What's Wrong with Ethno-Nationalism?

The Donald Trump Show

By Ross Douthat July 23, 2016 (LINK to article)

"[Donald Trump's] ethno-nationalism"

That is mean as a slur, of course, which Trump would reject, claiming to want to be President for ALL Americans.

The question is, does ethno-nationalism deserve to be demonised the way it is? I don't believe it does.

It's demonised because the Nazis were ethno-nationalists, as are some modern groups of racial supremacists, but ethno-nationalism doesn't have to be judged by such negative examples. Zionism is also a form of ethno-nationalism, and, although it includes some extremists, is generally viewed positively. Good Zionists - and there are many of them - reach out the hand of friendship and cooperation to Palestinians, who unfortunately refuse to accept it.

So, taking Zionism as a positive example of ethno-nationalism, how might one apply it to multi-ethnic America?

First, one needs to recognise that the present Constitution was written by and for just one ethnic group, i.e. whites. The founding fathers never intended it to be applied to races other than their own. Thus, America needs to be refounded with a new constitution written by and for ALL Americans, not just whites. A revolutionary idea, but a good one, I think.

Also we need to recognise the deceit of equating state and nation, not just in America, but in all so-called "nation states", which are not genuine nations at all, but mercenary "patron states" deceitfully posing as nations, to legitimise themselves, their ruling elites and the immense power they wield and abuse.

Anti-Fascists & Fascists = Goodies & Baddies

Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

By Ross Douthat, Dec. 2 2015 (LINK to article)


Let's face it, calling someone a "fascist" is just a way of dismissing and condemning them as a "baddy", by associating them with all the evils and horrors of Nazism. Those doing the accusing are usually primarily concerned with asserting their own moral superiority as a "goody".

I'm not an expert on fascism, but it seems to me that it can't have been all bad, as it is now portrayed, anymore than communism was. Both movements had 10s of millions of supporters, many of them very passionate in the belief that they were fighting for a good cause.

In the aftermath of WW2, fascism was equated with Nazism and dismissed as evil, while many in academia continued to view communism with sympathy. Clearly, with Stalin, things had gone badly wrong, but the ideas behind communism and socialism were not all bad. Far from it. But no such sympathy is ever shown towards fascism, not least, because there is a strictly enforced taboo against doing so. Anyone who does is immediately accused of being a fascist sympathiser themselves.

I think this was - and continues to be - a huge mistake. We (especially academics from whom others take their lead) massively overreacted to the horrors of Nazism, and as the Editorial Board wrote in a recent editorial, The Price of Fear, "In the reaction and overreaction to terrorism comes the risk that society will lose its way".

This, I believe, is what has happened in respect to fascism, which I elaborate on in this BLOG on The West's Overreaction to Nazism.

P.S. There is a very good biography, it seemed to my lay eye, of the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, which is long out of print and whose author, Robert Skidelsky, and publisher seem to have no interest in seeing back in print, presumably because it portrays Mosley in too objective and sympathetic a light. Certainly, he was no British Hitler. According to this biography, the violence which often accompanied his rallies was usually initiated by the Left, which doesn't fit the established narrative of it always being the fascists who were responsible for the violence.

Dominated as it is by the Left, academia  only seems interested in demonising fascism, by equating it with the obvious evils of Nazism, rather than in understanding it in its historical context, as they do with communism and socialism.

White Guilt in the Service of Political Power

What We Fear When We Fear Terrorism

By Ross Douthat, Nov. 30 2015 (LINK to article)

"American xenophobia: We fear attacks from a nebulous or specifically-Islamic “Other” more than we fear violence by angry white men . . . , because Americans still identify with whiteness/maleness/Christianity too closely to fully imagine “white Christian terrorism” as something to be feared . . . This is a mostly left-wing argument . . "

Indeed it is a mostly left-wing argument, behind which lies an ideology of white racial self-denial and self-contempt, which began as an understandable overreaction to Jim Crow, Apartheid and, of course, Nazism, with their ideology of racial supremacism, before being transformed into an instrument of socio-political intimidation, rewards, punishments, manipulation and control, just as medieval church ideology once served.

What makes this ideology so powerful and pernicious is that is serves the age-old strategy of “divide and rule”, dividing society into a morally superior, now supposedly "colour-blind", elite and the morally inferior, naturally (human nature being what it is) less colour-blind, masses, who must submit to the authority of and domination by their "moral superiors".

It plays the same power-political role that medieval church ideology once did, whereby "original sin" (disobedience of divine, i.e. priestly/state authority) is replaced by "racial prejudice" (the natural human inclination - like original sin - to identity with members of one's own tribe, race or ethnic group, which was wrongly made responsible for the Holocaust and equated with the evils of Nazi racism), which only submission to priestly/academic/state ideology and authority can save us from eternal damnation for, not as heathens and heretics, as in the past, but as "bigots" and "racists".

As in the past, we are being bullied by an elite of "moral supremacists" who demonise different aspects of human nature to their own, personal, advantage, and which academics don't recognise, because they themselves are some of the biggest bullies.

It's not just Culture, but also Race

Europe’s Refugee Problem, and Ours

By Ross Douthat, Nov. 18 2015 (LINK to article)

 "[The solution is not] assimilating them all, through some wholly imaginary means, into a Europe that’s roiled by completely-understandable fears about its own near-term security and long-term political and cultural fate."  

Editorial Board, please take note of these wise words.

Also, this European is not only concerned about Europe's "long-term political and cultural fate", but also about something which is clearly a taboo for the NYT, namely the fate of Europe as the ancestral homeland of white people.

I do not accept that it is "racist" to identify with my own white race of ethnic Europeans and to want to preserve it, anymore that it is for Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians to want the same for their indigenous races. I do not want my race reduced to an ethnic minority on their own continent by the forces of globalisation, as Native Americans have been.

I understand where this taboo comes from. It was an understandable overreaction to the Holocaust, which was blamed on "racial prejudice" against Jews, notwithstanding that European Jews are racially indistinguishable form other Europeans, which,  in my view, makes Nazi anti-Semitism an expression of racial SELF-hatred.

Post-racial multicultural ideology, which denies the importance of race, is the exact but equally extreme and insane opposite of Nazi racial ideology, and will have similarly catastrophic consequences if we persist with it, instead of facing up to the reality and importance of race.