In 2017 in the Czech Republic archeologists found a bone dating back about 1,400 years. So what, right? Well, the bone had German runic inscriptions. A firestorm has since erupted in Czech nationalist circles indignantly denouncing the finding. Why? Well, to the nationalist faction of Czech society, the finding flies in the face of their doctrine of pure Czech heritage and supremacy in Moravia where the offensive bone was found. They smell a nefarious implied allusion to long-ago held convictions among pan-Germans that the region in the Balkans was developed in antiquity by Germanic tribes, and it conjures up very unwelcome memories of German conquest and occupation under Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist Germany. Sounds crazy to we Americans, doesn’t it? Well, it shouldn’t. The Czech are hardly the only one’s claiming to have a bone to pick—if you’ll pardon the expression.
Over seventy five years after the guns of World War Two went silent and the founding of the United Nations, echos of the tribalist identities we say we want to shed are still with us and difficult not to see everywhere we turn. They are now, however, more confusing than ever before.
Consider. In the wake of the EU’s inept response to the pandemic, France’s Marine Le Pen and her National Front is riding a resurgence of popularity going into the upcoming election with slogans like “France for the French” on a platform of excluding Muslim culture from French society. Across the border in Germany the AfD Far Right party is garnering more and more seats in the Bundestag largely as a backlash to Chancellor Angela Merkel opening the floodgates to millions of immigrants from North Africa.
Closer to home, here in the United States a battle Royale is well under way for what exactly this country is, what this nation ought to look like demographically, and we are awash in recriminations and accusations which involve dredging up and wrangling over 250 plus years of North American history. Whatever viewpoint one may see the spectacle from, American cities are burning because of it and the diametrically opposed sides could not be much farther apart. Are the Europeans who founded this nation and settled this country and conquered the west heroes and patriots, or evil scoundrels to be stripped of their monuments, whose White Supremacy must be eradicated root and branch?
And then, once again to no one’s surprise, there is Palestine and Israel. As usual, this intractable conundrum gives rise to the greatest confusion—including here at home. Thousands of years ago, one son of Abraham took a left and the other took a right, and here we are. Untold numbers have perished in this land the size of New Jersey claimed by both Judaism and Islam. We have Palestinians lobbing thousands of rockets into Israeli cities, most of which are shot down in the air, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bombing and killing thousands of Palestinians. Both, of course, claim it as THEIR Holy Land. Comparisons to the bombing of the Warsaw Ghetto outrage the Israeli government. And Palestinians think Israel is going to put up with Hamas’ Iranian-funded rockets landing in Tel Aviv. Democratic US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Detroit accuses the Jewish state of “White Supremacy”, ignoring the fact that historically White Supremacists are hardly pro-Israel. Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians defend Israel in lockstep for eschatological reasons, dismissing the inconvenient fact that the beliefs of the Jewish religion refute the central historical premise of Christianity itself. There is no denying that to allow for the Palestinian “Right of Return” to what is now an officially Jewish nation would democratically destroy Israel as a Jewish state at the voting booth,
And, over in Asia, millions of Uyghurs in northwest China are locked up in Chinese concentration camps along with other ethnic minorities and Christians for the sin of not assimilating into a secular Godless Chinese Communist society.
What does it all mean? I will leave you with this. We in this country had better get ourselves right with each other, and stop all the nonsense. If we do not emerge from our present travails with our liberty in tact—yes, even at the expense of continued "inequities"—then we cannot expect this experiment called the United States of America to be repeated any time soon. We still have a chance to do just that, but our time will not last forever. Americans, unite now under the cause of LIBERTY. For without liberty, we will cease to exist as the land we know and love. And, by the way...if you do not love it, you may leave it.
