Australian law refused to recognize the existence of original aboriginal ownership of Australia until a High Court decision in the early 1990s overturned the concept of “terra nullus”. “Terra nullus” held that aborigines didn’t count as human, and therefore the entire continent was empty when the British arrived.

And now Derbyshire wants to introduce terra nullus into the American debate?

Time to put your sheet and hood on and stand up for the “real” America?

Pity few of the Racist Right’s supporters can afford to buy its leader’s boilerplate books or “inspirational” speeches.

Didn’t that asshat immigrate here from Britain? Am I missing something here?

So he really is saying that you aren’t an immigrant if you are white.

The British have a name for this kind of douchebaggery: Wanker.

Wankershire?

In your opinion is it acceptable to discriminate against an ethnic group if most members of said group follow an ideology you regard as evil, and cannot be convinced by any means to drop support for this ideology?

“essentially empty land”
With these three words, John Derbyshire glosses over what remains the largest campaign of intentional genocide in… well, I don’t know enough about the history of genocide to say the biggest or etc, but a genocidal campaign on par with the Nazis’, just spread out over a century or so to make it more palatable. Millions of people, dozens if not hundreds of cultures, erased.
….
John Derbyshire should be deported.

In your opinion is it acceptable to discriminate against an ethnic group if most members of said group follow an ideology you regard as evil, and cannot be convinced by any means to drop support for this ideology?

Why, what have the Christians done now?

In your opinion is it acceptable to discriminate against an ethnic group if most members of said group follow an ideology you regard as evil, and cannot be convinced by any means to drop support for this ideology?

and also, what are you going to do about these damn unicorns?

Interesting HTML. One question. You say people should stop trying to make every other counrty like the USA, but what is worse is people who refuse to the USA as it is.

As it is. I think you mean that they should see the US as a multicultural, multiethnic quilt right? Instead of a tower that is under siege by Mexicans or whoever. That is what you are getting at right?

Mr. Derbyshire. I would REALLY like to introduce you to my close friend, historical hero and role model, Henry Berry Lowrie

I’m sure he’ll find ways to entertain you…

mikey

Dear me. The Derb appears to think that Eddie Izzard’s ‘Do you have a flag?’ is reasonable historical analysis, as opposed to a piss-take.

That unifying culture was essentially abolished in the 60s and 70s, although it took time for the abolition to trickle down[.]

That’s a polite (i.e. sneaky) way to say ‘Enoch was right’. Well, fuck that shit. Also, if Iain Murray is so bothered about the supposed Mooslimification of the UK, he should go back home and find someone willing to have their children.

O’Sullivan is refreshing, in this regard: like so many Liverpudlians, he presumably traces his roots back across the Irish Sea, and recognises the melting pot of a city that sent so many immigrants — voluntary and involuntary — to North America.

Every people — by which I mean, ethnic bloc — deserves its own country. Though ethnic nationalism is responsible for some of the nastiest regimes in human history, I think the traditional liberal view that all ethnic nationalism is inherently sinful is wrong.

But even ‘good’ nationalism has bad consequences. The twentieth century in Europe began with a catastrophe than not only killed millions, but also destroyed two multi-ethnic, multi-language, multi-language empires, and began a process that ethnically cleansed cities and regions.

And that’s what makes things tricky: I think of the German-speaking populations in Riga, Prague and Danzig, or of Kant’s Königsberg, and how it would be easy to ignore that past if you didn’t know it. The rise of the nation-state means that patchwork-quilt countries can be transformed into down-comforter countries very quickly, and not pleasantly.

The real irony, though, is to hear bullshit about a ‘unitary culture’ from people who also stick the Confederate Battle Flag on their pickups or talk of ‘Southern heritage’. You can’t square that fucking circle.

I think you mean that they should see the US as a multicultural, multiethnic quilt right? Instead of a tower that is under siege by Mexicans or whoever. That is what you are getting at right?

Yes.

Derbyshire’s “tenth generation american” commenter was interesting. I think he is saying is that his family has lost its connection with its ethnic heritage: no more old country dishes, or artifacts, or funny names left in the family. I can kind of relate to this. On my mom’s side we retained our Irish Catholicness (that probably had more to do with the Catholic part) but on my dad’s side there was no ethnicity to speak of. That’s probably pretty common in the American diaspora, as people traveled across the country and lost touch with relatives and communities that shared their heritage.

What’s weird, though, is to go from the failure to hold on to one’s real ethnic identity to a presumption that its okay to appropriate a whole new “american” one. And, of course, if it is okay, there’s no reason why us white folk are they only ones who should get to do this.

That’s a polite (i.e. sneaky) way to say ‘Enoch was right’. Well, fuck that shit. Also, if Iain Murray is so bothered about the supposed Mooslimification of the UK, he should go back home and find someone willing to have their children.

Hehe. Agreed on Murray, and you’re right that that’s what he means about Enoch Powell, but, argh.

I’m tempted to excuse, with heavy qualifications, some people who have personally racist beliefs yet advocate or enact policies that do the exact opposite. Enoch Powell of course delivered the ‘Rivers of Blood” speech. But he was also simply a careless (as opposed to deliberate) public speaker in general, and as I understand it, consciously helped construct the British Civil Service so that minorities could be included in it. If I’m right about that last part, it’s very mitigating. Sort of along the lines of the self-identified Tory, H.L. Mencken, who was in private life an anti-semite, but in public, and when all wingnuts and almost all Liberals (even FDR) did and said little or nothing for the Jews fleeing Nazified Europe, advocated that America drop its immigration barriers and let all of them come here.

The real irony, though, is to hear bullshit about a ‘unitary culture’ from people who also stick the Confederate Battle Flag on their pickups or talk of ‘Southern heritage’. You can’t square that fucking circle.

This is absolutely right and is a point for Atrios’s position that *everyone* has Identity Politics, that being white and Christian is also an Identity Politics.

If John Derbyshire is of English origin then I hate to upset him***. He is more Basque than Celt, Roman, Phoenician, Anglo-Saxon, Viking or Norman. This really kills me, but all us true Brits are predominantly bloody wops! It almost makes me feel like Dennis Hopper’s character in True Romance.

*** – NOT REALLY

Muhammed (or a variant thereof) is the most popular first name in the world, not just in the UK.

And the most popular last name is Chang. And yet, you never meet anyone named Muhammed Chang.

I think it’s fair to distinguish Powell himself from the ‘Enoch Was Right’ crowd, who generally have limited fluency in English, let alone Greek, Latin and Hebrew.

I think he is saying is that his family has lost its connection with its ethnic heritage: no more old country dishes, or artifacts, or funny names left in the family. I can kind of relate to this. On my mom’s side we retained our Irish Catholicness (that probably had more to do with the Catholic part) but on my dad’s side there was no ethnicity to speak of.

Absolutely. I think there’s a degree of ressentiment among those who saw grandparents and parents change their names, hide their accents, ‘become American’ — and now subconsciously (or consciously) resent the idea that assimilation can mean augmenting what you bring to your new home, rather than suppressing it. That’s the pathology of Tom Tancredo, as I see it. The ‘leave it all behind’ attitude he propounds is take-my-ball-home cultural politics. It’s an astonishingly sterile, desiccated sense of culture, the equivalent of airport architecture. An America of Tancredos would be nasty in many ways, but it would also be really fucking dull.

But I also think there’s an element of nostalgic jealousy. The third-genners, especially Irish and Italian, whose families bought into the dream of the suburban house, the two-car garage and the professional career look back at the tighter communities of their grandparents generation, and see that social stratum occupied by Hispanic immigrants. It’s ‘Bowling Alone’ translated into racial politics.

Just to add on that last point. Most people know the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch from Monty Python, but I don’t think as many recall the way it opens:

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You’re right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Who’d have thought thirty year ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea…

The whole one-downmanship in their nostalgic memories is built upon the fact that they’re now middle-class risotto-eating wine snobs. And there’s a connection to the blue-collar schtick of Buchanan, O’Reilly, et al, which dovetails with their knee-jerkery towards the new class of ‘different’ immigrants.

[…] via SadlyNo: Ethnic Nationalism […]

This post was purdee.

yet their ancestors … were the worst kind of immigrants: colonists.

They may like to think of themselves as pure blue bloods, but statistically speaking it’s remarkably unlikely that any of these nativists have no ancestors that came to this country after 1776 (or 1787 or any of the reasonable founding dates).

Yeah, that quote from Derb’s 10th-generation-American reader is absolute fucking nonsense. He clearly doesn’t live anywhere near Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, or any other major American midwestern city where you can find all kinds of ethnic enclaves. Does he really not know about the Swedes and Norwegians in Minnesota and Wisconsin? Or the Poles in Chicago? Or the Germans in St. Louis? Hell, if I walk out my door in Cleveland and drive about 10 minutes in any direction I can find all sorts of Serbian, Croatian, Polish, Czech, Slovak halls and community centers and other such gathering places. Christ, one of Cleveland’s near East Side neighborhoods is called Slavic Village!

Where do they find these people? I mean, really?

There should be a limit to the amount of wingnuttarrhea the Sadlyno fellows expose us to every day. I come here prepared for the worst, but it’s always just a smidgen more hideous than the day before.

Do you not realize the impact these IDIOTS have on our well being? My eyes are shot for the second time today from blood vessels exploding.

There should be a vaccination – like the tetanus shot – or a hotzone suit and an anti-nausea pill. SOMETHING, ANYTHING to mitigate the harm.

In one sense Mr. Derbyshire is correct. The Americas were relatively “empty” when so many people immigrated here because disease killed about 100 million of them as Europeans began to arrive in large numbers.

I just saw the May issue of National Geographic at the dentist’s office this afternoon and it described how malaria became epidemic near Jamestown when Englishmen from Southeast England (a part of England that was swampy and prone to malaria at the time) began to arrive. He doesn’t even begin to understand what smallpox did to the native New Englanders and how it enabled Europeans to dominate native cultures.

Facts and historical truth have no meaning to the likes of the Derbyshires of the world. Anything can be true if it fits their political agenda.

Not all countries are or should be multicultural societies. Not all ethnic nationalism is bad: great strides toward world peace could be taken if oppressed indigenous peoples were given their own countries with full sovereignty. But some countries and societies are multiculturalist and multiethnic, though, and while these patchwork-quilt countries were first sewn together with bloody thread, that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been happy consequences.

I’m gonna have to disagree with you on this point for a couple reasons.

I like to call these reasons, “the Middle East” & “the Soviet bloc states”.Yes, it seems like a reasonable idea to round up those oppressed minority groups and stick them in a neat little border they can call their land, except we’ve got such an awful fucking track record of ‘giving’ away land for these countries to exist in that we either:

End up with people who were disenfranchised already, being shunted onto piece-of-shit lands and told to be happy they have a border, or they’re boxed in with one or more of their chief tribal foes, and end up kicking the shit out of each other like Siamese fighting fish, particularly if one of the tribes had land rights first, and then had a new oppressed minority pushed in with them.

We can act like this bloodshed is the inevitable price of international politics, but after so many years, is the best fucking idea we can come up “let’s make up new countries to fight with!”? Can’t we just quit it with parceling out land and drawing lines in the dirt to define where our country starts and another one begins?

Nationalism, as a rule, leads to bloodshed, oppression, violence and countless other atrocities of human nature. And in return it gives us… flags.

Aren’t we old enough as a species to just look at that and go, “yeah, I’m not gonna go along with that anymore?”

html

i think you get ian murray’s point wrong. he’s not saying that “Fuckin furriners” ruined everything, i think he’s talking about identity politics, which is a high-falutin way to say “dirty fucking hippies” were the problem. they allowed that the “other” might have something of value, those hippies, though the structure of change in the country (at least this one, and to a much lesser extent the UK) forced people to say: “ok, you’ve got a slavic hall? well we have a black power annex (or a gay/lesbian center, etc.).

it was a short trip from there to political correctness, and i’m not talking about bullshit usurped right-wing style, i mean the kind that anyone who went to liberal arts school in the 80s knows about. identity politics, the atomization of need and so on were necessary but not necessarily easy-to-live with changes in the essential structure of our country. yes, the old 50s way sucked if you were anyone other than male white christian, but for the average person it seemed comprehensible. what was unleashed by the various movements of the 60s and 70s to which i assume mr. murray is alluding has finally started to come good–you can now, in many parts of the country, be gay and both have rights and no one particularly giving a shit.

and that is the true measure of a melting pot, n’est-ce pas?

Not all countries are or should be multicultural societies. Not all ethnic nationalism is bad: great strides toward world peace could be taken if oppressed indigenous peoples were given their own countries with full sovereignty. But some countries and societies are multiculturalist and multiethnic, though, and while these patchwork-quilt countries were first sewn together with bloody thread, that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been happy consequences.

Let me join Patkin in dissenting from this view.

The Romantic, late-18th-early-19th-century notion of the nation-state, in which every ethnic group finds political expression for its peculiar genius in the form of its own state, always had to face the cold, hard fact that ethnic groups tend to live cheek-by-jowl next to each other. A world carved into units the size of modern nation states almost invariably was a world of countries whose populations were, in fact, multicultural, even if they were not “nations of immigrants.” France included celtic-speaking Bretons and a variety of Occitan speakers in the South. Imperial German contained numerous Slavs (Poles and Sorbs, among others) and Balts (Curonians). The UK had its Celtic fringe (and Scots-speaking folk in Scotland). Spain had Basques and Catalonians. Jews and Sinti/Roma were found all over the place. And that’s not even touching the most ethnically mixed-up parts of Europe, which largely lay in Russia and the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.

In short, each of the great monoethnic nation states was the result of a process of what we’d today call ethnic cleansing. Some populations were forced out; others forcably assimilated. But the idea that nation-sized geographical areas are naturally settled by single ethnic groups is simply false. And our continued commitment to defining sovereignty ethnically and at the level of the nation state, rather than than in terms individual people and smaller, living communities that are often multiethnic, promises to continue the string of tragedies that has flowed from the idea of the nation-state and the Wilsonian policies its inspired in this country.

Great Britain: from the moment it conquered the Celtic people North and West, but especially when it colonized Ireland (who were long regarded by the English as wogs), and thereafter when it became an Empire upon which the sun never set and the blood never dried, it forfeited all claims to a single ethnic or cultural identity.

Well said, HTML! I wanted to admire this particular sentence again.

I couldn’t agree more that every People (i.e., a coalition whose members define themselves foremost as members of said ‘people’, be the grouping national, cultural, religion or language-based) deserves its own patch of homeland. Of course, nobody’s about to let me or you start redrawing the world’s borders, so it’s a pure thought experiment. And just as there are no “pure” races left on this busy little globe, there are no “pure” Peoples — no culture untainted by the thoughts, foods, languages or sexual partners of its neighbors. But it could be argued from recent history that when the People of an oppressed minority gain control over their own little patches of dirt, it’s been a net benefit to all of us. Look at Ireland; since the natives finally wrestled most of their island away from the British Empire, it’s gone from a global backwater, a dumping ground for the least capable of its oppressors, a place best known for the skills and strengths of its exiles, to the vibrant “Celtic Tiger” of today. Look at Singapore — an island nation that basically declared itself the multicultural “homeland” for a core group of ferociously business-oriented Chinese/Malaysian/Indian refugees who mostly wanted to invent their own twentieth-century version of New York City, without crippling ties to the gigantism and corruption of its founders’ “native” countries.

And then there’s that plucky little neo-nation known as Israel, which managed to simultaneously establish a vibrant working democracy in a region where that was supposed to be impossible, and take the first steps towards its very own version of “ethnic cleansing”. So I guess the musical question is, How do “we” give historically disenfranchised peoples their own Place while preventing further, future damage to even smaller clusters of non-compliant peoples within the new borders?

I think the answer may be double-sided — we need more nation-states, but at the same time we need more regional confederations, like the European Union (or the original plan for the United States). For the last few hundred years, all political-economic history has indicated that small states had to keep growing larger, or else they would be engulfed — willingly or not — by their still-growing neighbors. The endpoint of this particular global experiment would be the British Empire, or the USSR, both of which were touted as end-of-history successes in the short term, both of which produced major improvements in select areas for a tiny percentage of their empire-runners, and both of which collapsed (are collapsing) in circumstances of bloodshed and terror which threaten not only their former colonies but their global neighbors (if Pakistan manages to set off a nuclear conflagration, Britannia will get some part of the credit). Gigantism — empire — has probably reached the nonfunctional end of its useful philosophical career. Even China, which has succeeded best & longest at the “Father of All Nations” (shell) game, seems to have gone past the point of diminishing returns; new technologies are making it ever-more-difficult for the small cadre of well-connected “princelings” to keep the peasant classes dumb, illiterate, and trapped in starvation-level tenantry (or even slave-labor factory jobs).

Don’t know if you’ve ever read Joel Garreau’s “The Nine Nations of North America”, but there’s an argument to be made that even The Most Powerful & Greatest Nation Ever in All the World & Human History — that would be us, the USA — is gradually shifting into a looser confederation of individual regions. The outline maps are unlikely to change in the short term, but it’s possible that California and Texas and Michigan and Massachusetts are not and cannot be “exactly equal” participants within a strong republic.

If every ethnic group had its own country, other countries wouldn’t have to be so monolithically ethnic because no one would feel deprived.

Yes, it’s true what you say, IB, but it’s also a myth that those various ethnicities lived together in harmony — they did not — nor did they refrain from nationalist movements, often violent. After the final partition of Poland, for instance, the nationalist impulse among Poles who then inevitably lived as minorites in other countries was strong. After Wilson gave the Poles back a country of their own, it wasn’t a wrong thing, even if Pilsudski was a dictator. The Poles weren’t wrong to want their own country; the Germans and Russians were wrong to fight to keep their Imperial acquisitions.

Am I a closet libertarian? I dunno, bit I admit it bothers me that so many liberals seem to love Unions and loathe separatist movements, secessions, etc. I know it comes from loathing the Confederacy, but the Rebels in the American Civil War were moral exceptions to the rule — usually, it’s the group which has been deprived and is historically oppressed that desires secession and ought to get it. Most secession movements don’t come from a desire to preserve slavery.

Spain would be much better off if the Basques were allowed to secede, and more importantly, so would the Basques.

Look at what it takes to preserve multiethnic states. A Tito here and a Saddam there — and the bloodletting unleashed when these tyrants fall is not new blood but a payment of sorts on the debt an artificial state’s existence accrues. States that are borne into or were epochs ago made multiethnic ought to stay that way. But for the rest, no.

Look at the former Czechoslovakia. Why should the Czechs and Slovaks have been forced to stay in a union when neither wanted to share a state? The democratic principle of self-determination demanded that they be allowed to separate because obviously Slovaks wanted their own country and the Czechs, theirs. I just reject this tendency to universalize America, even the good liberal parts of it. People should be allowed to determine their own fate, and many people throughout the world are stateless but want a state of their own.

I think ethnic minorities are less restless when they have an ethnic homeland option should things go afoul in their ‘new’ country. Thus multiethnic societies become more harmonious and less sectarian.

Kurds ought to have their own country. Ditto for Basques and Palistinians, Chechnyans, etc.

Do you not realize the impact these IDIOTS have on our well being? My eyes are shot for the second time today from blood vessels exploding.

There should be a vaccination – like the tetanus shot – or a hotzone suit and an anti-nausea pill. SOMETHING, ANYTHING to mitigate the harm.

Er, basically, I think Sadlyno.com aims to be the vaccination. I mean, right? This has always been my take on it, anyhow. They serve up the wingnuts, usually giving us a ‘shorter than’ of what they said, so that we can expose ourselves in small, relatively harmless doses. If we feel strong, we can click the link for a harsher exposure. When we feel we have had enough, we stop reading.

Also, the trolls give a different kind of vaccination- to a ‘live’ source, but one which is not as strong as the original strain.

Maybe if you are feeling overwhelmed, check out for a bit, rest, and come back.

Places with Spanish names: Los Angeles, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, San Jose, San Francisco, Montana, Amarillo, Las Vegas, San Luis Obispo, etc.

Places with French names: Illinois, Des Moines, Detroit, Vermont, Baton Rouge, Boise, Terre Haute, Dubuque, Pierre, etc.

If we go all-Anglo all-the-time, we’re gonna have a lot of name-changes and extra paperwork on our hands. Not a good harbinger for smaller government.

Nationalism founders on two main points: there isn’t enough land in the universe to support the ever-increasingly smaller factionalisms that nationalism gives rise to (national identities begin to blur with state, regional, and religious identities after a period of time, and thus provide finer and finer points of distinction between groups – is one an Albanian Serb or a Croatian Serb? An Orthodox Serb or a Muslim Serb?). Frankly, I’ve often thought that, given their druthers, the human species would factionalize down to “The Righte Sovereyne Natione of Fifthe Streete and Eightiethe Auenue”, who would then declare total genocidal warfare on “The Moste Holye Independente Duchye of Sixthe Streete and Eightiethe Auenue”.

Second problem is that all the different nationalities don’t just want “their own state” – they want their own state on a specific piece of land. Oftentimes, different nationalities feel this way about the same piece of land. In other words, nationalists hate physics.

I don’t often have a full-on Socialist geek-out on y’all, but this is a case where I think some of the writings of Marx and Lenin can actually be of some use – a good intro here (minus the stuff on Aboriginal rights at the end, which I am in no way qualified to voice an opinion on – it may be good, it may not, I just don’t know) and primary texts here and here.

In the end, I think I come to disagree with Lenin’s conclusions on this issue, despite thinking that his basic thoughts on the structure and purpose of nations is pretty much spot on. The history of leftist groups supporting nationalist movements never really seemed to work out the way he thought it would. Regardless, the ideas are still important to grapple with, even if the conclusions one comes to are different.

How do “we� give historically disenfranchised peoples their own Place while preventing further, future damage to even smaller clusters of non-compliant peoples within the new borders?

That’s the 64,000$ question, isn’t it?

I think my answer is, if they aren’t already there, lots of them in a majority, then they come here.

Since this will never happen, let me just say what I’d have prefered. Israel was a mistake to put *there*. But it wasn’t a mistake to give Jews a homeland. I would have prefered we gave them one here — no, not so that they could assimilate if they didn’t want to. I mean, *give* them a state and, if they wanted it, allow it to ‘go’ sovereign. Of course I think we should also pay to give one or several states to the Native Americans. And I hope the Hawaiians secede. All this would have had another good consequence — reduced the federal government and therefore, American imperialism. Oh, all the folks in the former American states would have no doubt joined in a mutual defense pact — so everyone would have still been safe from legitimate threats, but I bet there would’ve have been a lot less meddling in other nation’s affairs, too. (Also, before someone jumps on my ass for being for states’s rights — I’m not. The Civil War killed federalism stone dead. But at one time, way way before then, there was a document called the Articles of Confederation, and it wasn’t all bad. It’s also a mistake to assume that the smaller the government, the more necessarily conservative it is. Actually, Montesquieu argued that it was only a small state that could remain a Republic, with anything big destined for Empire. How right, in retrospect, he was.)

But all that is never gonna happen. So addressing what has happened: there’s a concept in ethics called ‘just titles’ which was explained to me the following way: if enough time goes by and generations pass, even something gained by unjust means becomes justly held. IOW, this is against revanchism of the sort that holds that, because Hebrews occupied parts of Palestine in Biblical times, Jews have the best claim to that land. But since Israel is there now and has been there over half a century, it cannot and should not be undone. And Jews need a state, anyway. So there it is. But it absolutely must give the Palistinians a state back of their own — and not a few acres splotched here and there of marginal value, I mean a serious concession in the form of contiguous worthy real estate. This actually would cost little, because the Palistinians are *already there*; meanwhile, what Jews are in the occupied territories are colonists and for those fascists — well, tough shit. Go home. They haven’t been there long enough for just titles to even begin to apply.

Likewise, the Chechnyans, Basques, Kurds etc are already in what should be their homelands. Just give them soveignty and don’t complain when they write their ethnicity somewhere int heir new national charter — it may be ‘for us, by us’ but in practice, I think that once they have their own country, there’ll eventually be a relatively peaceful and voluntary ethnic exchange.

Worst case scenario — a brief and bloody conflict and then a lasting peace. Versus an endless sectarian conflict with no resolution possible. Sometimes, people simply do not want to live together and when both agree on this in principle (if inevitably haggling over the size of the slices of pie), who are we to say no?

I’d first argue the point of “universalize America”. Wanting to see a world which is without borders means just that. America would no more exist than any other country. They’d be merely land on which people could reside and make a living for themselves.

Secondly, who do we mean by people who are stateless? I, speaking only as an individual, feel stateless. I happen to live on a piece of dirt claimed by the United States, but must I feel a deep upwelling in national vigor and pride for this happenstance? What do we do for those people who are stateless of their own will, men and women of the world at large?

I think people are just as restless when they have an ethnic homeland than if they do not, it’s just they’re now kicking their own ethnic brothers and sisters in the balls when they feel so. Is that progress? Is it any less a conflict between humanity just because people have the same skin, the same faith, the same flag to salute? Or is just not our problem anymore if Basque kills Basque, Kurd kills Kurd, Chechnyan kills Chechnyan?

My argument is not to keep two opposing forces in a union neither can hold together nor wants to, but to eliminate the union and the opposing forces. No more Czechoslovakia, but no Czech Republic, no Slovakia. Merely people on land. If there must be governing bodies, why can’t we attempt something truly global instead of the five major countries on the U.N. Security Council bullying everyone else around with their huge swinging thermonuclear cods?

It’s perhaps just as idealist as “if we can just cut up more territory, everyone will be happy”, but goddamn it, can’t we at least try it for once, instead of acting like one more nation will solve the fucking issue?

Yes, it’s true what you say, IB, but it’s also a myth that those various ethnicities lived together in harmony — they did not — nor did they refrain from nationalist movements, often violent.
HTML, you are missing Incontinentia Buttocks’ point — that the whole sick concept of a Nation-State, and the nationalist movements that result from that concept, is a “Romantic, late-18th-early-19th-century notion”. Karl Popper blames it on Napolean, IIRC. Prior to that, nationality (i.e. ethnic / cultural membership) had little to do with administrative divisions. No-one expected them to coincide.

Look at the former Czechoslovakia. Why should the Czechs and Slovaks have been forced to stay in a union when neither wanted to share a state?

Well, it was meant as a buffer state to constrain Germany, but that also meant including the Sudeten Germans, and we all know how that turned out. And the sell-out of Czechosolvakia in 1938 was justified by the good liberal principle of self-determination.

Likewise, the Chechnyans, Basques, Kurds etc are already in what should be their homelands.

And why are most Kurdish territories ethically homogeneous? Because the Armenians got massacred and evicted. Like I said, it’s possible to turn a multi-ethnic, multi-national state into a homogenous one in a very quick, brutal way, under the auspices of the good liberal principle of self-determination.

It’s a scary thought that the nation-state has led to far bloodier wars than the dynastic state, because people fight for their national identity, not the aristocrat in charge. But there you go.

It’s perhaps just as idealist as “if we can just cut up more territory, everyone will be happy�, but goddamn it, can’t we at least try it for once, instead of acting like one more nation will solve the fucking issue?

Humans organize; we’re a communal species, not a solitary one. If we go to your “merely people on land” scenario, what’s to keep all the other nation-states from taking over the people-on-land? A “truly global” government? Then what’s to keep that world government in check? Answer: organized groups of individuals, probably along the same old ethnic-political lines we have now, with a few extra layers of religion and politics to spice up the mix. Call me an old cynic, but I don’t think we’re plastic enough to give up all our old grievances; the best we can plausibly hope for is to even the playing field (resource distribution) sufficienty that more people get to prosper and fewer people are trying to kill off their neighbors. That’s where the American model comes in… Massachusetts natives despise New Hampshire people, and vice versa, and they jointly hate New York & all its inhabitants, although New Englanders will make temporary common cause with New Yorkers if it’s a question of resisting California. And yet somehow we all manage not to kill each other, much, and we’ve been able to work together towards some pretty impressive results.

This kind of loose confederation is now being tried in the European Union, with a success that’s surprised a lot of pundits who predicted that the French and the Germans would never be able to collaborate as equals (except maybe in an attempt to screw the Poles, or the English). And there are plenty of attempts being made elsewhere, from SEATO and the Pacific Rim Group to the African National Congress and the various trans-Muslim-nation attempts.

Sure, it would be simpler if we could just wipe out the last few hundred years of political history and just start our Universal World Authority from scratch, but barring Reagan’s fantasy about alien invaders who conveniently give us a few years’ warning to ramp up our combined defenses, I think the happiest alternative we can hope for is going to be some kind of mutual devolution-cum-evolution into a world of mostly tiny nation-states linked into separate, overlapping regional configurations depending on the political or economic issue of the day.

This actually would cost little, because the Palistinians are *already there*; meanwhile, what Jews are in the occupied territories are colonists and for those fascists — well, tough shit. Go home. They haven’t been there long enough for just titles to even begin to apply.

There is one eensy problem with your argument: where is home? The Jews haven’t had one. . .well, ever. They’ve been kicked out or smoked out of every country they’ve ever gone to, so to tell them to go home is essentially to tell them to go back to the very countries that wanted them gone badly enough to craft a nation-state for them far, far, away, so they wouldn’t have to deal with them anymore.

Israel may be a “Jewish” state, but it’s Christian Europe who made it that way.

There is one eensy problem with your argument: where is home?

Home is pre-1967 Israel. *Not* the occupied territories.

that the whole sick concept of a Nation-State, and the nationalist movements that result from that concept, is a “Romantic, late-18th-early-19th-century notion�. Karl Popper blames it on Napolean, IIRC. Prior to that, nationality (i.e. ethnic / cultural membership) had little to do with administrative divisions. No-one expected them to coincide.

But the idea that nation-sized geographical areas are naturally settled by single ethnic groups is simply false.

Ok. Yes, this is true, but that’s the way it turned out, that’s the way it works now, and within that framework is where my argument applies. You can’t wish it away. I sympathize with the idealism, but refer to Annie Laurie’s last comment. The world is more centralized; people naturally aggregate along ethnic political sectarian lines — what are ya gonna do? People have always been tribalist. It sucks, it really really sucks but that’s the way they are. People no longer are governed, thank god, by chief or kings. so it’s a state — of a tribe or tribes. And I refuse to see that just because one or other state is of the plural that it follows that *all* states must be of the plural while concomitantly, those of the singular tribe are wicked.

Incidentally, why I have come to react against the demand that no nation state be ethnically organized is through a long exposure to Hitchens, one of the first and worst to universalize everything about America/Britain, and on the subject of ethnic nationalism, heavily influenced by Popper. (There’s also more than a grain of Trotsky in it for him, too: the heavy assumption that a thing that is right for one country is right for all is something without which no doctrine of ‘permanent revolution’ could exist.)

How is it that I agree with both Patkin and Jillian? Both making distinctly contrary points, both in a very articulate and envy-making fashion, and I agree with both.

If I were a utopian, I’d say that what we need is not more formal, land-based recognition of differences, but more attempts to get everyone to recognise similarities. Fergodssakes, every human on earth wants food, clean water, shelter from inclement weather, and reasonable expectation of security of life and limb. If we could actually hammer these ideas through some thick skulls, a lot of our problems would evaporate.

Then we’d all get ponies and ice cream.

The empty land delusion is a balm for the conscience of invaders. Even Israel used to recruit zionists with the phrase “People without a land for a land without a people”.

Late to the party so what I have to say may be redundant n apologies if it is, but to my mind the problem with giving each ethnicity a state is it would increase the likelihood of war, not decrease it. Multiethnic states can, when properly functioning, help mitigate the worst effects of tribalism, by forcing tribes to join their interests. If each ethnicity has its own state, and army, then groupthink has that much simpler a path to taking control and creating conflict. As Jillian say, physics doesn’t agree with this plan. There’s no way to evenly distribute resources, no way to avoid one state ending up with a resource another wants or even needs. Part of why Israel doesn’t want to give up the post 67 boundaries is their only real water supply is in the expanded territory, and it’s fair for them to be concerned about whether an Arab state would let that water flow into their nation.
The solution to tribalism wouldn’t seem, to me, to be giving the tribes control.

Immigration is still very much a ‘hot button’ issue here in England at the moment. The term ‘asylum seeker’ is well on the way to becoming a racist euphemism.

As ever, when solutions are required to social issues, we always look to America for fixes. Our government talks about borrowing citizenship classes for immigrants from the US (now implemented), and a ‘Britain Day’ (though not an attempt to revive the old ‘Empire Day’, thank god).

Generally these ideas are sneered at by those in the know. Many commentators have noted that although Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish cultures are better defined, attempts to define an English culture often result in absurd caricature. That hasn’t stopped Billy Bragg, bless him, from making a go of it and coming up with a vague but very inclusive form of Englishness that embraces the immigrant and a ‘salad’ of ethnicity and cultures–something I find difficult not to endorse.

That said, the notion of white Englishness has gained much traction amongst working class/middle class Daily Mail-reading ‘middle England’. The neo-Nazi-tinged BNP has seats on councils now, reinvented as a populist working class movement. In those localities, the racists are certainly mainstream.

I’m not clear where this is going to go, but given that America tends to inspire some of the worst (and best) social experiments over this side of the pond, I am watching the US immigration debate with interest.

States, and federations of states, they’re something I can cope with as an administrative convenience. As long as no-one takes them too seriously, or reifies them into any kind of real entity with real rights.
[chokes back rousing chorus of “The Worker’s Flag is Deepest Black”]

Unfortunately there is always that stratum of people who think that the state should be taken seriously (by other people at least)… give them a chance, and before you know it, you have Oaths of Allegiance, and school-children saluting the flag, and that kind of bollox. To my mind that is as inane as expecting someone to swear an oath of allegiance to the company they work for (have any of the large corporations instituted that yet?).

This is what causes the problem when geographical states are confounded with nations. People do invest a fair bit of their identity in their nationality (understandable, I suppose)… then that flows over to contaminate their feelings for their state, and they start taking that seriously as well.

Ultimately this leads to one of those things which really really pisses me off, which is when the governing elite in a given country set about fostering a fictitious sense of Nationality, in order to encourage loyalty to the State. Basically turning HTML’s argument around.

New Zealand is a clear-cut example of this, though I suppose it’s equally true elsewhere (e.g. Lee B-W’s comment about ‘Britain Day’). The NZ population is a mixture of ethnicities and cultures (European settlers, indigenous Polynesians, etc., etc.). The Europeans are the dominant nationality; unfortunately they in turn are mostly descended from British, and there is not much traction to be gained from identifying NZ nationality as “Like Britain but more so”. So successive governments have invested a lot of time over the years on creating a new Nation. There is a sense that the population can’t be trusted to evolve their own national identity, so one has be bestowed upon them. Official Defining Moments have been created (the Gallipoli myth). It is real Straussian noble-lie material.

If you think “attempts to define an English culture often result in absurd caricature”, imagine how much worse it is when some bureaucrat or focus group tries to define a New Zealand culture.

Their definitions never seem to feature Malt Whisky.

Kurds ought to have their own country
There at least you are in accord with that Hitchens chap.

“Multiethnic states can, when properly functioning, help mitigate the worst effects of tribalism, by forcing tribes to join their interests.”

Great. Now if there *were* a properly functioning multiethnic state next door to the Kurds and Chechnyans, we could argue that they would be better off as part of that multiethnic state than trying to start their own country. As it is now this sounds like “let them eat cake”.

Was it a mistake to “let” the Baltic countries have their independence, too? If not, what is the difference between Balts and Chechnyans?

Hey, Herr Doktor, at least New Zealand has a fine reputation as an independent nation/state. Australia, now, we’re British colonials who have seamlessly segued into lapdogs of the Americans. Oh jolly.

Some folks, of course, like to stick with the ‘sunburnt country’ meme, with wide open spaces and rugged individualists (all men), and the egalitarian, ‘fair go’ spirit that once held for most of the country. Long past, sadly: now we’re one of the most tight-arsed, bigoted, selfish bunches of bastards ever to glue ourselves to the telly.

Gallipoli? Yep. Nothing like a massive slaughter to bring the nation together.

Or how about “Australia: we swim good”? “Australia: 9 out of 10 of the worlds deadliest snakes/spiders love it, and you will too”? (Okay, the spiders might only be 8 out of 10)

Or “Australia: it’s flat, and it’s brown. Very flat, and very brown”.

“Australia: we use a lot of soap, and we drink a lot of beer.”

Well, I’m not a universalist in anything, so I’m not saying Baltic states should be forced into a multiethnic model. I didn’t refer to them at all, so I’m not sure how I engaged in elitist faux-charity in their regard.
In political structure, however, I’m generally in favor of anything that promotes mankind overcoming the worst of its nature, and frustrating tribalism is a damn fine way to do so.
And to ask a small scale, practical question, what would happen to multi-ethnic families in this world of ethnic states?

I just want to say, before I piss a bunch of people off, that I’m not terribly entrenched in any position except one: against the universalization of American political values (or those particular to any country). Ethnic identity being the primary motivator of tribalism and organizing criterion of statehood is not our way, but it is *a* way — and it’s only wingnutty when it’s attempted within *our* culture and *our* nation-state. It may not necessarily be reactionary under other conditions, in other cultures with different histories.

Our model’s not the only one to follow. What’s good for our goose may not be good for another’s gander and vice-versa.

Now I gotta zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

And to ask a small scale, practical question, what would happen to multi-ethnic families in this world of ethnic states?

? Why do you frame this as a hypothetical? Do you think that multi-ethnic families don’t currently exist in European nation-states?

Well, I’m not a universalist in anything, so I’m not saying Baltic states should be forced into a multiethnic model. I didn’t refer to them at all, so I’m not sure how I engaged in elitist faux-charity in their regard.

Sorry, my latter comment was not directly to you but to everyone who doubted that Chechnya et al should have a right to independence.

And the Baltic states are already forced into a multiethnic model with their large Russian minorities. Although the treatment of these minorities is not always as great as it could be, the other option was not a happy multiethnic federation, it was to leave the Russians in charge with their yearnings for former imperialistic grandeur. Bringing me to my next point…

I’m generally in favor of anything that promotes mankind overcoming the worst of its nature, and frustrating tribalism is a damn fine way to do so.

So is frustrating imperialism.

“Muhammed (or a variant thereof) is now the second most popular baby name in the UK.”

What the steaming pile of manure is this guy talking about?

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/specials/babiesnames_boys.asp

It is at 20-24 just like it has been for years.

Why is it that whenever you bother to do more than 12 seconds research on these idiots facts you find that not only are they wrong, the authors must *know* that they were wrong.

Orstrilia! Orstrilia!
Ya know we’ll never fail ya!
We’ll fight fer ya and die fer ya
Whene’er yer foes assail ya!
Our sunburnt land is green in spots;
There’s gold in sand — and we’ve got lots.
We’re big on Truth and Liberty:
Orstrilia is the place for we!

The East is red, the South is not —
This is the Land That Time Forgot.
But Time has caught up with us now
And we’re all reading Chairman Mao.
Yes, Time has caught up with us now,
And we’re all reading Chairman Mao,
But Chairman Mao is rather bleak
So now and then we read Newsweek.

We’ve all got homes and cars and jobs;
We’re all right, Jack, but we’re not snobs!
If everyone was like we are
This World would be Utopia!
If everyone was like we are
This World would be Utopia!
There’d be a lot less strife and fuss
If everyone was just like us!

Orstrilia! Orstrilia!
Ya know we’ll never filia!
We’ll fight fer ya and die fer ya
Whene’er yer foes assilia!
Our blokes are beaut, our sheilas grouse,
And we have got an Opera House —
And pies with sauce, and BHP:
Orstrilia is the place for we!

Well, all I can say is that I’m a quarter Italian, a quarter Irish, and a half whole buncha different Eastern European ethnicities that will never be properly sorted out due to WWII, and I want a state for *my* fellow nationals. Now, damnit!

Also, I am going to be the Queen, because I am the leader of our independence movement. I am going to call myself “Queen BoudiccaVercingetorixCharlesdeGaulle”, and I will head our state because of the enormous esteem I will be held in based on my fearless agitating against our Sassenach oppressors. Unless, of course, it turns out that I am also Sassenach, in which case our oppressors are the Japanese (I know I’m not Japanese).

Oh, and Qetesh, I agree with Patkin here, too. If human beings are unable to move past the murderous impulses of nationalism (I don’t think it’s a problem to keep some aspects of nationalism – like, say, lederhosen and Oktoberfest), we might as well bag up the whole human enterprise right now and save ourselves all the heartache in the interim. Because we will indeed end up in the dustbin of history, and we’ll get there far more quickly than did things like the stegosaurus (with his walnut-sized brain).

While I disagree with Lenin’s conclusion on the national question, I agree with his analysis. Nationalism is a development of mercantile capitalism and does nothing but serve the interests of the ruling classes. If Mencken and Anne Laurie are right that it is a deep rooted instinct past which we’ll never move, then where we are right now in the world is arguably the best things are ever going to be – and therefore they are going to get worse.

If you had asked a serf living in Europe in, say, 1312, what he was, his response would have been “I am a Christian, sir” – by which he would have meant he was a Catholic. That is, if you could have gotten him to understand the question at all. While I know less about the transcaucasus, I’m willing to bet things probably would have been quite similar – except for that when they claimed to be Christian, what they would’ve meant would be Orthodox.

The only reason “Jewish” became a recognized ethnic identity is because it served the financial needs of the middle ages – only Jews were exempt from fairly serious usury laws at the time. If it weren’t for that, I doubt there would have been any Jews in Europe after the First Crusade.

“If human beings are unable to move past the murderous impulses of nationalism”

So Kurds and Chechnyans wanting to have their own country are just filled with “murderous impulses”?

“Well, all I can say is that I’m a quarter Italian, a quarter Irish, and a half whole buncha different Eastern European ethnicities”

And do you also tell your relatives that Ireland and a bunch of Eastern European countries getting self-determination in the last century was a bad thing?

“Nationalism is a development of mercantile capitalism and does nothing but serve the interests of the ruling classes. If Mencken and Anne Laurie are right that it is a deep rooted instinct past which we’ll never move, then where we are right now in the world is arguably the best things are ever going to be – and therefore they are going to get worse.”

Just look at those Scandinavian nation-state hell-holes that never managed to move past their murderous mercantile capitalism! Oh, wait…

Tell it to the Kosovars. Tell it to the Ukranians who were more than happy to help the Nazis kill Great Russians – until they realized that the Nazis just saw them as another group of subhuman Slavs. Tell it to the Poles, who were willing to believe everything the Nazis said about the Evil Jooooooos – while conveniently disregarding everything the Nazis said about the animal Polacks.

Nationalism is just what racism looks like when everyone is the same color.

That’s me, btw.

It’s not quite short term memory impairment that I have, because I can remember things that happened three minutes ago. It’s just thirty seconds ago that I struggle with.

I can never remember to change my name back, even when I tell myself to when I start typing.

“Tell it to the Ukranians who were more than happy to help the Nazis kill Great Russians -”

And you blame this on Ukrainian nationalism? Come on.

The search for single causes of complex events is always futile and a sign of overly simplistic thinking

That being said, Slavic nationalism in general has always been a pain in the ass for worldwide geopolitics, and Ukranian nationalism was part of the mix – however much hatred of Stalin was also there.

And part of the hatred of Stalin was generalized hatred of Georgians, too. For some reason, Georgians are always the rednecks of the world – whether they are on this side of the globe or that side.

I still say tell it to the Kosovars. Nationalism is a fetish.

“I still say tell it to the Kosovars. Nationalism is a fetish.”

Um, the overwhelming majority of Kosovars want independence. What exactly should I tell them? That they are all a bunch of fetishists?

Places with Spanish names: {list}
Places with French names: {list}
If we go all-Anglo all-the-time, we’re gonna have a lot of name-changes and extra paperwork on our hands. Not a good harbinger for smaller government.

In New Hampshire, in response to WWII, the towns of Berlin and Milan were decreed to henceforth be pronounced “BER-lin” and “MYE-lan” ever afterwards. Still are.

Then again, there’s a bar in downtown Manchester that still has “Freedom Fries” on the menu.

What exactly should I tell them?

Might I ask how you are going to tell them? Are they sitting in your garage? Have you created an army of homogenous Kosovar clones with identical politics and a monomaniacal goal of an independant homeland?

In tnat case, i think you should tell them “Hey, Jillian of Sadly, No! has proclaimed your desire for a homeland should be met through alternate means! I’m afraid because a random commenter on a humor blog has a fucking opinion on nationalism, your hopes of having a homeland are dashed! Now get out of my basement!”

Hey, it was Jillian who said “tell it to the xxx”, I was not implying that I have a line of Kosovo Albanians at my door waiting for political advice. (it’s my milkshake that brings them)

The NZ population is a mixture of ethnicities and cultures[.] So successive governments have invested a lot of time over the years on creating a new Nation. There is a sense that the population can’t be trusted to evolve their own national identity, so one has be bestowed upon them. Official Defining Moments have been created (the Gallipoli myth). It is real Straussian noble-lie material.

States are a psychological concept without true or measurable reality. You can’t argue a nation doesn’t exist if people identify with it. This identity is based on real commonalities and a shared system of meanings. It requires inter-subjective reality, the product of human minds but no singular mind to exist through mutual recognition. Identities spring from the need for rules to minimize conflict. Ethinic groups are closer to nations than states are.

A common ethnic nationality requires some common practice or culture and mutually understood social interaction and understanding of symbols, and certainly some common language. Myths of a common origin are important. Validity doesn’t matter, it’s what people believe and are unified in that matters. A myth, whether it’s our Founding Fathers (true) or Japan’s divine descendants (false), acts like political glue.

War-making is less legitimate today in Western states. We don’t (usually) recognize conquest. We have legal recourses and the U.N. outlaws acquisitions through war. States can’t integrate through conquest and marriage anymore, so what to do? You horizontally integrate the population with a super identity stitching a hierarchy of identities together. Even though this super identity informs every other identity, the combination of a nation’s unique identities separates it from other nations.

If the state doesn’t have to coerce the population to accede to the law it’s more efficient. I’m not sure the modern state could exist without a national identity. Governments are outgrowths of their nationalism, too, and unfortunately not all forms of nationalism are rational. France’s nationalism is heavily secular, suppressing religion and religious practice in the public as a unifying syncretism, and ethnic-genealogical irredentism led to Hitler.

Every form of nationhood is also a constant reminder of the Other. This is the other side of the coin for rational and irrational national identities. Nationhood requires an outside threat and engenders an Us v. Them mentality that mobilizes the population for aggression, no matter how the state was formed. It can be good or bad, but when it’s bad and is used to wage aggressive war it’s rarely the only thing or the most important thing that can avert war. There were domestic-political causes for Germany’s first war (archaic German government didn’t reflect ascending proletariat workers and nouveau rich classes, couldn’t handle the influx of public participation, etc.) and there were democratic and economic causes for Germany’s second war. Nationalism is one major reason why I think we allowed the government to invade Iraq (better to remain in a fearful stupor and trust the government than distrust the government and get it wrong), but there were definitely systemic democratic failures, as well.

New Zealand is a clear-cut example of this, though I suppose it’s equally true elsewhere (e.g. Lee B-W’s comment about ‘Britain Day’). The NZ population is a mixture of ethnicities and cultures (European settlers, indigenous Polynesians, etc., etc.). The Europeans are the dominant nationality; unfortunately they in turn are mostly descended from British, and there is not much traction to be gained from identifying NZ nationality as “Like Britain but more so�. So successive governments have invested a lot of time over the years on creating a new Nation. There is a sense that the population can’t be trusted to evolve their own national identity, so one has be bestowed upon them. Official Defining Moments have been created (the Gallipoli myth). It is real Straussian noble-lie material.

If you think “attempts to define an English culture often result in absurd caricature�, imagine how much worse it is when some bureaucrat or focus group tries to define a New Zealand culture.

It’s a *little* bit more complicated than that. James Belich’s _Making Peoples_ (love the appropriate name) should probably form background reading here. There’s a play between the apathetic majority “culture”, generally a European melting pot, and a dynamic (and pushy) minority culture, the Maori, which, as Dok says, the government is deliberately playing a role.

But it’s not in a position to manufacture a culture – just to interfere in the process of an evolving one. The Gallipoli thing is a good example of what the Dok gets wrong – the younger generation is paying attention to the ANZAC tradition, but *not* because the government insists they do. Does anyone think any government could order teenagers to attend a service held at dawn if they didn’t want to? The kohanga reo are now supported by the government – but derived from community activism.

Not to mention the Asian influence, the status of Auckland as the world’s largest Polynesian city, the continuing mopy angst over “what is a Pakeha anyhow?”…

Well, Derbyshire is right about the South, anyway, up through the early 1800s. Most of the population weren’t immigrants; they were persecuted natives and human-trafficking victims.

Mikey, mad frickn’ props for bringing the Lumbee love. And well done on timing too, the debate in the House on the bill for Lumbee recognition is starting right now.
(Jesus hopping on a pogo stick, Don Young is actually saying something sensible. If I think too hard about that my head will explode And a Robeson County Mac – Rep.Mike McIntyre to be exact is leading the call for recognition. Henry Berry Lowrie is laughing his ass off somewhere right now.)

It’s a *little* bit more complicated than that.
Over-simplifying things? Me?
Sir, you have wounded me.

“If human beings are unable to move past the murderous impulses of nationalism�

So Kurds and Chechnyans wanting to have their own country are just filled with “murderous impulses�?

Why, goodness, no! Firstly, I’m sure Kurds and Chechnyans are full of many other things. Meat, as an example.

But maybe Kurds and Chechnyans are the moral exception to the rule that nationalism leads to bloodshed. Why I’m sure that should either ethnic type get their own country, a pacifistic utopia on earth would arise from their sterling and noble national identity, one that would assist their neighbors without second thought to the way those dirty fucking Russians fucked them for decades upon decades, or how those rat bastard Turks are sitting on Just One More Tract of Our Land.

Nationalism is not merely a matter of murderous impulses. I understand some very fine flags have been manufactured by it, and the occasional peppy song to sing at sports events. But it’s pretty much set to appeal to the resentful and those with *nothing* but the State to their lives, lives they would willingly give to fuck over the Not-Kurds or Not-Chechnyans or Not-Americans.

Maybe I’m over-simplifying matters. God knows that I regard nationalism as the greatest trap ever devised to ensure man’s evil to man. But I’m not exactly sure what the fuck the point of establishing more lines in the sand is if we can’t try sorting out problems between people first.

“Well, all I can say is that I’m a quarter Italian, a quarter Irish, and a half whole buncha different Eastern European ethnicities�

And do you also tell your relatives that Ireland and a bunch of Eastern European countries getting self-determination in the last century was a bad thing?

I can’t speak for Jillian on this one, but since I’m largely in the same boat (half Irish, quarter everything-else-in-UK, quarter Spanish)… no, I don’t tell my relatives that. A) most of my relatives are American-born, so don’t give a shit what happens to the Motherland(s), and B) if I did tell them that it was a mistake, because all countries are mistakes, they might beat me with sticks.

Hail to thee, O Intertubes, to place me so far from those with sticks.

“Nationalism is a development of mercantile capitalism and does nothing but serve the interests of the ruling classes. If Mencken and Anne Laurie are right that it is a deep rooted instinct past which we’ll never move, then where we are right now in the world is arguably the best things are ever going to be – and therefore they are going to get worse.â€?

Just look at those Scandinavian nation-state hell-holes that never managed to move past their murderous mercantile capitalism! Oh, wait…

Why yes, because there’s no racism, ultra-nationalism or xenophobia in those lands.

The Scandinavian nation-states are a very nice and intriguing experiment in socialism. If I had my druthers and wasn’t a terribly asocial shut-in, I might vacation there one day. That said, they’re still a fucking nation-state, so I’m going to go with precedent and say that it’s just going to take the right kind of Other to turn them into fucking bastards.

Patkin, one thing I have to ask is: why draw the line now when not everyone has their state? I understand that you dislike the whole concept, and that’s fine, but isn’t it unfair that most have theirs but a few others don’t?

HTML:

Well, frankly it’s because I wasn’t around when all the other ones were started up.

It’s unfair, yes, but what else is there to do? We can’t just continue parceling out land until everybody has theirs, and then go, “Okay! Now everybody cease being a state!”

I mean, the last guy to get one would be all like, “but China got to be a state for thousands of years! No fair!” And China would be like, “aw, but I was going for the record!”

The line’s going to have to get drawn at some point, and at that point, there’s still going to be somebody jockeying for land rights.

There at least you are in accord with that Hitchens chap.

Actually, no, HDB: he’s for a federalist Iraq.

Fair enough, Patkin.

To my mind that is as inane as expecting someone to swear an oath of allegiance to the company they work for (have any of the large corporations instituted that yet?)

Back in the 1980s, according to the upper management of the (then) Big Three automakers, all the hippest & most forward-thinking of the Japanese manufacturers had company loyalty oaths to go with their company songs and compulsary company morning exercises. The Big Three management guys were soooo jealous of those happy, conformist Japanese workers! Of course the American line workers, selfish peasant bustards that they were, stubbornly refused to sign up for the songs & morning exercises, much less the loyalty oaths. And I seem to understand that the Japanese workers weren’t all that crazy about them either, unless the white-collar bottom feeders were hanging around taking notes during GM’s interviews…

If you had asked a serf living in Europe in, say, 1312, what he was, his response would have been “I am a Christian, sirâ€? – by which he would have meant he was a Catholic.

Maybe, Jillian, if the person asking the question was a stranger on a horse. But I suspect that, under more equal circumstances, he’d tell a traveller that he was born and bred on the Redcap estate, going back seven generations and proud of it, everyone knows Redcap, best holding in St. Kentwall’s parish. (Nothing to do with the Redhorse people, of course, whatever those sorry hopers might try to claim.) Although his mother’s people were from Jumping Tomtit, you know — there’s not many fortunate enough to born in JT that would consider emigrating, which shows just how well-considered Redcap Manor has always been…

Then he’s start quizzing the traveller about his people, so that the new guy could be assigned to his proper place in the cosmos.

Because, from both personal experience and wide research, I have come to believe that getting oneself and one’s neighbors appropriately slotted into one’s mental Network is a nearly universal anthropological urge. Of course the hip, superior people I now travel among on the internetz ask much more sophisticated questions, sometimes a bit more subtly, but establishing that the new poster is not a gods-damned neoconservative or some other variety of worthless subhuman is not unimportant even here. And nationalism is just another sorting mechanism — not the best or most sophisticated one, but if it wasn’t important why would the Reichtards be so eager to cry UnAmerican?

Patkin, perhaps the globe would be better off if we implemented Kurt Vonnegut’s suggestion: Assign every newborn one of a random list of 300 tribal names, and let people identify themselves as Chipmunks or Tulips instead of Serbs or Southerners or Red Sox fans. Of course, within weeks of implementation, people would emailing vulgar jokes about how many Hamsters it takes to change a light bulb, but it would at least shake up the old prejudices and get neighbors talking to each other in a new format. (Well, except for the Wisterias — you can’t reason with those people… )

Rafar

I don’t know if I totally agree with you considering that your link showed statistics for 2006 ….

and we are now in 200 fucking 7.

“Terra nullus� held that aborigines didn’t count as human, and therefore the entire continent was empty when the British arrived.

Sadly, this doctrine originated with Chief Justice John Marshall, who invented (out of thin air) the “doctrine of discovery,” the idea that white people gain clear legal title to land, superior to that of present inhabitants who had been living there for 50,000 years, simply by looking at it (or, if they happen to be the king, a map of it). Presumably, this involves the white man’s Superman-like vision powers.

“John Derbyshire should be deported.”

Preferably to Pine Ridge, where he will be forced to live in a third-hand HUD mobile home (without electricity), live solely off commod (with occasional stale surplus cheese hand-outs for special occasions like Christmas) and watch drunken lawyers, doctors and accountants pretending to be bikers hold wet t-shirt contests and beer bashes within desecration range of whatever he happens to hold as holy as the Lakota hold the paha sapa.

“Australia: 9 out of 10 of the worlds deadliest snakes/spiders love it, and you will too�

Ooh! Lurve it, lurve it, lurve it!!!1!
Also, probably 8 or 9 out of 10 of the deadliest species of shark. “Only the sky is (relatively) safe!” Hee hee!

Of course, within weeks of implementation, people would emailing vulgar jokes about how many Hamsters it takes to change a light bulb, but it would at least shake up the old prejudices and get neighbors talking to each other in a new format.
My capacity to empathise with other humans is sadly restricted. That’s why empathy is something to ration. No point wasting any on those goddamned Wisterias.

Actually, no, HDB: he’s for a federalist Iraq.
If I confined myself to talking only about subjects I knew something about, I wouldn’t be commenting at all.

What I’d like to know is who is this “we” that would be doing the handing-out of ethnic nation-state status? For if one is to parcel out land, then one needs to be in control of that land, or be willing to seize control of that land. Which is the kind of thing that tends to displace people and make more landless ethnic groups.

In any event, I think the folks that mention the ever-more-specific identity groups have it right. Once you start saying “Okay, everyone with a specific ethnicity gets its own piece of land,” then you’ll see that there are more ethnicities than you ever knew about, and they’re all going to want their piece. IMHO, the only useful ethnicity is homo sapien, and even if “we” had the power to parcel out land it would be a mistake to make distinctions based on some artificial concept of ethnicity (which itself is just a way of defining a legally non-killable “Us” vs. a legally killable “Them”).

My capacity to empathise with other humans is sadly restricted.
I have to admit that some people have much higher empathy levels. For instance, Anne Laurie and D. Sidhe. This is only because they stole my share.

HTML Mencken: I have a request.

Could every future reference to the Derb begin (complete with link) with the phrase “Confirmed pedophile John Derbyshire…”?

Of course the hip, superior people I now travel among on the internetz ask much more sophisticated questions

PC vs. Mac, for instance?

Once you start saying “Okay, everyone with a specific ethnicity gets its own piece of land,� then you’ll see that there are more ethnicities than you ever knew about, and they’re all going to want their piece.

Indeed. This statement also pretty directly implies that multiethnic individuals or families don’t get any say in the matter at all, right? It essentially assigns a greater value to those who actually have a specific ethnic identity while ignoring the ever-increasing numbers of people who don’t. Or who did, but reject it.

I have to admit that some people have much higher empathy levels. For instance, Anne Laurie and D. Sidhe. This is only because they stole my share.

Well, what else would you expect from those kinds of people…?

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