Posted by seigneur  3/09/2018 9:44 am | #61 |
DanielCC wrote:
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).
It so happens that I also inform my own views about the nature of countries (particularly nation-states) on the analogy of family. Interestingly, when man and woman come together to found a family, it's important that they should NOT have close blood relation. This fact has its function in the analogy.
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Posted by Timocrates 5/13/2018 6:39 pm | #62 |
If Anthony D. Smith is correct, the ‘core doctrine’ of nationalism consists of the following:
1. humanity is divided into nations, each with its own character, history and destiny;
2. the nation is the sole source of political power;
3. loyalty to the nation takes precedence over other loyalties;
4. to be free, human beings must belong to a nation;
5. nations require maximum autonomy and self-expression;
6. global peace and justice can only be built on the basis of a plurality
of free nations.
It would seem to me that at least 3 is highly problematic for a Christian. Possibly some of the others as well.
What do you think?
I agree that 3 is out of the question and leads to idolatry of the State, perhaps the deepest and most insidious and dangerous belief that fueled and exasperated all the other evils and crimes of communist and fascist states. The state is more of a means of service to the people and community of peoples/nations than an end in itself.
"The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16 (3).
Defend your Family. Join the U.N. Family Rights Caucus.
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Posted by Timocrates 5/13/2018 6:47 pm | #63 |
"For Adrian Hastings (1997), the very act of translating the Bible into the vernacular turned the reading public into a 'chosen people'. By allowing translation of Sacred Texts from Hebrew/Greek into the vernacular, Christianity encouraged the development of ethnicities and pre-modern nations. It also endowed the latter with a new sense of sacredness attached to their collective identities by supplying a ready-made sense of God-sent chosenness. Even in a secular world, the most powerful election myth remains a Biblical one: ....
Firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian values, nationalism then spread outside Christianity in the wake of colonialism. It is through the mirror of the Bible which nations are initially conceived: 'The Bible provided… the original model of the nation. Without it and its Christian interpretation and implementation, it is arguable that nations and nationalism, as we know them, could never have existed…' (Hastings 1997: 4). In particular, the role of territory is comparable to that of biblical Israel (see also Grosby 1995). The concept of a Holy Land has been passed on to all significant nationalist movements, either civically or ethnically based. (Ref: Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations. Contributors: Athena S. Leoussi - Editor, Steven Grosby - Editor. Publisher: Edinburgh University Press. Place of publication: Edinburgh. Publication year: 2007. Page number: 20)Utterly fascinating. No telling what one finds when doing research. Here all sorts of people claiming that Christianity is incompatible with nationalism---and lo and behold, a researcher surmises that it was the Bible and Christianity in the vernacular that created nationalism! Wow.
Isn't that tragic, however? The whole point of the Christendom was that people were first members of the Christian faith; national and ethnic affiliation were only of secondary importance. Frenchmen, Spaniards, Englishmen, Germanics, were first and foremost part of the Church and members of Christendom. Nationalism broke that. The nation always had secondary importance when compared to religion. That changed with the advent of the modern period, and thus "nationalism" became a substitute for what was previously reserved for the Christian faith.
I take nationalism to be a corruption of patriotism. And a distinctly modern phenomenon.
I would argue that nations are still part of the natural order and willed by God, though. I agree that there is a kind of modernistic nationalism that is a corruption and perversion of this, however. God/religion and natural law transcend the nations however and are actually a cause of peace and unity amongst them exactly so.
"The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16 (3).
Defend your Family. Join the U.N. Family Rights Caucus.
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Posted by Timocrates 5/13/2018 7:04 pm | #64 |
Yes, there may be, if you look for issues very hard. The fact remains that Poland is among the most homogenous nations in the world. As is Lithuania, Slovakia, Czech, and most of the other countries in that region. Ukrainians, Belarussians and Lithuanians in Poland's history do not add any significant variety, because they are linguistically related and racially indistinguishable.My point was that the homogeneity of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Lithuania etc. is a relatively recent phenomena, post 1918 and post 1945 and that it is something that has been consciously engineered. (Find all the linguistically and culturally homogenous nation states existing in the area of present day Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Czech and Slovak Republics, Ukraine etc. on a 1917 map.) Incidentally Marxists
played a prominent role in engineering it.
Good point, but tendentious and irrelevant to my point (because every point is in a wider context to have relevance). Poles have been in what's now Poland (named Poland for a millennium at least) for as long as human memory and historical record goes. Did Marxists engineer it to be this way? In comparison, current so-called Americans are recent immigrants and they'd do well to be aware of this.
ETA: To make it very clear what my point was, if you missed it: There are objective characteristics to determine a country's nation-state-ness from "pure" to "diverse", the characteristics being linguistic, racial, and historical at least. By these measures, USA and Poland are very different. You say Poland is somewhat mixed too. The answer: Of course there is a foreigner in every country and when you go far enough in history, it was inhabited by different people, but when we get back to my point, which was to compare USA and Poland, then USA is far more diverse, its timeline is significantly shorter and its history is a story of mass extermination of natives by mass immigrants/invaders, while Poland is as homogenous as it gets in this world, and has been so for about a millennium, admittedly somewhat depending on how you draw the territory.
After how many hundreds of years does someone finally stop being an immigrant? Are my relatives in England of Norman and Viking descent and origin still immigrants?
Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. are not immigrants and it is a post-modernism to even think or refer to them as such.
"The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16 (3).
Defend your Family. Join the U.N. Family Rights Caucus.
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Posted by Warnerbem 1/14/2019 2:35 pm | #65 |
Except that Im not a white nationalist... I just abhor all forms of bullshit and the idea that biology is socially constructed is weapons grade bs.
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Posted by seigneur 1/15/2019 4:07 am | #66 |
Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. are not immigrants and it is a post-modernism to even think or refer to them as such.
Actually, it's post-modernism to fail to acknowledge historical realities, particularly when they are fresh in historical memory and in national psyche. Also, it's post-modernism to fail to acknowledge the objective criteria for a nation state, such as ethnic uniformity versus diversity.
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