Geert Wilders for Breitbart: No Country Can Survive Without Deeply Rooted Tradition and Patriotism

Patriotism, Margaret Thatcher once said, is one of a nation’s “pillars of greatness.”

Today it is exactly fifty years since that Mrs. Thatcher became the leader of the British Conservative Party. She is one of the politicians who has inspired me most. She was a passionate freedom fighter as well as a patriot, and she understood that a country cannot survive if it is no longer rooted in its traditional values.

“Patriotism,” Thatcher said, “means that we cherish a nation’s history and feel concern for its future long after we ourselves have gone. It means that we will be prepared to make any sacrifices for the sake of our country and the things for which it stands. Take it away, and greatness decays; national freedom, even national survival will be placed in jeopardy.”

Today, we are living in amazing times, full of optimism for the future. In May, I will be speaking at the CPAC conference in Budapest, Hungary. Its theme is “The Age of Patriots has begun.” And so it has! In America, Donald Trump has ushered in a sea change in politics. He is performing a political miracle, which, barely a year ago, seemed almost impossible: To simultaneously roll back wokeism and illegal immigration.

In Europe, we are set to do the same. America’s Constitution allows Trump to immediately put his political mark on the country. In my home country, the Netherlands, as in most other European countries, we are obliged to build coalition governments and seek compromises. Our processes of decision-making take longer – far too long in my opinion. But let there be no doubt about it: In Europe, too, wokeism and illegal immigration will be ended. Trump’s victory is working as an accelerant of patriotism on both sides of the Atlantic.

All across the West, our national identity is rooted in Judeo-Christian values. Both wokeism and multi-culturalism are undermining this identity. The fight against wokeism and against mass immigration are two sides of the same coin. It is the same fight. And it is an existential fight.

Wokeism, reduces an individual’s identity to the color of his skin or his sexual preference – away from what traditionally defines our identity: our relationship with our family, with our neighborhood and with the nation into which we are born. Wokeism redefines identity into something essentially egocentric and subjective, while identity is traditionally defined in relation to others: an objective allegiance to family and nation.

One does not need to be a practicing Christian to acknowledge the deep truth of what the 13th-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote: “The principles of our being and governing are our parents and our country, which have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently, man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God.”

The slogan for next May’s European CPAC Conference is: “God, Homeland, Family.” Margaret Thatcher would undoubtedly have agreed, so would Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and Thomas Aquinas. We are standing in a tradition of ages and walking in the footsteps of giants.

The other deadly enemy of our identity is mass immigration and multiculturalism. This enemy aims to destroy our identity by radically changing the makeup of our neighborhoods and nations. It floods us with immigrants from alien cultures in numbers which can never be assimilated.

This is what Angela Merkel did in 2015, when she threw the borders of Germany and Europe wide open to millions of foreigners. “Wir schaffen das – we can do it,” Merkel said. Today, Friedrich Merz, the new leader of the German Christian Democrats, is desperately trying to distance himself from Merkel because – who would have guessed! – Germany dismally failed to “do it.” Later this month, the German voters will make this abundantly clear.

Both wokeism and multiculturalism find their roots in the ideas of the so-called Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist philosophers who settled in the United States in the 1930s. There, they came to dominate liberal thinking, not so much by advocating Marxist anti-capitalist economic reform but by pushing social engineering.

The fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the 1980s marked the death of Marxism as an economic theory. Today’s leftists, influenced by the Frankfurt School ideologues, focus on changing the moral and cultural foundations of Western society. They advocate using the state as a radicalizing cultural force intent on destroying traditional Western culture and the Judeo-Christian morality it is based upon.

The American Democratic Party and the mainstream political parties in Europe have been hijacked by these ideas. Last November, the American people made it very clear that they would not tolerate that. In Europe, too, the voters are flocking to patriotic parties, such as my own Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands.

This is what we believe:

Perceptive so-called “Classical Liberals” have always been aware that freedom and democracy cannot exist without a traditional moral order. Margaret Thatcher’s mentor, the Nobel Prize winner Friedrich von Hayek, who also greatly influenced Ronald Reagan, was a classical liberal exactly because he was a traditionalist who believed that traditions encapsulate the wisdom, the life experience, and the knowledge of the generations which preceded us and who were definitely not stupider than we are.

There was a famous moment during a policy meeting of her party where Mrs. Thatcher slammed a copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty on the table and declared: “This is what we believe!”

As early as 1922, Hayek’s own mentor, Ludwig von Mises, pointed out that Socialism can only prosper when individuals are atomised and cut loose from the ties to what identifies them. When the family disappears, Mises wrote, “society is confronted with separate individuals only. Nothing is left but the individual and the state.” Ronald Reagan basically conveyed the same message when he told the American nation at a prayer breakfast in Dallas, Texas, in 1984: “If we forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

It is important to stick to God – our Judeo-Christian civilization – homeland and family. They are the bedrock of a free society. That is why we have to defend them. In his Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at Hillsdale College in 1977, Ronald Reagan famously said: “Freedom is something that cannot be passed on in the bloodstream, or genetically. And it is never more than one generation away from extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it, or it is gone and gone for a long, long time.”

Half a century after the beginning of Mrs. Thatcher’s rise to power, it is fitting to remember her wise words and political legacy. President Trump honors her political legacy and so do I: Let us restore freedom, eradicate wokeism and stop mass immigration.

Geert Wilders MP is leader of the PVV, the largest party in the Dutch government and parliament

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