Despite being an accurate description of the way that human societies organised themselves for ten thousand years, the word ‘ethnostate’ has become taboo recently. Although the debate is usually dominated by arguments between insane Nazis and insane Marxists, there is a fascinating variety of opinions on the question of how wide and/or porous the group borders should be. This essay attempts to put them on a spectrum.
The two poles of the ethnonationalism spectrum are ethnosupremacism and ethnomasochism.
Ethnosupremacism found its apogee in the racial supremacist doctrines of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1940s, under which the Eastern Europeans were declared subhuman and therefore less worthy of existing in the lands of Poland and Ukraine than the German soldiers to who the land was promised. This pole of the spectrum fell out of favour, understandably, when the German “Drang nach Osten” ended up causing the deaths of over 25 million people.
There are two aspects to ethnosupremacism (see: The Three Definitions of Racism) and one is much more dangerous than the other. The first can be considered a sort of pride in the achievements of one’s kin and is little different to individual self-esteem raised to the group level, whereas the second is the belief that other ethnicities are categorically lesser and perhaps even ought to be exterminated.
The first step from ethnosupremacism towards sanity could be called ethnoconservatism. This is the “fuck you, I’ve got mine” of the ethnonationalist spectrum. This position is similar to regular conservatism on the class spectrum. Essentially it says that, because one’s own kind are doing well from the way that society is structured, there is nothing wrong with the way society is structured and it should therefore stay the same.
This is different to ethnosupremacism in the sense that the ethnosupremacist doesn’t believe that any amount of money can help the lesser races overcome their inherently base nature, whereas the ethnoconservative doesn’t care, they just don’t want to pay for it. Likewise, the ethnoconservative doesn’t despise other races, they just don’t think it’s right to mix with them, for whatever reasons.
This is a common position in the New World, on account of that the remnants of the native population are often much poorer than the descendants of the settlers. If an individual feels that the Government shouldn’t charge them taxes in order to fund social programs etc. intended to reduce income inequality, they are likely to take this position.
Ethnomasochism has found its apogee today, in the anti-white SJW culture that represents the furthest swing of the Great Pendulum away from the ethnosupremacism of the Nazis. Ethnomasochism is discussed at length here but could be summarised as a belief that one’s own kind were worthy of particular disgrace on account of some past political misdeeds. Very often, ethnomasochism is the result of a low self-esteem, whereby the individual’s self-hatred is projected onto the race as a defence mechanism.
The first step from ethnomasochism towards sanity is a realisation that individuals do not inherit sin from their forefathers, and that even if they did, it would be impossible to determine how much blame one’s forefathers had caused one to inherit. However, if one is more intelligent than the average person one might come to perceive that gross pride in one’s race is considered vulgar by most cultured people and that a modicum of racial humility ought to be adopted, on occasion, for the sake of politeness.
A white person here might not possess any self-hatred but might make a joke about how a high proportion of child sex offenders are white people. An Asian might make a joke about how he’s shit at driving, and a black person might make a joke about how he feels tempted to steal something. This is not genuine self-hatred but a kind of self-deprecation for the sake of social utility. Indeed, a person needs to have genuine self-esteem before they can joke about themselves in this manner.
This is the position most commonly associated with sanguine cosmopolitanism and could be described as ethnocurious. Many people who are university educated or who identify with the left-libertarian quadrant (of the common political model) are here, especially if they are the sort of person who does a lot of international travel. Ethnocurious people often have foreign girlfriends or boyfriends, and can prefer other races on account of that interactions with their own kind lack novelty.
In the middle of the spectrum is a point of reason. Here it is acknowledged that each person is an individual, and therefore neither responsible for the crimes of their race nor able to take credit for its accomplishments, and yet that each person has genetic characteristics that have shaped the way that their environment has treated them, and which have thereby shaped their life story.
Here one believes that the most logical thing to do, therefore, is to treat everyone else as equal partners in a grand human project to minimise the amount of suffering endured by conscious beings in this world. Other people are to be understood but their resentments are not to be encouraged.
Unfortunately for us, this point of reason conflicts with all the other positions. Ethnosupremacists will shun you for being a weakling who is unwilling to stand up for his own kind. Ethnoconservatives will shun you for being a suspected Marxist. The ethnocurious feel like this position wilfully misses out of much of the flavour that life has to offer, and ethnomasochists will despise you for not adopting their quasi-religious narrative that their particular race is guilty.
Even more unfortunately, this point of reason conflicts with neoliberal ideology (the prevailing ideology of our age), and so a combination of state and corporate power has colluded to obscure the truth about it. Neoliberal ideology demands that any desire on the part of big business for cheap labour can be met by simply opening the borders to mass Third World immigration, and so any problems that might be caused on account of mixing together people of genotypes that never previously mixed can be dismissed as racism.
The dumber a person is, the more likely they are to pick an unsophisticated position at either pole of the ethnonationalist spectrum. If they are sadistic they will choose ethnosupremacism where everyone else is subhuman, if they are masochistic they will choose ethnomasochism where everyone else is an immoral oppressor. If they are intelligent they will have a nuanced position somewhere centrist.
*
If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).