How English is England?
Nationalists believe in the homogeneity of their nation, which is corrupted, they claim, by immigration. The truth is, the homogeneity that they imagine existed is a myth, deliberately designed to hide the fact that those in power were not originally from ‘here’ — that in almost every case, the ruling elite are foreign conquerors who have convinced the nation that they are ‘one of them’.
Freud talks about this in Moses and Monotheism; and Nietzsche discusses it in Beyond Good and Evil. Even the self-admitted fascist, Costin Alamariu (who is sympathetic to many nationalistic ideas), describes it in his book Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy:
The persistence across large periods of time of a consciousness of a separate origin among the ruled on one hand, and the rulers on the other, is of course possible even in cases where the rulers attempted to justify their position in the most creative ways. The Normans, as a hostile elite in many places across medieval Europe, famously had recourse to the most convoluted mythologies regarding national origins, in order to erase their foreign provenance and legitimize their rule. Yet as successful as this task was in many cases, the persistence of an antagonistic Anglo- Saxon consciousness on the part of the conquered as late as the American Revolution and as late as the novel Ivanhoe, nevertheless shows how difficult it is for…
