Rather than an expansion or counterpoint to the earlier post sort of on this subject on this blog, this post is has only a tangential connection to Nationalism. That connection being: if you believe you are not a unique people then you cannot be a unique people, and culture is the thing which makes a group of people unique, beyond genetics of course.
So, what is culture? Everything which makes a group identifiable from another group, except those things which are informed by genes. When someone says “There is no British culture” they may mean something else, but they are in fact saying there is nothing which defines the British as a people distinct from a larger group i.e. European, or even just Human in general. This is a very silly thing to say because we are manifestly different from even our closest neighbor, the damnable French. But let us take it seriously in order to give me an excuse to ramble about what British, or English is, because it is a rather difficult thing to do, especially for people who have no been fully exposed to other cultures. And that is how you discover what a culture is: by comparing and contrasting one group to another.
There is a British culture because: we hold very different views on marriage and infidelity to the French, we treat our children differently, we eat different foods, speak different languages, listen to different music, dance differently, adhere to different fashions, have different views on where law originates, what a person’s rights are, we drink tea and they drink coffee and when they do drink tea they drink it differently, we drink more beer and cider, they drink more wine, we are different because pubs and cafes, we are different because we have different idioms and sayings, even if we spoke the same language we would say different things.
Of course these differences become more pronounced when you compare us to people further away, the Han Chinese for example, but you could say that these are differences between the larger groups we belong to, so the difference between European culture and Sino-sphere culture. But this does not discount these elements as being part of British culture, just because they are common to our larger cultural group does not mean they are not ours, the same way that just because there are some striking similarities between the English and the Japanese does not detract or remove these similarities from what makes these people unique. Just because there is a Finnish Metal band who takes heavy influence, themes and instruments from Japan does not mean Finland and Japan have no culture, nor that this band is not something which can fit in either.
The benign explanation, the charitable one, explaining why certain people, certain journalists especially, have this incredible xenophilia to the point where they proclaim that the culture they belong to does not exist, is because they lack the ability to see that these “wonderful, diverse” foreign cultures prove the existence of the very thing they say doesn’t exist. Cultural “enrichment” in practice means cultural replacement or cultural degeneration.
-Kentlad
Liberalism Is Moral Syphilis 