In the world in which nationalism (the belief in the nation-state system) is supposedly on the decline and internationalism (the belief in one-world government) is supposedly on the rise, there is still one event in which nationalism seems to be out of the grasp of the internationalist movement, the World Cup.
This year’s host is South Africa. As one would imagine, this has proved an ideal occasion for mass propaganda about the plight of Nelson Mandela and the black South Africans under the rule of the evil Afrikaaners. And while it is the case that ESPN and other media outlets are running stories about the racist history of South Africa, there is one area that the internationalist forces cannot touch, the element of national pride.
Despite the Leftist overtones surrounding the World Cup, there is nothing that can overcome the intense national and even ethnic pride that the World Cup incites. For Americans, who are phenomenal at every major sport but soccer, it is hard to comprehend just how significant the World Cup is for other nationalities.
The World Cup is the time every four years that a country’s eleven best men are put in front of the entire globe to represent their country in hopes of becoming the best in the world. It flies clearly in the face of internationalism, which preaches that all of mankind is one gigantic family and in no way should we compete with each other or assert that one group’s values are in any way superior to another’s. Diversity and competition are discouraged and replaced with uniformity and passivity, unless of course the subject at hand is the AIDS epidemic in Africa, or preserving millions of acres of land because it is the habitat of the rare New England flatworm, then action is encouraged. But otherwise, the nations are taught that they are to reject their heritage and reject their people’s identity.
This was most evident for Germans after the two world wars. During the First World War, German-Americas were told to put away any hint of their German identity and they consequently assimilated to the standards of the Anglophile establishment, hence large sections of German-American culture across the country vanished (though remnants still remain in the Northern states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, the Dakotas and pats of the West, where German communities were well established). However, the real blow came after the Second World War when Germans in Germany were taught that their country was a despicable excuse for a nation. According to the Fabian Socialist elites who used their own propaganda and the Leninists of the USSR, Germany and the Germans therein were revolutionized into a new breed of European. Germans were taught to do more than reject their heritage, they were taught to hate it in exchange for a new, cosmopolitan one.
This revolutionary agenda of the internationalists was almost fully realized in Germany until the summer of 2006 when Germany was the host of the World Cup. As a result of the tournament, Germans experienced a counter-revolutionary change. After World War II, Germans only found national pride in football; any other expression of German pride was immediately associated with and smeared as National Socialism. But in 2006, Germans' sense of national pride was restored when their national team placed third overall and the black, red and gold flew all over Germany.
Now in 2010, the same phenomenon is happening. In Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne and all across Germany and the United States, German people are beginning to express their heritage with courage and boldness, unafraid of their detractors. But it is not just contained to Germany. All accross Latin America, Africa and Asia, people file into cafes, sports bars, street corners with radios, or radios just to watch or hear how their eleven best players are preforming, because it really is not just the eleven that are competing. It is the entire nation that is moving with the team. When the national team wins, the country wins. When the national team loses, the nation has lost. They are, in a sense, spiritually bonded.
The internationalists have attempted many times in many different ways to dilute the rise of national pride associated with the World Cup, but they have yet to accomplish their goal. The tournament works counter to their agenda as we have seen not only in Germany, but also in South Africa by unifying whites and blacks under a national banner, or in England where football fans display the cross of St. George with pride, and even in the United States where the American team is gaining in ability and success, creating a sense of national unity identity. Our specific identity, no matter what the group, is something that should never be taken from us and something that should be preserved, because it is who we are as individuals and as a community.
