“ethnonationalism is absolutely a non-starter, and, in fact, would be terribly immoral to promote because it might encourage hostility toward the many different minority ethnic groups in the country”
Why is hostility “terribly immoral”? You get so close to being able to think outside the trite liberal box, and then swerve back into its comfort at the last moment. There is nothing “immoral” about hostility. Hostility is a natural and healthy state of being when under provocation.
More fundamentally, “cultural nationalism” is a meaningless term because culture is downstream from reality, primarily biology. Swedes do not have Swedish culture by coincidence. They have Swedish culture because their material biology spontaneously generates it. Somalis do not have Somali culture by coincidence. They have Somali culture because their material biology spontaneously generates it. Wherever Swedes go, they will tend to produce a Swedish-type culture in proportion to their numbers. Wherever Somalis go, they will tend to produce a Somali-type culture in proportion to their numbers.
So your polite liberal “cultural nationalism” must either be ethno-nationalism or fail. You cannot import twenty million Somalis into Sweden and have Swedish culture remain Swedish even if every one of them signs a pledge that they support Swedish culture. Even if you kidnapped twenty million Somali children at birth and had them all raised by Swedish parents with no knowledge of their ancestral culture, they would still produce a Somali-type culture, not a Swedish one, because that is what they are. Mowgli could not be a wolf, despite being raised as one, no matter how much he wanted to be. Non-ethnic cultural nationalism will meet—is meeting—the same fate.
I am in agreement with you. I'm also in agreement with Bo that true ethno-nationalism is an impossibility now (and immoral simply because WE accepted those diverse ethnic groups as citizens under the presumption that they are equals). That died with low crime rates and Hart-Celler.
I suppose the solution to cultural change Bo is suggesting is limited diversity with the goal of assimilation to the dominant or "native" ethnic groups cultural identity ? Isn't that effectively ethno-nationalism lite? Didn't we have that in America? Why hasn't it worked? What's the ideal proportion of ethnicities? How do you force people to assimilate ? Isn't that immoral? Why do some cultures assimilate better than others? By the way, is the ethno state of Japan immoral?
I'm reminded of the claim that immigrants (the children of African American slaves, Hispanics), built America and yet, strangely, built nothing like it in their home country.
Thanks for the reply. Your comment about immigrants supposedly building the West when they couldn't build their own countries is very true!
I must point out that “we” the people didn't accept diverse ethnic groups. As the UK's Patriotic Alternative say: We were never asked. At the time it started happening, polling consistently showed extremely strong public opposition to mass immigration and to the civil rights movement. This was done to us. We can't be accused of immorality for rejecting an occupation army that was imposed upon us.
As I said above, assimilation cannot work because the different sub-species of human are fundamentally different to each other at a biological level. One can get away with it between closely related groups within the same sub-species, but outright different sub-species are socially incompatible. No amount of assimilation can make a Somali a Swede.
So what's immoral is insisting that we must persist in maintaining this anti-social, anti-reality situation indefinitely just because some individuals will be inconvenienced by being asked to return to their parents' countries. In a way it doesn't really matter whether one thinks that repatriation is immoral or not: the status quo cannot continue, and either we will politely require them to leave or they will brutalise and eventually exterminate us like they have done in every other country where they have gained the upper hand—see Haiti, see Zimbabwe, see South Africa, etc. It is not immoral to refrain from committing suicide, to refrain from stopping someone murdering you.
As for the feasibility, large shifts in non-linear dynamical systems always seem impossible right up until the moment when they happen. There are many cases, even in recent history, of indigenous peoples reasserting themselves over invading swarms. Kazakhstan, for example: in 1897 ethnic Kazakhs were 83% of Kazkhstan's population; in the 1930s they became a minority behind Russian migrants; by 1959 were just 30% of the population; but by 2021 they had successfully recovered their position to over 70% of the population and rising. I want that for us! I want it and it can happen if enough of us decide we want it and are willing to demand it.
I completely agree with this, cultural nationalism I feel like is the way to go forward, especially in countries that are already pretty diverse like the US, as a Finnish person I would like to maintain the ethnically homogeneous nature of my country. But its probably unlikely to happen in today's market.
I especially liked that last part about the "passing of the torch" action and it would be important that people woke up, and actually realized how important it is to have high level of respect towards those cultural cornerstones that have gone through multiple generations of "natural honing" and how the likely hood is very high that it is in fact those ones that need to be treated with respect and undermining them might lead to disastrous results for the nation at large, And the more explicit attributes of how the society functions that are largely derived from the baseline are probably bit more malleable and context specific, depending on the economic state of the nation, technological advancements etc.
This type of thinking also brings attention to the fact that they have gone through multiple generations, which makes it much more likely that they actually have some resemblance of wisdom ingrained in them, as I'm rather skeptical of the idea that in one singular generation, one particular egghead genius is able to come up with an system that is superior to this "natural event" that has already gone through the path of trial and error through centuries.
Deracinating our ancestors cultural and moral crafts that have been honed through hundreds or maybe even thousands of years has always been an absolutely appalling idea to me, and it would potentially be dangerous for our future generations, that the only thing we pass on to them is deracinated national identity. One the worst mistakes that we could do.
“ethnonationalism is absolutely a non-starter, and, in fact, would be terribly immoral to promote because it might encourage hostility toward the many different minority ethnic groups in the country”
Why is hostility “terribly immoral”? You get so close to being able to think outside the trite liberal box, and then swerve back into its comfort at the last moment. There is nothing “immoral” about hostility. Hostility is a natural and healthy state of being when under provocation.
More fundamentally, “cultural nationalism” is a meaningless term because culture is downstream from reality, primarily biology. Swedes do not have Swedish culture by coincidence. They have Swedish culture because their material biology spontaneously generates it. Somalis do not have Somali culture by coincidence. They have Somali culture because their material biology spontaneously generates it. Wherever Swedes go, they will tend to produce a Swedish-type culture in proportion to their numbers. Wherever Somalis go, they will tend to produce a Somali-type culture in proportion to their numbers.
So your polite liberal “cultural nationalism” must either be ethno-nationalism or fail. You cannot import twenty million Somalis into Sweden and have Swedish culture remain Swedish even if every one of them signs a pledge that they support Swedish culture. Even if you kidnapped twenty million Somali children at birth and had them all raised by Swedish parents with no knowledge of their ancestral culture, they would still produce a Somali-type culture, not a Swedish one, because that is what they are. Mowgli could not be a wolf, despite being raised as one, no matter how much he wanted to be. Non-ethnic cultural nationalism will meet—is meeting—the same fate.
I am in agreement with you. I'm also in agreement with Bo that true ethno-nationalism is an impossibility now (and immoral simply because WE accepted those diverse ethnic groups as citizens under the presumption that they are equals). That died with low crime rates and Hart-Celler.
I suppose the solution to cultural change Bo is suggesting is limited diversity with the goal of assimilation to the dominant or "native" ethnic groups cultural identity ? Isn't that effectively ethno-nationalism lite? Didn't we have that in America? Why hasn't it worked? What's the ideal proportion of ethnicities? How do you force people to assimilate ? Isn't that immoral? Why do some cultures assimilate better than others? By the way, is the ethno state of Japan immoral?
I'm reminded of the claim that immigrants (the children of African American slaves, Hispanics), built America and yet, strangely, built nothing like it in their home country.
Thanks for the reply. Your comment about immigrants supposedly building the West when they couldn't build their own countries is very true!
I must point out that “we” the people didn't accept diverse ethnic groups. As the UK's Patriotic Alternative say: We were never asked. At the time it started happening, polling consistently showed extremely strong public opposition to mass immigration and to the civil rights movement. This was done to us. We can't be accused of immorality for rejecting an occupation army that was imposed upon us.
As I said above, assimilation cannot work because the different sub-species of human are fundamentally different to each other at a biological level. One can get away with it between closely related groups within the same sub-species, but outright different sub-species are socially incompatible. No amount of assimilation can make a Somali a Swede.
So what's immoral is insisting that we must persist in maintaining this anti-social, anti-reality situation indefinitely just because some individuals will be inconvenienced by being asked to return to their parents' countries. In a way it doesn't really matter whether one thinks that repatriation is immoral or not: the status quo cannot continue, and either we will politely require them to leave or they will brutalise and eventually exterminate us like they have done in every other country where they have gained the upper hand—see Haiti, see Zimbabwe, see South Africa, etc. It is not immoral to refrain from committing suicide, to refrain from stopping someone murdering you.
As for the feasibility, large shifts in non-linear dynamical systems always seem impossible right up until the moment when they happen. There are many cases, even in recent history, of indigenous peoples reasserting themselves over invading swarms. Kazakhstan, for example: in 1897 ethnic Kazakhs were 83% of Kazkhstan's population; in the 1930s they became a minority behind Russian migrants; by 1959 were just 30% of the population; but by 2021 they had successfully recovered their position to over 70% of the population and rising. I want that for us! I want it and it can happen if enough of us decide we want it and are willing to demand it.
I completely agree with this, cultural nationalism I feel like is the way to go forward, especially in countries that are already pretty diverse like the US, as a Finnish person I would like to maintain the ethnically homogeneous nature of my country. But its probably unlikely to happen in today's market.
I especially liked that last part about the "passing of the torch" action and it would be important that people woke up, and actually realized how important it is to have high level of respect towards those cultural cornerstones that have gone through multiple generations of "natural honing" and how the likely hood is very high that it is in fact those ones that need to be treated with respect and undermining them might lead to disastrous results for the nation at large, And the more explicit attributes of how the society functions that are largely derived from the baseline are probably bit more malleable and context specific, depending on the economic state of the nation, technological advancements etc.
This type of thinking also brings attention to the fact that they have gone through multiple generations, which makes it much more likely that they actually have some resemblance of wisdom ingrained in them, as I'm rather skeptical of the idea that in one singular generation, one particular egghead genius is able to come up with an system that is superior to this "natural event" that has already gone through the path of trial and error through centuries.
Deracinating our ancestors cultural and moral crafts that have been honed through hundreds or maybe even thousands of years has always been an absolutely appalling idea to me, and it would potentially be dangerous for our future generations, that the only thing we pass on to them is deracinated national identity. One the worst mistakes that we could do.