Daniel Greenfield article: Superiority Complex

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 07:36 PM PDT

The people of most nations have a natural tendency to believe themselves superior because of their culture, religion and way of life. Such a belief not only makes for a healthy dose of national pride, but also serves as an immune system rallying the people to fight off invasions and maintain their way of life against the winds of change.

Today in the First World however, liberals attack such beliefs in their own countries as reactionary and dangerous. Those who do believe that their country is better or that their culture is superior, are mocked as ignorant, stigmatized as bigoted and routinely compared to Nazis. This is the liberal reductio ad absurdum which reduces all forms of pride in one's group, any sense of cultural worth and national exceptionalism to jackboots and straight armed salutes. Pinning all the blame on the "National" half of National Socialist, while completely overlooking the "Socialist" part, which had a good deal to do with the economic problems that the Nazis decided to loot their way out of, not to mention the centuries of historical context that made Nazism what it was, was a convenient way for globalists to attack nationalists for reasons that had nothing to do with WW2. And everything to do with their ideological belief that the Nation-State was the great enemy of human progress.

But what happens when people who do believe that their culture, their nationality and their religion are superior immigrate into nations where the host population has been taught that they are no better than anyone else?

Contrary to liberal dogma, the result can never be tolerance. Only intolerance. And when the cultural and national sense of superiority of new immigrants is encouraged, while that of the native population is discouraged, conflict is inevitable. Under such conditions, assimilation and adaptation are out of the conquest. Why would you want to adapt to an inferior culture? Why would you respect people who don't respect themselves?

Violence by new immigrants is met by appeasement which only feeds an existing superiority complex. Liberals treat every act of violence as a response to discrimination by a racist host society, that must be remedied with more benefits, apologies and kowtowing. A process that only convinces the new immigrants that they really are superior. Because for all the talk of tolerance, they are entitled to special privileges, that the natives not. New immigrants who come from cultures where there is no notion of equality, and a wide gap between the high and the low, may accept tolerance from their betters, but not from their inferiors. Tolerance and charity from your inferiors is an insult that must be answered by showing them their place.

If liberals treated all cultures, all nations and their historical narratives of greatness as equally invalid, the results would still be disastrous, but less incompatible. But when for example, the American narrative of heroism in the Alamo is disparaged, but the Mexican narrative of heroism in the Mexican-American War is celebrated and affirmed-- then a clash of cultures is inevitable.

So too when European colonialism is depicted as evil, but Muslim colonialism as beneficial, there will be conflict, rather than peaceful co-existence. Rather than defanging nationalism, liberals only cripple the nationalism of their own home countries, while encouraging the nationalism of the new arrivals. Little wonder then that Europe looks the way it does, or that America is facing a critical conflict over its future. Sarkozy is being depicted as the embodiment of evil, because he's trying to evict illegal gypsies from encampments in France. Israel is being roasted over the coals domestically, because it wants to deport some of its migrant workers, who have managed to drop their own anchor babies in the country. Arizona's governor is being compared to Hitler for trying to check the immigration status of criminals. Cameron's immigration cap is meeting with Liberal Democratic hysteria.

The common denominator is that First World countries with very generous immigration policies are being depicted as monsters for trying to exercise some very limited authority over immigration. The United States is a country of immigrants, France and England are filled with refugees and their children, and their children's children. Israel has taken in everyone from Sudanese refugees to Vietnamese boat people. But somehow it's never enough. Because domestic liberals will always insist that immigrants from more backward parts of the world, have more rights than the country's own citizens, particularly than those citizens who used to be immigrants and actually paid their dues. Instead liberals prefer refugees, bordercrossers and migrant workers, often with shady backgrounds and little to contribute except social problems.

And their only real argument is the same old reductio ad absurdum. Deporting gypsies is bad, even if their presence is illegal, because the Nazis deported gypsies. Barak suggested that Israel deporting migrant workers with their children who were born in the country, would make Israel appear to be no different than the Nazis. Arizona checking immigration status, again no different than the Nazis. Going by such talking points, you might get the impression that the Nazis were bad because they deported illegal immigrants, not because they were genocidal mass murderers who tried to conquer the world.

Except of course virtually every country with a functioning government deports people who are in the country illegally. Sometimes it imprisons them. A country that does not control its own borders or make any distinction between citizens and people who just wander on in, is arguably no longer a functioning state.

And that is the central point of controversy. Whether nation states will continue to exist as entities with representative governments empowered to manage regions by their native populations, or whether they will give way to regional and global organizations that do not represent citizens, but the welfare of anyone and everyone in the area. The left favors accelerating the breakup of First World states using population transplantation. The less compatible the new immigrants are, the more social problems they bring with them, and the more hostile their disposition toward the natives-- so much the better. Because the goal is colonization, not integration.

In its day, the USSR deliberately mixed together population groups, deporting and transplanting different groups, where they would be perpetually in conflict with one another. Uzbeks and Koreans, Russians and Estonians, Chechens and Kazakhs, and so on and so forth. These policies bred a great deal of needless conflict, which still continues to this day. But this Divide and Conquer policy kept different groups at each other's throats where they weren't a threat. The Soviet Union did not invent this tactic, it was carried over from the Czars, and was an old tactic of empires. To break up the national resistance of a native population by colonizing it with foreigners.

But the tactics of empires have a way of turning on them. Today Russia's future is Muslim, a future that its Ex-KGB rulers embrace in order to keep the Chinese at bay. Europe's future is not the EU, not even Eurabia, but something closer to the Middle East, a squabbling mixture of angry peoples who are united loosely by Islam, but cannot stop fighting each other long enough to form the much heralded Caliphate. The future is no better for America, where Mexican nationalists will find themselves fighting African-Americans, Hmong and others who won't be nearly as enthusiastic about Reconquista once the multicultural facade comes off, revealing Mexican nationalism, and second class status for everyone else.

Liberals have been calculatedly trashing the free market social advancement and legal equality that made it possible for so many different peoples to call America home. On American shores, nationalities who couldn't stand each other at home, learned to get along. Not because they were forced to by the diktat of some committee, or an educational campaign on tolerance featuring celebrities, but because fighting no longer made sense. They did not for the most part cease to be French, Scottish, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Japanese and all those things, but they could be those things without having to fight each over them.

Legal equality and advancement through a free market, meant that fighting each other no longer offered any kind of advantage. Working hard and co-existing with others did. At least it didn't until the 1960's came along, and suddenly being a member of a victimized group and willingness to riot in the streets became very advantageous. The American experiment fragmented into a gang war, in which success was a badge of shame demonstrating that you were either one of the oppressors or their lackeys, and failure proved that you were the victim of the man. And the American middle class, that great engine of social change that had served as a firewall against socialism, began falling apart.

Being American used to mean a sense of optimism and confidence in the future. Now it has come to mean always being willing to say sorry. Americans are denounced for denying history, for refusing to admit their culpability and for not being sensitive enough to everyone else's feelings.

The great triumph of liberalism has been to hijack a formerly optimistic culture, and transform it into a pessimistic one, feeding it nightmares about nuclear war, global poverty, pollution and global warming. Snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, they successfully turned the American dream into the American nightmare. Liberal culture took an America which had been the symbol of commercial triumph, and forced it to see itself as its enemies saw it, glutinous, barbarous, ignorant and violent. And that pattern has held true across the First World, from Australia to Israel to Italy. Only a handful of nations with a great deal of national integrity and resistance to outside influences, such as Japan, have been able to resist being force fed this mirror history of themselves, in which everything that they valued proved to be a crime of one sort or another.

But the greatest lie is the one that liberals tell themselves. In their self-deception they actually believe that Muslim immigrants will see the EU as a different breed of horse, from the nation states they are hard at work dismantling. They never stop to ask themselves, why in the world would Muslims regard the EU as any worthier of their respect and submission, than the governments of England and France? To Muslims, the EU is a means, not an end.

Having successfully discredited the histories and cultures of the countries that gave birth to the EU, the left has also discredited the EU itself. Within their ranks, a United Europe might be an event of almost religious significance, but to Muslims, it is nothing more than Europe squared. And if they are taught contempt for the countries and cultures of Europe, why should all of them piled together be any different? What the EU is to the Eurocrat, the Caliphate is to the Muslim. An inspired union that transcends the old laws and norms. And if they have to give their loyalty to something, it will be the Islamic Union of the Caliphate, rather than the secular European Union.

The situation is no better in America, where every value and tradition is being replaced by a vast bureaucracy and codes that no one knows or understands in their entirety. Without an American patriotism, or a history worthy of respect, there is no bond but that of a popular culture that is saturated with celebrity scandals and the ceaseless tabloid shriek of fame being offered fleetingly to ordinary people who manage to become elevated to a meme of their own. Without legal equality, ordinary people no longer have rights, but connections to people within the bureaucracy who can help them out. Without a free market, the best strategy is to employ those connections to make money off the government. And such a system naturally pits ethnicities and races against one another. Without law or mutual interests, such conflicts will eventually be settled with violence, as they were in urban areas during the seventies.

Without universally respected laws, the final argument is always force. And the more that argument is used successfully, the more it will be used in the future. The Tough on Crime eighties combined with the economic recovery of the nineties helped check the worst of it in America. But without economic prosperity, only force is left as a counterweight. And force requires that you be willing to use it. Meanwhile Europe is headed into the teeth of that same storm. Before the next decade is through there will be a lot more burning in Europe than cars, entire cities will burn. The left has empowered the use of violence as a tool of social change, over market economics. But their romanticism of revolutionary violence will lead to a revolution that will have more in common with Iran and Pakistan, than with the storming of the Bastille.

The left has fed the superiority complexes of refugees and migrant workers, even as it has marginalized and criminalized the superiority complex of the natives. It has done this in the name of tolerance, but the collision of two groups, one of whom has a superiority complex, will not lead to tolerance, until that latter group takes power. Then it may bestow some tolerance on those who were its former rulers, but are now its subjects.