• she/they

I'm just a green dog with a big butt and some hyper fixations. Trans, nb, bi, Possibly ΘΔ.


dante
@dante

the more i learn about history the more i am convinced that the modern concept of a monocultural nation-state (that is, a nation-state that is primarily distinguished by being of "one people") is an inhumane invention, mostly constructed to aid & operationalize colonialism.

people just didn't live in monocultural worlds for most of human history and it's bizarre to desire that, unless your goal is to better define cultural heirarchies to expedite/justify resource extraction from the "worse" nations. which, of course, happens all the time in the modern world, so like, i get it. but it's not good and shouldn't be desired by any good person


bethposting
@bethposting

when usually this actually reflects the fact that their country is dominated by a single ethnic/cultural group to the extent that anyone in that group is seen as inherently foreign, and therefore not a "part" of their country that they could be racist against, or is seen as being an ethnic/nationalist group and not as a "race" per se.

obviously the US, Canada, etc. do have problems with racism that are fairly apparent because of how quite a bit of the population isn't white people. but, for example, if anyone from a 99% white european country tries to tell you they aren't racist at all, ask them how they feel about muslim immigrants or about the romani people and you'll get quite a different story.


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in reply to @dante's post:

eh, mostly in parallel, not exactly in contradiction. you can use the apparatus of a state (defined loosely as "the legal entity of a government & its holdings, recognized by other states as such") to enact anticolonial/liberatory goals, but i would hope that the broader goal of such struggles is not to replicate a monocultural/monoreligious/monoethnic/whatever state. that is, however, the dominant status quo of powerful nationstates currently though, so i guess you just gotta contend with that.

personally i think it requires a more specific socioeconomic goal (e.g. "centrally controlled socialist state with guaranteed civil rights for all citizens, regardless of origin/religion/etc") than just "we would like to create a nationstate of the formerly oppressed peoples of [region]". Like ok! that's a good start. but what is the state, how does it function, what are its goals beyond just "existing".

It might be worth looking into the Kurdish liberation movement, which within the last few decades has shifted away from the goal of a Kurdish nation-state and towards a vision of a multinational federation.
The pitfalls of national liberation in the context of imperialism and colonialism is something that socialists and communists have struggled with for a long time, and between Lenin and Öcalan there's many different attempts of grasping and tackling that problem.

A genocide researcher spoke at my shul a week or so back about how much of the antisemitism seen in the 19th/20th century can be see as a part of exactly what you're discussing here, and how Jews made that kind of Nation State construction a little thorny. Hard to define the concept of "a people" by language and borders when a different way of looking at it exists vibrantly in every city and town. It's necessary to understand that in order to understand the antisemitic roots of zionism, both now and then.

Yeah! I'm reminded of Stalin's famous line about Judaism, calling the bund movement "nationalists without a nation" as a justification for purging them from power (ignoring the labor bund playing an instrumental role in soviet success ofc). Like, you have a disparate group of people from all over Europe (and the world ofc but that wasn't really noted) who all speak different languages and look differently all calling themselves of the same people is,,, portraying homogeneous hegemonoy and borders as natural necessitates portraying them as unnatural and deviant. The State of Israel in this lense can be seen as an act of assimilation, giving a nation to this group, teaching Jews how to be European

Anyways, that's a summary of his 30 minute talk I only half remember haha. It seems like a fruitful rabbit hole!

The State of Israel in this lense can be seen as an act of assimilation, giving a nation to this group, teaching Jews how to be European

YES exactly! that's a good way to put it. by using the "language" of a State to assimilate a "nation" is a great way of conceptualizing that

in reply to @bethposting's post:

I was first told racism was an American thing by an Israeli co-worker explaining why it's ok she referred to the one black guy at our workplace as the N-word (hard r) because "we don't have racism in Israel." A couple weeks later, she had sex with him. No moral. Humans are weird.