My wife tears up every time she hears the American national anthem and sees the Old Glory waving in the background. Colin Kaepernick looks like he’s getting a colonoscopy. This makes my wife American and Kaepernick un-American. As a thought experiment, we conduct a poll testing the veracity of this statement among folks who voted for Trump and those who voted for Hillary. Among Trump voters, the vast majority rate this statement as true. Among Hillary’s, the reverse is correct.
Now replace the American anthem and flag with the Russian symbols of sovereignty and test this proposition among all Russians. The results will mirror those we got from the Trump voters. In other words, a vast majority of all Russians believe that being Russian means feeling a deep emotional connection to the Russian symbols of national sovereignty such as the Flag, the Seal of State (bald eagle for the US, two headed eagle for Russia), and the National Anthem. Feeling disdain for these symbols, even if strongly disagreeing with Russian government policies and actions, past and present, is disqualifying in terms of being a Russian, no matter what one’s passport says.
The amazing thing is that the same poll conducted in the US sixty years ago in 1956 would have yielded results much more similar to current day Russia than current day America. Now ask yourself: which country “won” the Cold War?
Russia is the last European, nuclear armed, major power in which the majority of the population hold on to the patriotic definition of national identity. This definition is at the base of all human existence and it is shared by Putin, Trump, Farrage, Le Pen, etc. It is also reviled by Soros, Hillary, Blair, Holland, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and the like.
Trump’s tweet on the criminalization of the burning of the American flag and the proposed unprecedented penalty of the loss of American citizenship was not a trick designed to change the news cycle away from his alleged conflicts of interests, as most “pundits” have put forth; it is a distillation of his patriotic worldview. If the American flag means nothing to you or worse, it is the symbol of oppression, regardless of any historical or current events, you are simply not an American and the American passport that you possess is in the truest meaning of the word fraudulent.
Opinion: Russian Imperial Resurgence vs. the Founding Fathers
The fundamental question is one of boundaries; sitting around our tribal hearth, telling and retelling stories about the wondrous deeds of our ancestors we draw a boundary around us. The boundary includes the king and his retinue, but also the poorest peasant and the wretch who steals from everyone’s plate. It doesn’t include the Other. We have become very good at telling ourselves apart from the Other; we have different audiovisual symbols, we cling to the slightest of linguistic differences. In the Hebrew Bible the name for the Other is “ger”. He is to be protected, but never accepted; not in the first generation.
The globalists wish to efface this boundary and replace it with a new one. On the inside are the educated and the affluent. On the outside are what the Soviets used to call “byvshiye liudi”, the “former people”. These are the blue collar workers, the non-unionized employees, the small business owners. Who can plausibly argue that Obama doesn’t feel much more affinity with Angela Merkel and Francois Holland than with the coal miners of Kentucky?
The two boundary systems, the tribal and the globalist cannot coexist. This is simply because educated elites are an essential part of any tribe; the tribe cannot exist without them and in fact they are the guardians of tribal lore and symbols. Their loyalty to the tribe is essential to the tribe’s survival and no tribe can survive the betrayal of its own elites.
When Trump kissed the American flag on stage before one of his rallies, when Putin walked side by side with Patriarch Cyril in full regalia to dedicate the newly erected statue of Prince Vladimir, the founder of Christian Russia, they were asserting their positions at the head of their respective tribes. Tribal leaders are expected to be rich, famous, and powerful; the members of the tribe never begrudge them that as long as they care and love the lowest member of their own tribe more than the highest member of the tribe next door.
Can one even imagine Obama, or for that matter Romney, Hillary or Merkel, kissing their respective flags? Wearing on their persons the slightest and the smallest symbols of tribal belonging? How “gauche” do you think they are? Of course it wasn’t by omission that Hillary did not wear an American flag lapel pin in any of the three presidential debates. Trump would have wrapped himself in the flag like in a prayer shawl if rules allowed. And with zero cynicism.
The Arrival Of The Neo-Bolsheviks
If there’s one thing that the lower caste tribal members know, it’s cynicism. When Trump kisses the American flag, they know it’s for real. When he wears his truck driver style cap with USA emblazoned across it, he does it without a trace of self-consciousness. And they know just as well that Obama wouldn’t be caught dead wearing his American flag lapel pin anywhere or anytime that his advisers didn’t force him to.
The betrayal by the elites of their own tribes and the creation of a new supra-tribal structure of and by these elites is the true nature of globalism and it is a radical departure from thousands of years of human history and tradition. In the past, both modern and pre-modern, tribal elites were the most patriotic members of the tribe. American elites in fact defined and created their tribe in the waning years of the 18th century. Their descendants a quarter of a millennium later are only too keen to betray that tribe and join with people like the Saudis whom the Founding Fathers must have surely abhorred in the new Globalist tribe. The Russian elites in the beginning of the 20th century knew full well that trouble was coming. Many of them had Swiss bank accounts and villas on the shores of Lake Geneva. But neither they nor Tsar Nicholas II exercised their privileged status to abandon their tribe, even as it was abandoning them, and escape certain death at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Such an abandonment, such a betrayal was a fate worse than death for these imperfect people.
The Globalists, like any tribe, need allies, lackeys, and most importantly enemies. As to allies, they have a really big one: China. While certainly a traditional tribe with traditional tribal elites, China prefers the Globalist tribe over the nationalist one (at least for now) because it allows China to manipulate its currency and transfer vast amounts of wealth from Western working classes to its own. As for lackeys, no shortage exists in people who feed on the crumbs from the Globalist table. Unfortunately in America this group consists mostly of African and Hispanic Americans, mostly in the inner cities, whose votes are essential for any globalist victories at the ballot box.
As to the enemies, well, count among them all of the Trump voters in America, the Brexit voters in the UK, the Hofer voters in Austria, the Le Pen voters in France, and pretty much everyone in Russia and the Jewish population of Israel. When it comes to the Jews, now evenly split between Israel and the North American diaspora, the situation is of particular interest. Israel, which defines itself as the Jewish State (is the UK an English State?) is the most nationalist of all Western countries. The North American Jews, who are over-represented by at least a factor of ten in the media elites, are among the leaders of the globalist movement. Though notable exceptions like Marc Steyn, Mark Levin, and Ezra Levant provide strong anti-globalist viewpoints to the mix.
So forget about the old Iron Curtain, the new frontiers are between the red and blue counties in America, between London and the rest of England, between Russia and Bilderberg.
