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A Scenario: The Danish Civil War
A sample:Concept of Citizenship The economic analogy afforded by the phenomenon of inflation is extremely instructive in any consideration of the questions of group identity or group membership. Consider the familiar chain of events when countries start printing money to cover obligations that cannot be met any other way (public salaries, government bonds, etc.). The entry into circulation of new money without a commensurate creation of new wealth means that each unit of currency corresponds to less wealth, with prices rising as a result. Though the motivations underlying the printing of new group memberships (i.e. the issuing of citizenship or equivalent status) are clearly different, a partial analogy can be drawn in terms of the effects. In a country like Japan, which has yet to develop an interest in allowing mass immigration from the developing world, citizenship (group membership in the Japanese nation) is remarkably clear-cut. To be Japanese is to be a member of that ethnic, linguistic and cultural community located on the Japanese archipelago. Though it is possible in principle to obtain Japanese citizenship, it is extremely difficult and time-consuming and will not result in one being thought of as Japanese by the Japanese. This state of affairs, in which the conditions for citizenship are universally agreed upon by group members and not undergoing non-organic, top-down attempts at revision, can be likened to a stable currency. In Japan, Japanese citizenship is a solid gold coin, its value unquestioned in social transactions. When a government prints new citizenships at a rate necessitated by mass immigration, it is attempting to create a new set of criteria for group membership. In effect, it is saying that the old criteria, evolved over a period of centuries, if not millennia, are to be rewritten by bureaucratic fiat, under cover of a smokescreen provided by meaningless boilerplate about shared values, and diversity. The timescale for this rewriting will be massively compressed relative to the initial evolutionary timescale, making gradual adjustment impossible. As this process advances, two things will become clear: the legal reality of the citizenship of the newcomers, and the utter incompatibility of at least some portion of them with the still deeply-entrenched membership criteria of the natives. Consider the case of Abu Hamza, that charmingly photogenic favourite of the British tabloids up until his arrest, trial, and incarceration by the British state. Given that the Home Office granted him a British passport after his (reputedly bigamous) marriage to a UK citizen, he was declared, in effect, by the state to be as British as anyone else. But what could this possibly mean? If an Egyptian-born radical Muslim who incited violence against non-Muslims, advocated global jihad, and was implicated in a variety of terrorism-related activities could be British, then we are forced to one of two conclusions. The first is that the category of the British citizen had degenerated to the point where it was compatible with these activities, in which case it would be hard to see why it should be granted any significance. The other is that the state was simply wrong, and that, legal issues notwithstanding, Abu Hamza was not British. Either way, the currency of citizenship would have been debased, with a British passport just not worth what it used to be. RTWT Posted by: SR-71 2007-11-29 |
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