Ethnostates - Really 'Refuges' from Ethnic Tension/Conflict?

[Mossling]

On this video, alt-right spokesman Richard Spencer uses the accepted right of jews occupying Israel - the right to have their own "ethnostate" - as a platform to demand something similar for his own perceived ethnicity:



The journalist apparently felt too trolled to provide any elegant response to Spencer's rhetoric, which is apparently something much needed in the West these days - a coherent respectful dialogue regarding which identity is more important - having a human nervous system, or having a specific cultural heritage - ethnically-driven or otherwise.

Personally I am with Bertrand Russell on this one - 'remember your humanity and forget the rest', so to speak.

But I don't see much changing in the centuries to come, unfortunately - just journalists like the guy in the video being trolled by sophistry.

[Serpent]

On this video, alt-right spokesman Richard Spencer uses the accepted right of jews occupying Israel - the right to have their own "ethnostate" - as a platform to demand something similar for his own perceived ethnicity:

Thing One: Israel is not universally accepted; it was set up and propped up by the Allies as a bulwark against any threat to the oil supplies; no Christian country wanted a large influx of Jewish refugees and it was easier to give them somebody else's country than to deal with the prejudice in their own; England and the US had no intention of keeping their war-time promises to the Arabs who helped them against the Ottoman Empire and well-armed, resolute Jews made a handy shield against retribution.
Actually, the ethnic and religious exclusivity isn't even unanimously approved of by third-generation Israelis or assimilated Jews elsewhere.

Thing Two: Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa were ethnically coherent -- there is a better word that escapes me atm -- until European aggression messed it all up. Toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube and chicken have to roost somewhere.

Thing Three: Try to figure the logistics. Given the proportion of genetically pure Caucasians to the people of mixed and coloured 'races', their safe space would be, like, Ireland or Delaware. I doubt the asshole would be content with such a small territory.

Thing Four: The guy with the shit-eating smirk is irredeemable human waste, so why bother arguing with him at all?

But I don't see much changing in the centuries to come,.

There are no foreseeable centuries to come. Within the next half century, everything changes.

[BadgerJelly]

I think the journalist did a pretty good job.

The message was clear. People heard it and Spencer was left looking like the person he is. The US has a big issue with racial discrimination, but in the past 50 years (as serpent eluded to) a great deal has changed in regards to general world equality not merely the racial aspect.

I do think we are, at least in the western world, in somewhat of a shuffling position. Big changes mean many will be left feeling unstable. Things will settle and then we'll no doubt push on further trying to be better than we currently are at being human.

I would love to see someone interviewing someone in power and acting in exactly the same manner. That is simply exposing their duplicity and ideology, then walking off after showing they are incapable of sensible discourse.

[Forest_Dump]

I figured I should comment on at least one thing:

Thing Two: Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa were ethnically coherent -- there is a better word that escapes me atm -- until European aggression messed it all up. Toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube and chicken have to roost somewhere.

There is a long debate on what "ethnicity" means such as how often ethnicity is imagined or created (circumstantialist approaches usually following one interpretation of F. Barth's famous chapter) vs. truly inherited (primordialists - I cite Gil-White's 2001 paper in Racial and Ethnic Studies) but virtually all place ethnicity as beng somewhere between race and tribe (both also problematic terms). So...

I find it hard to imagine Europe as being ethnically coherent. Although certainly a bit of a back water in terms of population movements over time, probably the last time it could be called ethnically coherent was when the Neanderthals ruled there before anatomically modern Homo sapiens muddied things up. There might have been quite a while of stability with mostly amHs with some variable amount of Neanderthal dna (and culture?) before the (swarthy?) Indo-Europeans moved in. And then we know historically about those Mediteranean Romans who also brought along soldiers from all over their empire. Lots of Arabic Jewish communities in Europe go back to these times but since became so inter-mixed that it is difficult to think of Jews as being anything but pure European. (And I know of the many debates about the extent to which Judaism is an ethnic group, religion and/or of a socio-political movement with only imagained claims (a la Anderson's Imagined Communities) to being an ethnicity or religion - kind of like "Christians" who don't take into account anything other than some select European "strains".) And through time there were all kinds of barbarians from the east who raped and pillaged their way across Europe fragmenting groups, etc. My own "pure" British (historically although we have een in the New World for 400+ years) immediate family shows some of this with my mother's maiden name being classic Saxon while my father's surname being Anglicized Norman. Read the classic "Ivanhoe" for a great take on that ethnic history.

However, both the Americas before contact and Asia were even more ethnically diverse. Ask some old Japanese bigot wht they think about Koreans and the Ainu and you would get a surprise. That get magnified when you compare the history of the Han Chinese with Mongoleans and the Tibetans. Compare them with the Arabs (and Jews) of SW Asia and the idea of any kind of coherent "Asia" is quicly just a fiction of western views of the world.

Of course the America's are even more ethically diverse with far more diversity in language, religion, economy, political structure, etc. Would you really lump the Plains Indians of Dances with Wolves with the Aztecs and Mayans?

Now Africa is, IMHO, the most diverse although European history still prefers t think of it as an unusual amalgam (for political/exploitive purposes I am surprised you are unaware of). While up to the 19th century political structures literally did range from simple hunter-gatherers to kingdoms, Africa is the only continent that actually has more than one real, genetically-identified race!!! Oh, and by the way, the slave trade in eastern Africa was active across the Indian Ocean for a good 2000 years before the Americas began to be colonized by Europeans which is actually making a bit of a difficulty for looking at changes in skin colour, etc., in southern India, the SE Pacific, etc.

[Forest_Dump]

I figured I should comment on at least one thing:

Thing Two: Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa were ethnically coherent -- there is a better word that escapes me atm -- until European aggression messed it all up. Toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube and chicken have to roost somewhere.

There is a long debate on what "ethnicity" means such as how often ethnicity is imagined or created (circumstantialist approaches usually following one interpretation of F. Barth's famous chapter) vs. truly inherited (primordialists - I cite Gil-White's 2001 paper in Racial and Ethnic Studies) but virtually all place ethnicity as beng somewhere between race and tribe (both also problematic terms). So...

I find it hard to imagine Europe as being ethnically coherent. Although certainly a bit of a back water in terms of population movements over time, probably the last time it could be called ethnically coherent was when the Neanderthals ruled there before anatomically modern Homo sapiens muddied things up. There might have been quite a while of stability with mostly amHs with some variable amount of Neanderthal dna (and culture?) before the (swarthy?) Indo-Europeans moved in. And then we know historically about those Mediteranean Romans who also brought along soldiers from all over their empire. Lots of Arabic Jewish communities in Europe go back to these times but since became so inter-mixed that it is difficult to think of Jews as being anything but pure European. (And I know of the many debates about the extent to which Judaism is an ethnic group, religion and/or of a socio-political movement with only imagained claims (a la Anderson's Imagined Communities) to being an ethnicity or religion - kind of like "Christians" who don't take into account anything other than some select European "strains".) And through time there were all kinds of barbarians from the east who raped and pillaged their way across Europe fragmenting groups, etc. My own "pure" British (historically although we have een in the New World for 400+ years) immediate family shows some of this with my mother's maiden name being classic Saxon while my father's surname being Anglicized Norman. Read the classic "Ivanhoe" for a great take on that ethnic history.

However, both the Americas before contact and Asia were even more ethnically diverse. Ask some old Japanese bigot wht they think about Koreans and the Ainu and you would get a surprise. That get magnified when you compare the history of the Han Chinese with Mongoleans and the Tibetans. Compare them with the Arabs (and Jews) of SW Asia and the idea of any kind of coherent "Asia" is quicly just a fiction of western views of the world.

Of course the America's are even more ethically diverse with far more diversity in language, religion, economy, political structure, etc. Would you really lump the Plains Indians of Dances with Wolves with the Aztecs and Mayans?

Now Africa is, IMHO, the most diverse although European history still prefers t think of it as an unusual amalgam (for political/exploitive purposes I am surprised you are unaware of). While up to the 19th century political structures literally did range from simple hunter-gatherers to kingdoms, Africa is the only continent that actually has more than one real, genetically-identified race!!! Oh, and by the way, the slave trade in eastern Africa was active across the Indian Ocean for a good 2000 years before the Americas began to be colonized by Europeans which is actually making a bit of a difficulty for looking at changes in skin colour, etc., in southern India, the SE Pacific, etc.

[Serpent]

Sure, we may know that, but 16th century Europeans didn't. They had no notion of genetics, evolution or ancient migration and dispersal patterns
People looked the same and shared cultural values; populations occupied geographical regions for centuries at a time, married mostly within their linguistic and religious group. (And there were plenty of incentives to do so. There still are.) Japanese bigots were not expected to be good neighbours, to eat or socialize with Koreans.

As far as they were concerned, race was a very real thing, that gave people with more weapons license to invade, rob and enslave people with fewer or less effective weapons; to re-form the political, legal, religious and economic systems of those peoples.
Most recently, those activities were conducted by peoples based in Christian Europe - people who identified as "white". Some of them think they still are white, still can dictate, and are willing to hurt or kill anyone who points out their error. I was trying to point out how few would meet even their own criteria of whiteness - especially in North America.

What I mean is: the people who base their claim to superiority on the 'glorious deeds' of their ancestors, now whine about being a threatened minority as a result of the situation created by those ancestors. But it's no use telling them any of that.

[Mossling]

Thanks for interesting responses to the OP.

Something that is strange about enthinicity and thus the "ethnostates" that proud ethnic identities want to indulge in, is how it sort of promotes the idea of in-breeding - like the examples of some jewish couples going for genetic checkups before having children because of insular breeding patterns within their perceived ethnic grouping. It is instinctive (apparently) to aim outside of one's immediate kinship group, but who knows how far outside. Racists tend to 'stick to their own', but the human gene pool is called a gene pool for a reason - it's good to mix things up, is it not?

And sure, caucasians are less protected from skin cancer in sunny habitats, but we can innovate around that as people do in Australia, for example, so beyond arguments involving specific habitats for ethnicities, I cannot see any solid ground beyond a kind of cultural fascism. Sure; each to their own, but to make a big deal out of one's skin colour or history (the relics of which may or may not even be in physical existence anymore) is seemingly missing the point behind human societies and their cooperative foundations.

Humans didn't come together to cooperate primarily because they shared the same skin colour or family name, lol, that's like some weird childhood view of the world. Humans came together because of the economic truth that more hands make lighter work and everyone benefits more than if they operated alone. Thus, it doesn't matter if the hands are white or brown or whatever, it's just hands.

Thus, "purple drank" isn't a black people's drank, it's just a drank, and fish'n'chips ain't British - it's just some fish and some chips, innit. I think people need to get over this random preferences and colours stuff, it's like being kids and asking "What's your favourite skin colour? - Melato, caramel, or cream?", "What's your favourite food? - Chicken, pork, or venison?" - as if those things - skin and food preferences are somehow profoundly identifiying. Lol. Ridiculous.

[BadgerJelly]

Moss -

It is instinctive (apparently) to aim outside of one's immediate kinship group, but who knows how far outside

Third cousin is optimal for humans.

Humans didn't come together to cooperate primarily because they shared the same skin colour or family name, lol, that's like some weird childhood view of the world.

No, they came together because it was the best way to protect their DNA. So whether you think it is 'some weird childhood view' or not, it is actually perfectly logical in terms of continuing the family line.

[Braininvat]

duplicate post

[Braininvat]

DNA matters when you need a kidney replaced. Otherwise, I'm with Bert Russell.

Richard Spencer can go form a white Christian enclave in northern Idaho (since most of it, and Montana, already is one) with his idiotic racist pals. They richly deserve to be someplace with 7 months of winter every year and loose gun laws. Hopefully they'll kill each other off in some internecine conflict over the meaning of eye color or hat size.

[Serpent]

It is instinctive (apparently) to aim outside of one's immediate kinship group, but who knows how far outside.

Anywhere! Scandinavian girls are pretty; Guyanese girls are pretty; Bantu girls are pretty... Ancient merchants with long trade routes would bring home wives or concubines, as well as copper, silk and spices. (Human trafficking is not a modern invention.)

Racists tend to 'stick to their own', but the human gene pool is called a gene pool for a reason - it's good to mix things up, is it not?

For sure. The smaller the gene puddle, the weaker the strain becomes - until all the anemia and hemophelia are bred out - at considerable expense to the family, in terms of infant mortality and low life expectancy.) Did you read the bits in Leviticus about staying away from other outsiders, all the special dietary restrictions so you can't socialize with them (in case they persuade you to their religion)? And all the military statutes against fraternizing with occupied nations, and so on.
Why make a law, except to curb a natural instinct? Nobody ever felt the need to enact a law: "Thou shalt drink wine, beer and strong spirits." but they've unsuccessfully made laws against it. The political and religious elites are jealous of the population over which they hold sway: if they allowed free mixing, xenophobia would erode away; they would no longer be able to manipulate people through hate, fear and suspicion.

A cluster of other heritable conditions would have long ago disappeared; almost everybody would be resistant to human-to-human transmission of disease... there might be no gods and no wars...and no high tribal mucky-mucks.
Imagine!

[Lomax]

Thing Four: The guy with the shit-eating smirk is irredeemable human waste, so why bother arguing with him at all?

Somewhat strangely, Richard Spencer is an influential voice. He's the guy who coined the term "alternative Right", or as we now know it, "alt-right". The linked article shows that he is not completely stupid, although the video in the OP demonstrates his inability to improvise. What concerns me most about his infamous article is his express acknowledgement that people with his views need to be euphemistic or even dishonest about them. It's like the experience of speaking to a holocaust "denier": one nearly always gets the impression that they are, properly speaking, a holocaust affirmer.

Which brings me to the most serious shortcoming of his argument. Israel is ~20% non-Jewish. He obfuscates the difference between a safe space for us poor, downtrodden, historically persecuted Whites, and a space in which non-whites are not welcome. His creepiness, or perhaps ignorance, doesn't end there. Does he really argue for accommodating the white Muslim population of Bosnia? How about the remaining Jewish diaspora of Europe? ("Why do Jews need a safe space?", he laughably asks.) Does he, for that matter, argue for such incredibly inviting American borders at all?

[Mossling]

Moss -

It is instinctive (apparently) to aim outside of one's immediate kinship group, but who knows how far outside

Third cousin is optimal for humans.

Humans didn't come together to cooperate primarily because they shared the same skin colour or family name, lol, that's like some weird childhood view of the world.

No, they came together because it was the best way to protect their DNA. So whether you think it is 'some weird childhood view' or not, it is actually perfectly logical in terms of continuing the family line.

I didn't mean come together in order to procreate, but I meant kinship groups coming together to form cooperatives - broader societies. In that sense, the colours of the hands don't matter, it's the lighter work that matters.

[BadgerJelly]

Moss -

Well, it does matter for that reason. You'll likely help your own kin more than anyone else's. It is not the lighter work, it is the benefit for your kin (hence slavery.)

[Serpent]

I didn't mean come together in order to procreate, but I meant kinship groups coming together to form cooperatives - broader societies. In that sense, the colours of the hands don't matter, it's the lighter work that matters.

That's probably true in many cases - though procreation tends to take place in all circumstances. Alternatively, a very successful clan might grow in numbers and wealth, and be able to trade more, including the payment of bride-prices for their many sons; such marriages would cement alliances with neighbouring tribes, which might lead to mergers later on, when danger threatened or crops grew lean. More often, a growing tribe found itself short of lebensraum and raided another's territory. The common practice in that situation is to kill the men and older boys, but add the fertile women and young children to its own population. A more developed and powerful tribe might regularly raid the smaller, weaker ones in its vicinity, capturing slaves and livestock. (After a couple of generations of procreating, slaves may very well become citizens.) Another circumstance could be some outside danger or natural event that reduced the number of able-bodied adults in two or more clans/tribes in a given locality, so it made sense for them to band together for mutual protection. A nomadic tribe might grow feeble through the vicissitudes of weather and geography, and ask asylum of a larger, settled one. Lots of ways amalgamation could take place, and all of those happened someplace, sometime.
Hence the diversity of DNA in modern peoples.

[Mossling]

Moss -

Well, it does matter for that reason. You'll likely help your own kin more than anyone else's. It is not the lighter work, it is the benefit for your kin (hence slavery.)

Yes, I agree, it can be genetically beneficial to help one's own kin, however I did say cooperating outside of kinship groups such as family units - in broader societies that eventually became cities like Athens and Rome, for example.

Cooperatives larger than kinship groups were apparently more about efficiency and surpluses, rather than 'white power' or whatever. Some people who live in all-white or all-brown broader societies have never even seen another ethnicity, so ethnicity doesn't even come into the social equation for them.

Similar-looking tribes merged into greater long-term cooperatives because of the fact that many hands make lighter work of staying alive. This is why the idea of ethnicity as being a primary driver for a state I do not think is historically accurate, even - as a basic human driving force. Ethnostates seem to be based on that premise, however.

And on the skin-colour front, it seems that can be easily over-ridden by the projection of how much a person of another ethnicity has the right genes for carrying half of one's one genes more successfully and for longer than forecasted within a present system. If you were a short and fat white woman, for example, what are potential benefits of mating with a tall, muscular, athletic black man? Or what if you believe Jews are more intelligent than other humans, so they are more attractive? What if you want your kids to be born in China because it is the next superpower on the horizon?

Of course it is not just about skin and hair and eye colour, but Spencer seems to think it kind of is, somehow...

[Serpent]

Of course it is not just about skin and hair and eye colour, but Spencer seems to think it kind of is, somehow...

That's just the easiest line of BS to sell in certain parts of the US - because it feeds their pre-existing fear and hate. ("Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Sure, it makes us feel large and magnanimous to forgive our debtors and those who have wronged us; what's hard-to-impossible is forgiving our creditors and victims.)

A more sophisticated approach you very often see on forums lately is the Euro-Christian apologetics of cultural superiority. The case they can sometimes make with a good deal of fancy rhetoric is: We're so much more advanced (Just look at those Greek statues and Roman aqueducts! Just look at the illuminated manuscripts and cathedrals! - oh, btw, don't look at European witch- and book-burnings, or the Arabic numerical system.) and these barbarians who don't even understand it are going to destroy our magnificent achievement. (If you don't care about, fear for your daughters.)

The bottom line - overt or hidden - is invariably: I'm just a minnow in the big lake. The more I shrink the pond, the bigger fish I'll be.

[Lomax]

I don't mean to encroach on Forest's area of expertise, but I'm not sure I buy the kin-selection argument for racism. Our genetic differences with other ethnicities are ultimately very slight, and millennia of race war have probably ultimately diminished the population of every so-called race. The human species is also descended from only a few thousand people, at a time when it nearly became extinct altogether, and the resulting lack of genetic variety makes us much more prone to illness, disorder and syndrome. Genetic drift is a malevolent factor in the preservation of one's bloodline.

Without any knowledge, I can speculate some other possible causes of racism. It may come from cultural and historical differences; it may be a by-product of out-group hostility which prevents tribes from becoming too trusting toward strangers; it may be a by-product of our fear of the "uncanny". That second hypothesis might contain a tacit concession to the kin-selection theory. The first one may be circular. Other possibilities may be available.

[Mossling]

Skin colour is the first indicator of genetic dissimilarity when one spots a person from afar.

If one instantly considers them enemy or foe, then this no doubt rouses one's sense of self-protectionism from beyond the mere cultural level.

I see it rooted also in humans living in a hot sunny climate vs colder cloudy climate, and skin tone seems to have been 'selected' on this basis, and since climate is geographically localised on our planet, then territoriality and the beneficial technology developed and stored within that territory quickly comes into the equation.

Thus, an ethnicity revolving around skin colour and technological culture can easily emerge as an apparent core identity that is intimately connected with heaven and earth.

In actuality, of course, there are extremes and gradients - the Mediterranean is a good example of a 'melting pot', and just because most of the redheaded people come from a rather small population in north Britain, and so forth (no matter their skin and eye colour at this point) does not make them any 'purer' in 'British blood' than a black-haired Roman who arrived in South England during the first invasions.

Britain itself has thousands of years of DNA arriving from all over Europe, and blue eyes, in any case, I have heard before, most likely originated in the Middle East.

I wonder what an ethnocentrist would say about North Indian people with 'Greek' blue or green eyes, for example. And what about Homo sapiens and Neanderthal cross-breeding? Is that acceptable or not? Plus, do white power voices hate suncream or coconut oils that allow humans of various ethnicities to wander the globe more comfortably than before?

For ethnocentrists seem to place as much emphasis on technological innovations of various cultures as they do on skin colour, but the technological innovations can now override the 'genetic innovations' that evolution brought through the skin. You can't have both cakes and eat them simultaneously - are technological innovations to be hailed or not? If so, then drop the importance of skin colour. It's now as significant survival-wise as one's appendix.