Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

In his farewell address Ronald Reagan said that America is a shining city upon a hill, whose light guides freedom-lovers everywhere.

He wasn’t wrong. He forgot the obverse of this. Those who lived in darkness feared the light, and scuttled back under their stoves like cockroaches. (I think the Bible quote is somewhat more poetic but less practical.) And those who would extend the darkness of authoritarianism to cover the whole world can’t help but look upon America and gnash their teeth and make up ridiculous crap about us, in order to scare their victims back into the dark, in order to make them ask for the yoke upon their shoulders and the boot on their faces, because it must be better than those “lawless” and “bigoted” Americans.

Recently at Vile 666 Comissar Frau Buthurt put her whoremouth on my name (she really should learn better. I might start featuring an excerpt of her “wisdom” on Instapundit every night, to make people laugh.) and those of my friends, to explain we had made ourselves unacceptable to polite society everywhere, with Sad Puppies.

You see, before that the left might have suspected us of evil independent thoughts, but since we didn’t speak they could pretend Alles in Ordnung and that everyone was goostepping to their tune. But, oh, we had to speak up and point out that “literature that upholds the Marxist viewpoint” is not precisely quality literature. Oh, maybe for “literary fiction” which is to say “things that college professors love.” (“Literary” in the sense of trancends its time and place and speaks to generations yet unborn, by definition can’t be decided until the generations yet unborn have a say.) Not for, you know, stuff people read for fun, like genre literature. For that, particularly for an award that billed itself as fan-awarded (AHAHAHAHAH!) it should be “things people like to read when they’re not virtue signaling their friends down in ye old communists biergarten, where they gather to discuss how to recover the glory days of “The Lives of Others.”

From this, Frau Butthurt, who wants to be a Comissar just like her dear Papa, decided she needed to give the “European” perspective and the “German” perspective.

Which is funny. I mean, maybe American leftists stand around, breath baited, waiting in anxious hope for the next great pronouncement from Europe. After all, their kill list is nothing compared to those of European leftism, and people who hate humanity must revere the millions dead at the hands of Socialism in Europe, both the National and International variety.

Maybe they sit around of a winter evening, looking into the fire and going “if only we knew the German perspective! I mean, a country that killed over six million of its own citizens due to their ethnic and cultural traits, and an assorted mass of others for things like sexual orientation, can’t help but have great perspective on how we can do the same again, only harder and faster.

Me? Bah. You see, I have European relatives and know that their perspective on the US isn’t worth the soiled paper you flush down the toilet.

We are not like them. We are something quite different.

Frau Blurtout told the massed and credulous sheep of leftism (and a few thousand Chinese robots) that we’d revealed ourselves to be as bad as some three initials, but we might still pretend we weren’t racist like another three initials. I’m too lazy to remember the initials or even look them up, but I understand the extreme one is their neo-nazi party and the other one some form of social democrat or democrat socialist, which honestly is what passes for “right wing” in Europe.

Of course Frau Blurtout is blurting from a portion of her anatomy not usually used for speaking, and she knows jack and shit about America. Yeah, I know she supposedly spent some time in an ivy league college in the East, squandering the money that Papa dearest extorted from the captive people of the DDR, but you know, those colleges know jack and shit about America. They ate the effluvia of Marxism with eager, open mouths, failed to turn against it when Stalin’s sins became known, (mostly because they were SURE communism would win—so efficient, so centrally controlled—and wanted to be on the side of the victors) and are now devoted to obscuring the horrors communism (and yes, socialism, though those are hard to see because it’s mostly what’s missing not what was actively destroyed that marks the path of destruction) and ranting about Capitalism or admitting to themselves they’re craven cowards and moral horrors. (This is probably partly why they hate humanity and happiness. Most of all they hate themselves.)

But even if she hadn’t sojourned in the most “European-lite” part of the US, in a field dominated by her fellow travelers, Frau Comissar would still know nothing of America. It takes a good ten years for the scales to gradually fall from the eyes, and for people to realize the US REALLY is something quite different from the old blood soaked European abattoir.

My family who is far better-intentioned than the Comissar of Vaginitude tries desperately and fails to get it. I don’t know if they still think so, but for a while they were convinced Libertarians must be the party of religious people. Why? Well, they’re called “right” and right in Portugal is the party of soil and religion. (Sighs.)

The thing all of the spectrum in Europe from communist to social democrat (or, gasp Christian democrat) can be compassed by our democrat party. You see, they’re ALL socialist. They have accepted socialism as the only true way to run a society. (Have pity on them. They transitioned from monarchies, mostly. How can they know what to do without someone in power telling them?) Their only quibbles are national or international, religious or atheist. That’s all.

And then they look at us, and they hear us say we love our country, and that religious people should be allowed to practice their religions, and their little authoritarianism-addled brains fasten onto that and think we’re some kind of blood-and-soil lunatics, and so “racist, sexist, homophobic.”

They can’t grasp that our entire system is based on freedom of the individual and that what passes for “Right” here is actually howling crazy liberal in any other time or place in history. (You have to forgive them. What passes for Left over there is the remains of the “great families” who now call themselves socialists and rule as always, only with less regard for their subjects and fewer references to G-d. No, I’m not joking. Every single “son or daughter” of good families I knew was a socialist or a communist. Because it’s the only way they could get back in power.)

But what is called right here is on the “less government” and “we don’t care what your color is or what your preferred sexual partner is,” so long as you don’t do it on my front door or disturb my pets.

Sure, there is a vanishingly small (and really, truly, crazy, but loud) segment of our population who has eaten the European right’s lies whole. It’s like 2k people in the entire country, so a ridiculously small percentage. Most of them are genuinely laughable. The only person I knew (at a remove) who was in the KKK was the son of a SPANISH family of Catholics. Yeah. Crazier than Marxists is hard to achieve, but he was right there.

Thing is, that’s why “blood and soil” can’t take hold here. We’re too mixed, and we move around too much. Sure, there MIGHT be 30 families of pure English or German blood (outside of Amish communities) who have farmed the same land for 250 years and who are “blood and soil” linked to it. But most American families have birth certificates all over the country, and marry whoever pleases them, regardless of skin color.

My friends getting their DNA examined? Finding out they have oh, African or Asian blood? They report it not with frustration or shame, but high amusement. To hear a blond proclaim that they have “more than a drop of the tar” and speculating about which great grandmother got naughty or which great great grandfather changed his name, moved away and “passed” is something that would be incomprehensible in most of Europe, where race and birth place still matter a lot. (They’re not pure race either. The country I come from was the reservoir tip of Europe. BUT it was more than living memory ago, and they can tell themselves pleasing lies. At least those who are for Blood and Soil who are, arguably, somewhat saner than those who want to throw the doors open to the world and expect the result to look like their own country.)

We? We’re not a country of blood-and-soil but a country of belief. And our belief tends to the idea that those who dwell in peace and produce should be left in peace, to produce. The whole of the bill of rights could be condensed to “Don’t hurt people, and don’t take their stuff.”

We in fact don’t care what color you are or where you were born. We do care if you are one of us. What do I mean by that? Fit in or fuck off.

Acculturation isn’t easy, I have talked about it on this blog often. Like all processes of growing up, it hurts and it’s a bit like going insane. But an European (Or Asian, or African, or for that matter Australian) who wants to become American must undergo that process to “grow” into an American. It’s hard. But it’s absolutely necessary. Don’t come here and demand we print ballots in your language. Don’t come here and bring with it your ancient hatreds and your moth-eaten prejudices. Don’t come here and bring us your “perspective.” Don’t tell us how they did it “back home.” If this isn’t your home, you don’t belong here.

We’re so different from you that you can’t even see us without superimposing your expectations.

But what we are, and what we do make us not only that shining light upon the hill, but also the engine of progress in the world. Real progress, not the vain promises of “progressives” whose system would take us back to the 1930s. The future comes from America. The rest of the world is just running frantically to catch up with it.

Immigrants? Sure. What we are and what we do attracts freedom lovers from all over the world. And if you want to come in and work like hell to be one of us, you’re welcome.

But if you come in to make us more like the mess you left, go away. We already have enough homegrown Americans In Name Only aka Those Who Are No Longer Our Compatriots. They were born here, but they had their birthright stolen by an education that inculcated them with the old notions of a dying world. Or alternately they’re such born sheep they can’t even comprehend freedom.

To them and to foreigners who would “School” us in the old ways I say “Come and get it.” This is the nut you’ll crack your teeth on.

You see, we, the freedom lovers, have nowhere else to go. And we’ll fight like hell to preserve this, the last, best hope of mankind.

 

Reprinted from Acording to Hoyt for May 18, 2018.