Good read.
As we forget who we are and what is worth defending.https://t.co/A6tSsWF60s pic.twitter.com/ir1TxXuD39
— ArthurinCali.substack.com (@ArthurinCali) June 16, 2023
Tag: american identity
Cold Thoughts
The weather has turned cold. There was some sun today but temperatures were in the fifties. We got out for a walk and there was enough to do around the house but for some reason I couldn’t get a handle on anything interesting in the news. I guess things will have to percolate for a while.
I watched an old John Barrymore movie called Counsellor at Law. It was really pretty good. I hadn’t seen it for a few years and I even forgot the ending. It had all the stock characters for a movie taking place in 1930s Manhattan. And it occurred to me that the despised European immigrants that were the downtrodden denizens of the criminal courts in this movie have moved three generations later to the position of despised oppressors of the new downtrodden.
But the funny part is they did this without ever being rich or powerful in between. Our parents and grandparents struggled to become good Americans in the hope that their descendants would get to live in the working and middle classes by following the rules and believing in the civic nationalism that said that a man was judged by his deeds and not his pedigree.
And now we are told that all that was a mistake. Everything they did and we believed in was wrong. All that talk about freedoms and inalienable rights was just a dodge. It turns out that the Communists and the Fascists were right. Power comes from the barrel of a gun. We have no more right to freedom and happiness here than we did back in the old country where some patron or mafioso decided who got to work and who got to starve. In fact, at least back in the old country there was some sense of loyalty even toward the peasants by those in charge.
So, we’re all expendable now. Just a bunch of spare parts that are no longer needed in the new American economy. A giant game of musical chairs where they turn off the music and there’s no place left for you. It seems to me this explains why the Latinos are starting to gravitate toward the Republican party. They’re basically the new version of the southern Europeans of a hundred years ago. They came here expecting to work their way up and now they’re seeing the same dead end. And they’re figuring out that the Democrats aren’t the party that helps families. They’re the party of trans-gender indoctrination for their kids and of working women with no time for raising families.
I was reading Putin’s speech about the absorption of the Donbass regions into Russia. It was very long and had a lot about Russian history and the fall of the Soviet Union. But there was also a lot about the West.
I’ve copied some sections that I found interesting:
“In fact, they spit on the natural right of billions of people, most of humanity, to freedom and justice, to determine their own future on their own. Now they have completely moved to a radical denial of moral norms, religion, and family.
Let’s answer some very simple questions for ourselves. I now want to return to what I said, I want to address all the citizens of the country – not only to those colleagues who are in the hall – to all the citizens of Russia: do we want to have, here, in our country, in Russia, instead of mom and dad there was “parent number one”, “number two”, “number three” – are they completely crazy already there? Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed on children in our schools from the primary grades? To be drummed into them that there are supposedly other genders besides women and men, and to be offered a sex change operation? Do we want all this for our country and our children? For us, all this is unacceptable, we have a different, our own future.
I repeat, the dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves. This is a challenge for everyone. Such a complete denial of man, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, the suppression of freedom acquires the features of a “reverse religion” – outright Satanism. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ, denouncing the false prophets, says: By their fruits you will know them. And these poisonous fruits are already obvious to people – not only in our country, in all countries, including for many people and in the West itself.
The world has entered a period of revolutionary transformations, they are of a fundamental nature. New development centers are being formed, they represent the majority – the majority! – of the world community and are ready not only to declare their interests, but also to protect them, and see multipolarity as an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty, which means to gain true freedom, a historical perspective, their right to independent, creative, original development, to a harmonious process.
All over the world, including in Europe and the United States, as I said, we have many like-minded people, and we feel, we see their support. A liberation, anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is already developing within the most diverse countries and societies. His subjectivity will only grow. It is this force that will determine the future geopolitical reality.”
Now I have no illusions about Vladimir Putin. He is a cold-blooded killer. He will use whatever means he needs to achieve his goals. He was the architect of the Second Chechen War, a brutal conflict. He is a Russian partisan. He has no love for America. And yet most of what I copied above from his speech is demonstrably true. Our government is erasing normalcy from our society and substituting a sick twisted anti-human creed. The family is denigrated and mocked. Freedom is being erased as a hate crime. Prosperity for most people is being outlawed. Even Vlad the Impaler can point to us and name our sins. They’re that mortally clear.
It’s a cold, kind of bleak day, but I found illumination in an old black and white movie and the words of a modern-day autocrat. The United States has abandoned the principles that made it great. It has broken faith with the people who fought for it and believed in it. It remains to be seen if it can be prodded back on the high road again. But at least I found a little clarity.
Even the Hopeless Narcissists Are Waking Up
How horrible must things now be if someone as addicted to make believe as Bill Mahr says that things have gone too far? Bill Mahr had a monologue on his show where he tried to explain to his audience of cretins that if America now has a different national anthem for black people, then the Left has revived segregation all on its own. Apparently Mahr thinks he still lives in a world where the Left cares about fairness or even sanity. His point is that if we let every race or ethnicity have its own bubble then we would no longer be “one nation indivisible.”
How cute! After spending a century sledge hammering the country to bits, now they’re afraid that white people may realize that the other identities don’t consider themselves part of “America.” Well Bill, it’s too late. We know the score and most of us are well beyond caring whether they kneel to the “Star Spangled Banner” or stand in rapt attention for “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” These people are not our countrymen anymore. They’re just grifters looking for another payday.
What it does tell me is that Bill Mahr knows that the jig is up and the powers that be better start reeling in the crazy before the pot boils over. Or maybe Bill is trying to hold onto the part of his audience that still believes that America can still fool most of the people most of the time. Maybe he’s right. Maybe there are still tens of millions of idiots who think all of us will just magically come together with Left and Right joining hands around the flag singing Kumbaya.
But even if there is a huge chunk of stupid people buying into this sad story, I think the portion that has awakened to reality is large enough to start making a meaningful difference. When thirty to forty percent of the population no longer believes in the concept of a republic it’s a pretty good bet that that country is going to decline pretty fast. I don’t think it will implode the way that the Soviet Union did in just a decade or two after its people gave up on it. There’s too much money and resources in this place to force it into the ground that fast. But it’s easy to see that this isn’t the same America as the 20th century version. The Left got their way. They’ve turned it into a land of factions. And the people they are trying to disinherit will be the largest and angriest faction of all. It may take another twenty years but what will be left will be a Yugoslavia. And eventually that breaks apart. Maybe that was their plan all along. But when it does break up the parts will be different from the former whole. There may be a place for each of the new identities. Not that it will be a smooth transition. There will be a lot of jostling. But there is the possibility that mostly everyone will be happier than we are now. My guess is the only ones who won’t be happier are the grifters who set this whole thing up. Seeing all those people happy to be rid of them is sure to make them miserable. But you can hardly fault me for smiling about that. A question that I am still working out is whether I want to stick around for that whole messy civil war thing. It seems like a bad idea.
But anyway, once the country has been busted up it will be appropriate to have multiple national anthems. The only question is whether anyone will get stuck with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Identity Politics and the Future of America
Hat tip to Vox Day for a link to a well written article by a black conservative on why black people vote Democrat. Here’s his link. And here’s the article.
The author Lipton Matthews persuasively explains why it is very unlikely that Republicans will ever be able to separate black voters from the Democrat party. Basically voting for them is a group strategy that provides rewards in an overall way. This is despite the obvious failings or even awfulness of a Maxine Waters or Al Sharpton that even the black voters see.
This is important for white Americans to understand. In the presence of interest groups negotiating for their preferences you must do the same. Appealing to these interest groups in the old way as fellow members of a nation is no longer possible or even desirable. They do not act in that way. They do not believe in it. You should not believe in it. Instead we need to discover who we can and cannot cooperate with. Whose interests mostly match up with our own and whose interests are to a greater extent opposed to our own. A good example would be a place like Singapore. It is a multi-cultural society that historically has found its ethnicities in violent antagonism toward each other. In order to thrive it has been necessary to carefully define what behaviors are allowable. Freedom exists but is also circumscribed by what actions would lead to chaos.
Our country and its freedoms were instituted with the idea that there would not exist differing populations in conflict with each other. These freedoms cannot exist when powerful groups are gaming the system to discredit it. Conflict and intimidation is what is being foisted on us. Criminal behavior is being selectively allowed and the policing of criminal behavior is being attacked and criminalized. Really the only question is whether an organized resistance will coalesce and provide relief from the attacks.
As the only group currently unrepresented by a political entity it has fallen to the Republican party to serve that purpose for white voters. But in the future a different organization will emerge. And this organization does not need to be exclusively white in its membership. But those who join must need to see their interests as aligned with the interests of the white population of America. Call it Traditional America. Call it whatever you want. But it is the group of people who don’t want to see George Floyd held up as a role model or saint. It is the group that knows that putting ten year old children on puberty blockers and castrating them or removing their breasts is child abuse and madness. I’m sure there are reasonable people of every race and ethnicity who would sign up for the platform that used to be called conservatism. But what is important is that conservatives realize that in the present environment all of those things have disappeared and won’t come back if we keep playing the game under the old rules.
The Great Awakening
In a recent post I stated that back in 2015 the Alt-Right/Dissident Right (or whatever your favorite term is) predicted that the identitarian politics and globalist economic policies of the Left would push the civic nationalists over the edge and radicalize them into their own identitarian group. In that post I called it the Great Awakening.
The term Great Awakening is actually a description for several religious revivals that occurred in British North America and later in the United States between the 1730s and the late 1800s. I am stealing the term to use for a completely different phenomenon.
What I am talking about is the phenomenon of normal apolitical Americans waking up to the fact that the Left has been systematically destroying this country for the last fifty years. And that they’ve been doing it with the tacit approval of most of the Republican hierarchy for most of that time. When I say the Left I am including the progressives that make up the Media, Academia, the various bureaucracies at the state and federal level that lately are being called the Deep State and all the other entrenched organizations that have been pushing a radical agenda that works for the destruction of the family and traditional life in general.
Up until recently, most normal people assumed that the way to resist these progressive institutions was to vote for the Republicans at the state and federal level and support their efforts to preserve traditional values and cultural norms. But the Great Awakening was catalyzed by the spectacle of the 2016 election in which the mask finally dropped and we saw the republicans for what they really were. They were the gate keepers for the Democrats. They ensured that no matter who was elected the progressive agenda would continue unabated. During that election Donald Trump called out all of the republican presidential candidates and exposed them for their weakness and lack of courage. He identified illegal immigration as the weapon being used to destroy America and said he wasn’t afraid to fight against it. And when the Republican voters threw him their support, the Republican Establishment showed their true colors and became the Never Trump movement and declared that they’d rather elect Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump.
But even after voting for Donald Trump many Americans didn’t recognize the fact that they were personally the target of the progressive agenda. Even after eight years of Barack Obama and all the hate and lies that attended his “fundamental transformation of America,” these sleepwalkers assumed that nothing could or should be done to change the trajectory of the culture.
Luckily for us there are two things happening to wake these sleepwalkers up. The first is the President. President Trump makes it a part of his duties to call out the progressive fanatics. His bombastic style is an effective means for exposing the ugliness and stupidity of these people.
The other thing that is waking the sleepwalkers up is the acceleration of the Leftist agenda. We now have immigrant congresswomen from the Middle East openly spouting anti-American and antisemitic sentiments openly. And not being censured by their Democrat leaders.
And we also now have the transgender phenomenon on full display. We have high school girls who’ve worked and trained to become competitive athletes being forced to compete against essentially men. The dispiriting result of such an unfair practice is opening eyes even among communities that normally would have nothing to do with traditional groups. A schism is opening up in the so-called LGBTQ community between lesbians and transgender supporters over the primacy of biological identity.
All these increasingly strident and unappealing spectacles are waking up normal Americans to the reality that the country is being hijacked by a concerted effort to undermine the normal way of life that makes life worth living.
So, what makes me think things are changing? Look at the intersection of the two factors I mentioned above. When AOC’s “Squad” started dumping on America, President Trump told them to go back to their dysfunctional craphole homes and fix them up before they complain about America. And when the Media breathlessly interviewed Republican women expecting them to condemn the President they didn’t. A few years ago, they would have. But defending the Squad is a bridge too far. Most Americans have had enough of strident leftists. And this week when President Trump went after Representative Elijah Cummings for his inaccurate statements about the ICE border station and told him to spend more time improving the conditions in his own Baltimore congressional district most Republicans may have been uncomfortable but they could see the relevance of the comparison.
The worm has turned. The Overton Window has shifted radically and the truth can now finally set you free. President Trump has made it thinkable to call the Leftists on their lies and people are starting to do it. And that neutralizes a big part of the scam that they’ve used on the right for the last fifty years. And that will cause the whole thing to accelerate even more.
And that’s what I call the Great Awakening. We’re waking up and finding out that the Emperor has no clothes and we don’t have to pretend anymore. That doesn’t mean we automatically win. We may find out that we’re outnumbered. The awakening isn’t an end it’s a beginning. We still need to figure out how we get what we want. We’ll have to find out who we can work with and who we can’t. But at least we’re awake.
Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 2
Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 1
At the end of the first part of this post I said I’d look a little more closely at the specifics of the Dissident Right’s logic and compare it to my own way of looking at where we are.
First off let’s acknowledge something that we cannot afford to forget. The Dissident Right (or Alt-Right if you prefer) was the only group who both knew what was going wrong in this country and weren’t afraid to say it out loud. They recognized that the Left was in control of all the levers of power and the Establishment Republicans had no intention of changing the results of the Left’s program.
The Dissident Right explained exactly how the schools and colleges proselytized the children and how the Media, the Democrats, Big Business and the Courts twisted every part of society until nothing remains of the normal world of just a few years ago. And as proven, the Establishment Republicans use the anger this generates to get themselves re-elected. But once in office they can be depended on to never actually reverse any of this destruction and instead just talk about how dead set they are against whatever the next outrage is. And when that outrage becomes law they just move along to the next.
And the Dissident Right identified the fact that both Parties and Big Business were determined to use immigration, both legal and illegal, as a means to swamp out the votes of the citizens of the United States as a way to eliminate all resistance to their agenda. It was plain during the 2016 election that none of the Republicans, no matter how “conservative” he was, would say a word against illegal immigration for fear of being called a racist.
And the Dissident Right was the only group that supported Trump. Everyone else either said he was a joke or abhorred him for being a vulgarian.
So, as I said above, ignoring the Dissident Right means ignoring the only group that knew how we were losing the Country to the Left and how we could stop them from doing it. Clearly what they say has to be carefully considered.
But you might say, why not just jump on their band wagon? For me, that is a disturbing choice. The Dissident Right is comprised of people who believe that differences in race and even ethnicity prevent a heterogeneous state like the present United States from living in harmony. They believe that the future will be a fractious hodge-podge of identity groups that, led by the trouble-makers on the Left, will spend all their time pursuing imaginary grievances against the European Americans that they’ve been told are holding them back from being happy.
The Dissident Right points to affirmative action discrimination and the destruction of the family and the LGBTQ lawfare warriors and de-platforming of people on the right and say we are already there and that once we are a majority-minority-nation, things will only get much worse.
Accepting this hypothesis as true is not something I would do unless forced by irrefutable evidence. But having it espoused by people who have been right about things that the majority were wrong about means I have to find reasonable arguments for why the Dissident Right is mistaken in their conclusions.
Instead of going through a bunch of cases and subsets of categories I’ll sum up the problem we’re experiencing by saying that in the 1960s when the economy was very strong the leaders of the Democrat party saw that they no longer had an unbeatable coalition of disaffected voters like they had in the 1930s and 1940s. They decided to follow the Marxist playbook and weaken their enemies by sowing as much division as they could. They espoused abortion as a way to destroy the family and they sponsored all the grievance movements to further fracture the country. They infested the schools and steadily eroded intellectual life until even the sciences were politicized and distracted from their primary functions. And they enshrined massive immigration both legal and illegal.
But even when all this was going on it was still possible for a conservative leader like Ronald Reagan to rally the Right. And when that happened, the country was able to see itself as one people. It was only when we were led by people who believed in the propaganda of the Left that everything has fallen completely apart. Basically, since 1988 (thirty years) we have been living under the rule of the Left and their Globalist Echoes on the Fake Right. Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama allowed every outrage of the Left to happen to us with either enthusiasm or feigned reluctance.
This track record is why I think that the Dissident Right may be mistaken in the irreversibility of the changes we are experiencing. In just two years President Trump has installed a whole generation of federal judges who will begin the process of reversing the damage done by the rogue judiciary. Without Justice Kennedy it’s possible that the SCOTUS will reverse the decisions that found a constitutional mandate for abortion and gay marriage and affirmative action. Those types of actions would change the world we live in. Once those injustices are addressed people would see the world much differently.
The final thing that I need to address is the Race Realism that the Dissident Right says will prevent the United States from existing in harmony. They claim that both differences in behavior and feelings of separateness will forever keep different races and ethnicities from living peacefully together. My experience with diversity is a product of growing up and living in New York City in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Believe me when I tell you that things were very far from harmonious in the “glorious mosaic” that existed in that era. There was a separate neighborhood every ten to fifteen blocks and mostly the ethnic and racial groups didn’t happily mingle or even interact. There were riots and even several large areas of the city burned down. Crime was rampant and the subways were very dangerous as were the parks and other empty areas. Of course, the Democrats were always stoking the unrest with grievance propaganda. But then I remember what happened when the city finally had had enough and elected a law and order Republican, Rudy Giuliani. It got better! And indeed, the people of all races and ethnicities felt more united and less angry when a sensible government started enforcing the law and holding everyone accountable.
I won’t claim that there aren’t differences between people. In fact, I’ll go one step further and says we’re all different from each other. Every family has a smarter kid and a tougher kid and a kid who doesn’t follow the rules. But if one kid does better in school you can’t hold him back to make the less smart kid feel better about himself. And as every parent knows, the best way to keep the peace in a family is to come up with reasonable rules and make sure that everyone follows them. It’s only when you see someone else getting away with something, you’re not allowed to that trouble begins.
So, this is getting overly long. My way of thinking about this is that if we can elect non-leftists who want to restore normalcy to the country, we can do it. Maybe it won’t happen. But just saying it’s impossible doesn’t appeal to me, at least not yet. President Trump has given me hope that it can be done. Let’s see if he can do it before we throw in the towel.
Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 1
One of the most troubling aspects of the America we now live in is the racial animosity exhibited almost universally across the whole spectrum of political ideologies. Of course, the Marxists and their descendants, the Progressives, have perfected it into a weapon that they use to inflame hatred against Americans of European Descent or as we used to call them Americans. But the fallout of this multi-generational strategy is that their opponents, especially on the very farthest edges of the Right Wing are learning to use this same tactic in reverse. A whole generation of Alt-Right and Dissident Right ideologues are focusing on racial identity politics and the tactics of racial polarization to the exclusion of almost anything else. In fact, this idea that racial identity will trump all other ways of uniting and dividing people has actually made headway among formerly “color-blind” conservatives. My read on this is that rather than any effective proselytizing by the Dissident Right, the real catalyst for this transformation was the racial animus and partisanship demonstrated by the Obama Administration during the Black Lives Matter and other teachable moments that our “Dear Leader” talked down to us about.
In that sense I somewhat understand the depth of the hatred that has developed along the racial divide. The behavior by the Justice Department in fueling these fake police incidents was outrageous and did enormous harm by throwing fuel on the already hot flashpoints that exist in the crime ridden ghettos where the police are just about all that stands between poor people and the law of the jungle.
But what it has turned into on the Dissident Right is a conviction that civic life and law and order cannot transcend differences between people of different races and ethnicities. The more thoughtful voices in that community do not contend that we are headed for some kind of civil war or balkanization of the United States. They talk more about individual states ignoring laws that they do not agree with and going their own way on these things. In fact, this is not that different from what California and some other places have already done on immigration law with their so-called sanctuary cities.
What this all amounts to is the Dissident Right declaring that the Progressives have outmaneuvered the Right by increasing legal and illegal immigration to the point that they will have a permanent dominance over electoral power and will use it to create a permanent grievance machine to disenfranchise Americans of European Descent by punitive means such as affirmative action and other discriminatory policies.
Are they right?
I prefer to think that they’re not. My read on this is that the situation has been exacerbated by Republican “leaders” who actually seem to buy into the fairness of minority identity politics out of some kind of ancestral guilt or because they see electoral advantage in joining the progressives. The proof of this can be seen in the success of a civic nationalist like Trump who isn’t guilted into kowtowing to illegal immigration out of fear of being called a racist. Once you disarm the Progressives of that weapon you find out that the majority of Americans, even in Blue States, want immigration laws to be obeyed.
I contend if the Right forcefully advocates for full enforcement of immigration laws and the elimination of reverse discrimination policies by the government and other entities, it will go a long way toward lowering tensions between the various groups living in the United States and will allow people to start thinking of each other as neighbors and not potential enemies.
Am I right? I can’t claim I’m sure. I think the next few years will be indicative of whether the Dissident Right is correct or whether there’s still time to fix the mess we’re in. And believe me, I don’t minimize how bad things have become. On the worst days, I shake my head and look at maps to see where I can move to that will allow me to stave off the worst of it for a little longer.
In the second part of this I’ll look a little more closely at the specifics of the Dissident Right’s logic and compare it to my own way of looking at where we are.
American Pride
One hundred and two years ago my grandfather was a sixteen-year-old Italian American kid living in New York City. When the Americans entered World War I he wanted to join the army to fight America’s enemies but his parents forbade it and because he was under age he couldn’t join without their permission. So, he took the alias of Charlie “Young,” claimed he was eighteen and joined without their knowing. His sense of pride in being a New Yorker was such that this Italian American kid was thrown in the stockade for fighting with a southern recruit who called him a “Damn Yankee.”
I remember after September 11th, 2001 a reporter in New York City interviewed some students on the New York University campus who had just witnessed the World Trade Center collapsing into rubble killing thousands of New Yorkers. He asked them whether they would be willing to enlist to revenge the attack. And they said absolutely not. Their future was too important to sacrifice for their country. They did allow that there probably were less important people who could do it though. Probably dirt people who didn’t go to NYU.
Times do change.
What does it mean about a high school if it bans the wearing of the American flag because it’s too divisive? The only thing I can think of is that the school is outside the boundaries of the United States. What that means to me is that whole areas of the political boundaries of the United States are occupied territory. If you are in California you are no longer in the United States of America. And that also goes for New England, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes region, the Mid-Atlantic states and almost all of the large metropolitan areas. A good rule of thumb is to use those voting maps of the United States and look at all the counties that vote Democrat, all of the blue areas. Within these areas pride in America is at least an abomination and in some cases a crime. And even outside of these enclaves, parts of your life have become occupied territory. Most of the internet is now an anti-American domain. Most of the large businesses have standardized on anti-American nomenclature to avoid being harassed in the Blue States. Most of the churches have joined the enemy and even the Boy Scouts of America has succumbed.
This situation is designed to destroy the social cohesion of the American identity. Once that is achieved, all that is left is the identity politics that the left loves so much. With everyone divided by ethnicity, race, sex, religion and ever more idiosyncratic characteristics it is easy for the grievance instigators to rig up further outrages outlined in the intersectional conflict playbook. And I think they’ve succeeded. They’ve raised up the millennials to basically ignore the idea of patriotism. Regional variation of course, exists. There are pockets of old-style American identity and patriotism even in the tattered fabric of this country. But even they are under active attack by the Left. They are ever vigilant against any signal from traditional society breaking into their progressive matrix. When it does, they send the courts and the social justice warriors to attack and destroy.
I am so sick of living in occupied territory.
My idea for fighting back is two-fold. First off, support Donald Trump. He is naming judges to the federal and supreme courts who can defend traditional Americans from the Left. If they strike down all the Constitutional protections for the leftist social programs it will allow the states to decide on their own policies. Under that scenario many states will restore the rights of traditional people to live their lives the way they want.
Secondly, I want to move out of occupied territory. With the Supreme Court holding the progressives at bay I could live in Idaho or Utah or the Carolinas or Missouri or Kansas or Arkansas or Texas or any one of twenty states that won’t make me feel like a stranger in a strange land. Imagine not having to know your vote is wasted. Imagine knowing that your neighbors don’t hate and despise you. Imagine knowing that the local school isn’t teaching your children and grandchildren that their ancestors were evil people. That is something I dream of.
If I were more of a statist, I guess I could dream of forcing the blue states to honor the memory of their own country. But I don’t. Let them go down their road. Let me go down mine.