I had a Lightbulb moment recently when reading an article on the Unz Review. It was one of many such recent articles comparing America and China and wondering which will emerge as the stronger power.
No other nation today is rising like China. They are in a growth phase which is propelling them into great power status.
They are not the first nation to experience this situation. The Egyptians, The Romans, Greeks, Mongols and of course, more recently, the British, Americans, Germans and Japanese have all gone through similar phases.
Many people trace the rise of china to 1978, when Deng Xiaoping instituted limited capitalism. Many commentators have identified Capitalism as the secret of China’s recent success.
Yet in 1978, and even to this day, America was, and is, far more capitalistic than China.
At that time Americans also had better education, government, bureaucracy, resources, health, and so forth and they did manage another decade or so of growth.
Yet by comparison, China’s growth has dwarfed that of the USA and every other Western nation.
Admittedly they were coming off a low base but that is no longer the case and they are still growing strongly while America continues to sink.
So, what is the driving factor in all of this?
Unz argues that extractive elites are the problem. He feels that because our elites no longer feel loyalty to their people, that they are selling us out and causing the decline.
China’s elites, by comparison do not seem to be working this way to anything like the same extent.
What Unz does not put forward, is a theory as to why this should be the case.
Personally, I think that nationalism plays a large part.
The Chinese today are fiercely nationalist. Try talking with even the most apolitical Chinese student. If you make even the gentlest criticism of the Chinese government, then you had better be prepared for a massive argument and never to be spoken to again.
This nationalism goes right through the Han Chinese. The Chinese Government is cutting up prisoners and selling them for body parts, putting Muslims in concentration camps, genociding the Tibetans and threatening many of their neighbours.
The Chinese people have shown themselves willing to accept these, and many other outrages because of their fanatical nationalism.
Now think back to other rising nations in the recent past. Germany and Japan both instilled a rabid nationalism into their people.
I know that that didn’t end well, and, of course, people point out the terrible price we all paid.
What is forgotten, is that it only ended badly for them, because they were faced with entrenched powers who were just too strong to overcome.
But think about what they did achieve. Germany, which had been wracked by war, hyperinflation and was a conquered nation, took on all of Europe, the British Empire, the USA and the Soviet Union and almost won.
Japan took on China, most of the rest of Asia, the rump of the British Empire, the USA, Australia and New Zealand and we had to drop no less than 2 atom bombs on them to subdue them.
Even after being virtually flattened and defeated, both nations emerged to become economic superpowers. How did that happen?
What all of these rising powers had in common, was a very strong sense of nationalism. People were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Nation.
When the Japanese found themselves technologically and materially deficient to the Americans, they persuaded young men to fly kamikaze (suicide) missions into American ships.
You have probably heard of the Japanese soldier in the Philippines jungle who didn’t know the war had ended and was camped out and still waiting for orders in the 1970s.
This fanatical devotion to the nation was the driving force for the rapid advancement of these nations.
Nothing else can come close in motivating people.
If you look at the decline of great powers, it is the decline of nationalism that causes it. I grew up in the 60’s and 70s in the UK and patriotism was considered crass, low class and deplorable. “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” was constantly quoted at us.
Meanwhile, we had communist inspired unions fighting management who couldn’t care less about them. Each side only cared about themselves. Neither side cared about the damage they were doing to the nation.
In the end, management simply closed down the factories and sent them to low wage countries on the other side of the world, not giving a damn about “their” people. The decline of both relative power and economic success was savage during this period.
Meanwhile the Germans and Japanese, with their remaining nationalism worked hard, sacrificing for their nations, and crushed us economically. The benefit to the people of these nations was immense.
America’s decline has been evident since 1965 when the immigration reform act set in motion the opening of their borders and a mass movement of people with little to no attachment to the nation.
In this sense I consider the nation to be the people. People will fight over land, but it is not the land they are really attached to. That is just an asset. What they really care about is their people and to really motivate people nationalistically, they have to be ethnically homogenous.
The Civic Nationalist idea that we can welcome someone into our nation, hand them a passport and expect them to become “one of us” is just a fantasy.
It takes generations to assimilate people into a nation who are similar. After a couple of centuries, we have been almost entirely unsuccessful at assimilating the Aborigines for example.
Think about any of the recent powers in their growth phase, Great Britain, The USA, Germany, Japan, today China and South Korea. All of them were homogenous during their period of rapidly rising power.
The influx of large numbers of people foreign to the core nation has coincided with the decline of these nations. Diversity was not their strength and never can be.
Why did people allow this opening of national borders? Maybe because enough of them no longer cared about the nation.
It may not have been the starting point of decline. Japan has declined anyway, without an open border policy, but it certainly exacerbates the problem.
Losing homogeneity is guaranteed to rapidly erode any sense of nationalism. This is particularly so under Multiculturalism, when the newcomers are encouraged to eshew any sense of attachment to the nation, and instead, to retain attachment to their “community.”
None of the nations which are pursuing Multiculturalism are showing signs of real growth in power and prestige.
In fact, despite incredible technological advancement, wages in the USA in real terms have not increased since the 1970s, shortly after the borders were opened.
So, America has not even grown economically during this period. So much for the economic benefits of immigration.
Anecdotally, a friend spoke of his friend who was extremely high in a large corporation in the 1950s. “we could have probably pushed for salaries which were 30 or 40 times larger than a normal worker, but we just didn’t think it was right” he said.
He cared about his workers, his nation and his people.
Often, in this day and age, when a company executive looks at his employees, they are no longer “his” people – unless he happens to be Chinese. Little wonder then, that workers in the West are seen as little more than economic units, interchangeable with any other.
Is it any wonder that there has developed such a schism between the different stratas in a company ?
The movie length documentary American Factory shows this up starkly. The American workers want a union to represent their interests against the management.
The Chinese workers and management can’t understand this. They are all working for the benefit of the company. They are sacrificing for their people.
Americans, and Westerners generally, have been fragmented by communist inspired unions and multicultural elites for decades. Not surprisingly, they are now only willing to sacrifice for themselves.
This might sound sensible to a Westerner, but which of these people – Americans or Chinese – will increase their power?
Obviously, in the short to medium term it will be the Chinese. Eventually, Chinese leaders will abuse the sacrifices of the people and take them for granted.
Chinese workers will become disillusioned and will reject the sacrifice and reject nationalism. China will then begin to decline, as all great powers do.
In the meantime, our nationalism is under attack. I am not normally conspiratorial, but the attacks have been so savage that I don’t think that this is purely a coincidence.
We are constantly told that any sign of nationalism is racist because it disadvantages “others” and divides our nations.
This is partly true, but only because these same people have stuffed our once homogeneous nations with “others”
In Western nations, racism (Nationalism) is now one of the most serious crimes you can commit. There are entire bureaucracies devoted to stamping it out. Engaging in it can lose you friends, career, social media accounts and even in extreme cases, your freedom. But why is it so toxic?
The official line is always that it inevitably leads to Nazism or some form of ultra-nationalism which led to World Wars and tragedy. Whilst it is possible that this could happen, it is not a given by a long stretch.
Fire could burn your house down, but that is not a good reason to not heat your home with it.
Besides, this idea of ending wars by ending nationalism is not a good strategy when applied unilaterally – as our deteriorating relationship with China is revealing.
Our rejection of Nationalism has left us weak and vulnerable in the face of rabidly nationalist China.
It was the power that nationalism bestowed on us, that allowed us to contain a much smaller Germany and Japan in their nationalistically fuelled expansion.
As weakened and non-nationalistic states, how can we stand up to a far larger and nationalistic China. The short answer is that we cannot and if we don’t reject this BS multicultural, anti-racist anti-nationalist ideology and re-embrace nationalism, then we, and the rest of the planet, will be screwed.
