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We live in an age of relentless deconstructionism. In film and literature, the hero has long been subject to deconstruction. Masculinity and femininity have of course been deconstructed so thoroughly that the ravenous deconstructors have moved on to deconstructing the biological reality of male and female sexes. Perhaps nothing has been deconstructed more, however, than the concept of racial and ethnic identity.

In this zeitgeist of taking apart things to see what they’re made of (and then having no clue of how to put them back together), the white race has come under the most scrutiny. “What does it even mean to be white?” asks the deconstructionist. Curiously, the deconstructionist himself is in possession of the answer to his own question, if and when the topic of “white privilege” arises. In that case, there is suddenly no confusion at all as to who is white and what it means.

This same smug question can be — and is — adapted for more specific identities as well. “What does it mean to be English? Who even are the British people? What does it mean to be Italian? What does it mean to be French? Who are the Irish exactly?” The question is always meant to attack those native Europeans who desire their nations to remain as they have been for centuries, indeed millennia, and to justify the transformation of these nations via mass replacement migration into something entirely unrecognizable. The question is asked in bad faith, being an increasingly overt attempt to reduce European national identities to a mere delusion, a “social construct” from bygone and irrelevant times. The fact that these questions are never put to Asians, Africans, Israelis, or anyone else makes the intent behind them rather obvious.

That said, in a globalized world this question, when asked in good faith, is not completely useless or malevolent. In fact, it is quite a necessary question to ask. Thankfully, the answer is usually simple. Anthropology and modern genetic research have given us a lot of information to work with.

Who are the Irish? They are a northwestern European people, native to the island of Ireland, descended from the indigenous Gaelic-speaking Celtic tribes.

Who are the British? They are also a northwestern European people who can be more precisely identified as Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and English.

Who are the French? They are a western European ethnic group, descended first and foremost from the Gauls and other Germanic tribes such as the Franks, with a bit of Roman and Celtic mixed in as well. These definitions sufficed up until their specificity and, worse (from a progressive liberal’s perspective), exclusivity became “problematic” for the globalist desire for a world with no borders and no nations — merely global citizens consuming products in meaninglessly distinct economic zones.

Nevertheless, the definitions I just provided for the Irish, British, and French are very similar to the definitions of them given on Wikipedia. Despite all the attempts at deconstruction, as well as the efforts to revise these definitions so that they fall in line with inclusive ways of describing a nation, these definitions remain commonplace today — because they are true. The deconstructors ultimately end up making a mockery of themselves. In their attempt to delegitimize European identities, they fly their time machines so far back into the past that they end up deconstructing pre-historic humanoid species. Perhaps they should fly even further back in time and set their analytical minds to deconstructing the identities of those creatures who first evolved out of the primordial waters!

I said that the answer to the question “What does it even mean to be X?’ is usually simple, because there are indeed nations for whom the answer is a bit more complicated. Here we get to the motivation for this essay and its titular query. Recently, Lana Lokteff of Red Ice posted the following on her Twitter account:

It always irritates me when White people in America, Canada, New Zealand, & Australia don’t think of themselves as Europeans! Our ancestors came from Europe. We are Europeans. Further, the nations of our race founded outside of Europe are still European. You aren’t just White, you are European. Europe is home to 80+ distinct ethnic groups of which we White folks come from. Yes we are ethnic, diverse, and unique.

This prompted my friend and renowned appreciator of all things dissident Right, Gaddius Maximus, to respond with respectful disagreement:

Americans aren’t Europeans. The vast majority of us only care about our ancestors (blood) as far back as when they first set foot on this continent (soil). That’s usually when our family story (myth) begins.

He then followed that tweet with another in which he stated with honesty and clarity the difference between his own view and Lana’s:

I haven’t sent my spit to Google or the Mormons yet, but I’m fairly certain the results would come back a large percentage from the British Isles. Probably Scotland & England predominantly. Because of this I have great affinity for that part of the world but for me to claim it somehow makes me ‘British’ doesn’t really seem to pass the smell test. I hold the same view for concepts like ‘European’ unless we’re talking in the broadest possible biological sense.

Gaddius then conducted a poll on Telegram and Twitter to ask his readers if they consider Americans to be Europeans. The responses in the comments were unsurprising, but still interesting. Many people took the “broadest possible biological sense” approach and asserted that, as “white people” (a term which I dislike using, but which I will use in this essay because I have also argued that it works as shorthand when speaking about American demography), Americans and Europeans are the same — or at least, Americans are descendants of Europeans, and thus an extension of Europeans. Others had questions regarding the importance of things such as a nation’s “soul,” or its behavioral and psychic differences. Others asked, in apparent good faith, what was meant by “European.”

Because I consider myself a European, because I grew up in the United States, and because these kinds of questions are the very reasons why I decided to create the Pox Populi persona in the first place, I will add some of my own experiences and observations regarding this topic.

While the results of Gaddius’ poll, as of this writing, show that 48% of American respondents agree that Americans are Europeans, I believe this is reflective only of online ethnonationalists. If the question “Are Americans Europeans?” were put to the average American normie, I think the response would probably be a raised eyebrow, a bemusedly open mouth, anda resounding “NO.”

This also brings us to the uncomfortable (for some) reality that the American nation is not one of those nations that can be defined as easily as that of the Irish or French. Leaving aside the matter of who the United States was originally intended for (white persons of good character! white persons of good character!), the America of today is a prospect nation. It is a passport nation. So rather than responding to the poll with the question “What do you mean by European?”, it’s more useful to ask “What do you mean by American?”

Online ethnonationalists might take it for granted that the demonym “American” is reserved only for those white folks who descend from Europe, specifically Britain, but unfortunately, errors and subversive policy decisions made in America’s ancient and recent past make this an impossible position to take in the real world. Is Michael Jordan not American, then? And if he isn’t, what is he? Indeed, are black Americans Africans? What about America’s Asians? What about those Americans who are of mixed race, yet nonetheless are almost cartoonishly proud to be “an American”?

I can say from personal experience that America’s non-white population does not give a damn about Europeans. One occasion in particular sticks with me. When I was 18 and just about to move to Italy, I was telling some co-workers about my upcoming relocation and answering some of their questions. At one point, the obese black man chimed in: “Man, fuck dem Yer-o-pee-inz! Watchu wanna go’on der for?” Hardly surprising, most certainly, but it highlights the importance of defining who the “Americans” are in the question posed by Gaddius. And while it may not come as a shock to know that America’s blacks, Latinos, Asians, and all their variations hold Europeans in no special regard, it is worth gauging the white American view of Europe.

I believe that, sadly, there is a disconnect between American ethnonationalists and their fellow white countrymen. As I stated before, I believe the average white American would not agree that “Americans are Europeans,” and in fact many white American normies have a similarly antagonistic — or at least apathetic — feeling towards Europe that is not very different from the feeling that America’s non-whites have towards the Old World.

In relation to this, I recently commented on a clip from an interview with Nick Fuentes that was conducted by a red-haired girl named Pearl Davis. In it, Davis and Fuentes are about to dive into the matter of diaspora Jews who have strong feelings towards Israel when Davis says “I’m Irish; I don’t really care what goes on in Ireland.” As you can see in my Telegram post, I found Davis’ apathy rather sad and unfortunate. I don’t know who Pearl Davis is, therefore I don’t know how thick her Irish blood really is, although as American Krogan observed, it is interesting that she is innately aware of the fact that it is one’s blood, not one’s location or one’s accent, or even one’s customs, that defines your ethnic identity first and foremost. Regardless, that Davis “doesn’t really care” about Ireland even though she calls herself Irish is something that I could never understand and never will understand. As someone who is both Italian and Irish, I could never imagine myself being so apathetic to what is happening in Italy and Ireland. I could never imagine being apathetic about the history, traditions, languages, and so on of those two nations. Even as a child, with no knowledge of concepts such as ethnonationalism, identitarianism, and “blood and soil,” I still felt a connection to Italy and Ireland. I knew that those places were my family’s homelands, and it therefore simply made sense to me that I should be interested in them. Of course, now that I am someone who speaks about the existential threats faced by the European nations, including Italy and Ireland, I find myself even more concerned and connected to those places and those peoples than ever before.

But I realize that I am an exception, not the rule. Most Americans, even if they are proud of their European heritage, don’t do much to honor it. Those Americans who descend from non-English-speaking European nations don’t often learn the language of their ancestors back on the Old Continent. I am not sure how one could find out the exact number, but I’m willing to bet that a substantial percentage of Americans have never been to their ancestral European homeland. This collection of clips from The Sopranos is illustrative of this.

I also realize that white Americans aren’t limited to Pearl Davis’ style of uninterested indifference. Many of them, even those who consider themselves ethno- and/or White Nationalists as well as members of the dissident Right, are frankly antagonistic towards Europeans.

There is, of course, nothing strange about putting one’s own country first. If Americans want to put the interests and success of America first, even if that comes at the expense of Europe, they are well within their rights to do so. The French and the Italians are both European, but which nation do you think the Italians care more about? It’s the same with America. This is why I don’t believe in a white superstate. I believe in sovereign nations, and sovereign nations should look out for themselves before any other nation. That said, it cannot be denied that on many crucial occasions the American leadership has taken very anti-European positions, and these have trickled down to the general population as well. Whether it is evidenced by Americans gloating over the “Europoors,” or suggesting that Europe needs America to save it again (and owes America, forever, for being “saved” in the past), or the deeds of the American ruling class vis-à-vis Europe, it is no overstatement to say that it seems as if someone took a chainsaw and mangled whatever European roots white Americans might have felt, severing their sense of kinship with Europeans.

The irony is that Americans love to show off their European ancestry on other occasions — most especially within nationalist communities, but even within the white American population at large, it’s rather frequently that you will hear someone describing in great detail the various percentages of their European blood: “I’m a quarter Swedish, a quarter Dutch, half German — I think — and half Scottish. Or was it half Swedish and a quarter Scottish?” This is, of course, a facetious example, but I recall having many similar conversations with American youngsters. Lots of them would likewise add that they had some Native American tribe in the mix, too.

I suppose this medley of European ethnicities makes it hard to feel entirely connected to one or the other, and I suppose this showing off of European ancestry while simultaneously puffing out one’s big American chest can only be expected from a country that is hyper-patriotic, yet at the same time insecure in its identity and anxious about its future.

Americans are Americans . . . but —

The question of the American identity is made difficult to answer because it never actually had — and now never will have — a proper, organic ethnogenesis. As previously stated, European nations such as the British and the French are descendants of various ancestral tribes: tribes which were mostly similar and who all lived in the same areas, but which had some significant differences as well. Over time — a long time — those tribes became the nations we have today.

In America’s case, everything seems to have been sped up too quickly. It’s difficult to say how much time is required in order to achieve ethnogenesis, but I don’t think two or three centuries is enough. The first European settlers in the New World knew who they were. They were self-aware. Later, other Europeans were added to the mix, but this happened within a fairly small timeframe. If European tribes that were similar had their issues getting on with one another back in the Old World, enduring centuries of war, invasion, occupation, and other forms of strife along the path to their ethnogenesis, imagine how many more issues will arise when you massively compress this length of time.

If America had only ever been populated by Englishmen, Scotsmen, Germans, and Frenchmen, perhaps there could have been a genuine ethnogenesis, provided they had had another couple of centuries to live together. And this is without even addressing the matter of the Africans who were brought over with them.

But then the floodgates were opened in 1965 to literally the rest of the world. And, as Joe Biden said, it’s been a constant, unrelenting stream. If it’s already difficult to get Germans, French, and Englishmen to assimilate, cohabitate, and eventually form a new ethnos, and if matters get even more complicated once you throw in the Italians and the Irish, imagine how complicated it becomes when you’re adding sub-Saharan Africans, indigenous South Americans, Mongolians, Chinamen, Eastern European Ashkenazi, and others as well.

There’s simply no way to form a nation, an ethnos, out of all that — not by the historic definition given to us by Herodotus, at least.

The reason why Americans’ Europeanness is up for debate, and not the Europeanness of Australians, Canadians, or Boers is precisely because of this rapid mixing together of entirely different races. This isn’t to say that Canada, Australia, and even Europe herself aren’t in the process of rapidly trying to catch up with America on this path towards “melting pot” madness, but this is why I believe we end up debating about the American identity more frequently than Canadian, Australian, or Afrikaner. And again, speaking from personal experience, I have not come across as many Canadians or Australians who exhibit that bipolar, love-hate attitude towards Europe.

In hindsight, I think — and many of you reading this probably agree — that it hardly needs to be said that the demographic transformation of the fledgling American nation, which was brought about by subversive actors with proto-globalist designs, has ended in disaster. The “melting pot” has now boiled over. But this is an end that many great civilizations — or empires, if you will — were fated to endure as well. Demography undid the Babylonians, and the Romans as well. Today, European nationalists are remembering this and fighting back in whatever ways they can as their homelands are socially engineered through mass immigration by the same sort of subversive actors to more and more adopt the American “melting pot,” passport-nation model.

Americans are Americans, but as the United States grinds along the rusty tracks of civilizational decline, the salvation for white Americans will lie in having another go at an ethnogenesis based on exclusivity. In that regard, Americans will have to remember that they are, in an important way, also Europeans.

Reprinted with permission from Pox Populi’s Substack.

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