Ireland’s Quest for Identity

Alienism, Violence, and Power.

by The Prudentialist

Sinn Féin Leader Mary Lou McDonald said that the stabbing that occurred in Dublin is “just a shocking, unexpected, random incident” as protests and fires were started in reaction to an Algerian Migrant knife attack outside of Gaelscoil Colaiste Mhuire, a school for young children, leaving a teacher in her 30s and a young girl in critical condition still in the hospital. As the news broke out, riots took place, the media cycle was up in arms about “Hate” while anyone with a functioning mind was asking why was there an Algerian stabbing children in Ireland?

Rioting took place, dozens arrested, property damaged and burned. Violence and destruction as a response to this attack was as expected for the native Irish to react to such a crime that highlights the ongoing issues of immigration into Ireland and its changing social environment. Even Connor McGregor of UFC fame was retweeting Keith Woods and putting out his own takes on the subject.

What had occurred the morning after the riots was the usual apoplectic liberal clamoring about “Hate Having No Place Here” and the usual turning of the ratchet on “Hate Speech Laws.” The most common line about “being afraid” was made most evident from the timeline to the voice of the Taoiseach who had said “your sisters and friends are afraid of you.”

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says to the far-right protesters who rioted in Dublin last night 'ask everyone you know what they fear most on our streets. They're afraid of you. Afraid of your violence and your hate and how you blame others for your problems'.https://t.co/jSqOhnwgMh pic.twitter.com/5WxxSoT5Rw

— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 24, 2023

If the waves of mass immigration into America and Europe have been any indication, the fear and questioning of why it is unsafe for women to walk alone at night in city streets is met with the liberal cognitive dissonance of not being allowed to discuss race or the impact of immigration without being called a racist. The “nation of immigrants” mantra whose origins come from the United States, has been dropped by progressive Irish and foreigners alike. This interaction, with

John Carter’s on point reply highlights this cognitive dissonance.

This cognitive dissonance is the consequence of stripping away any larger group identity away other than the individual. From the “sacks of meat with electrical signals” to emphatic recitation from libertarians that “the smallest minority is the individual” our current form of progressive liberalism has emphasized the desire to be inclusive of the other while removing any sense of collective identification as the BBC and other programs inform us that Europe and America were always this diverse and that the perennial enemy of all Westerners has been those evil white racists.

The late Joseph Sobran discussed this in his 1985 “Notes for The Reactionary of Tomorrow” writing;

Put another way, liberalism cultivates alienation. It does so because it has become a form of alienation. It has a heavy investment in estrangement. It is primarily interested in emergencies and social pathologies, and it makes policy prescriptions on the basis of abnormal situations, with no concern for the possible impact on the normal. It finds disease everywhere, without offering a useful image of health. And its remedies aggravate real diseases: redistribution, “gay rights,” abortion on demand, appeasement–none of these policies has kept its promises, but liberalism was never really interested in the results.

There are two possible basic attitudes toward social reality. One of these, as I say, has many names, but I will call, it, for convenience, Nativism: a prejudice in favor of the native, the normal, and so forth, reaching an extreme in lynchings and pogroms. Its most ghastly form was German National Socialism.

The other attitude I am forced, for lack of a better word–or any word at all–to call Alienism: a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossessed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to “build a new society” by destroying the basic institutions of the native. The most terrible fulfillment of this principle is Communism.

This alienism, to build a new society ranging from fifteen minute cities to replacement migration is compounded that any nativist or nationalist tendency is the prelude to Nazism is how we’ve watched everyone from William F. Buckley Jr. to Donald Trump be called fascists or “crypto-Nazis.” Eat your heart out Jacques Derrida, the real ghost haunting the West is Hitler, not Marx.

Despite non-stop attempts to blot out identity and reterritorialize the West that nations like Britain or America have “always been diverse” whether this be with fantasy period pieces like Netflix’s Bridgerton to racially progressive, antifacists gangsters of Peaky Blinders, people vote along their ethnic and political interests. Ed West, writing in The Telegraph back in 2012 said the following:

Yet people in multi-ethnic societies do tend to vote on ethnic lines. In the United States 96 per cent of African-Americans voted Democrat in 2008, but no one criticised them for it. And Southern whites at the same election voted Republican by 73-27 per cent and in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana 85 per cent voted for the GOP.

Liberals are baffled and infuriated that poor whites vote Republican, yet voting on tribal grounds is a feature of all multi-ethnic democracies, whether it’s Northern Ireland, Lebanon or Iraq. The more a majority becomes a minority the more tribal its voting becomes, so that increasingly the Republicans have become the “white party”; making this point indelicately got Pat Buchanan the sack, but many others make it too.

Will it happen here? The patterns are not dissimilar. In the 2010 election the Conservatives won only 16 per cent of the ethnic minority vote, while Labour won the support of 72 per cent of Bangladeshis, 78 per cent of African-Caribbeans and 87 per cent of Africans. The Tories are slightly stronger among British Hindus and Sikhs – mirroring Republican support among Asian-Americans – who are more likely to be home-owning professionals and feel less alienated.

The Economist recently asked if the Tories had a “race problem”, but it may just be that democracy has a race problem. The American experience, where all Republican gains over the previous half-century have been among lower- and middle-class whites, shows where Britain is probably heading.

Democratic politics are existential wars fought without guns or bombs (usually) but by the ballot box, and only tend to heat up when the issues of actual existence are now being thrown into question. Upset that Republicans won an election, putting Supreme Court Justices trying to remove your existential, Moloch-Given Right to Kill Your Baby? Better try and kill Brett Kavanaugh. This is why each election for the political Left is the “most important election of our lifetimes” or why The Economist magazine ranks Donald Trump as the biggest threat to the world in 2024 above Nuclear Conflict, Climate Change, or Judgement Day.

Our politics and the question of polarization has been met with the blatant reality that man’s tolerance is incredibly limited when coming into contact with political enemies, and that we’re constantly in an environment where our media catered directly to getting us to pay attention to what our political enemies, foreigners, or fellow countrymen are saying at any point in time 24/7 if you opt to plug in. Even if you don’t plug in, and wish to be left alone, the media missionaries will come to your door not with a bible but with a digital battering ram. In 1977, Dr. Marshall McLuhan was interviewed on The Mike McManus show. The following was discussed:

[McManus]Way back in the early fifties you predicted that the world was becoming a global Village.

[McLuhan]We are going back into the bicameral mind that is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness.

[McManus]But, it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.

[McLuhan]No, tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is butchering each other. It is a full-time sport in tribal societies.

[McManus]But, I had some idea as we got global and tribal we were going to try to –

[McLuhan]The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other.

[McManus]Why is it? Is it because of the nature of man?

[McLuhan]His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

[McManus]Do you see any pattern of this in, for example the desires of Quebec to separate?

[McLuhan]I should think that they are feeling very abrasive about the English community and about the way the American south felt about the Yankee north a hundred years ago.

[McManus]Is this going to be a pattern right around the world?

[McLuhan]Apparently, separatisms are very frequent all over the globe at the present time. Every country in the world is loaded with regionalistic and nationalistic little groups.

[McManus]But in Quebec for example, like do you define it as the quest for identity?

[McLuhan]Yes, all forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent. Identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you? Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. It is only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent. Terrorists, hijackers – these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.

[McManus]And all this is somehow an effect of the electronic age?

[McLuhan]No, but people in all times have been this way. In our time, when things happen very quickly, there’s very little time to adjust to new situations at the speed of light. There is little time to get accustomed to anything. Even radio has sent tribal societies around the globe up the wall with intensity of feeling. One of the major violence makers of our century has been radio. Hitler was entirely a radio man and a tribal man.

Westerners have been told that these migrants are the “New Germans” or that Ireland in 2040 will have more migrants and people not of Irish origin to attract more capital investment and be one of the best places to be in Europe, whilst knife crime, ethnic rape gangs, and welfare fraud run rampant in a spiritually and culturally deracinated Europe. Tribally speaking we are there, tweeting, posting, recording video onto a never-ending, never sleeping media cycle that demands you see the reality of what’s in front of you and what’s coming your way from your foes at all times. It would drive a man to madness, to radicalism, to understanding that one can live by a consumer identity alone.

Great despair leads to a search for meaning and trying to reconcile that the great society did not go as intended, or that Suella Braverman’s comment multiculturalism has failed is just the plain truth. McLuhan’s point, a point made throughout the ages is that violence is the quest and pursuit of an identity. Frederick Jackson Turner said the same of the violence of the American Frontier being the best form of “Americanization” for incoming European Immigrants.

The Frontier today is making sense of what it means to be Irish, American, German, Britain, etc., in an age where acknowledging immutable characteristics for Ethnic Europeans is verboten. So as wanton racial violence takes place across the West, and as the celebration parallax continues in the face of unwanted immigration violence will indeed become part and parcel as identity and naked reality clash. The problem that will have to be overcome is the nature of political control, because for now every violent action in defense or reassertion of identity in this tribal world of ours will just be more ammunition to lock up Ethnic Europeans.

Ireland is a nation with a rich culture, history, and a myriad of traditions that should not be erased by “multifaith areas” or by masses who will not learn languages and smile knowing the demographic time bomb is ticking. Things are getting violent, people are searching more meaning and identity, and everyone knows that Irish children getting knifed by Algerians wasn’t commonplace in our lifetimes and it doesn’t have to be anymore.

---

This article has been republished from Substack with permission from the author.

---