The Japanese are a homogenous people who see nothing wrong with wanting to stay that way. This doesn’t make them exclusive, it makes them self-preserving.

On the other hand Michio Kushi, the ‘One Peaceful World’ avatar and renowned teacher of macrobiotics, would frequently point out to his audience of college graduate, bourgeois, ex- hippie students that it was wrong to be exclusive. As far as Michio was concerned you could do anything you wanted (I recall he held Al Capone in high regard) as long as you weren’t exclusive. For an avowed non-dualist it was the closest Michio came to calling something sinful. I found this amusing considering Japan’s centuries of enforced isolation.

I suppose as a young Japanese immigrant who came to America soon after the end of WW2 it makes sense that Michio would have strong opinions on what it means to be exclusive. As an outsider from a country and race that until recently was at war with America he probably experienced prejudice more than exclusivity, yet he never said anything one way or the other about prejudice. Perhaps in his mind they were the same.

It’s important to remember that Michio got his groove on in New York City during the early 1950’s. At that time blacks experienced racial prejudice and Jews were excluded from many schools, professions and social organizations. Michio saw exclusivity as a stigma on the American psyche  and was determined to avoid it. 

Michio knew Norman Cousins, the editor of the magazine “Saturday Review”. Cousins sponsored Michio to come to America and attend the World Federalist Society conference held in New York City in 1949. Like Cousins, Michio’s Japanese mentor, George Ohsawa, also advocated for  World Government. In Cousins’ case he believed the Nation State was, in the atomic age, a dangerous anachronism. Michio shared Cousins’ thinking and his lectures often include discussion of a universal order that when politically channeled would lead naturally to world government.

Well that was the theory. In light of what has been going on since the start of the 21st century Michio and Cousins were pretty far off the mark. It is noteworthy that none of Michio’s students have had any impact on world leaders or world events. The “new age”cadre of senior teachers Michio groomed have had nothing to say, to my knowledge, about the current state of geopolitics. The application of macrobiotics has become moribund, teaching about diet and health and little else. The use of macrobiotic’s ‘Unique Principle’ (yin and yang) and Wuxing (5 Element Theory) which could be helpful in explaining current events has been neglected. Analysis of our contemporary era’s geopolitical, biological, spiritual, cultural and sociological condition has been left ‘exclusively’ in the hands of the West’s dualistic, paradigm-fatigued clerisy. 

Michio’s focus on a simple message of dietary change to rejuvenate body and spirit, and teaching that food was medicine was in the 1960’s a revolutionary undertaking that found a receptive audience and I’m forever grateful that I was in on it. But there were other areas that Michio lectured about that I found myself unreceptive to.

Michio, though syncretic in his teaching method, was a utopian at heart and he took macrobiotics along a chillastic path, a path that he believed would usher in world government and paradise on earth. Michio mocked the idea of national borders and frequently used the analogy of the freedom of birds flying where they wanted, making the nation- state a meaningless concept, a “delusion”, as he would say. Michio also went into high dudgeon over passports believing that all he needed to do was say “I’m Michio Kushi, what more do you need from me?” Today this would align him with the globalist, “world citizen” advocate and “Open Society “ founder, George Sorros. 

Michio’s crackpot statements about superfluous borders and passports that were unnecessary for the so-called ‘world citizen’ went unchallenged by his students. I suspect Michio also harbored a distaste for patriotism, probably conflating it with an ‘exclusive’ love for one’s homeland and one’s people. According to Michio’s thinking patriotism would be too particularist, too chauvinist, too xenophobic.

I will never accept the idea that a traditional diet that includes whole grains, pulses, land and sea vegetables creates a longing for rootlessness and acceptance of all the shibboleths of post-modernity. I contend that a traditional diet does, if not the opposite, at the very least immunizes you to the more absurd beliefs found in the postmodern’s weltanschauung. 

In retrospect it’s surprising that Michio, who dreamt of One Peaceful World, and often talked about the order of the universe, didn’t realize that eliminating borders and passports in an effort to be unexclusive would, as we are witnessing today with the tsunami of immigration in Europe and our own southern border, bring chaos and strife. In retrospect Michio’s New Age dream was also Michio’s cauchemar.

Originally published at AmericanThinker.com on July 22,2024.

The ninety-eight year-old speaker at the Republican National Convention, Sgt. William Pekrul, was born the same year as my mother, making him a teenager when he fought at the Battle of the Bulge, where my uncle Calvin fought and was wounded.  He is one of the last of the great American warriors of WW2.  I took particular note of his comments regarding America as not just an idea, but his homeland.  Later, J.D. Vance, the nominee for vice president, echoed the same thought: that America is more than an idea.  It is our home.

Sadly, not all Americans share the conviction that America is more than an idea, more than an abstraction.  Were this contrary view of our country limited to ordinary people, it would be a harmless irritant, but it isn’t.

I recently went to the Minnesota Department of Public Services website to fill out a pre-application form for renewing my driver’s license.  I was asked a series of questions, one of which was my ethnicity.  When I typed in “American,” the form rejected it and instead printed “Declined.”  Apparently, despite having ancestors in America dating back to the late 17th century — ancestors who settled near Jamestown, Virginia, where they farmed, fished, and grew tobacco; ancestors who over the centuries fought in all her wars, including the tragic War of Secession — I am, according to the omniscient Minnesota Department of Public Services, not permitted to claim “American” as my ethnicity!  

For most of its history, America has been an ethno-state primarily composed of white European Christian emigrant-settlers.  This racial and religious compatibility contributed to the country’s strong, dynamic physical and institutional development.  Today there are forces at work, especially among more extreme liberal partisans, to create domestic strife by employing a putative multiculturalism against Americans of European heritage.  The notion that America has always been a nation of immigrants is leftist casuistry to support their egalitarian, multiracial social doctrine currently in conflict with the historic American nation.

These radical liberals, who fancy themselves on progressivism’s cutting edge, were raised in the hydroponic, synthetic medium of tendentious political and sociological theories.  These children of the metropole, many of whom are recently minted citizens, believe that because they are devoid of an American heritage rooted in four centuries of indigenous experience, all Americans should likewise be without a heritage.  In the postmodern liberal’s mind, America remains a nation of immigrants, not settlers, and therefore an American ethnicity is an impossibility.

Postmodern liberals suffer from oikophobia, a condition that is inimical to the natural cohesion of the nation-state — a condition that repudiates both homeland and countrymen while embracing the alien, the unfamiliar and foreign.  Oikophobia explains why postmodern liberalism holds those who possess American ancestry, in some cases going back hundreds of years, in contempt and why they enact policies that seek their deracination and demographic marginalization, all the while encouraging revanchist minoritism. 

My connection to America is vestigial, spiritual, metaphysical, and vibrational.  America and I are not two.  My heritage here goes back twelve generations.  I grew up in a New England harbor town that was bombed by British ships, looted by Redcoats, and later invaded by Hessian mercenaries.  My understanding of America and its history is visceral.  The house I lived in was built in 1698, and the Marquis de Lafayette was billeted there in 1778.  This same town has for 238 years continuously celebrated America’s independence with a Fourth of July parade led by current members of its Ancient & Honorable Revolutionary Militia.  Yet despite the length of my American ancestry, my heritage, and the nature of my lived experience, I am not allowed to claim on a Minnesota driver’s license application my ethnicity to be “American.” 

Ethnicity implies a shared history, shared ancestry, culture, language, customs, traditions, beliefs, communality and kinship.  Ethnicity means centuries, not decades of belonging to a place.  To our globalist elites, these distinctions are obstacles in the ongoing “deconstruction” of what it means to be an American.  Today the State believes it has the right to confer or withhold identity.  I for one am not going to allow some committee of throttle-bottoms to dictate my identity.  That prerogative is mine and mine alone.  I refuse to become an American pied noir when I am in fact an “American de souche.” 

Claiming one’s ethnicity and nationality to be the same is too monistic for the State to allow.  Acceptance of the idea that there is an ethnic American violates the pervasive and entrenched dogma of egalitarianism and inclusion and suggests a hierarchy of Americanness.  For the State, time has no relevance: 350 years of being an American is a grave rubbing, not an ethnicity.

My American ancestry predates our Republic, and that fact adds piquancy to my sense of being an American.  It also contributes to my having a deep, robust, organic, and unapologetic connection to what I’ve come to call a “republican heritage.”  Today’s cosmopolitan neo-American can’t be expected to understand this, so why should the Minnesota Department of Public Services be different?