The Spooky Mysticism Of Ethnic Nationalists

In a horror movie, it is the missing element, the unexplained element which provides the horror. We are frightened by the only-partially-revealed. We are even more frightened when this only-partially-revealed element has the power to shape events in the real world.

Paul Belien, himself, is such a horror. He gives us only a piece of his ideology. It is the missing part which is malevolent.

See is you can catch a glimpse of the horror as Belien attempts a "criticism" of Robert Spencer:

The success of the Northern League was the pivotal element in the victory of
Mr. Berlusconi’s alliance. It enabled him to win an absolute majority in the
Italian parliament.

...
Like the parties in Catalonia and the Basque country, the Northern
League (full name: Lega Nord per l’Indipendenza della Padania—Northern
League for the Independence of Padania) is a regionalist, indeed
separatist, party. Padania, in case you have never heard of it, does
not exist as a nation; it is the collective name that the League uses to denote
the various regions of northern Italy (such as Lombardy, Piedmont, Venice,
Tuscany, South Tyrol, and others). The League is made up of several
parties (including the Lega Lombarda, the Liga Veneta, the Alleanza Toscana)
that want to restore to their regions the sovereignty that they enjoyed prior to
the formation of the Italian State in the 19th century.

As Mr Mura points out, the “apolitical” Northern League is in politics not
for the sake of politics itself, but to “defend the territory.” There is
something remarkable going on here, though it will never hit the mainstream
media because the latter do not want to see it:

The most successful anti-immigration parties in Europe are
regionalist/secessionist parties. They are “apolitical” because they do not
particularly like politics. Their militants, members and voters do not like the
state, they want to be left alone. They defend local communities that want to
run their own affairs. They are parties of the land and the community, rather
than the state. They are, as the media and the political establishment
derisively call them, “populists.”

Owing to the massive immigration by people from an entirely different
culture, many ordinary Europeans no longer feel at home in their own countries.
Home is that cosy, often small, place where people feel safe among those whom
they know and trust. The fight for the preservation of Europe is a fight for
one’s own home, village, town, city, provence. That is why it is a localist
issue.

Resistance to Islamization is not a matter of ideology, as one prominent
American “anti-Jihadist” seems to think. The successful resistance in Europe has
a provincial and an ethnic basis. It is about the right of the Europeans to hand
their traditions, their identity, their cultural heritage down to their children
so that the latter can continue to enjoy Europe’s ancient freedoms. The spirit
of Old Lorraine has survived for 1,200 years. “Populist” parties in Flanders,
Switzerland, Lombardia, Cologne and Alsace and other regions along the spine of
Europe are popular for the simple reason that they are not prepared to let
twelve centuries of capitalist self-reliance, self-governance and limited
government fade away simply because foreigners are moving in with a spirit
adapted to Arabian desert life.

“It is the wrong way to fight the global jihad,” writes the American
anti-Islamist. “To form one group for indigenous Europeans, as has been done in
several countries, reduces virtually every issue to the one non-negotiable issue
of race and ethnicity, discourages cooperation, and thus encourages
Balkanization, works against the idea of representative government, and obscures
the common values of Judeo-Christian civilization that are shared by people of
many races and ethnicities.”

Ethnicity, however, is not by definition a racial concept; it is a cultural
one. Ethnicity is about the spirit, the culture that we share. For the above
parties this culture is precisely the culture of limited government, of the
common values of Western civilization, the adherence to home. Is all this bad
because it is indigenous rather than ideological?

Belien is pulling a sleight-of-hand on us here. And, it is the sleight-of-hand upon which all good horror movies turn. The question is, are we dealing with something that is of they physical world, or are we dealing with spooky, spiritual substances?

Note that Belien tells us the resistance in Europe is made up of "parties of the land and the community." This is a new way of phrasing the old racialist meme of "Blood and Soil."

When this whole counter-Jihad argument began I attempted, in a number of essays, to get people to define their terms. The words in question are

Ethnicity
Race
Culture

Here Belien castigates Spencer for saying that the argument is about ideology, rather than his preferred term, "ethnicity."

Then , he turns around and says that ethnicity is not race. He asserts that Ethnicity is not a racial concept, but is instead about culture.

What is culture if it is not race, and yet it is not ideology either? How is it that "culture" occupies some mysterious ground between race and ideology?

Race, or blood, is of the physical world. Ideology is of the mind. One can not assert that culture is of both the mind and the body, unless one also believes that ideas proceed necessarily from race.

Ethnicity, also, is either of the body, or it is of the mind. It's either blood or idea.

Ideas are those things which can be codified in language. We pass on culture through the medium of language. Western Civilization has reached the great heights it has reached specifically because of it's ability to codify it's ideas in the written word. The Judeo-Christian tradition, in particular, teaches that God spoke creation into existence, and Christ the Messiah is referred to as the Word of God.

Western Civilization is built on the ideas of the mind codified in the written word. Pagan civilization is built on the tribalist idea that blood is more important than idea. Paganist Tribalism is the ideological foundation of racism. Paganist tribalism is necessarily mystical, precisely because it is incapable of codifying the notion that ideas proceed from race.

We know that blood and heredity are not mystical ideas, as Belien would have it. Blood and soil are physically-verifiable phenomena.

Blood and Soil, or as Belien prefers to put it, "the community and the land", are not mysteriously tied to Ethnicity. And, Ethnicity is not mysteriously tied to Culture. "Blood and Soil," is a statement of ownership. It is not, as a political concept, part of the substratum of Ethnicity. For anyone, of any race, can own soil.

Paul Belien's argument is illogical as it rests on undefined assumptions about race, ethnicity and culture. If a man can not clearly articulate his assumptions, then his argument is not worth considering, particularly not if his argument is political in nature, with the potential to affect the lives and well-being of the hundreds of millions of people who live in Western Civilization.