I am an American. My ancestors hail from various ports of the old world: On my mother’s side all sprang from the black forest of Germany. On my father’s side the pedigree is forged between the fens of Denmark and the cobbles of Ulster and it is by way of Ulster whence my family acquires its name.
Naturally, I feel a certain affinity, or some would say sentimentality, toward all things Germanic and Celtic. But it does not make me a German-Dane or a Scotsman. I mean really, just imagine if I went to one of those little postcard hamlets in Denmark and simply declared myself a Dane. As sweet-natured as the Danes are, the women would likely snicker at my cowboy accent and the men would glare with furrowed brows and chide me with all the stoicism which northmen command. The Danes would appreciate the continuum of my commonality with them to be sure but they would never confess me one of them, a Dane proper.
The question then is, ought I to take offense at such exclusion? Certainly not. It is their right and their duty to preserve themselves with all the unique characteristics which make them who they are. And really, I wouldn’t have it any other way because if they lost definition of who they are, I, as an offshoot of that people, would lose reference to my own ancestors. If Africans, Arabs and Mongols might be declared ‘Danes’, being Danish loses all definition. If it means everything in general, it means nothing in particular.
No, I want Denmark for the Danes, Scotland for Scots and Germany for Germans. Could anyone imagine delftware porcelain bedecked with pictures of Nubians rather than the toe-headed Dutch? Holland wouldn’t be Holland without the Dutch. We Yanks might often consider the distinctions between all those kindred nations of Europe to be minor but if you want to know the differences between Swedes and Danes just ask one. They will happily delineate what are to them, profound differences.
Yet here in America the British came and founded a nation for ‘the White Man and his posterity forever’, meaning, men of European descent generically. Modern Deconstructionists typically conjure from this that our founders were proto-Marxists taking the first evolutionary step toward total egalitarianism. They take the American fusion of the tribes of Europe as proof that ethnicity be naught but ‘a social construct’, i.e., a figment of the imagination. Thus they extrapolate that as went ethnicity, so goes race—if Germans and Italians might be brought together under the banner of a single nationality, what’s to preclude the Mongol and Negro races from the same corporation?
First, it’s clear that whatever the assumptions of the Founders were, they certainly never intended for it to lead to racial amalgam. By their own testimony they reviled the very notion. They, like the Pilgrims, universally understood racial amalgam as one of the greatest curses which could befall their posterity.
Second, it must be acknowledge that the American doctrine of generic “White” identity over against any particular European ethnicity was uniquely crafted by those who by providence were Englishmen. As such, they had in their mother country the unique distinction of being the signal composite nation of Europe: England was originally peopled by the Bretons, a Celtic folk, but it sustained successive invasions by Angles from Denmark, Saxons from Germany and Romans from Italy. Thus comes the term Anglo-Saxon. Though they acknowledged themselves as contiguous with Roman civilization to some degree, and they honored their Celtic heritage, they expressed their identity by its foremost components—Angles and Saxons. But G. K. Chesterton and Abraham Kuyper have both said that Europe really has only three tribes: The Germanic, the Celtic and the Romanic (Italic) in their various communities. (C. S. Lewis agreed with this as well.)
Expectedly then, when the English Puritans struck ground in America, extending the English nation, they intended it to be a continuation of English civilization, which was itself a composite of all three of the tribes of Europe. They insisted of course upon maintaining a balanced immigration policy, with clear favoritism shown to the European nations with whom they shared closest relation. The American policy of “favored nation status” was most partial to the north and west of Europe but they admitted a trickle from the east and the south of the continent as well. This was the conservative approach, maintaining equilibrium of demographics with its attendant affections, sensitivities and culture which had long ago forged the country of their nativity.
But they admitted no immigration from alien races aside from the purposes of labor. They, being devout Biblicists, understood such precedent to exist as a practice of old Israel who had used foreign labor while keeping such people distinct from their own.
Irish Catholics were brought to these shores as slaves of the Englishmen; after serving the seven year term of their bonditure they were remitted to the status of free men who, if converted to Protestantism, could own property, and if maintaining their membership in good standing of a Christian church could even vote at the age of twenty-one. They were citizens, Americans, brothers. The prevailing theory of suffrage was of the “free-hold” sort via English common law (this was seen as consistent with and ultimately emanating from biblical Law) and it accepted all the tribes of the European race as assimilable because Britain had long been the generic representative of all the Japhetic peoples living cohesively subject to the Christian Lord.
This was not unlike the commonwealth of old Israel which would allow limited assimilation of outlying Hebrew-Semite tribes but was forbad from admitting those of dissimilar race.
And so it was that the Puritan slave trade of Africans and Indians was quite distinguished from their trade of Irish Catholics; though the Indians were allowed, not entirely unlike the Irish, to be freed and even buy land (in designated areas) after the passage of a seven year servitude, they could never vote or be considered American citizens.
But Africans were from 1632 forward accepted by law as “perpetual servants” without any right of release; which is not to say that they couldn’t be released, just that they had no right to it. Leviticus 25:39-55 was the justification for this practice, allowing for foreign (i.e., racially alien) slaves bought with money to be kept in perpetuity along with any children which they might bear. This seemed by the estimation of the Puritans and the British Crown to be the most equitable treatment of social stratification for the African as long as he was to reside among white men. Any lesser degree of Paternalism would leave the African destitute, unable to provide for himself and it would simultaneously be to admit great danger to all of American society. Moreover, the matter of possibly granting the African suffrage and citizenship were out of the question. One might as well declare oneself a poached egg as declare Africans to be Americans.
In their various appeals to the Crown the Colonists invoked no political corporation, no matters of economic expediency, nor any political idealism; they demanded their rights by way of primogeniture, on the basis of descent from Englishmen and their consanguity with Englishmen. The last such invocation was the Declaration of Rights of 1765 in which they claimed all the rights of “natural born Englishmen”. None but white men had any stake in such a claim.
It was with just such a sense of the matter that the Founding Fathers would reflect on the question as well. For them, America was an extension of England and as such, home to the European type generally, under English language, institutions and law. Therefore, when they set about the formation of our federal government in 1787 they claimed it to be “for the preservation of us and our posterity forever”. And they quoted from the earlier Declaration of rights (1765) in limiting the office of president to “a natural born citizen”. And contiguous with earlier Puritan law, the very first convention of the Congress of the United States of America declared that citizenship was open only to “free Whites” of good character residing in America for two or more years.
Despite the assertions of modern Liberals, America always knew what, or more precisely, who it intended to be. Our forefathers purposefully controlled immigration in favor of Europeans, especially of the north and the west of the continent and they always regarded it as impossibility for non-whites to be American citizens. They found this position in keeping with their own ethnic and historic identity in England and they found the scripture in support of such nationalism, as had the Church from the first century forward. This was so taken for granted that the alternative to it would have struck them as unabashed godlessness.
The ‘Americanism’ of our founding was based not upon a government structure or economic theory but upon the nation which formed it. That nation existed prior to the United States and as such, their chief concern lay not in the principles of a government but in the preservation of ‘[them]selves and [their] posterity forever.’ It was a matter of self-determination and self-defense of a people—the English-speaking White Race. Their Christian faith taught them that this was their primary civic responsibility and their government was subsequently formed to that end.
In summation, I, an American of Germano-Celtic extraction, speaking this German dialect known as ‘English’, feel a great sense of kinship with the various northwestern nations of Europe but I am yet distinct from them. And in the new world we members of the White race be one expanded Anglophile nation in our lesser tribes throughout. We are who we are; let us cherish that identity and safeguard it as our fathers who went before us. And let us think ill of no other people for doing likewise.
Could anyone imagine delftware porcelain bedecked with pictures of Nubians rather than the toe-headed Dutch?
Yes. It is very funny!
I could also imagine those little Russian “egg within an egg” things with Arabs on them.
Wait.
It is very sad.
“Yes. It is very funny!…It is very sad.”
Such things turn all into cinics do they not? We see one macabre spectacle after another and sooner or later we laugh to keep from crying.
The gas light districts fall down one after the other like dominoes as they become the abode of the “park in the front lawn” race of mankind, the habitation of every foul and unclean spirit.
What do we do?
Retreat to the dusty pages of Latin scholarship?
Regroup in the Occidental Underground!
Here, here, my friend. May God bless our endeavor.
Excellent article in defense of Separatism. I enjoyed it much.