, culturally, religiously, we're very different indeed, and it's foolish to claim that we're not. {It's s]uicidal to go blindly forth claiming that if we only ignore all differences of all degrees, then all will be well. It won't. Increasingly, people in the overrun nations are looking around in bewilderment and wondering why they're not allowed the simple question. The question that would go right to the heart of their justified concerns and fears. The concerns and fears which are not only unaddressed, but exacerbated and glorified by those responsible for both their inception and for the power to assuage them.

The question, then, is simple:

"Dude, where's my nation?"

"Death of the Nation?" Mr. Smith, New Crusaders, 4/27/07 (links omitted).