I was chatting the other day with a reader who actually knows me in real life about immigration, “magic dirt”, the concept of citizenship, and “picking sides” when the Big One finally goes down, and Western civilisation faceplants straight into the dust. Said reader has done quite a lot to point me at very good material explaining how this “Christianity” thing works (yes, I am obviously being facetious), and how real Christianity actually makes quite a lot of sense – as opposed to the Churchian abomination that infects most mainstream denominations, which only seems to make sense.

During that back-and-forth he asked me how I was coming along in picking sides. I responded by noting that I had actually been debating issues of citizenship and nationality with someone else just thirty minutes earlier, who insisted that, no matter what, I could not change who I am and would always and forever be someone from my country and no other.

My response to her was the same as my response to my reader: if the country of my birth went to war against the United States of America, who would I pick? My answer to that: the USA. Every time.

My reader swiftly corrected this noble, but misguided, impulse.

The correct answer, the only answer that makes any kind of realistic sense, is to take His side.

It is critical to understand this distinction and avoid making the mistake that I made, which is to confuse a nation with its Creator. The two are not the same thing, even if the nation itself follows every single one of the laws and commandments given to it by its Creator – which no nation, ever, has managed to do successfully.

I doubt that anyone who reads my work questions whether or not I love the United States of America. Make no mistake, I mock Americans and America all the time. I make fun of the fact that its people do not speak English, and that they insist on putting (fake) cheese on top of everything, that they speak with funny accents, and that their understanding of world geography is limited to, “South are the Mexican pool-cleaners, north are the effeminate mincing polite faggots”.

However, mine is the comparatively gentle mockery of a guest who came to a country that offered him an education, plenty of opportunities, a safe and comfortable place to live, and the right to work in peace and relative security. It is most certainly not the criticism of a foreign intruder who thinks that America owes him a good life just for showing up and sticking it out for a while.

There is pretty much no faster way to piss me off than to tell me that a bunch of Third World freeloaders have an absolute right to walk through America’s borders and be given the red-carpet treatment even though they hate everything that America stands for and have no use for its laws, while people like me, who love the country and are faithful to its laws, must wait patiently in line for years to be given the same privileges.

All of that being said – although I love the USA and what it stands for, or at least, what it used to stand for, the major question that each of us has to ask ourselves is simple:

Is America – or any other nation, for that matter – staying true to the Law?

Because ultimately, that is all that matters. And when looked at this way, the question of “which side” becomes almost absurdly easy to answer.

If you believe in objective Truth…

If you love beauty, humour, laughter, love, grace, and timeless values…

If you think that the Law is indeed a perfect moral code…

If you reckon that there exist only two sexes, and that men and women exist to complement and complete each other…

And if you believe that there is a higher Power above all of us who gave us all of these wonderful things that we see around us every day…

Then there is only one side. His side.

With Him, or against Him. That is all there is to it.

The nations of Mankind are inventions of ours – created for very good reasons and designed to keep different peoples apart, as they should and as they must. But ultimately, they succeed or fail based on their ability to comply with the laws of Nature, and therefore of Nature’s God.

Think upon this for a moment and you will see how this must be so.

Nations which deny the existence of God, fail because, to paraphrase Chesterton*, they then become capable of believing in anything, no matter how absurd or nonsensical.

Nations which insist on worshiping false idols are easily led astray, for at best they merely worship an aspect of the Truth, instead of understanding that Truth in its fullness.

Nations which do evil in the name of God, or of their understanding of God, however limited, absolutely deserve to be destroyed and must be destroyed. There is no moral justification whatsoever for doing evil deeds in the name of a just, benevolent, loving Creator who nonetheless expects us to follow His Law.

Nations which refuse to give their own people a bit of a breather, some time to rest and relax and recuperate from the stresses and trials of daily existence, quickly lose all cohesion and ability to plan for the future – because that is what overwork and exhaustion do to everything and everyone.

Nations which refuse to honour their ancestors, the forbears who sacrificed all so that the present generation can live in peace, harmony, and prosperity, richly and thoroughly deserve destruction, for a nation that cannot remember and respect its past will always keep repeating its own stupid mistakes, and therefore by definition has no future.

Nations which permit state-sanctioned murder – and it is vitally important to distinguish here between killing the enemies of a nation, which is entirely morally justified under the right circumstances, and actual murder – have no moral right to exist. No nation which permits the wholesale slaughter of the unborn, the innocent, and the unjustly convicted, can ever claim to have a moral right to exist.

Nations where adultery is not only widely permitted but easy to commit, do not respect the bonds and sacrifices that create successful and healthy families. And if the history of human civilisation teaches us anything, it teaches that once the family unit unravels and ceases to have meaning, the nation itself follows soon afterward. In fact, the Law prohibiting adultery extends beyond sexual relations – it goes to the very value of the nation’s currency. After all, what is the single fastest way to destroy a country? It is to debase that country’s coinage – which is itself a form of adultery. To destroy a nation in a year, literally all you have to do is destroy its currency.

Nations where state-sanctioned theft is commonplace and rife are nations without rule of law. What good does it do a man to own a business or property, if the government can come along and steal it from him at gunpoint? What good does it do the citizens to work and strive and earn money, when the fruits of their own labours can be taken from them at the whim of a government bureaucrat?

Nations which lie to their own people, as a matter of routine and course, never tell themselves the truth either. Such nations can never see reality for what it is, and therefore end up smashing headfirst into it at about 100mph when the bill for their folly finally comes due.

And of course, nations which permit covetousness as the basis of all public behaviour are themselves coarsened and cheapened by it. Covetousness is the very foundation of socialism, and socialist nations always and everywhere fail, because they eventually run out of the ability to steal things from other people to satisfy the covetous.

Now obviously, the Ten Commandments are not the whole of the Law – even an unwashed (and, given the heat in the old country right now, sweaty) pagan like me can figure that out. But they do form the core of the Law, and as such must be heeded.

And if you look at the United States of America, as it is, today, perhaps you will note that it currently violates every single one of these precepts.

The very existence of God in public places is challenged, under a ridiculously broad interpretation of the First Amendment. You cannot even display the Ten Commandments outside of a public building, thanks to the ACLU and its relentless assault on Christian conscience.

Instead of revering God and His power, far too many Americans these days seem to revere Mammon and Adephagia.

Far too many Americans – or, to be fair, their government, with the very notable exception of President Trump and much of his Administration – worship at the temples of the false gods of globalism and social justice, pretending that all differences of race, ethnicity, language, culture, and faith can be erased and all of Mankind can be blended seamlessly into one indistinguishable, bland mass.

Americans are regarded by their foreign counterparts as people who live to work, instead of working to live.

Infanticide and state-sanctioned abortion is now considered normal and a woman’s “right” to choose supercedes an innocent child’s right to live.

Adultery is at levels never before seen in human history, and the Sexual and Marriage Market Places in America are screwed up possibly beyond any hope of recovery. It is becoming nearly impossible in most big cities for men to find good, reasonably chaste, happy, feminine women in their early twenties who want to settle down and have children early, rather than getting smoked and poked throughout their twenties and into their early thirties.

The American government routinely steals from its citizens, at gunpoint, up to 40% of their incomes – and more in some truly lunatic states like California, that amount can go well over 50% if you add in state and local taxes.

The ongoing farce that is the Russia “collusion” investigation shows that the American government routinely lies to its own people – and gets away with committing flagrant crimes against those same people. And the Department of Justice appears to be totally incapable of doing anything about either problem.

And, of course, we know now that covetousness is embedded within the American government at just about every level, from Federal to State to Local. Every aspect of the American nation is riddled with covetousness. Everything must always be bigger, better, flashier, and more expensive than what the neighbours have; far too few Americans content themselves with what they have now, and almost none ever bother with the time-honoured concept of using layaway plans to buy things – in that they lay away money to buy something nice, and when they have enough of it, they buy it in cash.

America was, and to some extent still is, the greatest country ever created on God’s Earth. This, I do not debate or question. I love the country that it used to be, and there is not a whole lot that I would not sacrifice for that country – because it is a good and decent and noble place, founded upon a magnificent vision of a free and proud people who honour God and His Law.

But the American nation as it is today is difficult to stomach. It is not even really a nation anymore, merely a fractious agglomeration of squabbling and increasingly violent tribes who all have very different views about how to govern themselves.

That nation is, as the old joke goes, one of two republics that God created – the first being Switzerland, to show us all how things should work, and the second being America, as a warning to everyone else.

Once again – I love America. Unlike many of my red-pilled counterparts, who have turned their backs on the country and walked away from it, I still see it as the last best hope of free men on Earth. I still see it as objectively the best country to be in, anywhere.

Other countries have better women – notably Russia, Ukraine, Colombia, Thailand, and Vietnam – while American women are, by and large and at least in the big cities, fat and undateable disasters. Other countries give you more right to live as you please – but this is not true freedom, which in America is still understood even now to be the substitution of individual self-discipline for discipline imposed by others. Other countries have better infrastructure for the masses – but far lower regard for the rights of the individual.

As former socialist and now conservative gadfly P. J. O’Rourke pointed out in his books, especially Holidays in Hell, he left America because of its oppression and injustice, and traveled the world – only to realise that everywhere else was basically worse.

America is a great nation because it used to obey the Word and the Law. But the moment that it truly turns its back on that Word, for good – that is the moment when it richly deserves complete and total destruction. And I will not lift a single finger to stop it.

And neither should you.

For one lesson I have learned, very much the hard way, is that it is downright stupid to get between Him Upstairs and the target of one of His richly-deserved ass-kickings.

The only choice, then, is with Him or against Him. And if America continues to go against Him… well, He surely will have a few things to say on the subject. They will be distinctly unpleasant to hear, and the result of that stern little talking-to will almost surely be the dissolution and destruction of the grand experiment in self-government for which the forefathers of that once-noble place of wonders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour.

*There is some debate about whether Chesterton actually said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything”. We do know for a fact that a Belgian chap named Emile Cammaerts wrote, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything”. Anyway, take the attribution of the quote as you will.