Junkyard Wolf's Junkyard: Blood and Soil

During a recent school graduation I attended, I was minding my own business when I was treated to the unexpected sight of a grown woman trying to hold back her tears while talking about loving her country.

Now, I do despise nationalism and the stupefying notions of self-aggrandizement that typically follow it, but there is something good to be said about notions of "blood and soil" that beat almost supernaturally in the hearts of men and women.

There is nothing inherently wrong with patriotism - that simple expression of love for the locality you happen to call home. Localism has certain very human charms that give character to one's memories. Long afternoons playing games you know are played nowhere else, days spent languishing around brooks, streams and caves only you and your friends know, climbing trees and eating fruit you know only your mom or the neighborhood den mother can prepare...these things are what many cherished memories are made of, and they create that image in the heart that remains indelibly in place whenever one speaks of one's hearth and home. The Romans sometimes called the Second Punic War (the one starring Hannibal) "the war of gods and demons", and they reserve a special hatred for the Carthaginians because they trampled on the very vineyards and gardens, the very town and country squares and the very homes they believed their household gods resided in. It was this appeal to the honor of the gods and the honor of the hearth of which they were patrons that spurred the patriotic appeal to resist Hannibal at all cost, and it is a force that not even the greatest general since Alexander the Great could overcome. The little localisms that we cherish are our own version of the household gods, and woe be unto any man who would trample upon them.

To the internationalist cynic, such quaint little mementoes of the memory (which he will almost always associate with some simplistic "jingoism") are the source of the world's many ills, from xenophobic tension to the violation of minority rights. What the cyinic does not realize is that man is fallen, and that the corruption takes hold even of such noble things as the love for blood and soil. The fault lies not in the localism but in the frail failings of the human heart. As such, no appeal to internationalism can fix these things. If any, appeals to go beyond localism have often succeeded in making local problems national (or international), and have often been the impetus behind the many ills the internationalist decries. It is one thing to say "we are the world, we are the children", it is quite another to indulge in the hypocrisy of forcing man to shed his humanity (of which localisms are an integral part) in order to be "humane". Love of blood and soil need not be mutually exclusive with love for wider humanity. Indeed, love of blood and soil need not be saddled by nationalism.

In honor of localism, here are two of my favorite localist anthems...

Sweet Home Alabama by pre-plane crash Lynyrd Skynyrd.