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Spaceman Spiff's avatar

Why do discussions of white nationalism always feel the need to explicitly mention rejecting violence? It implies this is the drive that animates them, a hatred of strangers. Literal xenophobia, which conjures up images of racial superiority or a drive to subjugate others.

Most white nationalists view themselves as reluctant realists. They are in most cases pattern recognizers, not the racist stereotypes the Left love to promote. They look at mixed societies and conclude different people with different evolutionary paths have inherited different physical and mental traits. This makes living together difficult for all parties.

Some of those traits mesh well with European societies (the high IQs and restraint of East Asians), and some do not (ethnicities with significantly poorer self control and shorter time horizons). As multicultural societies mature we observe these traits are persistent. Third generation Chinese are still restrained and clever; other groups can live in Western nations for centuries and continue to behave like their distant cousins on another continent no matter what we do with education and quotas.

Whites also look at examples of what a diverse population endures, from Brazil and America to natural experiments in artificially reversing emergent power structures. In Rhodesia and South Africa a tiny number of whites ran systems for a black-majority nation, with all the apartheid and related phenomenon most find distasteful. Even the king of the Zulus laments what blacks have wrought in South Africa, although this cannot be reported in the Western press. His comments about the Bantu are actively ignored and are more explicitly racist than anything whites ever say.

Much "white nationalism" is based on one simple observation - they are coming here; we are not going there. It is their job to assimilate not our job to agonize over the failure of them to do so.

Even more important, when the imperial era came to an end those who were there left when asked. India, the African nations and others cleared out their Europeans. Jamaica was handed over wholesale to the former slaves. The Haitians acquired their country in a manner more violent than even the liberals claim whites to be today. In modern terms all these nations rejected multiculturalism which they viewed as unnatural.

We are being held to standards no one else cares about and that even seeps in to articles like this, with the need to reassure everyone else our concerns about losing our cultures and territory are seen as an aberration. We have to guard against those questioning the status quo and explicitly reassure people violence must be rejected which plants a seed that curiosity about this subject is dangerous.

Finally, white nationalists look at the cultural tropes in the nations people are leaving to come to our nations. Pakistan and Arab countries do not tolerate foreigners emigrating to their countries. Pakistan have just expelled 1.7m Afghans, most Sunni muslims with similar social mores to Pakistanis, because they are "prone to criminality and terrorism." No hand wringing, no agonizing over "Pakistani nationalism." They couldn't assimilate despite Pakistan's best efforts so they were sent packing.

Nobody in Pakistan emphasizes only a tiny proportion of Afghans misbehave. Some of them do and the Pakistanis refuse to expend resources filtering through their population to find the bad ones. They had their chance and the safety of the natives trumps everything.

I get the need to be neutral, to be decent. But a big drive for people seeking out the data and the hard facts is this constant framing of homogeneity as being unusual or distasteful despite the fact 90 percent of the world's population views it as normal.

I think these polls misunderstand most so-called white nationalists don't think of themselves as white nationalists at all, and nor do they think of themselves as white supremacists who need to get armed in preparation of an insurrection. They just see what their own locale now looks like and politely investigate. This investigatory impulse is, if anything, the polar opposite of the violent xenophobe caricature that is always mentioned. They seek to understand, often in an attempt to improve conditions for everyone.

Believing the blank slate mantra and then observing something quite different is hard to make sense of. In primitive societies we would see something like the violent xenophobe reaction Western nations worry about. In European societies we see the opposite, with people very reluctantly concluding this may be going wrong. Lets find out, lets test, lets look around and see where culture mixing has actually worked and try that. Then we discover it doesn't seem to work anywhere. Even worse we find out almost no one thinks it makes sense. China is for the Chinese and India is for the Indians.

We all know the use of white nationalism is a euphemism for white supremacist or violent thugs who hate people that look different. The need to remind us of this potential for violence retards the genuine discussions we desperately need to try to make this all work or to abandon it completely.

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Realist's avatar

"Notwithstanding these low numbers, there have been a number of deadly terrorist attacks by individuals who could reasonably be described as white nationalists. So concern over white nationalism is understandable, even if the threat is exaggerated."

Yes, there have been a few attacks against blacks by whites, but the vast majority of racial attacks are blacks against whites and Asians.

"Yes, I consider it odd that white nationalists find living among non-white people so intolerable that they’d rather go off and live by themselves."

Blacks self-segregate. Perhaps you should spend some time on the south side of Chicago. Black neighborhoods are the most crime-ridden areas in the country. When it comes to crime, blacks reign supreme.

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