This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Recently I was asked, as happens periodically in this forum, to clarify my position on that thorniest of thorny questions: The Jewish Question. Specifically, @faceh asked me, after I had criticized his equating White Nationalism with statements about “gassing the Jews”, whether I would support the removal of all Jewish individuals from positions of power in White countries. Work stuff pulled me away for a few days and I’ve been unable to answer his question, but I think it’s a useful opportunity for a larger post.
I’ve spoken before about how my conception of Whiteness can be modeled as a series of concentric circles. The central circle - the cluster of the most archetypally and uncontroversially representative examples of Whiteness - consists, roughly, of the historic populations of what can broadly be called Northwestern Europe (the British Isles, Scandinavia minus Finland, the Low Countries, Northern France) plus the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe and the Tyrol, as well as the diaspora populations of these ethnic groups in the New World. Some ardent Nordicists would stop here and say that only people who fit into this first circle count as properly White, but this is a fringe position and not one to which I subscribe. My ancestry is 100% British Isles on all sides as far back as I can trace it, which is hundreds of years, so I don’t object to the Nordicist position out of any personal conflict of interest, but it seems to me that any conception of Whiteness that leads you to conclude that the Romans weren’t white is just a massive own-goal.
So, then we move on to the second circle, in which we find the populations of Spain, Portugal, most of Italy, Southern France, Finland, Hungary, and arguably the West Slavs and the Balts. All of these ethnicities have certain aspects that make them non-central examples of Whiteness - such as partial admixture from non-White substrates, like the Finns and the Iberians, or speaking a non-Indo-European language, in the case of the Hungarians and the Finns. Still, these are very White-looking people, relatively speaking, and their cultures have all played an important part in European history.
Past that, you get to a third circle, encompassing the South and East Slavs, the Romanians/Moldovars, the Maltese, the Sicilians, and the modern Greeks. The boundaries of this circle are blurry, and there are certainly aspects of these cultures which strike members of the central circle as quite distinctly foreign, which is part of why nativists and White Nationalists of the early 20th century vociferously resisted the mass immigration of these peoples into Anglosphere countries. Many of these ethnic groups contain very significant recent genetic admixture from non-European conqueror groups. An argument can be made (and sometimes is made) to exclude this circle from discussions of Whiteness. For me personally, though, any model of Whiteness that kicks out Tchaikovsky and Nikola Tesla is, again, an avoidable own-goal. The outer edges of this circle is where pretty much any commonly-used understanding of Whiteness would stop, though. There’s one glaring exception, though, and that is Ashkenazi Jews.
If you ask the average American if Jews are White, he’ll probably say yes, although it’s likely he hasn’t really thought much about it. If you show him a picture of, say, the Beastie Boys, he’ll readily and without hesitation identify it as a trio of White guys - he might not even be aware that they’re Jewish; still, if he reflects a bit on Jewish history and the fraught relationship between Jews and gentile Whites, he might concede that the question is complicated. And indeed it is! On the Dissident/White Identitarian Right, the question of whether or not Jews are White is generally considered to have been definitively answered - in the negative - and has been for some years now. However, there are some of us in that sphere who aren’t totally comfortable with nor confident about that answer.
I’ve spoken before about my warm feelings toward Jewish culture and Jewish people. The first girl I ever loved was (and still is!) Jewish, and my most recent long-term relationship was with a Jewish woman. The Jewish approach to comedy forms a foundational piece of my sense of humor: clever, heavily verbally-oriented, sarcastic, self-deprecating, at times neurotic, and suffused with a general sense of unease and alienation. From an early age, I strongly related to the Jewish intellectual tradition: contrarian, relentlessly critical and deconstructive, never taking anything at face value or uncritically accepting a proposition. It’s a culture that venerates intelligence, high verbal IQ, and the ability and willingness to argue. I strongly considered converting to Judaism for years, because I suspected that I would feel at home in that tradition. (And could land a beautiful Jewish woman - I have a type, and the Ashkenazi female phenotype epitomizes it.)
So, when I started getting deeper into the Dissident Right sphere, I found the discussion of the “JQ” to be by far the most difficult part to digest. While there is still a healthy Jew-welcoming (or, at least, Jew-neutral) faction of the White Right (Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has never publicly recanted his statement about Jews - “They look White to me!” and Paul Gottfried and Nathan Cofnas are still important rightist voices), the overwhelming stance of the hard Right is that the JQ has not only been answered in the negative, but is one of the most important questions - if not the single most important question - that one must answer when considering geopolitics today. I tend to keep my head down when the Jew stuff comes up in those spaces, simply because I know I’ll be shouted down and potentially singled out for suspicion as a subversive/infiltrator. But, the doubts and reservations I feel internally have not been resolved to my satisfaction.
Basically, I place Ashkenazi Jews in a nebulous fourth Circle of Whiteness. This peripheral circle’s boundaries are in flux, and ethnic groups in this circle can drop out or drift into this circle based on political and material developments within their own cultures. Groups that orbit in this circle also include the Japanese, the South Koreans, Latin American mestizos, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Indian Brahmins, and Arabs. The history of relations between these groups and the more central circles of Whiteness is incredibly fraught, and filled with periods of violence and persecution, conquest, inter-ethnic competition, and mistrust. Arabs and Turks were the great racial/religious enemy of Europeans for centuries, with enormous bloodshed and iterated conquests on both sides; on the flip side, they were on the forefront of scientific/cultural advances during a time of severe cultural regression and stagnation in Europe, and Arab/Turkish scholars were primarily responsible for preserving the works of the great Greco-Roman thinkers during that same time when White Europeans were busy abdicating their responsibilities as stewards of that tradition. Jews in medieval Europe were heavily represented in a parasitic rentier class, which contributed greatly to the animosity so many Europeans felt toward them; however, they were also massively overrepresented in vitally-important technical fields such as medicine. Something like two-thirds of doctors in medical Germany were Jews, meaning that countless gentile White lives were saved or immeasurably improved by Jews.
The great question, to my mind, when it comes to this fourth circle is: will these groups ever see themselves as White? Obviously these groups are always going to be peripheral to Whiteness; nobody is ever going to see a Japanese person as just as white as a Dutchman. However, with the looming population explosion in sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South more generally, we could be approaching a situation in which it will become necessary for the civilizations of the Global North to begin mounting a coordinated defense against the waves of migration that could soon begin spilling out of the Global South. In the same way that Christian Europeans had to bury their long-standing inter-ethnic enmities in order to present a unified front against Saracen and Turk invaders, it may be necessary for societies above a certain level of material and cultural development to bury the hatchet and form a phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap. If such a scenario arises, civilizations such as China, India and Iran may have to make the crucial choice about whether or not they want to stand with Europeans, in a united Eurasian front - a Fortress Eurasia, if you will - to repel the invaders, or whether to actively join or facilitate the invaders as they overwhelm and annihilate the already weakened and degenerated peoples of Europe and the Anglosphere.
If such a scenario arises, I want these civilizations on my side. (“I never thought I would die side-by-side with an Arab.” “What about a friend?”) Under such conditions, a criterion of “White enough” will necessarily be sufficient. Jews are well within the “White enough” category, as far as I’m concerned, and I wish that others on the White Right would not be so cavalier about continuing to ignite the already-burning bridge with an ethnic group that still has the capacity to become a powerful ally, but which also had the possibility to continue its development into an equally powerful and implacable enemy.
So, the Jewish Question is actually a series of questions, and some of those questions need to be answered by Jews themselves. I don’t know how many Jews, or what percentage of Jews, see themselves as my enemy, or are likely to act as my enemies as worldwide racial conflict begins to boil over. I’m open to believing that the answer isn’t as dire as many on my side believe. I don’t know the answer, and I’m still trying to talk it out.
Can someone explain this thread to a confused Slav? I thought "are Slavs white" question was just an expression of good old-fashioned Anglo supremacism. And that it was aimed at our culture. But people here seem to be seriously discussing whether we are white, in literal terms.
What does it mean? Personally I am probably paler than most Anglos. Most people in my country are paler than Italians or Spaniards. What's going on?
deleted
It's almost as if culture matters.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In WN circles I have never seen anyone suggest slavs are not white. Slavs were even regarded as Aryan under the Third Reich.
No, the plan was to culturally assimilate the more Aryan looking ones (huge genetic overlap between Czechs and Germans etc) and exterminate the rest.
With Russians, Germans openly planned to starve to death all Russian urban population as a food saving measures. (look up Hunger plan). They never managed that due to bureaucratic ineptness and unwilligness to go through with it on lower levels.
This is not true. The so-called "Hunger Plan" is yet another fabrication that takes a grain of truth and spins it into a plan of genocide. That so-called "plan" just referred to an estimate for the number of deaths of starvation that would happen as a consequence of German occupation of Soviet territory until the end of the war.
This starvation was estimated as a consequence of provisioning their own army through the end of the war. For example, from the wikipedia article:
This is not even close to some secret plan to exterminate the Slavs because they were not considered Aryan. It was an estimate of the effect of provisioning their army to continue the war.
Edit: There is also the fact that the Germans fielded one of the largest volunteer foreign armies in history, composed predominantly of Slavs. The volunteer rate of Ukranians to the German side rivaled the volunteer rate of British for the war effort. I know it's fashionable to think that the Germans had plans to turn around and genocide the people that were helping them, but there's no evidence for that. The best the mainstream narrative can do is misrepresent things like the "hunger plan" to assert genocidal plans that did not exist.
Are you seriously claiming that reaching an agreement to not supply cca thirty million people with any food because it might inconvenience your homeland and bring back memories of WW1 rationing & recognizing this would cause these people to die isn't planning mass murder ?
The claim that is at controversy is that the Germans had a plan to exterminate the Slavs. Those documents do not support that conclusion. It shows that the Germans considered mass starvation as a dilemma to provisioning their army to continue the war. You can say they should have surrendered and they are murderers for continuing the war. That's fine. But to say that this estimate was part of a secret scheme to genocide the Slavs is just not true.
There was mass starvation in India and Greece as a result of Allied blockades and diversions of food resources. Nobody would call that a planned genocide, even if you want to call it murder.
I never said that.
What they had a plan was for killing millions of conquered Soviet urban dwellers on account of the tight food supply.
It wasn't 'secret' in the slightest. Maybe not discussed in public or propagandised much, but forced population expulsions of Slavs and Germanisation of the more Aryan looking ones was a plan.
Come on. This is exactly what you said:
You said:
They had a plan to assimilate the Aryan looking ones and exterminate the rest of the Slavs.
As part of that plan, they planned to use hunger as the extermination method to achieve their goals.
The plan wasn't carried out due to lower level officers not following orders.
None of this is true. The reality is that there are some documents that assessed the logistical reality of the situation, and concluded that the Wehrmacht could only be fed from Russia in the third year of the war, and there was no alternative. This assessment soberly predicted mass starvation and regarded the situation as catastrophic. You can say that the Germans should have prioritized feeding the locals above feeding their army. Or that they should have surrendered at this point upon realizing the human cost of continuing the war. But that is all very different from the ahistorical claims you have made in your post.
These documents that historians use to spin a "Hunger plan" actually described the pragmatic concerns of the food situation rather than an implementation of some plan to exterminate the Slavs.
Lastly, Germany prioritized feeding locals based on those employed in the German war effort. Your notion that they went around giving food to those they thought looked Aryan enough and let the rest starve in order to exterminate them is a testament to the abysmal failure of mainstream historiography to move beyond ethnic hatred in interpreting history.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bullshit. Was their army powered by corpses? They (would have) died because the germans wanted them to die.
You’re doing a bait-and-switch by focussing on motive, as if a ridiculously small legitimate benefit makes the murder incidental and exonerates the murderer. ‘I didn’t kill him out of hate, he had 10 dollars in his wallet, so I had no choice’.
More options
Context Copy link
IIRC the definition of "aryan" was flexible and tended to widen over time, with groups that exhibited good military performance usually being defined as Aryan.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is where I begin to question your white nationalist credentials.
More options
Context Copy link
No, they definitely were not. Most Slavs were planned to be exterminated. The Nazis were even surprised at the number of Poles who looked "Aryan", and assumed that all of them were really just Polonized Germans.
The so-called "Generalplan Ost" referred to around 5 different iterations for plans of resettlement after German victory. Similar mass resettlements of ethnic Germans in areas conquered by the Allies also followed German defeat. None of these plans called for the extermination of the Slavs and none of those plans moved beyond the ideation stage. The mainstream historiographical interpretation of "Generalplan Ost" is one of many fabrications made by the Allies to post-hoc justify the destruction of Europe and Soviet conquests.
Alfred Rosenberg comes to mind as perhaps the most prominent Nazi racial theorist, and he regarded Slavs as Aryan. Slavs were even acknowledged as Aryan in law, i.e. in German racial laws:
Two Slavic groups are used as examples of Aryan in the racial law: Czechs and Poles.
There is a popular lie that "Aryan" only referred to the blonde haired and blue eyed phenotype. The lie that "Aryan" only included ethnic Germans is just a weaker version of the same lie made for the same reasons as the other lie.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People attempting to carve reality at the joints, using the idea that race is both genetic and cultural and pretending it’s just genetic.
As someone who identifies as American, only belatedly and reluctantly as white, and not at all as White, I am grateful for this peek inside the racial mind in its attempt to steelman and convince. To quote Ayn Rand in her essay on racism:
I have a working theory that the reason that rootless cosmopolitans, late-stage capitalists', and various other flavors of socially atomized WERIDo seem to gravitate toward racialism, (be it of the CRT or HBD variety) is that they lack a sense of culture. They compare a McDonalds in Tokyo to a McDonalds in Manhattan and conclude that the differences between the US and Japan are superficial because they lack any wider frame of reference. They judge on skin color because skin color is easy to see/measure. It's the old streetlight fallacy.
This doesn't make sense. A racialist would interpret far deeper meaning to the differences between a McDonalds in Tokyo and a McDonalds in Manhattan than a liberal would.
Yes, that is what I said.
The reason that socially-atomized young progressive urbanites such as yourself gravitate towards racialism (be it of the CRT, HBD, or WN variety) is that race is visible, and being socially atomized they have no real sense of culture. They ascribe outsize importance to superficial details like race because, true cultural differences (IE a city without a McDonalds) is completely beyond their ken.
To clarify, the entire rest of the world places profound emphasis on racial differences, both implicitly and explicitly. You are one of the very few who can claim to not place strong emphasis on racial differences and treat them as superficial. You can let that be your legacy and cling to it until the bitter end, if you want.
Incorrect
The vast majority of the world places the primary emphasis on language/culture first with genealogy a distant second but you mistake it it for race because you can't see the cultural issues that underpin it. As other users have noted both Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa considered Japanese to be "white" which is nonsensical from a genetic stand point but makes perfect sense in a culture first model.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is almost certainly true. In my experience, they compare their WEIRD acquaintances with WEIRD-mindcolonized non-Westerners and conclude that because everyone cares about Ukraine and climate change and reads and agrees with the NYT, regardless of nationality or race, we must all be the same on the inside. Next time you talk to someone who has "lived in China" or "worked in Tokyo for 5 years" consider that they may have never left their foreigner bubble or, even if they have, they spent time around non-Westerners who were Western-educated and, importantly, were the kind of people who preferred to hang around with Western foreigners.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link