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From the UK: White pupils excluded from extra Saturday literacy lessons
There was some discussion at the end of the last CW thread about the purpose of race-based immigration policies. Why not just test directly for IQ? Why use race, which can only be a proxy for other desirable traits like IQ or low criminality? The simple answer is: to avoid situations like this!
In general, I think it's a mistake for ethnonationalists to focus so strongly on purportedly intrinsic psychological properties of certain groups, like IQ or criminality. It does leave you open to the question of why you're an ethno nationalist, instead of an IQ nationalist or a low-crime nationalist (a focus on crime rates in particular leads to consequences that are unpalatable for the far right: if your overriding goal is to reduce crime rates, then you should be trying to build a society that has as few males as possible!).
An argument for ethnonationalism that sidesteps these concerns is that racial discrimination and preferential race-based treatment are more difficult to implement in a racially homogeneous society. If everyone in your city is white, then it won't even make sense for the local school district to set up a special program for black children. Instead, they'll just direct their resources towards the one and only racial group that is actually present.
It will be objected that there can be intra-European ethnic conflicts as well. Why stop at European nationalism? Why not separate out, say, the Anglos and the Germans too, to make sure they don't start engaging in preferential ethnic treatment as well. To which I say: if that's what you want, then fine! If two European ethnic groups did get into an ethnic conflict, then I would recommend (as a possible option, assuming that reconciliation does not seem feasible) that they should split up and live apart from each other as well. But there is currently no such ethnic conflict. There are however active tensions between whites and other groups, so that's the level of analysis that people tend to work at. Ethnonationalism is not an a priori eternal first principle of political organization; it is a pragmatic proposal designed to ameliorate ongoing conflicts, the same way that a couple can propose a divorce if they aren't getting along.
Granted, I don't think a Saturday school program only for black children is a catastrophic loss for white children. I think the school system itself plays a rather small role in a child's "education" anyway, in comparison to genetics and the child's home environment. But it is symptomatic of how it is currently popular to show preferential treatment to non-whites in Western countries today. More sweeping examples would be university affirmative action (recently made illegal in the US, but, I don't think university admissions officers are simply going to give up consideration of race that easily) and corporate DEI initiatives. It simply wouldn't be as appealing for Disney to woke-ify their classic franchises if they were based in a country that was 95% white to begin with.
IQ is like strength. It measures performance.
Race is more like nationality, it's about measuring what team you're on.
Say aliens with 1000 IQ showed up tomorrow and harmed our interests by scooping up all the world's forests for their zoo or whatever. It makes no sense to support them just because they're high IQ. For that matter, it makes no sense for Englishmen to support fellow Englishmen who sell them out to foreign interests or exploit public resources for personal gain.
Intelligence is not an unalloyed good in all contexts - just consider our longstanding concerns about AI! The most important thing is what team one is on, capabilities are secondary. If someone is high IQ but uses that intellect to market addictive drugs or perpetrate financial scams, they're worse than their anti-social low IQ peers who tend to be less destructive.
Race, religion, culture, nationality, language are the surest ways of defining what team people are on, in that order. These factors last longer than political ideologies. See the conflicts between communist Russia and China, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Now some will say that different races can work in harmony under a single state. I agree. They can work in harmony, for a time. Yet there's nearly always someone on top, nearly always tension and an eventual break-up. Multiculturalism as we know it today has only really been tried since the 1960s. The Austrian empire ruled over diverse nationalities for centuries (and not nearly as diverse as we're talking about today), yet it still collapsed back into its constituent parts.
We grossly underestimate the importance of unity. What happens when there's a major, serious crisis on the scale of the world wars? Someone will lose, some countries will be put under incredible strain by defeat and recrimination. Multi-national states disintegrate, national states survive. Just imagine if your country suffered 1/10th as much as North Korea. Fifty years of harsh Japanese occupation, then a devastating failed war where every single urban centre was incinerated by the USAF such that people were living in holes in the ground. Then forty years of Stalinist dictatorship, a famine as your superpower ally disintegrated along with your trade, near total isolation from world markets (remember that North Korea is mountainous, cold and lacks much fertile land or oil), blatant hostility from another superpower (Axis of Evil speech)... and despite all that they still have thermonuclear weapons, ballistic missiles plus a huge army! If North Korea had been multi-ethnic, it would've fallen apart like Iraq and Syria. IQ is also a factor, Koreans are pretty smart.
Anyway, diversity isn't strength, unity is strength. Trading unity for brainpower makes the state fragile and more prone to internal conflicts. Everyone should be on the same team, especially when chips are down. This very story proves that the UK is not united, there are open divisions even in peacetime. Consider the RAF stories of whites being rejected, general diversity aspirations throughout the workforce. This is a bad sign!
Why does tension and eventual breakup mean race must be the main arbiter of which team you're on? France had tension despite being relatively homogeneous right before the French Revolution; China broke up and reunified countless times throughout history, all the while slowly Sinicizing major parts of modern China so that even genetically different people who didn't use to be "Chinese" became culturally "Chinese."
Racial differences are not the sole cause of internal conflict within a country. China (or at least the core parts of what we think of as typical China) has been majority Han for thousands of years. That unity and staying power is impressive. China kept returning, Rome died. China was the opposite of multicultural for the period where it was homogenizing everyone into being Han. Indeed, it was more modern-sounding innovations like affirmative action for Mongols and Central Asians in civil service tests under the Yuan, (amongst other things) that angered the Han.
Because it's the most obvious, salient difference. If you're of a different race it almost certainly means you have different culture as well, probably different language and the other dividing characteristics I mentioned above. Yugoslavia, the Austrian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Soviet Union, Roman Empire... Where there are racial differences, these usually become central in times of imperial collapse - the French Empire was unique in being fairly homogenous and even then we have Haiti as a clear example of what I'm talking about: someone on top, tension, break-up and collapse of the old system.
Ah I see where you’re coming from, thanks for elaborating. Given the genetic diversity of “Han,” is it not possible to extend racial identity to promote group cohesion? I can think of “white” expanding to include Italians as another example where the genetics didn’t change but the concept of what the “race” entails did.
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Only if people choose to define themselves in those terms. For example, although there might be some American whites who choose to define themselves as being on the same "team" as whites in Great Britain and Australia, most of them would define themselves as being on the American "team." Every individual has dozens of identities, and it is not a given which one will be most salient.
This is remarkably ahistorical. The idea that "nationalities" exist is a comparatively recent one, as is the concomitant belief nationalism, i.e, the belief that each nationality has a right to it own state. Therefore, the argument it is impossible for one state to encompass more than one "nationality" is essentially circular; if people living in one state define themselves as belonging to different nationalities, then of course the state is going to have legitimacy problems. But, if they don't, then it won't.
Most importantly, the assumption that the fact that I identify with race X means that I see race X as my "team" (i.e. my nation, i.e, the identify to which I owe the greatest degree of loyalty) is wrong.
I'm not so sure that's actually the case. You can "choose" not to define yourself as Armenian, but that isn't going to change how the Committee of Union and Progress treats you. Rachel Dolezal chooses to identify herself as being on the same "team" as black people, but I don't think the world actually treats her that way - they treat her as white, regardless of how she chooses to define herself. The external world absolutely uses these traits to identify and categorise people, and while you can disagree with that assignment that isn't going to change how other people treat you.
Could you please provide a lot more elaboration on this? I can find evidence for the existence of the word "gentile" remarkably far back in history, and the Roman concept of Natio very obviously predates the peace of Westphalia. There's a concept here that has clearly been in use for recorded history, and I want to know what actually distinguishes nationality in the sense that you're describing it from the historically related terms and concepts.
But your claim was specifically about self-identity
Your claim was also about the political ramifications of group self-identity, and the impossibility of long-term unity among groups. The example of Rachel Dolezal does not seem relevant to that claim.
You also made the claim that "Race, religion, culture, nationality, language are the surest ways of defining what team people are on, in that order." The choice I referred to was re the "in that order" claim. (Note, by the way, the abject failure of the pan-Arabism and pan-African movements).
The issue is not whether or not people divided the world into groups, nor that they were able to understand that some people spoke different languages or practiced different religions. The issue is the political relevance thereof, because that was the claim that you made. What distinguishes the concept of the "nation" once the concept of "nationalism" developed is that is inherently a political concept: Nationalism states that every "nation" has a right to its own state. So, of course once the constituent groups of the Austrian empire (and of the Ottoman empire) began seeing themselves as "nations" rather than as simply interest groups or other subnational groups, those empires became imperiled.
I'm terribly sorry but you appear to have made a mistake(don't worry I've made it on here before, and I think quite possibly with you in particular!) - I'm not who you were arguing with and didn't make any of those claims. That said it seems like I deserve some of the blame if I missed the context of the points in your post.
No, the reason I used the term gentile is because it quite literally translates to "nations", at least as far as I can see in every single source - though I freely admit to not being able to speak ancient Hebrew and hence am relying on the work of others. The jews saw the people around them as "the nations" and even used the same word to refer to Judah - these people were very much using the term nation in the same sense that people do today, and I don't think the idea that they didn't explicitly state that Israel has a right to exist means that they aren't referring to a nation. There's very clearly a continuity of concept here and I don't believe it is worthwhile to say that "nationality" didn't exist in the past when it seems to me what you're actually saying is that the term nation acquired certain political connotations in the 19th century that it did not explicitly have previously.
Yes, sorry I did confuse you with OP.
But I believe that is a different meaning of "nation." In particular, the reference to Israel indicates the use of "nation" as a synonym for "state." But Israel is not a "nation" in the sense meant re nationalism. The Jews, in the eyes of Zionists, anyhow, are a "nation." So are the Kurds (in their own eyes), the Basques (ditto), etc. Israel is a state, or more specifically, a "nation-state.".
Part of my problem here is that I am not saying anything idiosyncratic. Rather, I am simply stating the standard understanding of historians and political scientists, which is why I said OP's claim re the dissolution of the Austrian empire was ahistorical: It is inconsistent with the standard scholarly understanding. And, there is a lot of scholarship on this; nationalism is possibly the single most historically significant idea to be developed in the last 300 years (other than classical liberalism and, perhaps, Marcism). Now, perhaps that understanding is incorrect. Perhaps the concept of nationalism is much older than they say. But, it seems to me that in order to show that, one must engage directly with those claims, which I don’t see happening thus far.
Sorry if I was being unclear again here, but I was talking about the ancients - I am not so sure that the Kingdom of Israel qualifies as a nation-state, especially when you had the Kingdom of Judah right next door. But the main reason I had for bringing up the ancient hebrews is that the term goyim has historically been translated as "nations", and the Romans had their Natio. There's clearly a concept here that people have been using for thousands of years, and our modern conception of the term nation is very much a development of that idea, especially when the concept of a "right to exist" would be nonsensical in the context of the late Bronze age.
This starts getting into murky territory and playing games with language, because I think that the Romans and Greeks of antiquity actually did have a national identity. What exactly was it that united the Achaeans, Dorics, Ionians and Aeolians? They recognised each other as related, and the Romans just called them the Greeks. And speaking of Greeks and Romans, which were the Byzantines? Just to clarify, I'm not saying that nationalism as we know it was a serious force or motivating factor in people's lives, but it very much seems to me like there's a continuity of concept here that people have been aware of at some level for a considerable amount of time, to the point that we are still using the same words they did when we describe it.
One thing it is not, is playing games with language. When historians talk about nationalism and national identity, they mean something very specific. I am no expert on the ancient Greeks, but when you say, "What exactly was it that united the Achaeans, Dorics, Ionians and Aeolians?," isn’t the answer, nothing? Did they see themselves as one people, or four? The mere fact that they saw themselves as related is not particularly relevant --so do Americans, Canadians, Aussies, and Brits. Nor is it relevant that the Romans saw them as Greeks, because the concept of the nation is all about self-identification.
More importantly, this is all a bit off topic. The modern concept of the nation might have had a precursor or two; after all, the idea must have come from somewhere. And the Jews, being the victim of an expulsion and having been treated as "others" for a long time, are a likely candidate, because self-identity as a nation often grows from being othered, as well as from historical events like expulsions (the residents of Palestine, for example, probably thought of themselves as Arabs, rather than Palestinians, pre-1948). But the initial claim, that a multiracial state is impossible to maintain, because look at the Austrian empire, is based on an assumption about the nature of identity which is inconsistent with the scholarly understanding thereof.
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Sure, there is such a thing as American culture. It is possible to decenter the importance of some identities - religion is very important in Lebanon but less so in the US. But do you not see the huge importance of race in America or the UK? There's a huge diversity apparatus trying to allocate people of the right race in the right place. I've filled in job applications in the current year, I know this to be true. Simply being a citizen of a state doesn't cut it any more.
Really? There had never been nationalist uprisings against foreign rule before the 19th century? Nationalism got more popular and powerful then but nationalism has been a factor for all of human history. What about the Judeans rising up against Rome, was there not even a little nationalism there?
States can encompass multiple nations but it introduces fragilities that often prove harmful. You can lump Occitan and Brittany together, put Wessex and Northumberland and Scotland together with sound management. But East Anglia and Mogadishu or Papua New Guinea is a much bigger ask.
Putting you specifically to one side, if everyone in America is on the same team, why all the rioting and strife, why the existence of this website which primarily exists to discuss political conflict in the USA, why the massive and persistent variation in voting by race?
I didn't say otherwise. OP made a claim that race is inherently the surest way of determining what "team" someone is on, and I was taking issue only with that specific claim.
No. Not nationalist uprisings based on the principle of nationalism. There have been uprisings based on maltreatment, or no taxation without representation, or neglect of local interests, real or imagined ("What have the Romans ever done for us?"), but not on the claim, "all 'nations' have the right to their own state; we are a 'nation'; therefore, we have the right to our own state." Because that was OP's claim: That governing a multi-group state is inherently impossible, because look at the Austrian empire! Even it eventually dissolved! I was merely pointing out that that happened only because of the advent of nationalism, and only because the constituent groups of the empire came to see themselves as "nations."
Maybe, but that is a much weaker claim than the original claim of impossibility.
I cannot tell exactly how you are using the term "nation." If you mean it in the nationalism sense, your claim is true by definition, but not every group sees itself as a nation. Most do not.
Because the inhabitants thereof are of different races? Or because they have different interests?
I didn't say that everyone on America is on the same team always. After all, all states, even monoracial ones, have political conflict among subgroups. And, as an aside. you are greatly overstating the scale of the variation in voting by race.
No, I said:
Furthermore, nations have always saw themselves as nations. It's not a complex idea. If you have a distinct culture, ethnicity, language, you want autonomy, you want to advance your own interests first and foremost as opposed to be part of foreign empires. Why did nations fight wars against foreign occupation, even before the 19th century? Why did a bunch of Greek states ally together to resist Persia (others collaborated yet the odds were wildly stacked against the Athenian-Spartan led alliance)? They wanted to preserve their independence, their freedom, their rights. The Persians ruled over many nations at the time and were fairly tolerant, yet the Greeks saw a fundamental, worth-dying-for need for independence.
By this logic you could obliterate nationalism entirely. Malaysia might complain about British exploitation of their resources, the Slovakians might complain about economic inequality and Czechs running things, the Norwegians might complain about Swedish protectionism hurting their interests. My point is that you can't separate maltreatment, unfair taxation, neglect of local interests from nationalism. How can the Norwegians know that it's unfair that Sweden gains from protectionism while Norway loses, how are they able to distinguish between them.
Two heads of the same coin. People from PNG have a completely different culture and way of life to East Anglians, why would there be any cohesion there? Witchhunts in the UK and witchhunts in PNG carry very different connotations.
In 2012, 97% of blacks who voted, voted for Obama. The significant differences between presidents Obama, Biden and Trump hardly seems to change these ratios.
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And my point is that you can. As I said, there is a very important difference between the claim, "we should be independent because we will be better off/taxed less/get better treatment if we are independent" and the claim, "we should be independent, regardless of whether we would be treated better, because we are a "nation" and every nation has a right to be independent."
You are choosing an outlier among an outlier and using it to represent the norm. The historical norm for black support of the Democratic candidate over the last 40 years is about 88-99 pct. Other groups range from the 40s to the 60s.
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Ireland fought for freedom for 800 years, but according to this claim, only the last 150 were for nationalist reasons. I don't understand that claim at all. The big nations, like Italy and Germany were only created in the 19th century, but prior to that there were smaller nations, like Ulster or Saxony. Ancient Greece saw itself as a nation in comparison to the barbarians and came together to fight the Persians. Presumably there is a reason that people want to claim nationalism is a new idea, but it does seem to go back as far as 1066 and all that, if not further.
I don't know that even the last 150 years was for nationalist reasons, because I am not familiar enough with the specifics. Nationalism is a very specific concept: It is that every "nation" has a right to its own state. (What constitutes a "nation" is a more amorphous question, but sometimes "a people" is used in lieu of "a nation", which perhaps captures the concept better). Hence, the claim that "we should be independent because the English are oppressing us" is not a nationalist claim. Nor is "we should be independent because we were independent in the past." Nor is "we should be independent because our interests will be better served thereby." A nationalist reason is: "The Irish are a 'nation" (or, alternatively, a "people") distinct from the English. Therefore, because all nations/peoples have a right to their own state, we should be independent."
Note that this conversation is rooted in OP's claim that the dissolution of the Austrian empire was inevitable because it was multi-ethnic. The point is that it was not inevitable unless and until its constituent groups came to see themselves as "nations" and to adhere to the tenets of nationalism.
This seems to be older than 150 years to me. "A Nation Once Again", the Irish song, is 170 years old. Parnell's "No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country—thus far shalt thou go and no further." refers to Ireland losing its parliament in 1800. Was O'Connell a nationalist when he said "“No person knows better than you do that the domination of England is the sole and blighting curse of this country. It is the incubus that sits on our energies, stops the pulsation of the nation's heart and leaves to Ireland, not gay vitality but horrid the convulsions of a troubled dream.”
After the war of independence in 1921, Ireland demanded "a self-governing Ireland with restitution of confiscated lands and churches, freedom of movement, and a strong Roman Catholic identity" exactly the same terms that O'Neill had asked for in November 1599. Few doubt that De Valera was a Nationalist. Why wasn't O'Neill one, given that he asked for identical terms?
Wikipedia writes:
This seems late to me, and 1169 is a more natural date, if not 1014, or earlier.
In the Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib (The War of the Irish with the Foreigners), which described the Battle of Clontarf the Irish were described as: brave, valiant champions; soldierly, active, nimble, bold, full of courage, quick, doing great deeds, pompous, beautiful, aggressive, hot, strong, swelling, bright, fresh, never weary, terrible, valiant, victorious heroes and chieftains, and champions, and brave soldiers, the men of high deeds, and honour, and renown of Erinn.
The foreigners as: the shouting, hateful, powerful, wrestling, valiant, active, fierce-moving, dangerous, nimble, violent, furious, unscrupulous, untamable, inexorable, unsteady, cruel, barbarous, frightful, sharp, ready, huge, prepared, cunning, warlike, poisonous, murderous, hostile Danars; bold, hard-hearted Danmarkians, surly, piratical foreigners, blue-green, pagan; without reverence, without veneration, without honour, without mercy, for God or for man.
Little has changed, and the foreigners still have blue-green hair.
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I have a lot of trouble with this claim as it seems to me that we can find many precursors to nationalism before its supposed birth in the 19th century or with Kant. If the claim is that the idea that "nationalities" exist is recent, the idea that peoples exist is surely not. If the claim is that the idea that all peoples have an inherent right to govern their own nation is new, specific claims for self-government based on the differing origins and interests of the ruler and ruled are not.
The only type of nationalism I have done serious study on is Irish nationalism, and it seems to very much predate the 19th century. The earliest case for Irish independence I know of was first published in 1645 with the Disputatio Apologetica de jure Regni Hiberniae or An argument defending the right of the kingdom of Ireland by John O'Mahoney. Of the four reasons he gives for Ireland's right to independence consent of the governed (at least in the sense that the Irish kings only consented to the English claim under duress) is one.
If nationalism is defined as the universalisation of and international commitment to propogate what were before only specific claims for self-rule then this is a problem of definition and I can't refute it, but to say that this marks the beginning of the concept of nationalism as nationalist parties and partisans have seen it seems to ignore the giants we're standing on.
But, does O'Mahoney make a claim that people in Ireland identify as a separate nationality, and have an intrinsic right to a separate state on that basis alone, or does he merely that they did not consent to being ruled by the English? Those are very different claims. See, eg, the Declaration of Independence, which rests on an argument re the latter (specifically, that people have the right to withdraw their consent when government becomes destructive of the rights that govt is created to protect). An argument based on nationalism is that group X, because it is a "nation," has a right to self-determination, regardless of whether the imperial power ruling over them is just, unjust, originally based on consent, or whatever. But that is not the claim made in the Declaration of Independence.
Also, how much was the uprising in Ireland tied to the ongoing religious conflict in England and environs? it is one thing to say, "we are being oppressed by outsiders, so we should be independent of them." It is a different thing to say, "all nations (ie. nationalities) have the right to self-determination. The Irish are a nation; therefore we have the right to self-determination.
It seems to me that "precursors" is doing a lot of work there. All historically important ideas have precursors, after all.
I'm not sure but the distinction between 'Gael' and 'Englishman' was very common and goes back at least as far as the 12th century and the 'Gael' and 'Gall' (foreigner i.e Vikings) the 9th.
If they don't consent to being ruled by the English than what's the alternative? A concept of self-rule is implicit in the complaint.
It was intensified by the religious split but it long predated it. The Norman conquerers basically became Gaelicised and adopted the local language, loyalties and customs and England's defacto holdings shrank. Things naturally tended towards Ireland being its own political world until the English reasserted their claim in the 16th century.
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While probably true, no one who’s willing to listen to that argument will be in a position to make decisions about education policy any time soon- either because of preexisting arguments or because their paychecks depend on it. The policy itself is small potatoes, but the clear intent is to discriminate against whites and it indicates that increasingly discrimination against whites and only against whites is acceptable.
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Haringey is approximately 32% White British. My estimate is that among school-aged children, it’s more like 20%. Most of the white British will be wealthy Londoners who live in the affluent neighborhoods of Highgate and Muswell Hill, who will almost certainly send their children to private schools. (Quite a few of the rest will be Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have their own schools too). The rest of the borough is “among the most deprived local authorities in England” according to Wikipedia.
My guess is that there are very, very few white english children at the schools sending students to these programs. So while white working class English boys are indeed one of the lowest performing demographics in UK schools (as many conservative opinion columnists have noted in response to this program) there are very, very few of those left in Haringey. (And many if not most of the working class white children in the borough will be the children of slavic immigrants, who seem to perform fine).
For what it’s worth, I think this stuff is pretty smart and pretty good. Whatever becomes of the immigration debate, encouraging a culture of achievement, responsibility, respect for education and conscientiousness in young black men (which this program seems to want to do) is surely a good thing. It would be a bad thing if the government shut it down.
Goes to show how important numerical superiority is. Once the share of the population of ones ethnic group decreases sufficiently, persecution of it becomes of lesser concern. Usually it is the other way a round, with minorities being discriminated against being viewed as less justifiable due to lacking democratic means to defend themselves.
I don’t think it’s of no concern, I just think that the intersection of the venn diagram of:
Native
Poor/working class
Bad literacy
Lives in this part of Haringey and attends one of the schools that is part of this program
..will be almost nonexistent. How many white working class Dutch-American boys go to public schools in the Bronx?
If there are a negligible number of them, then what do you gain by locking them out?
"Sorry Bobby, we want a racially-pure program, so we won't help you" doesn't fly with me even if it's only targeting one student.
I'm not a liberal. I don't believe in universality. If it turns out for a variety of reasons that we discuss here regularly that black kids in this part of London need this extra support with literacy then I don't have a problem with the (largely black, as I understand it) Saturday school teachers doing their best to fix the issue. This is exactly the kind of stuff that, if it works, is actually worth my tax money, as opposed to so much of government spending.
Forgive my ignorance, but that still doesn't answer the question: What do you gain? Are apartheid systems better than universal ones in some way?
I'll admit that most of my opposition is based on liberalism, but even something as bland as "literacy is good" points towards more inclusive programs instead.
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I mean it won’t work- it’s probably more likely to backfire- but that’s par for the course. If extra support for literacy is needed then there’s no reason to expect that discrimination against whites is an important part thereof- if it is, that has to be explicitly argued, which it hasn’t been.
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