this cult of continuity, the confident assumption of knowing to whom and to what we owe our existence - whence the importance of the idea of ‘origins’ – Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”
What passes for legal tender is a convention for the reckoning of debts – and a legalised violence steps in where convention falters.
The ideology of ethnicity, of racial purity and supremacy, arms the violence against anyone who does not conform to nationalist dogma. Those who do not align themselves with the vision of nationalism are attacked because their life-practices refuse to reproduce the values responsible for the structuring of an ethnic identity. For us this is of course a very familiar characteristic of greek society, where institutions like religion and the nuclear family support ‘national [racial] coherence’. Identities like the ‘good patriot’, the ‘faithful orthodox’, the ‘greek mother’ and the ‘virile man’ are constructed according to institutional and social mandates and it is these that safeguard social norms. [translation from emailists modified, *above image from Belgrade Pride 2001 footage.]
The Australian Conservation Foundation recently endorsed Federal MP Kelvin Thomson’s calls to reduce migration to Australian to “to more sensible levels.” There was (perhaps still is) some very nice graffiti in Melbourne - our way of life IS the problem
… there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon a parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so, before him … - William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769).
And here’s a pdf for the frontier household piece.