Tuesday, October 20, 2015

HEIMAT ASSHAT.

At National Review Kevin D. Williamson says there are racist nationalist parties, and there are non-racist national parties, but it's all good because they're all nationalist:
I’m not sure how I feel about the Swiss People’s Party. Some of their advertising and rhetoric makes me think that they don’t seem like an entirely splendid bunch of guys: Their most famous poster depicts a bunch of white sheep literally kicking a black sheep over the border. One detects some nasty undertones. But are they wrong for liking the Swissness of Switzerland? I like it a great deal, and it seems strange to begrudge them the same feeling about what is, after all, their country.
"Swissness" means "whiteness," apparently, and who could be against that except someone who isn't white or what mah pappy used to call a nonwhite-lover. Williamson also compares love of Swissness to the desire of the Japanese not to have Frenchness get in their Japaneseness:
If you were to visit Tokyo and go looking for some Roppongi-style adventure and maybe one of those weirdly delicious curried cutlet things or a visit to a Shinto shrine, but arrived to find nothing but sallow men in black turtlenecks sipping espresso in smoky cafes and reading Baudelaire, nothing but pate and baguettes and Gothic cathedrals and everybody speaking French, you’d surely be feeling that something had been lost, and that that something was Japaneseness.
So that explains the Japanese skinheads! Well, as long as they keep the stink of Gauloises out of the Shibuya Crossing.

Williamson also predicts that he will be called racist for this, which these days is a badge of honor among his kind, to which he is welcome, though I think his problem is more an overeager and ill-considered contrariness, i.e. being an asshole.

UPDATE. Booman thinks I'm being too generous, and he's got a point:
The Swiss and the Japanese don't have the same history with immigration [as the U.S.], and they haven't historically had the same labor needs. But, here's the key, if they need immigrant labor then they need to adapt their cultural expectations rather than form nationalist parties based on the idea of preserving their cultural identity. It's okay to be proud of your Japaneseness or Swissness or Frenchness, but once your country has to become diverse for economic reasons, you lose the right to expect that everything will remain as before. 
What happens is that some people always figure out that there's political power to be had in representing and stoking people's discomfort with change. Racism is how this manifests itself... 
So, yeah, it's kind of a natural human response to immigration that some percentage of people will feel very uncomfortable, but the people who live off and heighten that discomfort are worse than mere contrarians. They're sociopathic manipulators whose net effect is basically evil.

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