My case for race and racialism - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14562469
I've been thinking a lot about whether authoritarian and fascist societies ought to be racialist or not and there seems to be disagreement among PoFo members. By racialism I don't mean (seriously) hate towards other races but the ability (and quite possibly legally enforced measures) and duty to live among your kind and preserve your genetic ancestry. It is not relevant if race is a social construct and biologically invalid - Language is a social construct as well, yet we continue to preserve the diversity between nations by speaking our mother tongues.

I'm always confused when people (specially white nationalists) say that blood and race are two important pillars because both can collide and become incompatible with each other - Let's imagine someone who is mixed race but one of the parents is a native-born - This person has the blood, and ultimately no one is 100% pure, so I don't understand why they're less citizen than "pure" natives... On the other hand, allowing anyone to have national citizenship is ridiculous because we might as well attribute it to everyone in the world. Being born on my soil doesn't make you a native and it never will, regardless of how hard you work.

I am southern European and that makes me suffer from a dilemma - On the one hand I'm subtly racialist like the majority of southern Europeans (Italians aren't called racists by mistake) but on the other hand I don't get along with northern European whites (Germans, etc.) and I'm perceived as less white by them. My idea is to create a new race (or a new Caucasian sub-sect) - The southern European race - The criteria for being southern European would be (at least) 50% of native blood regardless of your race. This is crucial because miscegenation and mixed heritage is fairly more common in southern Europeans (hence why less blondes with blue eyes) - We're not latinos like Americans call them, but we're not as white as northern whites, so it's a complicated case - For this reason I don't get along with white nationalist groups because the degree of purity they demand is ridiculous.

As for race mixing - Since everyone with at least 50% pure bloodline would be of the same race (and if it's a social construct we can alter it and change it immensely) in theory there would be no race mixing and some degree of multi-ethnicity is inevitable

Communities I would allow to stay on national soil:
- Gipsies - They've been living in Europe forever and despite my prejudices I see no reason to kick them out as long as they integrate
- Jews - In my country Jewish communities have been living here for hundreds of years (and some degree of Jewish heritage is fairly common but not noticeable to the naked eye) so they should be allowed to stay and quite frequently they're indistinguishable from southern European whites

How racist am I?
#14569943
RACIALISM IS A DISEASE OF THE BRAIN.

Nazism is a bastardization of Fascism. Racialism is a competing form of collectivism and cannot exist within a Fascist State as it infects a populace and divides. And even in an all white State it would soon encourage intraracial conflicts (such as between Italians and Nordics, as you have noted). The only answer is to lift up the State and completely dissuade any sort of identity politics that exist outside the State. Multiculturalism would also be completely destroyed, as this also exists only to infect the proles with dissent for the benefit of our capitalist overlords.

As for what you are - you are Italian. You are European. There is no "white race". That's a silly concept borne out of the subjugation of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. There is a caucasoid race of which skin color has no bearing. There is absolutely nothing scientific about either a white race nor a Mediterranean race. You are Caucasoid. The end.

Fascism and racialism are absolutely incompatible.
#14569946
Dystopian Darkness wrote:I am southern European and that makes me suffer from a dilemma - On the one hand I'm subtly racialist like the majority of southern Europeans (Italians aren't called racists by mistake) but on the other hand I don't get along with northern European whites (Germans, etc.) and I'm perceived as less white by them. My idea is to create a new race (or a new Caucasian sub-sect) - The southern European race - The criteria for being southern European would be (at least) 50% of native blood regardless of your race.

The southern European race is calling Mediterranian race. Enjoy your Armenia.
#14569955
Here is a few words... by Haile Selasse and made famous by Bob Marley on the curse of racism.

Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war.

That until there no longer
First class and second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man's skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war.

That until the basic human rights
Are equally guaranteed to all,
Without regard to race
Dis a war.

That until that day
The dream of lasting peace,
World citizenship
Rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued,
But never attained
Now everywhere is war - war.

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That hold our brothers in Angola,
In Mozambique,
South Africa
Sub-human bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed
Well, everywhere is war
Me say war.

War in the east,
War in the west,
War up north,
War down south
War - war
Rumours of war.
And until that day,
The African continent
Will not know peace,
We Africans will fight - we find it necessary
And we know we shall win
As we are confident
In the victory

Of good over evil
Good over evil, yeah!
Good over evil
Good over evil, yeah!
Good over evil
Good over evil, yeah!
#14569972
Dystopian Darkness wrote:I've been thinking a lot about whether authoritarian and fascist societies ought to be racialist or not and there seems to be disagreement among PoFo members. By racialism I don't mean (seriously) hate towards other races but the ability (and quite possibly legally enforced measures) and duty to live among your kind and preserve your genetic ancestry. It is not relevant if race is a social construct and biologically invalid - Language is a social construct as well, yet we continue to preserve the diversity between nations by speaking our mother tongues.

I'm always confused when people (specially white nationalists) say that blood and race are two important pillars because both can collide and become incompatible with each other - Let's imagine someone who is mixed race but one of the parents is a native-born - This person has the blood, and ultimately no one is 100% pure, so I don't understand why they're less citizen than "pure" natives... On the other hand, allowing anyone to have national citizenship is ridiculous because we might as well attribute it to everyone in the world. Being born on my soil doesn't make you a native and it never will, regardless of how hard you work.

I am southern European and that makes me suffer from a dilemma - On the one hand I'm subtly racialist like the majority of southern Europeans (Italians aren't called racists by mistake) but on the other hand I don't get along with northern European whites (Germans, etc.) and I'm perceived as less white by them. My idea is to create a new race (or a new Caucasian sub-sect) - The southern European race - The criteria for being southern European would be (at least) 50% of native blood regardless of your race. This is crucial because miscegenation and mixed heritage is fairly more common in southern Europeans (hence why less blondes with blue eyes) - We're not latinos like Americans call them, but we're not as white as northern whites, so it's a complicated case - For this reason I don't get along with white nationalist groups because the degree of purity they demand is ridiculous.

As for race mixing - Since everyone with at least 50% pure bloodline would be of the same race (and if it's a social construct we can alter it and change it immensely) in theory there would be no race mixing and some degree of multi-ethnicity is inevitable

Communities I would allow to stay on national soil:
- Gipsies - They've been living in Europe forever and despite my prejudices I see no reason to kick them out as long as they integrate
- Jews - In my country Jewish communities have been living here for hundreds of years (and some degree of Jewish heritage is fairly common but not noticeable to the naked eye) so they should be allowed to stay and quite frequently they're indistinguishable from southern European whites

How racist am I?


As race is a social construct, and not something based upon biology, what exactly would be the purpose of your arbitrary new "Southern European race"? I'm guessing that you'd want to include Iberia, Italy, Greece, and maybe some surrounding areas. These places have different histories, different governments, different cultures, different people, different attitudes. Many people in these countries have ancestry with ethnic groups that were never really represented in Europe. Even more importantly, every single person in Europe's ancestors did not originate in Europe. Every ethnic group currently centered in Europe migrated there, and were never indigenous to Europe.

So if you want to create a new, arbitrary race to avoid "race mixing" with other equally arbitrary racial groups, where exactly is the logic when all of these groupings are purely arbitrary, meaningless, and there's really no such thing as racial mixing as there is no such thing as race to begin with? And even if you wanted to drop "race" and just say that you want to base this on culture, there are plenty of cultural, economic, and political differences between the regions of Southern Europe. In essence, you basically want to "race mix" all the "races" in Southern Europe together into one bigger "race" because you want to... avoid race mixing.
#14574409
Most of these biological racialist ideologies are problematic for reasons already discussed. For example, if you go on many racialist or anthropology boards (they are usually one and the same; I have yet to see an anthro board that was NOT dominated by racialists or racists) there are endless discussions about who is "white" with the typical wars over whether Southern Europeans are "white," the definition of "white" usually being based on the ideal of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Northwest European.

I don't blame French, Germans, Italians and others who don't want their countries to look like Western Hemispheric multiracial societies. Of course, to be fair the same should apply to countries in Africa and Asia as well. It is why I understand why Africans sometimes seek to expel Europeans living in their countries, although I may not like it on another level.

The case for "racialism" should be based on feelings of kinship not necessarily on stuff like IQ, phenotype, or other factors that most people don't think deeply about. A preference for your own people is not really racist, at least not in my opinion. I think this is how most Southern Europeans think about race. I am Italian-American and I can say that this is probably how most of us think about race. Maybe its our Catholicism that prevents us from being attracted to Nazi-style biological racism, or the fact that some Northern Europeans consider us to be " not quite white" or inferior. But in any case, that is how I understand the race issue.

Edit: So, I think I am in basic agreement with OP, although I am not sure if a new "Southern European" category is the way forward as Southern Europe itself is pretty diverse. How about Pan-Latinism instead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Latinism
#14577085
Essay time.

Spoiler: show
I think before anything else we perhaps need to disambiguate the terms 'white' and 'race': they need to be separated. Colour is not the same thing as race. The political utility of the term, 'the white race', is null: races are not political actors. There can never be "unity of the white race", as these ridiculous American 'white nationalist' types like to harp on about. Personally I think it would be good to simply stop using the term 'white', but it probably isn't going to go away any time soon, given non-white peoples generally identify people of European heritage with that term. With regards to 'whiteness' as 'Europeanness', there hasn't been any significant admixture or large-scale population movements from North Africa or the Near East, let alone from sub-Saharan Africa into anywhere in Europe, since the Neolithic era. Furthermore, if we are to take up such ideas as 'race', we need to note that 'race' isn't a static essence: identity is a dynamic reality. When you take 'white' to mean 'indigenous European', Southern Europeans cannot be 'less' European than Northern Europeans, unless they are also 'part' something else (what, and where is the evidence?). Even if you want to look at it in anthropological terms, the Mediterranean Sea has actually acted as a migration and genetic barrier for millennia. It's curious, because 'racial differences' are actually emphasised or declared not to exist for political expediency: we can see this with Northern Europe and Southern Europe vaguely, but also more clearly with the example of Northern Italy and Southern Italy, where essentially 'Padanian supremacists' look down on the 'terroni', "southerners", (between which there is little anthropological difference) for political reasons.

On a similar note, it's often asserted that Italians amongst others were alienated in the United States by 'whiteness studies' people, but not for the reasons they outline. Italians amongst others were excluded or discriminated against not on the basis of their 'whiteness' ie, their being caucasian, which has never been in doubt, but rather their 'Latin' qualities, their Catholicism, and their ethnicity; and also the fact that Italians themselves may refrained from identifying with 'white culture' (read: the dominant Protestant-Puritan culture) because they identified with an 'Italian race' - Italianità.

Simply put, it doesn't matter if the absurd American 'white nationalists' are trying to exclude 'dirty whites' from their nonsense or foist their own ethnocentrism upon others: they can be safely ignored, for they are irrelevant and will remain so. For 'race realist' types, racialism is a sort of ethnocentrism transplanted into the realm of pseudoscience. Their political goals (the ones that come close to approaching reality in a meaningful way) seem to consist in only demeaning others. In any case, the very word 'race' nowadays triggers a great many people. And the discussion around it often attracts the wrong sort of people who are usually only interested in the scientific racism of a bygone era for questionable, misguided purposes. Advocating reconstructivism in anything or a 'return' to 'previous state' (see: neo-Nazis) could only ever be baggage. Of course, some other people believe that identifying racial differences (expressed in social terms) is tantamount to racism, but this position isn't tenable. Benoist (I could quote this piece of his at length which contains a lot more enlightening material (character limit, and to try to make sure that this post doesn't meander too much) and I encourage anybody interested enough who hasn't read it to read it) touches on identity expressed in biological terms in his usual erudition:

Alain de Benoist, 'On Identity', pp 44-48 wrote:The most popular form of pathology of identity is essentialism. Instead of considering identity as a substantial reality, which derives from a permanent narrative of the self, it is conceptualized as an intangible essence. Identity is therefore defined as an attribute which never changes, as that which is shared by all members of the group. The individual becomes only a “type,” representative of the supposed traits of the group. The subjective part of identity is reified, transformed into objective identity. The difference is posited as absolute self-sufficiency and determination, in the very same way in which identity opponents present it; the only difference is that they are quite content with this determinism, condemned by others as eminently “carceral.” Simultaneously, the universal — often wrongly assimilated with universalism — has been renounced, without realizing that one of the functions of the particular is precisely to attain the universal starting from its particularity; that means that the universal does not have a proper content to itself, and, hence, it could only exist through the particular. […]

Faced with the “globalizing” homogenization, one could only oppose the desire for homogeneity to a lesser degree, just like the independent and separatist movements only criticized the Jacobin state in order to defend the right to establish a micro-state, which would still be the same. The narcissism of the group members is reinforced by the integration of ideals, attributed to the entity in which they recognize themselves. This narcissistic satisfaction allows everyone, including the most mediocre members, to identify themselves with the highest realizations (real or idealized) of their community. This is what Georges Devereux calls “supporting identity.”

Biological identities, considered to be unchangeable, are frequently put to the service of ethnocentrism, racism and xenophobia. However, the biological criteria of belonging (to a race, to a species) only have a relative value. Of course they do play a role, but they do not bring out anything specifically human, because human beings have no specific essence outside of their socio-historical existence. Such criteria do not allow to discriminate between friend and enemy in politics, or to determine what notion of the common good should prevail. They also fail to explain rapid political and social evolutions which occur within a homogeneous population. To reduce the definition of who is “like me” to that means to hold on to all other forms of belonging, inherited or chosen. Add to this the phantasms of purity and impurity, the phobia for mixing (all of them rooted in the Bible), which are often used in the perspective of inevitable declines, of an imminent disaster, of the conjunction of future catastrophes: this is nothing other than a reversed ideology of progress: the inevitable only changes direction.

It is true that cultures form distinct worlds, but these worlds can still communicate among themselves. These are not different species. Because they incarnate in their variations the essence of human nature, their representatives can seek to understand and accept each other without renouncing each other. (If cultures constituted separate universes, how would globalization be possible? How could one culture convert to a religion which appeared in the center of another? How could researchers from one culture become specialists in another?)

Rousseau had already warned that identity might degenerate into self-love. Essentialism is clearly rooted in the metaphysics of subjectivity. Essentialism insists on the collective “we” with the same self-centeredness which liberalism attributes to the individual “I.” This self-centeredness goes together with a self-valorization which encourages the devalorization of the other. Belonging thus ends up confused with truth, which means that there is no truth anymore. Essentialism applies to the group the same liberal principle which legitimates egoism and interest, and makes them triumph. For liberalism, individual egoism is desirable and legitimate; for racism, group egoism is such as well.

In any case, I try to address the root causes (I say this sort of thing often) of large-scale migrations to the developed world vis-à-vis the logic of modern capitalism. ('Multiculturalism' is an ideological reaction to large-scale migrations to the developed world, which occurs as a result of globalism.) If one starts from that line of thought, racial quotas become redundant. As Benoist notes in the second paragraph above, calling for assimilation into a nation in the face of a globalising homogenisation is not only questionable but replicates the logic of Jacobin assimilation, "which saw the will to maintain traditional identities as equivalent to a refusal of "progress". The arguments against "communitarianism" used nowadays are exactly the same that were used earlier to oppress minorities or to eradicate regional cultures and languages [...] It is obvious in the [French] Republic’s fight against regionalisms", and he notes further, "[the h]omogenization of the world and an ethnocentric withdrawal go hand in hand", similar to Benjamin Barber's "Jihad vs McWorld".

Only individuals can be assimilated into a community, not whole ethnic groups, unless something other than migrants assimilating into the autochthonous population is happening. The result is of course a de facto multiculturalism, but one that would affirm identities in the public sphere (ethnic or national, local or regional) rather than negate them in order that no other form of identity mediates to the abstract, generic humanity or "global citizens" that some followers of liberal thought wish to see created in their image.

If I'm reading the original post correctly, I see a desire (in my words) not to associate with 'white nationalists', to protect discrete identities from a homogenising globalisation, and a desire to go beyond simple nationalism (if all of this is more or less the case, I approve), but I would have to put a question to DD: what is the aim of codifying this Southern European race? If it's for political expediency (ie, for creating a shared political framework for Southern Europe), and recognising the cultural links and shared values amongst Latin societies, and at the same time differentiating this unit from Northern European societies, recognising that differences exist there, I would be careful not to absolutise this form of Mediterraneanism as the ultimate form of identity for Southern Europeans (a quick overview on the historical developments of Mediterraneanism can be found here), but we should perhaps say instead that it mediates a Southern European's relationship to Europe as a whole, which should not necessarily conflict with a pan-European identity, in other words, avoiding metaphysics of subjectivity that Benoist speaks of.
Spoiler: show
Bulaba Jones wrote:So if you want to create a new, arbitrary race to avoid "race mixing" with other equally arbitrary racial groups, where exactly is the logic when all of these groupings are purely arbitrary, meaningless, and there's really no such thing as racial mixing as there is no such thing as race to begin with?

I think you've answered your own question here, Bulaba.

And even if you wanted to drop "race" and just say that you want to base this on culture, there are plenty of cultural, economic, and political differences between the regions of Southern Europe. In essence, you basically want to "race mix" all the "races" in Southern Europe together into one bigger "race" because you want to... avoid race mixing.

Differences between regions in Southern Europe doesn't imply incompatibility - it's just that these differences need to be taken into account, despite the fact that there are similarities amongst Latin societies with regards to culture, lifestyle, religion, levels of economic development, and so forth. I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective - which is to say one that emphasises similarities and fails to recognise differences, and what would amount in the end to homogenisation. I don't believe the goal here is to create a "homogeneous Southern European race", or a form of identity that would prevail over everything else. The goal should be to codify transnational identities which are grounded in the "kinship amongst nations" that Kojève speaks of, in the face of the decline of the nation-state. More on that below.

Many people in these countries have ancestry with ethnic groups that were never really represented in Europe. Even more importantly, every single person in Europe's ancestors did not originate in Europe. Every ethnic group currently centered in Europe migrated there, and were never indigenous to Europe.

All said, DD appears to have (correctly) discarded with any confused notion of static "purity", so the fact hunter-gatherers from the Near East had spread throughout the whole of Europe 450 generations ago or that farmers from the Near East diffused agriculture to Europe by migrating in the Neolithic era doesn't really have any bearing on the identity of anybody in Europe today, which is to say that European identities aren't negated simply because there are extra-European elements in Europe's history. In my eyes, you're saying that European identities themselves are at base meaningless.

Piccolo wrote:The case for "racialism" should be based on feelings of kinship not necessarily on stuff like IQ, phenotype, or other factors that most people don't think deeply about. A preference for your own people is not really racist, at least not in my opinion. I think this is how most Southern Europeans think about race.

I agree. As far as race goes, phenotype plays a role in identification (ie, race is a social construct based on a real thing (perhaps phenotype), and so isn't a "purely" social construct, unless we are to argue that race is also an optical illusion), but I don't bother going beyond that. An argument that suggests a simple preference for endogamy as opposed to xenocentrism is racist however, is rather absurd.

So, I think I am in basic agreement with OP, although I am not sure if a new "Southern European" category is the way forward as Southern Europe itself is pretty diverse. How about Pan-Latinism instead?

Giorgio Agamben revived Alexandre Kojève's talk of a "Latin Empire" not that long ago:

Giorgio Agamben, 'The 'Latin Empire' should strike back', March 2013 wrote:In 1945, Alexandre Kojève, a philosopher who was also a high-level French civil servant, wrote an essay called The Latin Empire: Outline of a doctrine for French policy. This essay [in fact a memo to the head of the Provisional Government, General Charles de Gaulle] is so topical that it is still of great interest today.

Showing amazing foresight, Kojève maintained that Germany would soon become Europe's main economic powerhouse and that France would be reduced to a secondary power within Western Europe. He also lucidly predicted the end of nation states that had, until then, determined European history. As the modern state had emerged with the decline of feudal political formations and the emergence of nation states, so the nation state would inevitably cede the way to political formations, which he called "empires", that would transcend national borders.

Urgent need to refocus on cultural ties

These empires could not be based, Kojève argued, on abstract units that were indifferent to genuine cultural, lifestyle and religious ties. Empires - like the "Anglo-Saxon Empire" (United States and United Kingdom) and the Soviet Empire which he could see for himself at the time - had to be "transnational political units but that were formed by kindred nations".

This is why Kojève proposed that France should play a leading role in a "Latin Empire" that would economically and politically united, with the consent of the Catholic Church whose traditions it would inherit, the three major nations whose languages are derived from Latin (France, Spain and Italy), while at the same time opening up to the Mediterranean nations. According to Kojève, Protestant Germany, which would soon become the richest and most powerful European nation (which it did, in fact, become) would inevitably be swayed by its extra-European tendencies and turn towards the Anglo-Saxon Empire - a configuration in which France and the Latin nations would remain a more or less foreign body, obviously reduced to the peripheral role of a satellite.

Today, now that the European Union has been formed by ignoring the concrete cultural links that exist between nations, it might be useful – and urgent – to revive Kojève's proposal. What he forecast has turned out to be true. This Europe that strives to exist on a strictly economic basis, abandoning all true affinities between lifestyles, culture and religion, has repeatedly shown its weaknesses, especially at the economic level.

A Greek is not a German

The EU's so-called unity is beginning to crack and one can see to what it has been reduced: the imposition on the poorest majority of the interests of the richest minority. And most of the time, these interests coincide with those of a single nation, which nothing in recent history should encourage us to see as exemplary. Not only is there no sense in asking a Greek or an Italian to live like a German but even if this were possible, it would lead to the destruction of a cultural heritage that exists as a way of life. A political unit that prefers to ignore lifestyles is not only condemned not to last, but, as Europe has eloquently shown, it cannot even establish itself as such.

If we do not want Europe to inevitably disintegrate as many signs seem to indicate it is, it would be appropriate to ask ourselves, without delay, how the European Constitution (which is not a constitution under public law, but rather an agreement between states, either not submitted to a popular vote or – as in France – flatly rejected [by 54.67 per cent of French voters]) can be reconfigured anew.

We could, thus, attempt to turn political reality into something similar to what Kojève called a "Latin Empire".

I don't really have to comment here, since his summation touches upon the most relevant themes. As he says, Europe cannot continue to strive to exist on a purely economic, utilitarian plane, failing to account for regional differences in the realm of culture, lifestyle, etc, a plane which assimilates politics to economics - when in actuality politics constitutes an aspect of the social, contrary to the liberal theory that the individual, social only by necessity, constitutes the beginning and end of all social reality. And so Europe must be a primarily political project, not an economic one.
Spoiler: show
Kojève's article itself is worth reading, but it is perhaps unjustifiably France-centric. It's interesting nonetheless. I quote most of the first half, and the excluded parts talk of retaining now lost African colonies, ensuring French preëminence in all kinds of fanciful ways, warnings about perfidious Albion (yawn), how France could bend Germany to serve its Latin Empire (talk of annexing Saar and expelling the German population to secure coal for France (lol!)), etc. But at the same time, a lot of this - the first half, anyway - can be applied to Europe as a whole: a Europe with a 'Latin component' that might one day free itself from the twin imperialisms of the Russians and the Americans.

Alexandre Kojève, 'Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy', 1945 wrote:[…]

I. The Historical Situation

1.


There is no doubt that we are currently witnessing a decisive turning point in history, comparable to the one that took place at the end of the Middle Ages. The beginning of the modern age is characterized by the unstoppable process of the progressive elimination of "feudal" political formations dividing the national units to the benefit of kingdoms, which is to say of nation-States. At present, it is these nation-States which, irresistably, are gradually giving way to political formations which transgress national borders and which could be designated with the term "Empires." Nation-States, still powerful in the nineteenth century, are ceasing to be political realities, States in the strong sense of the term, just as the medieval baronies, cities, and archdioceses ceased to be States. The modern State, the current political reality, requires a larger foundation than that represented by Nations in the strict sense. To be politically viable, the modern State must rest on a "vast 'imperial' union of affiliated [1] Nations." The modern State is only truly a State if it is an Empire.

The historical process which formerly replaced feudal entities with national States, and which is currently breaking down Nations to the benefit of Empires, can and must be explained by economic causes, which manifest themselves politically in and through the requirements of military technology. It is the appearance of firearms, and notably of artillery, which ruined the political power of medieval subnational formations. The feudal "Prince" – baron, bishop, city – was capable of arming his vassal-citizens with swords and spears, and he maintained himself politically as long as this armament sufficed to enable support for a possible war, with his political independence at stake. But when it was necessary to maintain an artillery to be able to defend oneself, the economic and demographic bases of the feudal political formations showed themselves to be insufficient, and this is why these formations were progressively absorbed by national States, which alone were able to arm themselves in an adequate fashion. Likewise, nation-States were – and are still – sufficient economic and demographic foundations to maintain troops armed only with handguns, machine guns, and cannons. But such troops are no longer effective nowadays. They can do nothing against a truly modern army, which is to say motorized, armored, and involving an air force as an essential weapon. Now, strictly national economies and demographics are incapable of putting together armies of this kind, which Empires alone can maintain. Sooner or later these Empires will thus absorb nation-States politically.

This fundamental inadequacy – demographic and economic and, consequently, military and thus political – of national States is demonstrated in a particularly striking way by the example of the Third Reich. Throughout the High Middle Ages, Germany pursued an imperial project, at once anachronistic and premature, and thus utopian, which is to say without a real foundation in the present, and consequently unrealizable. The pursuit and inevitable failure of this project had as a consequence that Germany entered into the truly feudal period and emerged from it 150 years late, from which it has never known how to catch up since (never having been able to or having wanted to skip stages with a revolutionary act). So it was with a delay of a century and a half that Hitler began his political action. And thus he imagined and created his Third Reich as a State strictly in keeping with the "national" ideal, born at the end of the Middle Ages and having already reached its perfect form in the revolutionary ideology and its realization, signed with the names of Robespierre and Napoleon. For it is quite evident that the Hitlerian slogan: "Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer" is but a (poor) translation into German of the watchword of the French Revolution: "The Republic, one and indivisible." And one could say that "the Führer" is but a German Robespierre, which is to say an anachronistic one, who – having known how to master his Thermidor – was able to undertake the execution of the Napoleonic plan himself. Moreover, Hitler expressed the essence and the motive of his political thought very well by putting himself at the head of a movement which calls itself "national-socialism," and which consciously contrasts itself with Soviet "imperial-socialism" as much as with Anglo-Saxon "imperial-capitalism." Generally, the Third Reich was undoubtedly a national State, in the particular and precise sense of the term. This is a State which, on the one hand, strove to realize all national political possibilities, and which, on the other hand, wanted to use only the power of the German nation, by consciously establishing, qua State, the (ethnic) limits of the latter. Well, this "ideal" nation-State lost its crucial political war.

To explain the total military – and thus political – defeat of this nation-State, one cannot raise the limited size of its national base, as it is tempting to do when one tries to explain the crushing defeat of the Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, Yugoslavian, and Greek national States. Nor can one speak of military incompetence, as is sometimes done to "explain" the fate of fascist Italy (which was also eminently "national"). Finally, there can also be no question of "causes" often raised in discussions of the collapse of France: disorder, lack of foresight, domestic political unrest, etc. The German national State pressed 80 million nationals into service, whose military and civic (if not moral) qualities revealed themselves to be above all praise. Nonetheless, the superhuman political and military effort of the Nation served only to delay an outcome which can truly be called "fatal."


And it is certainly the eminently and consciously national character of the German State which is the cause of this "fate." For to be able to sustain a modern war, the Third Reich had to occupy and exploit non-German countries and import more than 10 million foreign workers. But a nation-State cannot assimilate non-nationals, and it must treat them politically as slaves. Thus Hitler's "nationalist" ideology would have been enough by itself to ruin the imperial project of the "New Europe," without which Germany could not, however, win the war. It can therefore be said that Germany lost this war because she wanted to win it as a nation-State. For even a nation of 80 million politically "perfect" citizens is unable to sustain the effort of a modern war and thus of ensuring the political existence of its State. And the German example proves clearly that nowadays, a nation, no matter which one, which persists in maintaining its national political exclusivity must sooner or later cease to exist politically: either through a peaceful process or as a result of a military defeat. By dispelling the illusions of the 1914-18 war, the current war, conducted by Empires, signaled the last act of the great tragedy which national States have performed for five centuries.

2.

The political unreality of Nations – which has been appearing in fact, if not in a notable fashion, since the end of the last century – was more or less clearly recognized from the beginning of this same period. On the one hand, "bourgeois" Liberalism proclaimed more or less publicly the end of the State as such, which is to say [the end] of the strictly political existence of Nations. By not conceiving of the State outside of the national setting, and by observing at the same time – more or less consciously – that the nation-State was no longer politically viable, Liberalism proposed to abolish it voluntarily. The essentially political – i.e., in the final analysis martial – entity, which is the State in the strict sense, had to be replaced by a simple economic and social, not to say a police Administration, put at the disposal and at the service of "Society" which had moreover been conceived of as an aggregate of individuals; the individual was supposed to embody and reveal, in his own isolation, the supreme human value. Thus conceived, the "statist" liberal administration had to be fundamentally peaceful and pacifist. Put differently, it did not have, strictly speaking, any "will to power," and consequently had no effective need, nor adequate desire, for this "independence" or political autonomy which characterizes the very essence of the true State. On the other hand, "internationalist" Socialism believed it could see that political reality was in the process of moving from Nations to Humanity as such. If the State was still supposed to have political meaning and raison d'être, it could only have them on the condition of finding its foundation in "the human race." Since political reality is deserting Nations and is moving on to Humanity itself, the only (provisionally national) State which will emerge as politically viable in the long term will be the one which has as its highest and first goal to include all of humanity. It is from this "internationalist" – not to say "socialist" – interpretation of the historical situation that the Russian Communism of the first era, which consequently united the Soviet State with the Third Internationale, was born.

But in fact the socialist-internationalist interpretation is just as wrong as the liberal-pacifist interpretation. Liberalism is wrong not to perceive any political entity beyond that of Nations. But internationalism's sin is the fact that it sees nothing politically viable short of Humanity. It likewise was unable to discover the intermediary political reality of Empires, which is to say unions, or even international amalgamations of affiliated nations, which is exactly the political reality today. If the Nation really ceases to be a political reality, Humanity is still – politically – an abstraction. And this is why Internationalism is, at present, a "utopia." Nowadays it learns, to its cost, that it is impossible to jump from the Nation to Humanity without going via Empire. Just as in the Middle Ages Germany had realized against its will that it was impossible to arrive at Empire without undergoing the feudal and national stages. Before being embodied in Humanity, the Hegelian Weltgeist, which has abandoned the Nations, inhabits Empires.

Stalin's political genius consists precisely in having understood this. The political focus on humanity characterizes the "Trotskyist" utopia, of which Trotsky himself was the most notable – but certainly not sole – representative. By taking on Trotsky, and by demolishing "Trotskyism" in Russia, Stalin rejoined the political reality of the day by creating the ussr as a Slavo-Soviet Empire. His anti-Trotskyist slogan: "Socialism in one country" engendered this "Sovietism," or if one prefers, this "imperial socialism," which manifests itself in and through the present Soviet imperial State, and which has no need of "classic," "second," "third," or any other internationalism. And this "imperial socialism," which turns out to be politically viable, conflicts with the "Trotskyist" utopia of "humanitarian" internationalist socialism exactly as much as with the Hitlerian anachronism of "national-socialism," founded on the politically antiquated reality of the Nation. […]

II. France's Situation

1.


Objective analysis of the historical situation shows clearly that if France remains politically isolated, if she insists on wanting to live as an exclusive Nation, she will necessarily sooner or later have to stop existing as a State in the strict sense and as an autonomous political reality. She will end, fatally, by being politically absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon Empire, which stands to become a Germano-Anglo-Saxon Empire. But given the differences of "race," of culture, of language, and of religion, of traditions, and "lifestyle," there can be no question of a true fusion between this Empire and France. The latter will always remain a more or less foreign body in it, and, consequently, will always play but a peripheral and thus retiring role in it: the role of a satellite, of a "second" which – in politics – is neither always nor necessarily "brilliant." In a word, in this hypothesis France ceases to be an end in itself and lowers herself to the level of a simple political means.

But it is not only France's politically specific gravity which will become negligible if she lets herself be absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon Empire. Her economy, too, will play only an entirely secondary role in it. France's economic functioning, too, and, consequently, her very social structure will have to transform themselves bit by bit in order to comply with and adapt themselves to the models and the requirements which, coming from outside, will often be in flagrant conflict with the traditions and the aspirations which, while fundamentally Catholic and Latin, are not for all that less authentically French. Finally, no longer sustained either by independent economic activity or autonomous political reality, French civilization itself will not count for much at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon world, and, consequently, of the world in general. Far from shining outward, France will be internally subject to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon civilization – fundamentally Protestant in its modern form, and basically "Germanic" – which will be sustained by the crushing prestige of the political force and the economic power of the Anglo-American bloc. The first vestiges of this influence can perhaps be perceived in the physical and moral aspect of French youth raised on films and novels from across the English Channel and from overseas. It can thus be supposed that, in renouncing autonomous political existence, that is the State, France will lose not only "face" but also her own face.

The preliminary signs of this state of things are already making themselves felt. Thus the attitude of certain foreign countries and the reactions of some of France's guests [4] – military and civilian – perhaps give a foretaste, if not of the contempt, at least of the indifference of tomorrow's world toward this country and her civilization. But what is infinitely worse is that the disastrous consequences of depoliticization are already taking hold at the very heart of the French nation. For there is no doubt that the latter's decline, which nobody disputes and on which it is pointless – and distressing – to dwell, goes hand in hand with the country's political diminution, which, for its part, reveals or explains itself with the loss of a real, enlightened, and effective political will. For it is certainly difficult to deny, or even not to see, that the France of yesteryear, of yesterday – and even of today – does not have, or no longer his, a clear and conscious political idea. Not only in fact, but also in his own consciousness, the modern Frenchman lives as a "bourgeois" and not as a "citizen." He acts and thinks as an "individualist" in that sense in which "private," "particular" interests are for him the supreme or only values. And he is "liberal" or "libertarian" and "pacifist" above all because he no longer wants to be subjected to the weight and the demands of the "universal" reality of the State and the means it uses to assert and preserve itself.

But it is certainly evident that this depoliticization of France and the French manifests itself not only through external as well as internal political decline in the strict sense, but also through a general diminution, as much economic and social as cultural and moral. It can thus already be seen that by ceasing to be a big and strong State animated by an effective – concrete, positive, and definite – political will, France ceases to be the vanguard country she has always been until now and becomes a backward country in almost all fields.

2.

The question of the force of France's decline is often asked – a decline which contrasts so sharply with the country's brilliant and glorious past. The explanations of "degeneration," "corruption," "fatigue," etc. are too vague and general really to signify anything. It seems a more concrete and therefore more convincing reason for it could be given.

On the one hand, in the domain of political ideology, the country continues to live on the basis of ideas which were definitively elaborated during the Revolution. The "official" political ideal of France and of the French is today still that of the nation-State, of the "one and indivisible Republic."

On the other hand, in the depths of its soul, the country understands the inadequacy of this ideal, of the political anachronism of the strictly "national" idea. This feeling has admittedly not yet reached the level of a clear and distinct idea: The country cannot, and still does not want to, express it openly. Moreover, for the very reason of the unparalleled brilliance of its national past, it is particularly difficult for France to recognize clearly and to accept frankly the fact of the end of the "national" period of History and to understand all of its consequences. It is hard for a country which created, out of nothing, the ideological framework of nationalism and which exported it to the whole world to recognize that all that remains of it now is a document to be filed in the historical archives and to join to a new "imperial" ideology, which has, moreover, scarcely been outlined and which it would be necessary to clarify and formulate to raise to the level of logical coherence and clarity of "national" ideology. And yet, the new political truth is penetrating little by little into the collective French consciousness. It appears there negatively, first of all, in the fact that the general will no longer allows itself to be galvanized by the ideal of the Nation. The recollections of the indivisible Republic's potency ring hollow and false, and the call to France's no longer finds the echo it still triggered at the time of the 1914-18 war.


It could almost be said that for the "average Frenchman" the current war entailed, from the beginning, only two political possibilities: France's politico-economic subordination, either to Germany or to England. And in fact, at least at times, this war provoked "passions" in France only insofar as it had to do with the conflict between these two "collaborationist" tendencies – a conflict in which the traditional, irreducible, and disastrous opposition between the Right and the Left was crystallized. But it is perhaps precisely because of this that the French soldier did not give his all in 1940 and that, after the Liberation, the Resistance movement evokes only distantly the mass uprisings of old. If the average Frenchman obviously refuses to die, and even to discipline himself and to "restrain" himself, for the sake of France, it is perhaps simply because he is more or less consciously aware that "the France" of national and nationalist tradition is an ideal which, politically, is no longer viable. For no reasonable man will want to sacrifice his particular values for a "universal" goal, which is only an abstract idea, i.e. a mirage from the past or a present without a future – in short, a nostalgic dream or an irresponsible adventure.

3.

Thus interpreted, France's military and moral collapse in 1940, as well as the political malaise that reigns there today, appeared as the price of the country's recovery and rebirth.

It could be said that a country such as Germany, which is capable of pursuing an illusion at all cost, of enthusing itself for a Romantic [romantique] and romantic [romanesque] dream, of sacrificing real values to an antiquated and nonviable ideal, is politically hopeless. But the "conscientious objection" of the French in this war shows that the general will in France can form only around a truly and really effective idea, that political consciousness there involves an acute sense of reality and that it is generally founded on solid common sense.

But there is no guarantee that a country which evades the dream will deny reality, that men who do not want to sacrifice themselves to a politically anachronistic illusion will not subordinate themselves completely to an effective political idea in the concrete present, thus realizing a total reconstruction of collective life. In any case, that is an experiment which has never been conducted in contemporary France. It is thus an experiment to be carried out there.

To conduct this experiment, it would be necessary, in lightening the crushing load of the glorious and ancient past of the Nation, to proclaim clearly and in all frankness that the "national" period of History is over, that France is politically dead for once and for all qua nation-State. But it would be necessary to add, in saying it, that this end is at the same time a beginning, that here, at least, death is also a rebirth.
For the Nation can and must go beyond itself in and through an international union of affiliated nations, where it must and can reaffirm its cultural, social, and political specificity by submitting it, in a peaceful, friendly, egalitarian, and free competition, to the largest group to whose creation it contributes by eliminating itself as an exclusive and isolated Nation. If the Nation dies only to engender the Empire, if the national abdication is the prelude to the accession to the imperial throne, the proclamation to the people of the death of the Republic, closed in on itself and limited by borders which have become too narrow, will be nothing less than depressing. This proclamation could, on the contrary, have a stimulating political effect.

In the concrete reality of the present historical situation, there seems to be only one truly viable political idea – having some chance, consequently, of being accepted by the collective consciousness and of generating and determining a general will – which can be presented to France. This is the idea-ideal of the Latin Empire, where the French people would have as goal and as task the preservation of its rank of primus inter pares.

III. The Idea of the Latin Empire

1.


The era where all of humanity together will be a political reality still remains in the distant future. The period of national political realities is over. This is the epoch of Empires, which is to say of transnational political unities, but formed by affiliated nations.

This "kinship" between nations, which is currently becoming an important political factor, is an undeniable concrete fact which has nothing to do with generally vague and unclear "racial" ideas. The "kinship" of nations is, above all, a kinship of language, of civilization, of general "mentality," or, – as is sometimes also said – of "climate." And this spiritual kinship is also manifested, among other things, through the identity of religion.

A kinship thus conceived exists without a doubt between the Latin nations – chiefly French, Italian, and Spanish. First of all, these nations are eminently Catholic, even if they are "anticlerical."
As far as France is concerned, for example, the foreign observer is struck by seeing the degree to which the "free thinkers" and even the Protestants and the Israelites there are penetrated by the more or less secularized Catholic mentality, at least when they think, act, or react in French. Moreover, the close kinship of the languages makes contact between Latin countries particularly easy. As far as France, Italy, and Spain particularly are concerned, it would be enough to make the extensive (and, furthermore, very easy) study of one of the foreign Romance languages mandatory in order to overcome all the drawbacks created by language diversity. Moreover, the Latin civilizations are themselves closely affiliated. If certain delays in evolution might create a belief in deep divergences today (particularly on the part of Spain), the interpenetration which took place at the outset (as well as during the Renaissance period, which is probably the historical Latin period par excellence) guarantees the possibility of reaching, in short order, a perfect harmonization of the diverse aspects of the Latin World's civilization. Generally speaking, the differences of the national characters cannot mask the fundamental unity of the Latin "mentality," which is all the more striking to strangers for often going unrecognized by the Latin people themselves. It is, to be sure, difficult to define this mentality, but it can immediately be seen that it is unique, among its type, in its deep unity. It seems that this mentality is specifically characterized by that art of leisure which is the source of art in general, by the aptitude for creating this "sweetness of living" which has nothing to do with material comfort, by that "dolce far niente" itself which degenerates into pure laziness only if it does not follow a productive and fertile labor (to which the Latin Empire will give birth through the sole fact of its existence).

This shared mentality – which entails a profound sense of beauty generally (and especially in France) associated with a very distinct sense of proportion and which thus permits the transformation of simple "bourgeois" well-being into aristocratic "sweetness" of living and the frequent elevation to delight of pleasures which, in another setting, would be (and are, in most cases) "vulgar" pleasures – this mentality not only assures the Latin people of their real – that is to say political and economic – union. It also, in a way, justifies this union in the eyes of the world and of History. Of the world, for if the two other imperial Unions will probably always be superior to the Latin Union in the domain of economic work and of political struggles, one is entitled to suppose that they will never know how to devote themselves to the perfection of their leisure as could, under favorable circumstances, the unified Latin West; and of History, for by supposing that national and social conflicts will definitely be eliminated some day (which is perhaps less distant than is thought), it must be admitted that it is precisely to the organization and the "humanization" of its free time that future humanity will have to devote its efforts. (Did Marx himself not say, in repeating, without realizing it, a saying of Aristotle's: that the ultimate motive of progress, and thus of socialism, is the desire to ensure a maximum of leisure for man?)

The Latin kinship, founded on the unity of substance and of birth, is already a potential Empire which remains only to be actualized under the concrete historical conditions of our time, which are, moreover, auspicious for imperial formations. And it must not be forgotten that the Latin unity is already, to a certain degree, actualized or realized in and through the unity of the Catholic Church. But the religious and ecclesiastical (clearly distinct from the "clerical") aspect is, in our day, all but negligible. On the one hand, it would be tempting to explain the prodigious flight of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon countries in modern Times through the intimate interpenetration of Church and State in the Protestant World; and there is no doubt that the fundamentally "capitalist" Anglo-Saxon or Germano-Anglo-Saxon Empire is, today, still distinctly inspired by Protestantism. (Certain sociologists even see in Protestantism the ultimate source of Capitalism.) On the other hand, in spite of its radically atheistic beginnings, the ussr has rediscovered the Orthodox Church and uses its support, as much domestically as externally (above all in the Balkans); more and more, the ussr thus takes the shape of an Empire which is not only Slavo-Soviet, but still Orthodox. It thus certainly seems that the two modern imperial formations are drawing part of their cohesion and thus their potency from a more or less official association with the corresponding Churches. And it can be agreed that the existence of the Catholic Church constitutes, under current historical conditions, a call to the formation of a Catholic Empire, which can only be Latin. (Let us moreover not forget that Catholicism above all sought – often by appealing to art – to organize and humanize the "contemplative," or even inactive, life of man, while Protestantism, hostile to the methods of artistic pedagogy, was mainly preoccupied with the worker-man.)

The spiritual and mental kinship which unites the Latin Nations seems to guarantee the character of liberty, equality, and fraternity, without which there is no true democracy, to their relations within the Empire. And it could even be believed that it is only by installing democracy in the whole of the Latin World that its "municipal" character, which it retains so long as it remains enclosed by purely national borders, could be removed. Only the Empire, with its quasi-unlimited material resources, seems capable of allowing the sterile and paralyzing conflict between the Left and the Right, implacable at the heart of the single Nation, and by definition poor and thus sordid, to be overcome. […]

2. […]

It is even possible that it is in this unified Latino-African world that the Muslim problem (and perhaps the "colonial" problem in general) can one day be resolved. For since the Crusades, Arab Islam and Latin Catholicism united in their mutual opposition concerning several synthetic points of view (the influence of Arabic thought on Scholasticism, the penetration of Islamic art into the Latin countries, etc.). And there is no reason to believe that, within a true Empire, this synthesis of opposites could not be freed of its internal contradictions, which are really irreducible only with respect to purely national interests. But an agreement between la Latinité and Islam would render the presence of other imperial forces in the Mediterranean basin curiously unstable. […]

In contrast, a Latin Empire comprising 110 or 120 million citizens (who are, moreover, authentic with respect to their mentality and external appearance) would be undoubtedly capable of creating and sustaining an economy of great stature, certainly more modest than, but at least comparable to, those of the Anglo-Saxon and Slavo-Soviet economies. This economy, for its part, would enable the standard of living in the future to rise in the whole Empire, which is to say, above all, in Spain and in southern Italy. By improving the material conditions of existence in these regions, we will undoubtedly see a sharp increase in the demographic curve in the coming decades. And this continuous (and, in principle, unlimited) extension of the domestic market, accompanied by ever-increasing employment, would allow the imperial economy to develop while avoiding the inevitable cyclical crises of the Anglo-Saxon economy, with its practically saturated domestic market, as well as the rigid and oppressive stability of the Soviet economy.

It can thus be anticipated that, in the very short term, France itself will profit from the so-called "sacrifices" it will have made for the benefit of the Latin Empire. For included in the imperial unity, its metropolitan ground and its colonies, even jointly exploited, will undoubtedly give it a return much larger than they could under strictly "national" exploitation – governed by so-called "selfish," but, in reality, simply antiquated, economic principles.

3.

Economic union is the condition sine qua non of Latin imperial unity. But it is not the raison d'être of the Latin Empire. The final and true goal of the imperial union is fundamentally political, and it is a specifically political ideology which must create and inspire it.

Now, the fundamental political category is that of independence or of autonomy. It is generally said that political will is a will to power or to "greatness." Without a doubt. But it would be more correct and more precise to say that all truly political will is above all an autonomous will and a will to autonomy. For "power" is only a medium for realizing autonomy, and "greatness" is a simple consequence of this realization. Considered as a political entity, the State does nothing more than to bring about a will to autonomy; through it [the State] creates and maintains itself, for through it [the State] integrates and governs otherwise disparate particular wills by creating a "general will" out of them, which is nothing other than its own will to autonomy thus made explicit and effective. Conversely, a State no longer driven by an absolute will to autonomy lowers itself to the level of a simple administration, having to serve, at best, the private interests it is moreover incapable of reconciling.

To create a Latin Empire able to exist qua political entity is thus to create and maintain a Latin "general will," autonomous in its will and desiring the maximum autonomy compatible with the general political situation of the day. Put differently, the Empire’s actions must follow, in the final analysis, from the imperial peoples' will to union and must be as independent as is possible and reasonable from foreign wills or actions. Practically, this signifies that the decisions taken by the Empire concerning its internal structure and conduct, as much as its foreign relations, must not be understood simply as a function of the desires and the actions of the two already existing rival Empires. [...]

TL;DR: Racialism bad; Jacobin-type (assimilating, homogenising) nationalism bad; liberal-atomist fragmentation bad; regionalism good; localism good.

I've broken it down into three parts to make it more readable, and not to clog up the thread.
#14577490
We're not latinos like Americans call them, but we're not as white as northern whites, so it's a complicated case - For this reason I don't get along with white nationalist groups because the degree of purity they demand is ridiculous.


It's not 'complicated'. Many people in Portugal, specially those in the South, have Arab blood. Where do you think words like 'al-face' come from? Does 'fado', the music genre, sound Arab to you? Have you ever visited the Castle of the Moors in Sintra?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_of_the_Moors
#14577551
Soulflytribe wrote:
It's not 'complicated'. Many people in Portugal, specially those in the South, have Arab blood. Where do you think words like 'al-face' come from? Does 'fado', the music genre, sound Arab to you? Have you ever visited the Castle of the Moors in Sintra?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_of_the_Moors


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