Everyone agrees on one thing. The world is on the brink of tumultuous change. But where are we going? And who is making the decisions on our behalf?
Breaking Point: The End of the World as We Know It
It is clear that the ideological direction of society across the Western world is creating a dangerous lack of perspective. The desire to create one global moral and social paradigm has resulted in a precarious system, where the simplest of errors may become a global catastrophe or the simplest of lies may become the basis for how millions of people understand the world around them.
In a world of instant information, the newscycle is our reality. Daily and hourly, we are bombarded by global crises, international catastrophes, world-changing developments, but always curated within a relatively narrow spectrum of outlook. We live in a time of great uniformity but rarely are the downsides of this explored or acknowledged.
Selective Catastrophes – The Human Dimension
Why is it that a value is placed on protecting Ireland’s natural environment, but no value whatsoever is placed on protecting our nation’s demography? In an age where broad ecological concerns are centre-stage, why are human communities not respected? It is especially strange when you consider that global population movements have direct impact on the natural environment.
The world is only comprehensible to us in human terms. That is where we must start. Dan Breen once said that what mattered first to him were “the people of Ireland, not the hills and the dales and the rivers.” It wasn’t that the latter were unimportant but it was the human context that gave them meaning. “I can look at them,” he said, “but I can’t look at them if the people aren’t there.” It is the relationship between a place and the people living there over time that creates both the reason and the duty to care. That is the viewpoint of an Irish nationalist. It is, unfortunately, almost the opposite of what pertains in Ireland today.
As the saying goes, he who pays the piper calls the tune. What we care about, in the grand scheme of things, is often a function of what people in power care about, and in turn want us to care about. Globalism, while broad in one sense, is also narrow. The opinions and ideas that dominate public discourse are largely disseminated from localities like London or Hollywood or Silicon Valley. Cosmopolitanism often displays its own curious parochialism.
Not all catastrophes are equal which is to say not all catastrophes get equal airtime. There are multiple approaches to a philosophy of care towards the natural world and there is little to guarantee that the dominant approach is the most sound. All we can be sure of is that it shares the inherent prejudices of the system as a whole, which must include the dominant money interests. Since the system is global, any error of approach is replicated manifold. It is reasonable to ask whether the broad focus on climate change, for instance, comes at the expense of other ecological and social concerns. What dictates such choices of emphasis?
The use of terms like “environmentalism” cannot be taken as neutral or straightforward, since the people in control of those words evidently are not. The pros and cons of such “terms of concern” cannot be separated from the broader political designs of those controlling interests. The language of concern is inflected by the ideological direction of our world-era, which for decades has been categorised by global liberalism. In the same way, the sometimes reactionary anti-environmentalism of conservatives gets us no closer to an ideal. It merely rebounds off the status quo, giving us a picture of where power resides.
Any project of social concern either reinforces or comes into conflict with the dominant prejudices of the age. Among the prejudices inherent to the current system is a contempt for national communities and integral traditions. In the case of environmentalism, this frequently expresses itself as a hostility towards humanity itself. One might argue that an environmentalism which is anti-human in character is itself a threat to humanity.
Inherent Prejudice
Any discipline of knowledge is limited by what you are permitted to say in polite society. The boundaries of acceptable conclusions will differ according to whether you work in the United States or Russia or China or wherever. At the point of contention, all things are political. The executive summary or conclusion of a scientific study is the spin you put on it afterwards in order to justify the research, appease the grant committee, provoke a headline or just plain cover yourself. It’s the political bit.
Occasionally, objections slip through. Deviations from the narrative. On February 18, 2021, William Reville, a professor of biochemistry in UCC, suggested in the Irish Times that collapsed birth rates were likely a greater threat to humanity than climate change. This certainly constitutes a minority opinion in the press or in accepted public discourse. Right or wrong, it is an opinion unlikely to be heeded.
It is a symptom of a broader prejudice that falling birth rates are, invariably, viewed as a positive phenomenon, despite the fact that such a phenomenon is in itself precipitous of crisis. It’s just not the kind of crisis that is fashionable. Falling birth rates, especially in the West, are symptomatic of bad governance, failure of states to support family formation, and a trendy obsession with overpopulation. Aligned with this is a widespread support, in some cases thoughtless, in some cases too well thought out, for mass-immigration.
An Unfashionable Crisis
The same William Reville wrote on January 19, 2017: “Unless indigenous fertility rates increase sharply, immigration-induced restructuring of many European nation states can be expected to first dilute and eventually replace indigenous cultures and social structures and experience to date predicts troublesome upheaval to accompany this transition.” The situation as nationalists might describe it, hidden in plain sight in a mainstream news column.
Here is a crisis. Here is the solution. Sustainable national communities require government supports for family formation, a national economic model, and a positive view of population. They also require a more level-headed perspective on mass-migration. The reliance on large population transfers from poor to wealthy countries is exploitative and destructive; it amounts to treating workers as cattle and communities as herds.
But this is a catastrophe which does not fill our newsfeeds and is not framed as something we should care about… and does not consequently matter. In so much as attempts to remedy it are suppressed, it is a willed catastrophe. It is a catastrophe willed by the forces who dominate our world-era.
Infinite Growth and the Fault-lines of Globalism
Whereas mistakes on a local level are comprehensible and even expected, mistakes on a global level are usually more inscrutable. The HSE or the NHS are at least present in our day-to-day lives, through actual human interaction, proximity, anecdote and experience etc., and still the higher echelons of their bureaucracies are maddeningly opaque… but an organisation like WHO is so abstract in most people’s minds that it might as well be from another planet. It exists entirely in the newsfeed, categorised as an infallible authority.
The level of chaos surrounding Covid-19 has revealed the fault-lines of globalism even as it showcases the power of liberal hegemony to sustain narrative. The weakness of the global system, as Tony Blair once admitted, is that it is interconnected and founded upon confidence. In 2020 we saw a relatively minor virus bring the world to a standstill. Imagine what a significant pandemic would do.
In the wake of this crisis, we have heard world leaders and financial bodies speak of a system reset or at least a move towards some new economic paradigm. On the surface, their assessments clearly indict their own ideological worldview. It was globalism that failed after all. For years nationalists have contended that GDP figures were a poor measure of a nation’s prosperity. Now it is generally acknowledged.
In their own words, the apostles of globalism now admit that their project has failed, but they refuse to give up the ghost. They tell us that the pursuit of infinite growth must end, but the only solution they offer is more globalism. Hair of the dog that bit us.
There must be a great reset, yes, but not the one we keep hearing about. Change is needed, yes, but change in the right direction.
Ireland’s Youth Have No Future Under Economic and Social Liberalism
Irish people in their twenties and thirties now earn less than their parent’s generation and have diminishing chances of ever owning a home or being able to start a family. The most socially “liberated” generation in Irish history has dire economic prospects. And for those who ask “Where is the revolution?” the answer is simple. This is the revolution. This is what people cheered for in the streets and it is about time they woke up to that. It’s about time people learnt that economic and social liberalism are part of the same agenda.
Economic and social liberalism dovetail in the sense that the atomised transient lifestyle inherent to the economic model, is marketed as a form of liberation. The negative impacts of the economic system are presented in other words as the social rewards, e.g. abortion is marketed as a “freedom to choose.” But where is the “choice” for a couple who want to start a family but cannot afford to? The system has no interest in freedom that leads to Irish families, only to atomised consumers.
Young women are told they can “do anything, be anything, have anything”, but the truth is nobody can have it all. Later in life, many will find that the “freedom” they enjoyed in their twenties is small consolation for the families they never started. Meanwhile, young men are being bought off with a sort of delayed adolescence, increasingly separated from traditional male roles and responsibilities. The result is lack of meaning and purpose on a staggering scale.
Liberalism functions by buying people off and not necessarily with money. It buys people off with social status, short term gratification, withdrawal of adult responsibilities, commodified rebellion, etc. The young people dancing in Dublin Castle to celebrate abortion in 2018, might not have understood it but they too were being bought off. The social and economic system which would make it impossible for them to buy a home or start a family, was giving them the illusion of freedom, the illusion of victory, which is all liberalism ever truly does. These are simply short-term highs that distract from the reality that you no longer have a future.
The Consolations of Modernity
The last year or so has been a real education in just how fractured and dependent many people have become. It is only when the “benefits” and “distractions” of liberalism are withdrawn that you see how truly damaged the modern individual is; leaning on their smartphones like a crutch to their fragile reality. We have not come to this situation overnight, but for a long time it was possible for most people to ignore. The first victims of liberalism were foundational truths, after all, and who was going to miss those?
To begin with, they attacked the historical and spiritual basis for our collective identity, what you might call the consolations of the past, but there were plenty of other things to distract us.
Then they attacked the material basis for building a life; the ability to earn a living, buy a home, start a family, what you might call the consolations of the future… But we still had other distractions.
This left us with the consolations of the present; companionship, comradery, sport, work, sleep, short-term highs, disposable relationships, consumerism, smartphones, alcohol, drugs… But then those things too they attacked. They said you couldn’t visit your friends, or play your sports, or go to nightclubs, or attend college, or in some cases even work your low paying job.
One by one the consolations of the present have become less certain and less consoling. They have become rewards for compliance. These final distractions are the ones they taunt us with, just as an addict is taunted by a dealer. Whether they bring in “passports” to further regulate ordinary daily life is almost immaterial. The point is they can and most people will probably go along with it. They have broken the human being, placed him outside history, deprived him of meaning, and now they gloat about it
Nationalist Ethos Vs. Globalist Ethos
“We’re pushing nature to its limit. We’re pushing population to its limit. We’re pushing communities to their limits.” These are the words of Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation. However, WHO have shown themselves not to be part of the solution but the problem.
Ideologically committed technocrats have accumulated too much control over national economies and peoples. Their contempt for human societies and above all the human desire for homelands, is inherent to their world outlook. This principle must be foremost in any new economic paradigm; the respect for home and for habitat; the respect for who we are and where we live. Globalism has made us universal foreigners. We need to rehumanise humanity by renationalising people groups. We must put new value on rooted communities.
We must reset the current course but not to globalism. We must reset to nationalism, beginning with the idea that human populations should be treated with the same respect and considerations as the biosphere and any other ecological priority.
We need to focus on sustainable national communities and limited regional blocs. We need to unplug, to whatever extent possible, from the global system and pull back from the cult of total inter-connectivity. In the process maybe we can rediscover what it means to be human and, in our own case, what it means to be Irish.
National Demographics and Government Responsibility
National demographics are government responsibility. They can not just be left up to “market forces”. Framed as an anti-poverty measure, Denmark’s recent legislation on combating “parallel communities” is significant in its broader implications. The move by a Centre Left government in a “progressive” Nordic society to limit residents of “non-western” origin in each neighborhood to 30 per cent, demonstrates the inescapable contradictions of 21st century multiculturalism.
An obvious implication is that engineered multi-racial societies are innately dysfunctional and require constant intervention on the part of State authorities to fabricate cohesion. But more interesting is the principle of placing a cap on the number of foreigners.
By agreeing to limit the number of foreigners in a neighborhood to 30 per cent, you concede the fact that governments have the power to affect demographic change. By implication, the refusal of a government to address demographic change as a potential problem, or indeed a government’s active suppression of people who try to address it as a problem, can be seen as evidence of an underlying policy. Governments bear responsibility for the demographic transformation of western societies.
Since governments have that power and since the principle of using that power has been conceded, it now requires only the will. Why stop at a neighborhood? Since you have agreed in principle that there can be too many foreigners in a locality, why not apply that logic to the nation as a whole? Why not limit the number of foreigners in a country to a manageable percentage of the overall population? Better still, since your goal is to eliminate “parallel communities”, why not cap it at a number that does not threaten the demographic cohesion of the overall nation state? 30 per cent is already far too high.
There are towns, localities and parts or our cities today where Irish people are a minority. At the present, Palestine has better odds of remaining Palestinian than inner-city Dublin has of remaining Irish. The phenomenon of “parallel communities” is well under way, yet there has been an abject failure by the political establishment to acknowledge even marginal responsibility for demographic change; the single most decisive variable in any society.
Monopolies and Oligarchs
Who has more power in Ireland today? The politicians in Leinster House or a company like Google? How can we have governments responsible for national change if they do not exercise real power? If we are serious about leaving behind us a society worth living in, then we need to grasp the nettle of corporate oligarchy. Tech monopolies, supranational governance and global financial institutions are dictating how we live our lives, not only at a cost to the individual, but at a cost to the greater good.
Over-reliance of Foreign Direct Investment, just as over-reliance on emigration and immigration, is symptomatic of a Faustian pact which successive Irish governments have bought into. For short-term economic and social highs or quick fixes, we have been willing to sell our own souls.
We need to take control of our country, yes, but in actual fact our very humanity. We need to dictate how these institutions transform our society, rather than settling for being at the mercy of corporate whims and market forces. We need to do it, other nations need to do it, and it needs to become the norm.
Human Welfare
In the face of a fourth industrial revolution, throwing up issues like widespread automation and “human obsolescence”, the challenge for any national government is not only giving people something to do, or something to spend, but something to live for. Any welfare project must be national in scale and in concept, depending always on the fraternal good-will of a truly national community, based on a relationship of rights and duties.
Is is undeniable that there are aspects of modern life which are mentally and physically destroying the human being. The long term health consequences both for the individual and for the society are potentially devastating. Large scale welfare projects, such as seen during lockdown, that basically condemn people to despair, long term sedentary lifestyles, inter-generational poverty or social alienation, must not be seen as the ideal model. Creative alternatives must be found whether that be though expanded ideas of national service or other participatory civic projects, especially in relation to the environment. The aim must be spiritual as well as anything else in the sense of lifting people up and giving people purpose. These are not issues that can simply be bought off.
Energy
If Ireland wants to be treated as a serious country, it must behave as one. There are no sentimental answers to complex questions. If we are serious about becoming less dependent on fossil fuels, for example, then we at least need to explore the concept of a modern nuclear programme. Renewable energy will play its part but it will not in the end be enough. Our continued dependence on British and French power grids raises issues of both self-sufficiency and security. If the main objection to such a programme is that our current political system is incompetent to carry it out, then we need a better political system.
Sustainable Communities
If we are serious about sustainability then we need to promote and support family formation and cease relying on mass-migration as a crude economic stop-gap. It is not possible to roll back the negative impacts of globalisation while treating the world population as a transient workforce.
The Natural World
If we are serious about sustainability and biodiversity, then we need to back it up with a national ethos. Just as the Irish language will never flourish until underpinned by a real collective sense of why we need to preserve it, the same applies to nature. We have our part to play on this island, as custodians of Ireland’s natural habitats and resources. Nationality provides the reason to care and the answer to the question.
Once the issue of environmentalism is dealt with on a human scale and placed within the ideological framework of national revival, there is no reason why it cannot be fully integrated. The greatest obstacle is its current association with “champagne socialists” and unaccountable global institutions. Care for the natural world should certainly not be a Trojan Horse for a myriad of harmful agendas, many of which have nothing to do with the relevant issues. It should be integrated and sit side by side with projects of national community where its benefits will be clear to all. An ethos of this kind could result in projects far more radical and yet far less disruptive.
An Economic Break
The centrality of the Money System is at the heart of the modern malaise. Above all else, we need to break from the endless cycles of debt, the endless pursuit of growth, the endless transfer of people, and to embrace a new economic model; one fitted to the principle of making a home in the world, not ripping it apart.
That means creating a system where the State alone is allowed to issue currency; a system where the State alone is allowed to provide Credit on a large scale. It means ending the situation where the majority of the economy and the majority of human effort and work is devoted to paying tribute service to International Finance through interest repayments. It means a functioning economy of real production and of real assets, not manufactured credit or manufactured debt.
Nationalist Government
It means a nationalist solution to the failures of a global system. It means sustainable futures, not based on growth statistics but on the quality of life of the nation and its people. A philosophy of hearth and home: a livable society on human terms. Not a vast impersonal technocracy removed from kin and country. This requires, of course, as does everything else we have addressed, a nationalist government.
This article was submitted by a National Party member. If you would like to submit an article for publication on the National Party website, follow this link.