by Neil Vodavzny

Old MacDonald’s Microcosmic Milieu, circa 1940s

By dint of a being a long-time comics fan (as well as a failed writer, though I do a fine-line in comics-themed mosaics if anyone’s interested), one gets imbued with the virtues of simplicity, not only in storytelling but more everyday things such as racial stereotyping or, as I prefer to call it, ethnicity, since that can apply to way of life, history, origins..as with Scottish dialect, say.

Even language is simplified if it’s dialect – Moira MacTaggert of X-Men just has to say the odd “och” or “dinna” and the art and story do the rest (past master John Byrne still hasn’t been bettered for taut line-work, by the way – nothing to excess). Actions are simplified, even if words aren’t. If words get complex, it’s often not clear what if any action or event they refer to.

The press are wont to say suchlike as, “There’s been an increase in anti-English racism in Scotland” – what does that mean? Both countries are relatively interbred, so the word race is just a redundant usage by the anti-racism establishment. In this case, anti-English means precisely what it says – mode of speech and possibly of exchange! It’s very clear what that means and anyone with the slightest imagination could conjure-up a mind’s eye picture of the interaction (or headbutt, Jimmy).

If the culture is an ethnocentric one then that will be contained in the verbal usage, as in English yeomanry. It’s completely self-contained. If the Right is waging a type of war against liberal media elites, then it’s a cultural war. Within this war there is a value-system that recognizes and appreciates ethno-entric lifestyles and folklore. Folklore gives rise to values which are lacking in the liberal Establishment.

It’s basically a simplification as a way of focusing on what matters. You could also liken it to a type of rule or grammar, to quote CC Beck again..

I like Swift and people of that vintage, way back in the 17, 18 hundreds. Benjamin Franklin tells how he learned to write by copying other great writers and learning his grammar, syntax, spelling. He points out how a change in one letter by a careless typesetter could change the whole meaning of a passage. Did you know there are various Bibles that have typos in them? In one of them, Franklin sais, by leaving out one letter, in a passage where it said, “When we get to that golden shore, we shall all be changed” the typesetter left the “c” off, and it said, “We shall all be hanged”. When I see things like that taking place, it riles me up. I say, “That damn fool idiot”. The same as you can see in land developers when they move in, cut the trees down, and cover everything in concrete. That’s certainly not how to improve things.

Occam’s Razor is the principle that the simplest solution is often the right one – applied to language it would tend to mean giving up redundancies for the sake of clarity. What goes where and why – it’s more useful to think in terms of a value-system since that’s what matters. Swedes, Norwegians or Dutchmen are absolutely specific words requiring no qualifications. That is to say, there is something called Norse legend, someone called Ibsen, and geographical formations called fiords.

What I’m going to suggest is that attaching any specifics of race to the words is a redundancy. We already know what the words mean. For the same reason, attaching any specifics of race to the liberal media elites is a redundancy – it doesn’t actually figure if it’s the culture you’re talking about. Choosing words carefully and being grammatically correct is one of those old-fashioned things that might be worth preserving.

Ethnocentric societies are “real” in the sense that all societies are that as a normal state of affairs (also in that tribes are an extension of a family). They are sometimes stereotypical, tending to preserve customs and so on – what you could call Tintin-esque. Odd US sects like the Amish have that in spades. This is just stating the obvious, really, any country such as Britain in the 30s, 40s, 50s – see image. It’s only relatively recently societies have deviated into a global free-for-all, so it’s by no means reactionary to espouse such values of simplicity.

Nor is it strictly racially-oriented. A better word is tribalistic, in the sense any small grouping such as a village is. On this scale, societies are naturally tribal so it’s just the usual state of affairs that has been true since the dawn of time up to about mid-century, say. Those societies are easy to recognize, not racially but through their customs – you only have to look at a Constable (1800s), a van Gogh (1880s) or an old painting of a Dutch interior.

The issue is preserving values that are patently apparent from the customs and folklore of societies that are organized along traditional lines – town & country maintaining tribal patterns of obligation, duty, service. As a secondary effect, the customs preserve racial origins, but that isn’t the primary cause. The cause is patterns of obligations that aren’t political, but maintain hierarchical affiliations that are based more on lineage and inheritance. A rural culture is one where land gets inherited, passed down through generations. For this reason origins are preserved, but this is all to do with traditional virtues, not an absolute definition of race.

Maybe that’s slightly precious, but it’s just to simplify the terms of the debate. Liberals feed on race like vampires on Vestal Virgins, for the reason it’s a topic they’re very comfortable with. The point of ethno-centrism is it produces values which are tied to origins, spirit, nature. Those values are common to all ethno-centric cultures. They are not common to a liberal elite.

One can argue about identity till the cows come home, but the origin of Europe is in Greek classicism.