To Anon specifically, thank you for your contribution, and please continue in this interesting discussion. By examining ourselves we grow, and often it is necessary that in order to develop, we need to have light shone on particular aspects which we may have not been aware of.
Anon has not stated who Anon is - and what (if any) relationship he or she may have with the party, but that is of no importance. Discussion and examination from the perspective of another can be the catalyst we need to we see ourselves more clearly]
To Anon.
First of all, thank you for making a serious, critical contribution to The Journal of Progressive Nationalism.
"A preliminary definition of progressive nationalism: national, socialist, and therefore necessarily monetarily sovereign, but also non-racist and protective of national minorities - even whilst being fundamentally assimilatory in relation to national values, laws and cultures." Wilberg
You argue that “this roundly contradicts what has been written on the SWPE site where white separatism is promoted, not just European values and culture but it would appear that the DNA thing is central.” It would have - and still would be be - useful for me in responding if you had cited those elements on the SWPE site which you see as standing in contradiction to my remark - in particular but not only your impression that for the SWPE “the DNA thing is central”. But let us move on to the conclusion you draw re. SWPE policy:
“The result seems to be in terms of policy that the SWPE wishes to send all non-white people and of course some white non-British people away with what is called voluntary repatriation. This idea might have been a goer 50 years ago, possibly, but things have changed hugely since then. Getting nostalgic about the old NF policies as if they have standing outside of historical context is foolish. That's not to say that it is in and of itself a bad idea and that it wouldn't have any effect, but ultimately if you wanted to whiten Britain a bit more, you would end up with non-voluntary repatriation, inevitably. So please, don't try to sweeten the pill, the results would be violent and ugly.”
Again, I find myself largely in sympathy with what you write here, although in SWPE policy outline, I could come find only one statement in the policy outline that appears to confirm that repatriation is part of SWPE policy:
“We will use the profits of the multinational corporations to pay for the resettlement of people in their homelands.”
The question for me is that what is meant by “people” here remains a bit unclear. European whites or non-white non-European “people”? Recent, young and first generation immigrants or also second, third or fourth generation ones? To use a personal example, my German wife, who, speaking fluent English, lived and worked in England for 30 years, did not form part of any German ‘minority’ community, and was perfectly happy to assimilate with British people and culture without giving up her German nationality. Then again, living as I do in Prague, I see no tension whatsoever between native Czechs on the one hand, the large Ukrainian and Russian immigrant communities - which effectively form part of an intra-white and intra-European form of ‘multiculturalism’. Here also, the Vietnamese population, despite a lack of social or even linguistic assimilation, constitutes a perfectly harmless ‘national minority’.
On the other hand, I believe there are strong arguments for the repatriation of particular groups of young, wholly un-assimilable, aggressively native-hostile or criminal first-generation non-white male immigrants in Germany, since a result of the dire conditions and demographic explosion in Africa there will, within decades there may soon be literally hundreds of millions of Africans on their way to that country and others. And in a German context also, I believe there are also good grounds for offering aid to those recent immigrants who wish to return to their homelands - including many Syrians who have a deep attachment to their homeland, and whose return is only obstructed by continued Israeli and U.S. military provocations and attacks upon Syria.
I am also in sympathy with your reference to Strasser and agree with the view that:
“....even if immigrant groups do exist within the social national state, they can choose to assimilate which as has already been explained is not multiculturalism, or can form a national minority group which absolutely must accept that the public, majority national culture is the dominant one and that their scope is very much limited to their own community. This, I would propose is also not multiculturalism, there would be a dominant culture, unapologetically so. This cultural self confidence would I imagine express itself in the fact that our legal system is formed by the dominant, British culture and would start to be applied without fear or favour across the land and in every quarter.”
Again, with reference to Germany, the idea of maintaining an “unapologetic” dominant national culture or Leitkultur in the terms you describe it has considerable and justificable support, and I agree with you that such a policy should be applied in Britain also - but only if we do not confuse “national culture” with the imperial nostalgia of the English ruling caste, which has, since the end of the 19th century, based its policy towards Europe on the sole principle of doing everything possible to aggravate national conflicts and bring about wars between European nations and peoples - and above all to keep Europe and Russia divided.
Returning to your critique, however, I do see a problem in ensuring through the British legal system that what you call the “scope” of national minorities is very much limited to their own community. Throughout ancient and modern history - including American, British and Russian history, there has been a problem of ethnic minorities exerting a wholly disproportionate influence (albeit not always negative) on the economic, financial, political and social systems of their host countries, and also on their media and cultural values. Thus the entire history of American economics was effectively a history of struggle with Jewish banking interests and Zionist political interests - a struggle decisely lost with the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve bank in 1913 as well as the Zionist-pressured entry of America into both World wars and its wars of aggression in the Afghanistan and the Middle East. Similarly, the disproportionate role of Jews in the Russian revolution, as well as in the NKVD, Gulag system etc. cannot in any way be underestimated. As for Britain, the power of the Zionist-Jewish lobby - and its growing influence on even the legal system today also cannot be underestimated. This influence too, has a very long history going back many, many centuries. In the 20th century, Zionist groups were the chief backers of Churchill and Roosevelt’s warmongering against Germany (even Churchill’s much beloved cigars were paid for with Zionist money). The there were the Zionist-backed plans - the Kaufman (1941), Hooton (1943) and Morgenthau (1944) plans - for the extermination of Germany and the Germans. I do not refer to all this to justify the wholesale expulsion of all members of a ‘national minority’ such as the Jews (and certainly not to a land - Israel - seized at gunpoint through the occupation and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of its native population).
Having said this however, I believe that there are important further questions to be addressed in relation to your post. You offer reasonable definitions of ‘multiculturalism’ and of ‘assimilation’ - though I believe there are more questions that can be asked about the use of these terms. Thus there is true and fake ‘assimilation’. Just think of the Zionist lobby and neocons in the U.S. - who from the outside appear assimilated, and may even be secular Jews - but whose prime loyalty is to Israel and their own international ‘tribe’. In contrast, many German Jews were assimilated to the point of seeing themselves primarily if not only as German patriots - cherishing its culture and even fighting for it in both world wars. The German-Jewish relation could have become a model of a most fruitful symbiosis - were it not for those internationalist Jews and Jewish elites who sought only to exploit, profit and exert disproportionate power over their Gentile compatriots.
You write also of “national cultures” and the “cultural self-confidence” of nations - or even simply of ‘nations’ as such. Here I see another question that still needs addressing. For if we think of the “cultural confidence” of Germans and the immense contribution of German culture European culture as a whole - we must not forget that this long preceded the establishment of Germany as a nation state. The question I see here is too complex and deep to go into here, but I would suggest there are grounds for distinguishing what has been called a national ego (whether in the form of the state, political institutions, a prominent leader etc) from the national soul - by which I do not mean anything that can be reduced to biology or DNA, but rather embraces all those distinctive or core values and qualities of different peoples which first gave birth to ‘nations’ (a word whose earliest root meaning is simply ‘to be born’). ‘Nationalism’ based on what I call ‘the national ego’ and the political state can serve to defend or even bring about a renaissance of the national soul. But it can also serve as a form of (over-)compensation for the loss of that soul, i.e. for the disensoulment of nations and their cultures which is the mark of U.S. based global capitalism - which, through its global ‘pop’, gender and celebrity-obsessed culture industry seeks imposes its own soulless, wholly homogeneous commercial monoculture - including, paradoxically, a homogeneous monoculture of ‘diversity’ - on the media and culture of Europe and other regions.
It is unfortunate that even the term ‘progressive’ nationalism still retains connotations of a soulless and purely ‘progress’ oriented modernism, in response to which the attempt to merely revive and mimic the symbols and rites of ‘traditional’ cultures and religions has given rise to a mere marketplace of New Age forms of pseudo-spirituality - and constitutes yet another form of superficial identity politics.
Finally, an important question I hope to write a lot more about, but feel a need to provisionally state. The question has to do with the way in which so much political discourse in the U.K today takes the form of virulent and vituperous debates about what the best and most correct ‘answers’ are to particular issues - rather than deeper discussion and debate of what the most essential QUESTIONS are that might lie beneath these issues.
Thanking you again for your comments,
Peter Wilberg
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