Independence Day

2,449 words

Nations who went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished.–Sir Winston Churchill

We may not know to a certainty what the globalists want, but we know what they don’t want: nationalism. The goal of the Davos elites is not just the erasure of nations in a literal sense, to be replaced by global federalism, but the forbidding even of nationalistic feeling among the peasantry they feel us to be.

Nations may remain as a token, of course, and you are permitted to cheer for your national soccer team, just as long as white indigenous players are in the minority. Many observers noted that the French team which won the last soccer World Cup was essentially pan-African in racial origin. In what sense did “France” win that competition? Other than that tokenism, the nation-state is to be despised and rejected by its enemies. Michael O’Meara draws the modern battle lines accurately in an essay from the collection, Toward the White Republic:

Terre et Peuple, Blut und Boden: The notion that every people needs its own land is as old as Europe itself. In the post-modern, transnational, and global order favoured by our one-world elites such a notion, of course, is deemed obsolete, as if the quantitative monetary principles of the world market are a better way of organizing social life than traditional ones based on healthy families, organic communities, and ethnoracial identities.

Much has been made by the sneering Left of the fact that many nations are what has been called “mongrel states.” But while the tired old adage stating that “America is a nation of immigrants” is technically correct, this is a rather slippery argument. While true, it is also true that those original, nation-building immigrants were not Panamanian, Haitian, or Gambian. They were from hardier European stock possessing what we might call “bell-curve privilege.” Now they are victims of their own success as the ruling institutions of the nation they built from nothing have turned on their own history. The Left see no point to a grave unless they can spit on it.

The European Union is a clear expression of deep-rooted hatred of nationalistic opposition to what it believes to be its manifest destiny as an entity free of the troublesome nation-state. This aim is exercised by the promotion of what the late Sir Roger Scruton called oikophobia, an Ancient Greek construction meaning a hatred of one’s home. The whole premise of the EU is the dissolution of sovereign states, which the Gauleiters of Brussels deem responsible for the wars of the twentieth century rather than the more obvious reason, which was a pathetic failure to kick Germany hard when she was down and to keep kicking her until she couldn’t get back up.

On a related subject, perhaps the greatest recent image of German self-hatred was Angela Merkel, who stood on stage with other politicians of her party several years ago at some idiotic photo-shoot (as if we need to see ugly people again and again), and snatched away a small German flag being waved childishly by one of her stuffed-suit sidekicks. Her look of disgust and the shake of her head as she removed it from his hand were those of a Mother Superior inadvertently witnessing one of her nuns urinating in the public square.

Europe aside, the anti-nationalistic toxin is currently most virulent in the US, where children are routinely taught to despise the flag, history, and customs of the nation de Tocqueville saw as the greatest experiment in democracy on Earth. This national auto-erasure is even now crossing the herring-pond to the United Kingdom, where England is the specific target. While the Scots, Welsh, and Irish (although of course only Northern Ireland is a part of the Union) are encouraged to celebrate their nationhood on Burn’s Night, St. David’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day respectively, any celebration of St. George’s Day in England is frowned on, and the English flag is often literally banned from public display. St. George’s Day also falls on Shakespeare’s birthday (the same date on which the Bard shuffled off this mortal coil), and the censorious treatment of the Swan of Avon in Britain’s schools says much about the educational elites’ opinion of nationalistic fervor. National culture, the imprimatur of the history of a people, must be sanitized by ethnic cleansing. Thus, the English Touring Opera has just fired a dozen or so white singers — some with up to 20 years’ experience — in order to make the cast more diverse.

How pleasant, then, as a citizen of the British Isles, to see my local town swathed in red, white, and blue flags, garlands, and bunting on a day of national celebration, to hear traditional music ringing through the streets, to see young girls in ethnic dress, and to feel an entirely unaggressive and affectionate patriotism in the air. There is only one problem. I am not in Britain. I am in Costa Rica, and it is La Día de la Independencia.

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.

The red, white, and blue of the Costa Rican flag are actually the exact tones of the colours in the French flag, having been designed by the first Costa Rican president’s wife, who insisted on summoning the revolutionary fervour of La République. The actual name of this country is La República de Costa Rica — the heavy coins here confirm this — and so perhaps Signora Madriz had a spousal say in that, too.

The flag also includes an emblem to denote the region of Costa Rica in which the flag is being flown, indicating regional affection as well as love of country. Even on the 364 other days of the year, the flag is flown everywhere and with pride — and I am not referring to the faddish new, “woke” meaning of the word. The Anglophone countries and their embassies are more concerned with the rainbow monstrosity know as the “pride flag” than they are with pride in their nation’s actual flag.

Costa Rica celebrates its independence from Spain, which occurred in 1821, on September 15, and on that Wednesday, just like every other Tico town, my own sleepy Pacific-side hamlet had its celebrations. They may have been muted this year, but there was nothing last year due to uncertainty over COVID, and so it was welcome this time. Costa Ricans need no excuse to express their love for their nation, and the current and state-mandated ethnomasochism in Europe and the Anglophone countries would mystify them. Their patriotism is as natural to them as any other aspect of their lives.

Patriotism, as Dr. Johnson famously quipped, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. He meant not that patriots are scoundrels, however, but that genuine scoundrels will resort to patriotism — or rather its trappings — when it is expedient. You see this type of propagandist semiotics in Great Britain at present, with “Conservative” ministers interviewed on television making sure they have a prominent Union Flag behind them. (The British flag is only referred to as a “Union Jack” when flown at sea). The engraved “crown mark,” indicating imperial measurement rather than European metrical, has been reintroduced for British pint beer glasses. But these are focus-group-incubated sops which can be thrown to a politically unaware public via the standard delivery system known as the media, at very little cost to government. You also hear empty buzzwords from the collective political voice such as “British values” and “what makes Britain great.” This is from a quasi-autistic political class who care little about their country except the affection piglets feel for a sow’s teats. Scoundrels indeed.

Whether nationalistic pride is genetic, cultural, archetypal, linguistic, or a result of the interactive combination of all of these and more, it exists, and its existence is of great concern to the open-borders, globalist, great-reset merchants currently seeking a way to finish the job they have started: that of enslaving anyone outside of their quasi-Freemasonic cabal. Nationalism for the Bilderberg crew is a glue for which they need the solvent. How they would hate Costa Rica’s Independence Day parades.

The town is small, and it is easy to follow the parade. The first celebration I witnessed, in 2016, had thousands of participants and observers, and was policed by six or seven police officers on foot, smiling and happy to be with their kinsmen. Imagine that in London. There would be ranks of riot police warned to watch for the English flag. Again, this would baffle the locals here.

A local style of music has evolved over the generations, my province being originally tribal, as all pre-Columbian areas of the country were. There are ranks of drummers (mostly boys) providing a martial beat incongruous in a country which has had no standing army since 1948, and accompanied by mostly girls playing the lyra, best described as a vertical xylophone held in a lyre-shaped frame. It is a strange combination, with tinkerbell notelets over marching music. But Latin America is full of strange things.

As noted, this year’s celebrations were modest compared with previous years, with their gangs of papier–mâché puppet devils, horses, traditional rural dances, and late-night revelry. But to un extraño like me, the atmosphere is one of people at ease in the cultural trappings of their nation.

Costa Rica does have particular cause to be fervently nationalistic. Just as Sir Cecil Rhodes said that to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in life’s lottery, so too there is a sense that Costa Ricans appreciate their good fortune in not being, say, Nicaraguan or Guatemalan. Those caravans of refugees swarming like (non-)worker ants to the northern Mexican border are unlikely to contain many Ticos or Ticas.

Costa Rica is known colloquially as the “Switzerland of Central America” in reference to its relatively robust economy by regional standards, but bearing in mind that it only has to beat the likes of Mexico and El Salvador, this is not quite the accolade it appears to be. Nevertheless, there are many other Latinos who would like to live here. In Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s wonderful novel 2666 (set mostly in Mexico), a day-dreaming police officer is reprimanded by his superior: “Where are you? Off in Costa Rica?”

It is a naïve proposition, but I sense that a main difference between Latin countries and the European and Anglophone nations is that politicians here tend to be closer to the people. This is not to say that they are all ex-fishermen, stevedores, or postmen. (Certainly not the latter. Costa Rica doesn’t have postmen or postwomen, it has post offices; your mail goes there and you pick it up, which looks like a huge economic saving to me). Current Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado Quesada, unperturbed by the fact that his surname can be translated into English as “cheesy,” won’t have dirtied or toughened his hands too much during his pre-political career as a journalist, writer of historical fiction, and business consultant. (I was delighted, incidentally, to discover that the President gained his MA at Sussex University, my own university, as mentioned in a previous episode.) But there is a sense he understands his country and empathizes with its people in a way wholly absent from the curious political class running (down) my own country. He would have a national flag in his office as a matter of course, not a matter of optics.

Costa Rica’s governmental party has the staunchly Latin American name of the Citizens Liberation Party, and we can be excused a wry smile on learning that its original election platform was to fight corruption which, on this continent, is like Britain’s King Canute famously sitting on a throne on a beach wearily commanding that the tide turn back. That said, corruption here is at the very least out in the open, while in my country you have to delve into the connections between trusted corporate allies of the government and the concomitant advantages they receive to find them, and the underbelly is just as rotten as any Latin financial chicanery.

This is a broad-brush, layman’s assessment of a country I just happen to have ended up in. I am not here because it is Costa Rica. I am here because it is not England, and it pains me to say that. I suppose I am lucky to have lived through peak England, although the rot was already starting in the 1960s. I was just too young to know it. We weren’t taught to love England when I was a boy, but we were allowed to, if we found cause. Those days are gone.

Finally, two points concerning nationalism from the perspective of an Englishman abroad. If anyone attempted to pull down the statue of a national hero here, the locals would beat them up. If the police got involved, they would help — to beat them up. The nationalism here is visceral, but not in the way of some lard-arsed and hideously tattooed English football supporter, drunk and bellowing and causing an affray in some unsuspecting European town. Simply put, it is the unobtrusive expression of a love of country. It needn’t be over-thought. But we will end on a musical note.

Costa Rica’s national anthem is typical of Latin America: a jaunty, militaristic toe-tapper with a minor-key section in the middle to make you remember to feel sad sometimes, because every nation has its cause for tears. There has been, as you would expect, a good deal of tinkering with and excision of various lyrics from national anthems across Europe which reflect any love of country, or even a hint of pro patria mori. But the lyrics of the Himno de la Republica de Costa Rica is moving for those who live in emasculated countries. Some of its words suggest that, for a nation with no army (although the cops are concomitantly tough guys, having no military to join), they might be prepared to defend their borders in a way no European nation would be permitted to:

Noble homeland, your beautiful flag
Expresses for us your life.
Under the limpid blue of your skies,
Peace reigns, white and pure.
In the tenacious battle of fruitful toil,
That brings a glow to men’s faces,
Your sons, simple farm hands,
Gained eternal renown, esteem and honour.
Hail, gentle country!
Hail, loving mother!
If anyone should attempt to besmirch your glory,
You will see your people, valiant and virile,
Exchange their rustic tools for weapons.
Hail, O homeland!
Your prodigal soil
Gives us sweet sustenance and shelter.
Under the limpid blue of your sky,
May peaceful labor continue.

I wonder if, in the future, drummer boys and girls will march to celebrate the independence of ordinary people from the scourge of globalism.

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