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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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This seems to me a quite bad refutation of white nationalism.

The best refutation of white nationalism is fact that there is no such thing as "white nation", that all the hundreds of millions of pale skinned people all over the world (white nationalists themselves vigorously disagree all the time on the basic issue who exactly should count as "white") do not see themselves as "one nation" and do not see any stranger with the same skin color as their brothers or sisters.

White nationalists have to build their nation out of nothing, have to organize, educate and agitate on unprecendted worldwide scale, have to persuade, for example, Balkan and Eastern European peoples to put down their mutual grievances and see each other as fellow white comrades.

Do you see any force capable of such monumental task? I don't.

The best refutation of white nationalism is fact that there is no such thing as "white nation", that all the hundreds of millions of pale skinned people all over the world (white nationalists themselves vigorously disagree all the time on the basic issue who exactly should count as "white") do not see themselves as "one nation" and do not see any stranger with the same skin color as their brothers or sisters.

I remember reading a couple of discussions online following the first Black Panther movie and the first season of Bob Hearts Abishola, respectively, making a parallel point about "black" — that things like "Pan-Africanism" have always been primarily phenomena of "diaspora" blacks (Erik Killmonger, Gloria Tyler), while Africans have their own particular national and sub-national identities, rivalries, and enmities.

(This parallel also provides a good rejoinder to the 'if you, a "white" American, want to live in a "white ethnostate," just go back to Europe, bro' argument — how's Liberia been doing?)

But note that while the above militates against a global "black" identity, it doesn't remove the salience of such an identity in the American context; hence the increasing ADoS discourse. There's no "black nation," but there's quite arguably a "black American nation." Ethnogenesis is a thing.

And the parallel goes for white Americans… to a degree. For various reasons, including, but not limited to, the "break" from the "old country" and its culture being less extreme for (mostly, to varying degrees) willing immigrants versus slaves brought in chains. The "melting pot" did a lot, but so did "Albion's Seed," as it were.

So there isn't even one "white American nation" — there's at least two, and they're increasingly hostile. A lot of times, when a certain type of "white person" goes on about how awful "white people" are, they don't mean themselves, they mean the other tribe. As I've put it to people before, I'm not a "white nationalist," but I am, perhaps, a Borderer nationalist. And "build[ing] their nation out of nothing… to organize, educate and agitate" on that much smaller and more homogenous scale would indeed be an easier task than "convincing Balkan and Eastern European peoples to put down their mutual grievances and see each other as fellow white comrades" — consider, for example, why quite a number of "white Americans" with no historical, familial, or geographic ties to the South will display a Confederate flag?

Except, I, for one, don't particularly see trying to carve out a Borderer ethnostate as much of a path forward either, even if the "tribes" are increasingly segregating geographically. Instead, I see the best path forward for my people to lie outside the (increasingly outdated) Westphalian nation-state model.