Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

2,050 words

Imagine that your house catches fire. You run out, family and pets in tow, to try your darndest to put out the fire. Imagine your neighbor looking on, saying “well, it’s not my house.” What’s wrong with that situation? Well, fire has a tendency to spread. Pretty soon, if your house is on fire, your neighbors’ houses will likewise catch fire. Therefore, not only does your neighbor have a duty based on good neighborly practice to help you put out the fire which has engulfed your house, but it is also in his interest to extinguish the flames before they spread to his own home. And so we’ve fixed the image and replaced it with the heroic common struggle of men defending their home against fire.

After the fire’s been put out, you and your neighbor rebuild your houses into a single entity. Now you share a bathroom, and he is a notorious bathroom hog who brazenly claims that he can only do his innermost, deep thinking while on the can because of something something self as a conscious act-object something. Oh, and you also sleep in the same bedroom and he’s cranky in the morning because apparently, you snore. Pretty soon, you and your neighbor start hating each other, even though at one blessed moment in the past, you put out the great fire which imperiled both your houses. Naturally, you start hating your neighbor so much that you take up arms, start shooting at him, rape his womenfolk, steal his stuff and vow to see him and his fell ilk eradicated from God’s good Earth! Anything less would be treason to you and yours, for your neighbor left you without toilet paper in the middle of the Great Diarrhea of 1986. How can such good friends, as close as brothers, be brought to hate each other?

Well, who said you gotta live in the same house as your neighbor?

In case you’re wondering, my metaphor of the two neighbors represents here the two extremes present in the Dissident Right with regard to European unity in the face of the many pressures and difficulties our peoples are faced with. The neighbor who ignores the fire next door, thus allowing it to spread to his own domicile, is the so-called petty nationalist. The petty nationalist does not realize that multiculturalism, globalism, immigration, and all of the well-known conflagrations of today will eventually spread to his house. The neighbors who, having put out the fire, start living together and intruding on each others’ most intimate moments are the so-called racial imperialists, who’d weld together the various disparate nations of Europe and forcefully integrate them into one homogenous racial blob. People don’t generally like either of these options.

The position of the petty nationalist is very much indefensible. The various nations of Europe cannot individually defend themselves against gigantic global enemies, be they the full force of the Islamic ummah, rootless cosmopolitan subversives, transnational corporations, or the gold-hoarding, industry-stealing, disease-exporting dragon in the Far East. Not counting Russia, Germany is Europe’s most populous and wealthiest nation, and France has the greatest military power. Not one of these countries can reasonably stand up to either China, the Islamic world, or even Russia and the USA, to say nothing of Europe’s smaller nations. I’ve written on this subject before, about Eastern Europe’s justifiable anxieties about Russia. When you’re small and your neighbor is big, when he can very easily show up at your doorstep with an army as large as your population, no number of assurances will convince you that he won’t eventually change his mind and decide that might makes right. Naturally, the nations of Europe form alliances to ward off external threats.

At the same time, these alliances must remain alliances. Just as the neighbors of our metaphor started hating each other when they were forced to share bedrooms and toilets, so the nations of Europe become enthralled to mutual resentment and contempt when forcibly integrated with each other. The vitriol dripping from the tongues of English nationalists when talking about Polish plumbers is astounding and would discourage many from attempting to create a continent- and race-wide common consciousness.

The NATO pact is one such example of a wrongheaded alliance. NATO policy against “duplication of capabilities” shoehorns every European nation’s military into specializing for one role, while the US military is exempt from this requirement. In practice, this means that no one European nation can use its military independently from the US. France is the only exception, only due to its long absence from the alliance, thanks to the wisdom of its president Charles de Gaulle who — for all his faults and treasons, well documented on this site and elsewhere — still managed to keep France somewhat sovereign in the latter half of the 20th century, or at least somewhat independent from the Anglo-Soviet duopoly. This is to say nothing of the fact that NATO is a way for US politicians to extort money from European member states and transfer it to the American military-industrial complex. In short, this is not an alliance, but a tool for imposing American (globohomo) suzerainty on the nations of Europe. The inclusion of non-European countries such as Turkey is likewise an incalculable mistake that could very easily drag the whole of Europe into wars that are not in its interest and give Turkish military personnel access to European military secrets and assessments of European military capabilities.

If you thought that was bad, let me tell you about The Bruxelles Horror, The Thing From Strasbourg, The Union from the Black Latrine, which you may know as the EU. This bureaucratic nightmare of regulations and directives is the biggest threat to the sovereignty of European nations since the Turkish invasions of the 16th and 17th centuries. Its now-notorious method of decision-making by committee makes it the wet dream of leftoids, apparatchiks and other generally undesirable neurotypes. It is a colossal attempt to homogenize European nations into unworkable middles, resulting in labor laws which are too stringent for Italians, but too relaxed for Germans, in levels of centralization too high for Englishmen, but too low for Frenchmen.

When the 2010 sovereign debt crisis rolled around, it was forced to abandon this approach of unworkable middles and was taken over by Angela Merkel, who uniformly imposed the German way of doing things on the entire continent, resulting in much misery and intra-European hatred. People who would have been friendly before started hating each other, because they were forced to live together — and more importantly, live like each other. Deny an Italian his riposa, his three-hour lunch break, and the many redundancies and inefficiencies of Italian communal life, and he’ll resent you with all the deep darkness contained in the word vendetta. The reason why the European Union broke at its British and Italian seams is simple. It forced the Italians to work like Germans, and it dictated to the British as if they were French. Pretty soon, it will have to either force the French to build a cult of labor and economic gains like the Germans, or shoehorn decentralized and pacific Germany into the semi-militarized dirigisme of the Fifth Republic, with the impoverished and nationalist Ossies dragged kicking and screaming behind. European history is very clear as to what happens when France and Germany get locked in a cycle of mutual hatred.

I already have a good idea of what happens when you force Europeans to share living space because I’ve spent my entire life in the shadow of the Yugoslav wars. In a series of conflicts spanning from 1991 to 2001, the various nations of Yugoslavia settled their accounts with blood and iron. Men who were neighbors, coworkers, best men at each others’ weddings, friends, who named each other brother, who participated as comrades in peacekeeping missions as part of the Yugoslav National Army, were suddenly shooting at each other, burning each others’ houses and raping each others’ wives and daughters. It was a brother war if there ever was one, but mention to a Serb that a Croat is his brother will likely get you punched in the face, even 20 something years on.

My question to those who would force European nations to live together — who’d keep the European Union but try to make it based and redpilled — is this: if Yugoslavia couldn’t keep its six nations together, even with its 1974 constitution which transformed this federal state into a confederacy of states, how the hell are you going to gather Europe’s many nations together in a continent-wide federal entity without the end result including death camps, snipers shooting civilians in the streets, and wholesale expulsions of entire populations by armed forces?

People resent each other when forced to live together. Nations do as well. Ask a Croatian nationalist about Yugoslavia, and he’ll claim that Croats were the perpetual victims of that state and that Croatian labor built Yugoslavia. Ask a Serbian nationalist about Yugoslavia, and he’ll claim that Yugoslavia was an anti-Serbian entity that served to undermine and destroy Serbian nationhood at the expense of elevating every other nationality. Ask a Macedonian nationalist about Yugoslavia, and you’ll get a spirited rant about how the Yugoslav authorities suppressed and gaslit Macedonian nationalism and used our country as a dumping ground for toxic waste. What’s interesting is that all of these stories are partially true. Yugoslavia was indeed an anti-Croat, anti-Serb, and anti-Macedonian entity, and it was also anti-Slovene, anti-Montenegrin, and anti-Bosniak. It was pro-Yugoslav, but Yugoslavs do not really exist outside the sick fantasy of former regime apparatchiks and extremely confused children of mixed marriages.

That’s perhaps going too far. Yugoslav means southern Slavs. There definitely exists such a group of people and it includes all the nations of the former Yugoslavia, as well as the Bulgarians. In this sense, southern Slav is an ethnic designation. It is an element of identity, a level between nation and race. One can have various levels of identity, beginning with familial, scaling up to local, regional, national, ethnic, sub-racial and finally racial. And so, I am a Macedonian, but also a southern Slav, a Slav, and white. All levels of identity can be vectors of identity politics. Not all levels brook the establishment of a common state. History teaches us that the national level is the highest at which stable state-type entities can be established. But there’s nothing stopping us from forming alliances at the higher levels and ultimately, at the highest, racial level.

What if there’s a middle ground between letting your neighbor’s house burn to the ground and moving in with him, making life intolerable for the both of you?

When large and organized enemies attack Europe, Europe has reacted by forming alliances against such enemies. After many centuries of raids and invasions, the Pope called on Christian Europe to proactively defend itself against the strength of Islam. After many years of hard fighting, the Crusades finally broke the back of the Muslim caliphate and introduced confusion and disunity among the followers of Muhammad. European men of various nations standing side-by-side turned back the tide of Turks at the gates of Vienna. The loss of authority for the Pope and the Catholic church spelled the end of European unity, and what followed were many centuries of brother wars until the imperfect solution provided by the Peace of Westphalia.

The nations of Europe are facing many threats, and we have to face these many threats together if we are to live. However, we must face these threats as equals coming together for a common goal, which is the survival of each nation. Already, we are seeing the beginnings of such alliances in entities like the Visegrád group, which do not seek to subordinate European nations, nor do they seek to forcefully integrate them with each other. Rather, the nations of Europe will work together for their common defense against external threats, both from hostile immigrants and great powers seeking to impose their suzerainty on us. Anything less means defeat. Anything more will lead to devastating brother wars.

The best way to prevent a brother war is to let each brother have his own house.