A nation is a construct of the Westphalian settlement. Before that the magistrate was your Lord, or the courts so appointed: in England the Justice of the Peace — who was often one of the gentry who owned much of the land — dealt with minor matters and greater matters were taken to the courts of assizes.

But both gentry and the common people lived in the land for generations upon generations. The people made the county, an the counties the country. If you did not marry in and follow the customs of the country, you did not belong. You were foreign: Tolkien was correct when he had his Hobbits warn against going to the Marchlands, for there people were queer.

The customs and traditions of a people may not have moral qualities, but they allow a people to live to gether. And to say that a citizen is one born in a nation who does not follow the customs of the people… misses the point.

Hassan may live in Sweden (or New Zealand) but he is a Muslim who wants Shari’a, not Swedish Law: his loyalty is not to Sweden, and his family is not from Sweden. A Kiwi living in Sweden is still a Kiwi, and a Swede living in NZ is still a Swede. It takes generations of living in a nation to change… the Pakeha experience is that this takes two or three generations at least to stop calling the place you came from home, and to find your ancestral homeland, the hills and trees, strange.

We are commanded to care for the strangers and treat them fairly. By our laws: not to have one law for the stanger and another for our fellow countrymen. To not establish systems of injustice that oppress the traveller, but also not allow them to have laws that are not ours. Thus, there should not be tolerance of Shari’a and its penalties or allowances for such things as polygamy within our nations. For our nations are good.

And each nation can choose when to let people be counted within them. Someone saying “I am german” does not make them so. The cosmopolitan and rootless life, is a wasteland, as Eliot portrayed, complete with the delusions of nationality without ties of blood or soil.

The emphasis is mine.

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

Ideologues have no interest in ties of blood or land or traditions. They want to sweep this all away, so that the peace of Islam will come (as the Munich killer, the most recent Muslim fanatic, seems to wish), or to make a new Soviet. The Law will be ignored, friends betrayed, and the populace lied to.

For, in their mind, the end justifies the means. But that is the logic of dystopias. You cannot elect a new people so that your neat models become the reality. Not without accepting there will be death, and the blood of those killed will be on your hands.

Or that when things change, you may find yourself losing. For this progressive, federal experiment has failed. We forget that nations can and do align to defeat evil, and then live as neighbours together.

I’m New Zealand European: Pakeha. I have ancestors in England, Ireland, France and Poland, by blood. I have five generations buried in the good earth of this land. My intellectual ancestors include the French (Jean Cavlin), English (Lewis, Tolkein, Milton) German (Bach, Popper) Russian (Solzhenitsyn) and American (Schaeffer, Pound, Eliot, Beale, Heinlen). I can acknowledge and celebrate those of my nation and those of others. But this pan natinal globalism means we don’t identify tho traitors, or allow tradition and common deceny guide us to keep evil our of our laws.

Martel knew better. He let the German and British and Spanish Lords return to their homelands. He was content to be faithful, and a child of France. From him we should learn.