General Politics Thread

What is your opinion of colonial independence movements?

They're inherently nationalist, just in the form of "stop oppressing our people!".

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Mar 15th 2019 at 2:44:00 AM

I would describe a 'stop oppressing us' colonial independence movements to be patriotic, not nationalistic. Per 'notes on nationalism'

Regarding borders: Naturally it is better without them. Just ask the EU countries how much better they are off with Schengen and Freedom of movement. But you can't just do away with them without any consideration, and there are actually situations in which they are useful (ie when you control that no beef from the UK enters your market during an BSE crisis).

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is inherently arbitrary.

Loyalty to a country or idea of a country is nationalism, it just doesn't have to be ethnic.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Mar 15th 2019 at 3:02:05 AM

We can’t ignore the connotation of the word nationalism though. Generally it’s used to refer to the right-wing, militaristic governments that oppress people and restrict rights in the vein of Nazi Germany.

Slapping that on the anti-colonial developing governments trying to express pride in their culture and heritage and insisting that they arent inferior to the colonizers seems a bit tone deaf.

Patriotism has had some bad connotations in the US at least, but it’s nowhere near as unfortunate as nationalism.

Nationalism just means promoting the interests of your own country over the interests of other countries. Pretty much every country in existence could be said to be nationalist to a degree.

Ultranationalist does have some bad connotations, rightfully so though.

"Nationalism" meant that once, as in "nation = a country", but it doesnt mean that any longer, and hasnt for a long time. Nationalism now carries strong connotations of ethnic and racial exclusiveness, ie "Russia is for the Russians" or "Britain belongs to the English". It's a legacy of the idea of the "nation-state", that the best way to organize global society was one state for each "nation", that is ethnic/culture group. Nationalism is nearly always presented in strong opposition to cultural diversity.

@Spartan:

Most of the "good" ones were Leftists tho due to Cold War politics. Usually tended to become dubious themselves.

In the case of my fellow Latin Americans, I'm mixed, thought the issue is that everything broke after the Enemy Mine that was Spain. It was also a very different political landscape.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Mar 15th 2019 at 1:19:02 PM

I keep hearing here and there on this forum that the notion of countries/states as we know them today is actually a modern invention dating no earlier than about the late 18th / early 19th century, around the time the USA and Revolutionary France had emerged. However, I don't really get it. Can someone explain it to me?

The Big Empires died by that era. Sure, Spain already had fell but the British, German, Russian,Ottoman and French empires were still there.

The nation state was already imagined and applied somewhere, mainly on the American continent, but it was after decolonization that it became the de facto global Status quo.

World spawning colonial empires are pretty against the State as we know it. Is.weird to imagine it now, but Liberalism was seen as radical back then.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Mar 16th 2019 at 10:11:37 AM

Worth noting, many people in the United States did not see themselves as "Americans" until after the civil war (people saw themselves as citizens of their states), which is part of why such a war was able to happen.

Yeah, see, the issue is that the people upholding this view claim that, say, "France" didn't exist as we know it until a couple of centuries ago... even though the Kingdom of France existed from the end of the 10th century to the late 18th century. How does that make any sense???

Hell, what about the Roman Republic and its successor the Roman Empire? Aren't these political states by our modern definition, or at least are close enough to it that they can be considered to be its prototypes?

Edited by MarqFJA on Mar 16th 2019 at 6:51:25 PM

I'll try to explain it as simply as I can. Long post incoming.

See, some of the Countries that exist today, like France, have been around in one form or the other for a long time. However, the people in those Countries did not always see themselves as part of something greater.

Basically, if you went to France in the 12th Century and asked a man in the Normandy Duchy what he called himself, he'd probably say Norman or Breton. He probably wouldn't say French except in the context that he spoke a dialect of the French language.

Similarly, if you went to the Arabian Peninsula in the 9th Century and asked someone from Al-Maanama where he was from, he probably wouldn't say he was from the Arab Empire - he'd probably say Bahrein.

Point I'm making is, people in those days were far more loyal to their locality and local lords than any over-arching cultural allegiance. At best, they'd be loyal to the religious head of whatever faith they followed - and even that was very diffuse and ephemeral in most cases.

The concept of nations simply did not exist in the terms we understand today - there were Tribal Allegiances, sure (witness the Tribes of Rome, for a particularly well-documented example), but Tribes usually aren't large enough to be called their own Nations.

The idea that people could be loyal to their overall cultural and linguistic group that was far larger than a Tribe but far smaller than the World popped up just after the French Revolution, by the French Revolutionaries themselves. The reason for this was that they quickly realised after deposing Louis XVI that he wasn't ruling One Kingdom, but something like six or seven different Kingdoms that were nominally all part of the Crown of France. They had a more-or-less common language and customs, but still saw each other as fundamentally different from each other.

To find a unifying cause for their new ideals, and break the power of the Church at the same time (which was, if you're feeling cynical, the whole point behind all of this), they made the concept that there was a Nation that everyone belonged to, based on common customs, language and heritage, and that people owed their loyalty to that more than anything else. Hence the seemingly ancient concepts of Emblems, Flags, Anthems, State Symbols and the like - a mixture of the old and the new.

They basically set up a continuity, to claim that Nations were an eternal, perpetual thing, by reusing and resuscitating ancient symbols and repurposing them for their time. Basically, Appeal to Tradition, modified to suit the needs of the day.

The Useful Notes Page has a very informative summary of all of this. I suggest having a gander over there for more.

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is one major work on the subject, examining how those common factors and concept of a "nation" was disseminated among the people that now belonged to it, specifically looking at the advent of capitalism and the print medium.

Edited by Eschaton on Mar 16th 2019 at 10:53:45 AM

Asking to people as Soban or Archon

How do you guys think the Right could reorganizate itself? If they would do it in first place.

>How do you guys think the Right could reorganizate itself?

That depends on what kind of organization you are talking about.

Organizate in ways that they aren't bigoted and we can get viable right wing ideologies.

I wonder if is possible to get Right Wing ideologies without bigotry, I know Libertarianism exist but...well, it isn't popular here.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Mar 17th 2019 at 9:42:00 AM

Easy, the Left wins the fight against bigotry and then the Right will pretend it always opposed bigotry.

There's a reason even the most bigoted right-wingers won't advocate for slavery, it has been strongly driven from the Overton window (by the left).

That's how the Right will move away from bigoted thought.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Mar 17th 2019 at 7:44:27 AM

Even in the best case they still look bad .

...is kind of depressing. You shouldn't be thinking that political repression is a good idea.

I kinda miss the Cold War where assholery was no partisan

Edited by KazuyaProta on Mar 17th 2019 at 9:50:32 AM

Like...

Since the thing that pretty much defines the Left is the drive towards more equality, fighting bigotry is pretty much inherently a Lefty thing and anyone who fights bigotry is almost automatically on the Left (or at least considerably further to the Left than people who otherwise share the same ideology, but don't fight bigotry).

Edit: Note that there is a difference between being opposed to bigotry and fighting bigotry.

Edited by Robrecht on Mar 17th 2019 at 5:00:51 PM

I guess that It was so simple.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Mar 17th 2019 at 3:57:22 AM

The thing that pretty much defines conservatism is loyalty to one's in-group, be it your family, your religion or your country. That's almost what being conservative means, in a modern context. While a person can be a conservative without explicitly endorsing any obvious form of bigotry, there is pretty much no practical way to define an in-group without excluding from it another group of people, who then become the out-group. Naturally, the first duty of an in-group member is to defend the in-group's beliefs, lifestyles, and political interests from any source of unwanted change (that's the literal meaning of the term "conservative"). As the most obvious source of unwanted change will always be the beliefs, lifestyles and political interests of the out-groups, the spontaneous result will be the development of a negative attitude toward those outgroup lifeways, and the people who practice them. A negative attitude toward people who belong to groups that we dont approve of has a name: bigotry. There's almost no way out of it.

That's the basis of my claim that nearly everyone is a bigot, of one kind or another.

TL;DR You can't be Conservative without being a bigot. No way around that. The only exception to this are the so-called "Fiscal Conservatives" but that term is nebulous enough that I don't take it seriously.

Unless they explicitly define themselves as Classical Liberal or (shudder) Neoclassical, which are legitimately fiscal conservative viewpoints (never mind that the Neoclassical ones are two cherries short of a fruitcake, but I digress).

The Thick of It said it best -

Now I'm no saint - I used to hold some pretty regressive views for a very long time. Regrettably, I was homophobic for quite some time before learning the hard way how shitty that behaviour was. It took a long time to learn it was not okay to be a raging asshole towards other people, and even longer to come around to shedding it.

Point is, overcoming bigotry is a continuous effort since, like DeMaquis said, we all are a little xenophobic one way or the other.

Edited by TechPriest90 on Mar 17th 2019 at 12:15:57 PM

Some of us own it, and some of us dont.

With nationalism, I think one thing people tend to overlook is the nationalism of small countries and ethnic minorities, where that nationalism is often the desire for self-determination and/or an end to oppression for the ethnic/linguistic/cultural group in question. People often define nationalism as the nationalism of the majority only, which often is oppressive towards minorities and exclusionary towards the other. Lots of punching down. Minority nationalism can fall into that, but more often punches up just because of where they are. And there's no point going "that's patriotism though" because almost all groups of that ilk have used the name nationalism for themselves and defined themselves as such. Hell, to show how arbitrary 'patriotism' and 'nationalism' is, I thought the former was the 'bad connotations' one for the longest time.