An earlier version of this article appeared in the magazine Identity, published by the British National Party.
Over the past few decades, British society, culture, and politics have increasingly come under the sway of America. Our common language has always made it particularly easy for us to influence each other, but, with the expansion of the media through cable and satellite TV, and the spread of ‘viral trends’ like blogging, internet sharing, and social media, this process is rapidly accelerating, with most of the influence flowing one way, from America to Britain, rather than the other way round.
Both in terms of substance and style, British politics has been particularly susceptible to American influences. In the past few years our political establishment has accepted ideas like multiculturalism, political correctness, and affirmative action that clearly stem from America’s unique conditions as a country with a 300-year history of high immigration, unassimilated indigenous peoples (Red Indians), and a history of racial injustice (domestic slavery). While it may be possible to make a case for some of these ideas in an American context, they have zero relevance to Britain, a country with a history of racial homogeneity going back thousands of years and the proud record of leading the way in abolishing slavery.
In addition to these alien ideas, our political establishment has also slavishly imitated American political techniques, adopting its presidential focus on photogenic ‘zeroes,’ like Tony Blair and David Cameron, and its sleaze-fuelled, media-savvy, spin-laden image politics.
Because of America’s vast influence on our society and political system, it is vital that British nationalists develop a clear understanding of what America is and how this feeds trends in this country and around the World. This is not as easy as it sounds because America is not just a pile of objective facts waiting to be learned. The America you are most likely to encounter is itself the carefully honed product of image manipulation and lies, pushed by some of the most seductive and skilful propagandists on the planet, motivated by a variety of reasons, some sinister, some simply business expedience.
To understand America properly, it is necessary to view it as existing on two levels. First there is the big, transcendent image created through mass media and culture, something that can easily be fed into the World’s TV sets, computers, newspapers, magazines, and multiplexes. This can be called Macro America, a phenomenon that exists in contrast to Micro America, the unreported everyday reality of hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans, which can only be approached by direct experience or careful appreciation of complex facts and data.
Macro America travels easily and is everywhere. Go to your local multiplex, look at ads for Gap clothing, or watch the latest CNN report on “Obamania” and you'll see it. In this America race is seldom an issue and when it is, it is because a few nasty Neanderthal rednecks make it so. In this America, people of different races coexist in a kind of multiracial heaven. Blacks, Whites, Asians and other races mingle as if ancestors, history, and culture had no more weight than, say, which flavour of ice cream people prefer. In this America, criminals are overwhelmingly White; judges and police chiefs are fine, upstanding Black women and men; and cops almost invariably pair up with someone of a different race – unless, of course, they happen to be the nasty Neanderthal redneck cop at whom we are supposed to throw our popcorn! In this America, the historical contribution of non-Whites to the country’s history is boosted so that you almost wonder what Whites contributed to the creation of their own country.
Even many Americans -- Whites insulated from the harsh realities of multiculturalism by affluence or kids brainwashed by an education system run on Marxist lines -- swallow this version of America. A recent study asked 2,000 high school students from 50 states to pick the most famous historical figures that were not presidents. Incredibly for a country that gave us such greats as Robert E. Lee, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and General Douglas McArthur, the top three places were all occupied by relative nonentities who just happened to be Black -- Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman -- showing just how much Macro America is being channelled into American schools.
Although King’s words and actions had some measurable historical impact on American society, the same cannot be said for Parks and Tubman. They are extremely marginal figures, especially Parks, whose claim to fame is that she once refused to sit at the back of a bus. Despite such lightweight historical contributions, these two figures have been artificially boosted by the U.S. education system because they tick not just one politically correct box (Black) but two (Black and Female). The fact that these comparative non-entities are promoted at all reveals that the US education system is much more interested in symbols than in facts.
The Macro America that distorts high school history in this fashion can also be found in the mouths of mainstream politicians, business leaders, diplomats, museum curators, and in the prose and prattle of almost all journalists and reporters employed by the mainstream media.
But this unreal “affirmative and inclusive” version of America is a dangerous lie that costs lives. Nowhere in this version of “reality” is there space for the unpalatable fact that 90 percent of all interracial crime in America is committed by Blacks against Whites, including 934 Black-on-White murders in the USA in 2005. It stands to reason that much of this crime could have been prevented by the victims taking precautions against people who either looked suspicious or whom the victim was unable to judge accurately for racial and cultural reasons. The mistaken belief that such caution was “racist” must have undoubtedly contributed to an unknown number of tragic robberies, rapes, and murders.
Most Americans, because they live close to the realities of Micro America, are less likely to be hoodwinked by the myths of Macro America than people elsewhere in the World. But, because of politically motivated “affirmativeness” (i.e. reverse racism) and the financial imperative of movies and TV shows to appeal to as wide an audience as possible by including positive characters of all the different races in the same stories, American society continues to pump out what is, in effect, absurdist multicultural propaganda.
Almost any TV show or movie not explicitly about racial problems presents us with an image of America as a harmoniously integrated society with people having partners and friends of different races. In a recent Disney movie High School Musical (2006), aimed at impressionable young people, almost all the characters had best friends and/or boyfriends/girlfriends of a different race. The hero, Troy Bolton, played by the White actor Zac Efron, for example, falls in love with Gabriella, a Hispanic girl, while his best friend Chad is Black. Obviously it is hard to criticize such relationships on a personal level, but the picture this movie presents of carefree racial harmony is one that is simply not found at the Micro level.
Since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, great efforts have been made and billions spent to racially integrate American society, especially the schools, all underpinned by something called “contact theory.” By educating children of different races together, it was assumed that they would effortlessly discover a common humanity that would override their ethnic identity. More than 40 years on, however, the de facto segregation of American schools is actually increasing.
How has this happened? Quite simply by Whites voting with their feet. Rather than see their children’s future endangered by multicultural social experiments, large numbers of Whites have either opted for expensive private education or moved to areas where their children can be educated with children largely of their own race. Efforts to integrate schools have seen Whites become almost non-existent in the public school sector of large urban areas. In Dallas in 2005, only 6 percent of children in state education were White, and, while Macro America likes to portray any unwillingness to associate with non-Whites as bigotry characteristic of poor, uneducated Whites, practically all these kids were from poor families as the more well-off Whites had already fled the system.
A recent study by Michael Emerson and David Sikkink of Rice University shows that the more educated Whites are, the more likely they are to reject out of hand schools with a high proportion of non-Whites. Furthermore, even where schools are integrated on paper, they are often segregated at the micro level, with kids of different races choosing different subjects, clubs, and sports, and holding different proms.
The process is also mutual. Other racial groups also feel a need to segregate. One of the “benefits” that integration was supposed to bring was that it would help close the academic gap between Blacks and Whites. In fact it had the opposite effect. Black students in racially mixed schools are invariably stigmatized as “acting White,” when they do well, an effect that is much less apparent in schools that are overwhelmingly Black.
This is because contact between children of different cultures and races generates confusion, cultural misunderstandings, and stress. This then activates our inherent tribalism, creating identity reinforcement, leading to mutual mistrust, tension and hostility between racial and cultural groups. For these very reasons, the drive to integrate, which once involved bussing kids from different neighbourhoods to make sure they “mixed,” has been greatly relaxed in recent years, allowing schools to re-segregate on the sly.
The naïve White liberal sociologists, like Gunnar Myrdal and Gordon Allport, who initiated this social engineering experiment have nevertheless succeeded at the mythic, macro level of fictitious high schools in Disney movies.
Another goal of the civil rights movement was to create an America where people of different races lived side by side in multiracial neighbourhoods. While Macro America pretends this is a fact, Micro America contradicts it. Even when the gap between Black and White incomes greatly narrowed in the 1990s -- thanks largely to “affirmative action” programs that gave Blacks racistly unfair employment and promotion advantages -- more affluent Blacks did not move into affluent White neighbourhoods. Instead, to enjoy the comfort that comes from living with people of one’s own race and culture, they created their own affluent Black neighbourhoods.
Whites, meanwhile, in order to maintain their comfort zone in a society where their numbers have dropped from 90 percent of the population in 1960 to around 65 percent today have been on the move. In 1960, Los Angeles was 72 percent White. By 2000, Whites were only 33 percent. During this period, while the myth of a harmonious multiracial Macro America was being fed to the World, America’s Whites were, in effect, fleeing the multiracial reality in droves for small-town or rural White areas.
In almost every case, the micro reality is radically different from the macro myth. Instead of the Black and White buddies familiar to us from such movies as Lethal Weapon and TV series like Miami Vice, the vast majority still associate, marry, go to church, and live in neighbourhoods with their own kind. Even in prison, where people lack the freedom to make choices, Black and Hispanic gangs fight for dominance and White gangs fight for survival, despite an official policy of integration that simply exacerbates these natural tensions.
With British democracy compromised by the growing power of the EU and the refusal of the Lib-Lab-Con parties to countenance a referendum on the new EU constitution, some segments of our media have favourably contrasted democracy in America with our own system. But the fact is that, in America voters are simply being offered two versions of the Marco American fantasy. Candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, globalist representatives of Macro America who favor high-immigration, will face off against globalist, high-immigration-favouring Republicans like John McCain. The Right endorses the same Macro myths of multiracialism as the Left, while much of its voting base lives in gated and guarded monoracial communities.
What makes this all the more tragic is the degree to which Americans are aware of the reigning ideology but refuse to directly challenge it. Rather than calling into question the tyrannical liberal myths of multiculturalism, political correctness, and affirmative action, those that can readily flee to schools and neighbourhoods where they can secretly practice the state heresy of racial self-segregation, while using the thought processes of Orwellian doublethink to claim that they are simply escaping “crime,” “pollution,” “congestion,” or “poor educational standards,” rather than a dysfunctional multiculturalism and the racial and social chaos it brings on the micro level.
What the hypocrisy and schizophrenia of America teaches us is that democracy is not simply a political phenomenon, it is also cultural. Where political leaders represent the common people, we say that that country is a democracy; where they don’t, we call it a tyranny. The yawning chasm between the real concerns and problems of Micro America and the fatuous, vacuous, feel-good rhetoric and image manipulation of Macro America reveals that America is, in effect, a cultural tyranny.
