Appalachia

So people asked me in the comments, why I care about some hurricane in America. I didn’t think I had to explain this, but here it goes.

There are groups of people I like more than others. If I liked everyone equally, as Aristotle noted, it would mean I am a friend to none. I like the Jews, I like the Finnish, I like the Japanese, I like the Indians. I don’t know much about the Africans, but from what I know I like the Ugandans most. But they are all to some degree strangers, I like them from the perspective of an outside observer and I’m never genuinely going to understand them.

But what do you think the people of Appalachia, the descendants of Highland Scottish who were betrayed by their own clan chiefs, forced to flee to South Carolina and Virginia, descendants of the Scotch-Irish who were forcibly resettled on the plantations of Ireland, who built a culture of rugged individualism because they had learned they could trust nobody, who fiercely rejected slavery and now huddle together surrounded by muddy water on the roofs of their houses, built of wood with techniques learned from Norwegian settlers, are? They are family.

In a sense, to paraphrase Emily Brontë, they are more myself than I am. They are the people who learned the hard way they could trust nobody, so they settled in remote mountains, in an alien land governed by a new social experiment, a country without a king.

There are Dutch people who settled in the new world, sure, but they are mostly from well to do families. Families that owned land here, the people my own ancestors worked for. Do you think I feel more affinity with some Dutch aristocrat, or a German prole? The aristocrats of North-Western Europe, the bourgeoisie, the patricians, the land-owners, they recognize each other, they readily intermarry. But the peasants identify entirely with their own town.

But I’m hardly alone in this. When I went to rural parts of Norway, I regularly ran into guys with confederate flags on their cars. Do you think those guys have some opinion on slavery? Of course not. We just recognize that there are people out there who are the same thing as us: Indigenous. They are indigenous in the same way as the Maori in New Zealand are. Their culture has become intimately tied to the landscape they live in. This is not something you choose, it’s something that happens to you.

We are against the rootless cosmopolitanism and arrogance of the people living in the big cities. I don’t care for New York, I would love for San Francisco to be struck by an earthquake and for all the tech billionaires to die in the rubble as much as I would love to see Amsterdam flushed out into the north sea. But the people of Appalachia live and die with their land, as the coal mines shut down and the world changes around them.

And unlike people in places like San Francisco and New York, they don’t try to impose their way of life and their values on us here in Europe. You Americans can keep your Saint Floyd, your polycules, your air conditioning, your artificial intelligence and your drag queens, thank you very much, we’d rather have your bluegrass and your log cabins.

I used to think walking the Appalachian trail would be the only thing I could imagine stepping into an airplane for again. I told my friend who moved to the United States to walk the trail a few weeks ago. But now a third of the trail is inaccessible, swept away by the mud. There are villages that will never recover from all of this.

I happen to have the ability to use English words to express this. But some guy in Norway in a big SUV with a confederate flag and a weird moustache feels this. Europeans are the cool kids, Americans want to sit at our dinner table. I hear more English than Dutch in summer when I walk through downtown Rotterdam. Well, now you know who is invited.

Some of us recognize our souls are the same, so we’re mourning. But we don’t mind mourning. It means we are lucky, we had something we loved.

35 Comments

  1. after your ridiculous endorsement of harris, you’ve almost redeemed yourself.

    i grew up in the city, but we had a country home near appalachia (on the horse country side of the border with hill country), and i always identified more with that land than the crack-infested shithole we lived in most of the time. it breaks my heart to see the land being destroyed by data centers and tract homes for the h1b’s that run them.

    • I’m pretty sure he was trolling his readers with that shit about Harris. It got the expected response, which was 100% against.

  2. “We are against the rootless cosmopolitanism and arrogance of the people living in the big cities. I don’t care for New York, I would love for San Francisco to be struck by an earthquake and for all the tech billionaires to die in the rubble as much as I would love to see Amsterdam flushed out into the north sea. But the people of Appalachia live and die with their land, as the coal mines shut down and the world changes around them.”

    1000%

    I’m 1/4 Scotch-Irish myself, so there’s some hillbilly in me, but never been to Appalachia.

  3. There is a really good episode of Top Gear where they drive three supercars on a road trip across the Appalachian mountains. They start in North Carolina, then travel through Virginia.

    After that, they visit the ghetto/hood part of Washington D.C. and Amish country in Pennsylvania (a town called Intercourse) and finish with a race across Manhattan.

    It’s on Netflix (Season 15 episode 6) and there’s various episode segments uploaded to YouTube. Here’s a funny clip where they visit a tire shop in a small town close to the border of North Carolina and Virginia, where they find it very difficult to understand the locals’ hillbilly accents:

    https://youtu.be/26hOn4KYjyA?si=9KPpPTcPctZaPHAe

  4. LSWM Lives Matter, that ain’t hillbilly, that’s normal, at least hereabouts. I’ve heard REALLY country, some of it in my family.

  5. I’m red stick. Kinfolk settled in South Carolina. A few of us leaked into Texas eventually. Now the clan is spread from the Texas Gulf to the Panhandle, up to Missouri and over to Tennessee. Cousin Gomez, you have a lot left to learn about your kin.

  6. Well done.

    This is all very touching and poetic, and we appreciate the homeboy pro-Appalachian sentiment you feel for us from away in the Netherlands, but you seem to be saying we must hold our noses and vote Green/liberal always in accordance with Greta and the entire troupe of poisonous blue-haired crazies because the overarching issue is that THE PLANET IS AT STAKE.

    “Don’t you see the CLIMATE CHANGE that is occurring, you stupid low status White males??”

    If we don’t vote for international UN treaties severely restricting carbon dioxide we’re all going to quickly DIE in misery from HURRICANES, rain and drought!

    AHHHHHHHHHH!

    _________________

    No, I don’t see it occurring.

    And FREEEEEDOM does not involve voting against the 1st Amendment and for Kamala.

    Try again.

  7. How are you for the jews but against rootless cosmopolitans? It’s not a coincidence that every aspect of Western subversion is disproportionately funded and staffed by jews.

  8. I’ve mentioned before that I am half WASP and half Hispanic.

    The WASP half of my family has its roots in Virginia.

    As a child, I made many hikes on the Appalachian Trail, to Tinker Cliffs and Dragon’s Tooth.

    I know the beauty of that land well

    (It is often said that Tinker Cliffs and Dragon’s Tooth are the most scenic outposts of the Trail)

    (I’m tempted to share a photo but don’t want to dox myself among the Mossad reading)

    Though my paternal line is thoroughly WASP, my father was good friends with the Scots-Irish in his childhood.

    I’ll never forget his best friend “Andy” who was a hot-headed redhead and who loved to play practical jokes on everyone.

    Like, attaching a chain to the rear axle of his “friends” car, with the other end attached to something sturdy, so that when he drove out of his driveway, it yanked his rear differential out.

    Stuff like that.

    My WASP father never made peace with his Scots-Irish friend Andy after they had a falling out when my father thought he could be HSWM by parroting “elite” garbage about healthcare (or whatever) and he alienated his childhood friend by acting like he was “better than him”

    Andy died a few years ago and there was never any closure.

    That sucks.

        • Now that I think about it, there is something I’ve been wanting to say.

          Although the aforementioned video hardly captures the beauty of Dragon’s Tooth, or Tinker Cliffs, or McKaffes Knob, it does capture the vibe of a particular sort of American.

          I’m somewhat at a loss to describe this sort of woman.

          Like many here, I live in a congested metropolis.

          But I had family in Virginia. I know this type.

          As a Schizoid, I only observed from the sidelines.

          But I assure you, Radagast, that there are women who love nothing more than hiking in nature.

          They exist.

          I wish you and I could hike the Appalachian Trail. I’m confident you would love it.

          Aw geez I’m being gay again

          This is all to say that you and I are faced with a choice.

          Do we allow ourselves to be enchanted and entranced by sparkly whores like Zheani, or do we finally admit to ourselves that we would be content with a crunchy hippy type of girl who likes to go hiking and observe nature.

          No judgement. I have not figured this out myself.

          But I have a feeling Kareninca has something to say about it…

  9. OT, but what are the red stars next to commenters names, which seem pretty random?

    Some people have them , others don’t. Some have them at one point, and then don’t have them later???

  10. CAP — Christian Appalachian Project
    Been doing great work for awhile. They have a good network. Donate online if you can. God Bless our Southern Folk.
    Best Regards,
    Red in OleVirginny

  11. I’m a Novocastrian by origin (coal, heavy industry, shipping, steel – until BHP closed in the 90s).

    The guys in the photo could pass for relatives.

    I can empathize with the sentiment here.

  12. Greatest novel ever set in Appalachia is Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy. For example, here Culla is lost in a swamp, following the current:

    “He followed it down, in full flight now, the trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them.”

    Every page has pyrotechnics like this. It’s a worthy precursor to Blood Meridian, standing on the shoulders of As I Lay Dying. I must have read it 50 times.

    Another great Southern writer is the Redneck Rastafarian. Literary talent pools disproportionately in the bottom half of our country. Meet the Gentile Joshua, a knowledgeable and pious Noahide for 35 years, former “Bible thumper,” AKA The Zionist Conspirator: estimatedprophet1977.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-quotable-zionist-conspirator.html

  13. You do understand that this is Vance’s background, right? And Trump is half Scottish, half German; he could have lived as a member of the American aristocracy but he decided to be a brash businessman instead, which alienated him from that group. The two of them understand the area very well.

    The people there are not welcoming. Like Southerners, they keep their land by being seriously unpleasant to intruders. Also, if you say something to one of them that offends them, no matter how innocently, they will never speak to you again. You have to watch every word you say, and then inevitably screw up. The sort of freewheeling natter that we post here would get us shunned instantly and permanently. I could post a few things here that are critical of the culture there in order to help you understand, but then anyone from there would hate me forever. The biggest threat to the people who live there are the wealthy who buy retirement homes in the area. A lot of them will be leaving now.

  14. Wombat:

    > An elitist snob hey? Well, that explains how you could tolerate teaching. You might even enjoy forcing kids into class to learn their class ????

    I will ensure that standards are kept.

    More than you can say, LSWM Jew.

    I’ve known a number of LSWJ’s.

    Fine people, all things considered.

    But they tend to erupt with no consideration of the gentle and sensitive souls surrounding them.

    Much like niggers care nothing for how they disrupt the whites around them.

    I’ve said before, this world would be a paradise if it were rid of subversive Jews and dysfunctional Negroes.

    You might say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…

    If what I’ve said offends you, then GOOD.

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