seigneur wrote:

Yes and yes. And what is *your* point? That there are no nation-states? That everybody is deluded about their ethnicity, about to what country, language, or race they belong, or to what degree they have adapted to wherever they happen to live?

​What I wrote directly contradicts those points. My point would be that the USA lacks racial homogeneity but that even Poland, a current classical example of a linguistically and culturally homogenous nation state, can lack a history of being so homogenous before the 20th century. Its people, through their history, can have assimilated people originally from different racial and linguistic backgrounds in reasonable numbers and can have failed, through long periods, to understand their national identity in terms of cultural, linguistic and racial homogeneity . (If speakers of different Western Slavonic languages and  speakers of East Slavonic languages (and Lithuanians) are treated as a single race though the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at its greatest extent could be treated as a pretty mono-racial state. Looking at genetics you could probably make an argument that there is a single Slavic race whose members have more in common genetically than what seperates them).    

​I thought that a position like that of Clinias, as far as I understood it at the time I was posting, would require that nation states or races have longer histories of homogeneity and lack of assimilation than is available in a 'model' nation state like today's Poland.    

​The role of Marxists in this region is interesting because it illustrates that Marxists are not always hostile to national identity, nationalism etc. but at times have worked to strengthen or support it. Communists may have produced even more homogenous national societies through working to eliminate the previous aristocracies and hereditary middle classes while in power. 



 

Last edited by FZM (3/08/2018 4:48 pm)

FZM wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Yes and yes. And what is *your* point? That there are no nation-states? That everybody is deluded about their ethnicity, about to what country, language, or race they belong, or to what degree they have adapted to wherever they happen to live?

​What I wrote directly contradicts those points. My point would be that the USA lacks racial homogeneity but that even Poland, a current classical example of a linguistically and culturally homogenous nation state, can lack a history of being so homogenous before the 20th century. Its people, through their history, can have assimilated people originally from different racial and linguistic backgrounds in reasonable numbers...

None of this changes my point or even speaks to it.

FZM wrote:

...and can have failed, through long periods, to understand their national identity in terms of cultural, linguistic and racial homogeneity.

To "understand their national identity" is a pretty subtle thing. Sociologists, historians and philosophers ponder over things like this. Ordinary people simply live it. They worry over identity only when there is an *identity crisis* due to war, mass immigration, or the like. And, in general, pre-19th ("national awakening") era perceptions of identity would have been mostly something other than "national", which does not obviate the fact that Poland's homogeneity (or level of diversity) has been about the same for a millennium - because to keep things comparable we must use the same criteria throughout.

FZM wrote:

​The role of Marxists in this region is interesting because it illustrates that Marxists are not always hostile to national identity, nationalism etc. but at times have worked to strengthen or support it.

Marxists are not always Marxists. I mean, look at the different strands of Marxism, Bolshevism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and then look at Social Democrat ideologues very cautious of Bolshevism and  Stalinism. Both are Marxist, but at least revolutionary versus non-revolutionary are two radically different things.

Ideology is one thing. Actual politics with concrete policies may turn out something totally different. When Bolshevists came into power by coup and then started the civil war to keep power, many things changed, such as embracing universal terror just to keep power and creating a strict top-down diktat form of government instead of bottom-up mandate according to their platform. This is not a leftist phenomenon. It's a power-struggle phenomenon at critical times. There was both Red and White Terror at that time.

I am not at all surprised that once Stalin got into power and it was clear that the world revolution was not happening all by itself as had been prophesied, he had to establish an actual country with population and borders, with interior and foreign policies. He had to, regardless of ideology. Therefore nationalism. And to enhance his personal position - personality cult. This is not surprising that Marxists may do it. When pressed in a similar situation, dictators of all minds and colours have done it.

But by now, Clinias has invented the label Masonic-Marxist. There is no end to his fruitful contributions.

Last edited by seigneur (3/09/2018 2:06 am)

seigneur wrote:

FZM wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Yes and yes. And what is *your* point? That there are no nation-states? That everybody is deluded about their ethnicity, about to what country, language, or race they belong, or to what degree they have adapted to wherever they happen to live?

​What I wrote directly contradicts those points. My point would be that the USA lacks racial homogeneity but that even Poland, a current classical example of a linguistically and culturally homogenous nation state, can lack a history of being so homogenous before the 20th century. Its people, through their history, can have assimilated people originally from different racial and linguistic backgrounds in reasonable numbers...

None of this changes my point or even speaks to it.

​Sorry, I have maybe lost the thread of whatever point you were trying to make, I suppose, to Clinias. That the de jure citizens of the USA are more genetically diverse than the citizens of Poland? That there isn't the same level of linguistic continuity among the de jure citizens of the USA as among the citizens of present day Poland and that the bulk of US citizens haven't lived in the same geographical location for 1000 years whereas the bulk of present day Poles have?

​But, as far as I can see Clinias doesn't recognise the political entity that is the United States and its citizens as constituting a real nation or race anyway. If you treat British settlers and generally Germanic settlers (why not? Poland is homogenous because of the genetic similarity between all Slavs and similarity between all Slavic languages)  as a race or nation then the main difference between that and the Polish race is that one has moved further from its original home.

 

FZM wrote:

If you treat British settlers and generally Germanic settlers (why not? Poland is homogenous because of the genetic similarity between all Slavs and similarity between all Slavic languages)  as a race or nation then the main difference between that and the Polish race is that one has moved further from its original home.

 

 Yes, they moved away from their own home into the midst of other people's home, i.e. the colonists do not have their real home there. This is a significant point, don't you agree? As a corollary of this point, it's dubious of colonists to call themselves a nation or regard themselves as a nation-state with some particular background, language, skin colour, "Christian values" or  something like this. Whereas Poland is the home of Poles, always was as far as history goes.

Last edited by seigneur (3/09/2018 7:08 am)

I have not participated in this thread mainly because I find politics an utter malignant waste of time. The debate however was ill-formulated from the word off - one should not have asked do nations exist (they don't) but whether people ought to be nationalist. Likewise Clinias was really trying to stake his argument on an analogy between nation and family as based on blood relation (something I would deny even in the case of family). This has been obscured by unnecessary capitalization, interjected appeals to the Greeks and a failure to even comprehend basic philosophical terms like 'contingent'.

Clinias wrote:

[To not present reality, and all the facts of reality---is to lie. To not have the WHOLE truth is a lie. And God says in the Book of Revelation, that there is a special Lake of Fire, for those that lie. 
 

We call them politicians (and for some reason, probably usage of the black arts on their part, many people listen to them)