East European Ethnocracy

S.A.M.

S.A.M.

uniquely dreadful
Valued Senior Member
While watching this excellent overview on Israel-Palestine by Jeff Halper, I was surprised to discover that the reason Jews (after 1000 years) were not considered Russians is because East Europe has innate beliefs in ethnocracy as the criteria of land ownership (ie Russia belongs to ethnic Russians).

This is the first time I have heard this. It seems really strange.

Could some East Europeans clarify this?


/moderator, please move if not appropriate.
 
Well, sure. If you ask anyone, what's their nationality, Russian Latvian citizens will most likely say that it's Russian and Latvian Latvian citizens will tell them that it's Latvian because they have Latvian ancestry.
Nationality in popular langauge here means ethnicity, and it's not something you can change by changing a passport.
 
Open societies are becoming increasingly, and more overtly multiethnic everywhere. Globally, ethnocracy is breaking down, which future anthropologists will surely note. I say good riddance to monoculturalism.

Halper's presentation is an illuminating review- and it's particularly convincing coming from an Israeli activist. I doubt that his introductory point was that tribal nationalism was or is unique to Eastern Europe. We've seen it in the West too, and it persists today. The Afrikaners who prototyped modern Israel's increasingly-apparent apartheid and bantustan system of ethnic separaticsm were not Eastern Europeans. Basque separatists are not Eastern European, etc. It seemed to me that Halper only nodded to the influence of Eastern European immigrants to Israel, without a real thesis that zionist or ethnocratic ideology is uniquely Eastern-European.

Halper's general point did distinguish the origins of what we sometimes call "Western" democracies, as evolved from the French and USAmerican revolutions, in a subtle refutation of the often-repeated zionist canard that Israel is an island of "Western Democracy" in the Mideast.

East and West is a very fuzzy dichotomy in Europe, and in current political ideologies. I lived in the Czech Republic for 2 years, and it was obvious to me that the general orientation of most Czechs is "Western". In other words, the Cold War lines (which is where this dichotomy was most clearly if temporarily drawn) have long been entirely blurred in terms of ideology.

It might be more useful to compare multiethnic democracy with tribal nationalism, without assigning any hemispheric models. These are portable concepts in place and thought, and looking back in an anthropological perspective seems to get fairly clumsy, the closer to the present the analysis moves.

Thanks for linking the KC Sabeel Conference, Sam. I hadn't heard of it, and a lot was covered there beyond the East European Ethnocracy model- Don Wagner's talk on Christian Zionism in the USA reveals a great deal about the core base of USAmerican support for zionism.

I would also be interested if some members here with an Eastern European background would respond, with their impressions of whether ethnic nationalism seems like an Eastern European franchise to them.
 
hypewaders said:
Open societies are becoming increasingly, and more overtly multiethnic everywhere. Globally, ethnocracy is breaking down, which future anthropologists will surely note. I say good riddance to monoculturalism.
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I disagree, it's the opposite. State powers are heading for a standoff, when everyone gets nukes. Ethnic groups and non state entities are becoming the dominant forces. Read the Transformation of War.

Should present trends continue then the kind of war that is based on the division between government, army, and people seems to be on its way out. The rise of low-intensity conflict may, unless it can be quickly contained, end up destroying the state. Over the long run, the place of the state will be taken by warmaking organizations of a different type.​

This subject is even more of a focus in "The Coming Anarchy".

Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. ... And West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.​

...On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it occurred to me what a risky idea the nation-state is. Here I was on the legal fault line between two clashing civilizations, Turkic and Iranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as in West Africa, the border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here the people doing the smuggling, on both sides of the border, were Kurds. In such a moonscape, over which peoples have migrated and settled in patterns that obliterate borders, the end of the Cold War will bring on a cruel process of natural selection among existing states. No longer will these states be so firmly propped up by the West or the Soviet Union. Because the Kurds overlap with nearly everybody in the Middle East, on account of their being cheated out of a state in the post-First World War peace treaties, they are emerging, in effect, as the natural selector—the ultimate reality check. They have destabilized Iraq and may continue to disrupt states that do not offer them adequate breathing space, while strengthening states that do.​
 
Africa is not a particulary good example, most of them were never real states to begin with (created artificially), and now are simply returning to their true stage of development.
 
Multiculturalism is fun and interesting, provided that the members of that other culture aren't violent religious zealots.

Purity? You're racist or something?
 
Its not the violent religious zealots you need to watch out for, its the illusion of knowledge generated by separatists.
 
No, I think it's exactly the religious zealots. They're unpredictable, irrational and dangerous.
And wtf is "illusion of knowledge generated by separatists"?
 
Well, because they are. Just look at all that fuss because of some Muhamed cartoons.
Don't agree with you.
 
Avatar said:
Well, because they are. Just look at all that fuss because of some Muhamed cartoons.
Don't agree with you.
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Thats part of the illusion of knowledge generated by separatists.

It took 3-4 months for the cartoons to create a fuss.

The second publication passed without (much) incidence.
 
spidergoat: "State powers are heading for a standoff, when everyone gets nukes."

Recent history shows that nuclear deterrence, or "standoff" does not prevent states from engaging in warfare. Military conquest is becoming increasingly impractical in light of many factors. I don't follow your suggestion of some historic paradigm-shift due to bigger bombs. Would you please elaborate on that?

"Ethnic groups and non state entities are becoming the dominant forces."

The most ascendant and dominant states today are multi-ethnic. "Non-state-entities" such as major corporations are predominately multiethnic. How does this fit your thesis?

"The rise of low-intensity conflict may, unless it can be quickly contained, end up destroying the state."

That makes little sense to me: Low-intensity conflicts are commonly exploited today for the purpose of consolidating state power.

"The Coming Anarchy"

People everywhere do not tend to enjoy, or wish to sustain anarchy. Whether you mean anarchy in the sense of chaos, or the political ideal, neither seems attractive, or to be gaining in mass appeal.

DeepThought: "Multiculturalism (inequality) is the work of Empires."

That's a strange conflation of terms. Defining multiculturalism as inequality, or as imperialism isn't accurate. How do you tie the two toether, DT?

"Purity is the only solution to avarice and aggression"

As Avatar remarked, that provocative statement calls for some explanation.

"Just look at all that fuss because of some Muhamed cartoons."

It certainly wasn't a world-changing, or unique phenomenon. Fundamentalists are easily insulted everywhere. Neither was that fuss evidence that fundamentalism is gaining ground.


In a broad historical and anthropological perspective, it seems evident that a vector toward multiculturalism, as opposed to ethnically-based states, is what humanity is traveling on. We've generally evolved (or devolved perhaps, from a separatist perspective) from universal clanhood and tribalism in our distant past, to the rise of modern states that increasingly encompass many ethnicities. The most unstable parts of the world today are those where extremes of ethnic competition and oppression persist. It's now axiomatic that segregationism is politically inflammatory and destabilizing.
 
Avatar said:
You're offtopic and talking nonsense again.
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If you're talking multiculturism, you need to be aware of manipulation as a source of conflict generation.

1. Since when do people in the Middle East read Danish newspapers?

2. Why was there a fuss over the cartoons 3-4 months after they were published in Denmark?

3. Why did most of the violence take place in the countries outside the western societies?

4. Why were two more cartoons added to the original set?

Manipulation of "knowledge" or facts to misrepresent the "other" is a common method of all separatists. It is excellently demonstrated by both the Nazi regime and by the Godless warriors of Stalin. To confuse this system of "framing" with religious zealotry is to underestimate its effect. (The Shiv Sena in Mumbai for example frequently represents Shivaji as a Hindu fundamentalist when he was a secular pluralist, just as Christian Zionists represent Jesus as a Christian warrior)

I am curious, what is your personal view of ownership. Does a country belong to its inhabitants or to an ethnicity?
 
Land belongs to no-one, it's fiction, you can't own the land. The state should be run and the land legally used by its citizens, not inhabitants. Local governments are an exception and should be also run by inhabitants of that particular administrative territory.

About your cartoons - I don't care by whoom it was arranged, the important thing is that those people rioted due to some atavistic and irrational religious sensibilities. And there are many other examples of the danger of religious fanatics.
 
Avatar said:
Land belongs to no-one, it's fiction, you can't own the land. The state should be run and the land legally used by its citizens, not inhabitants. Local governments are an exception and should be also run by inhabitants of that particular administrative territory.
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So you define citizens as separate from inhabitants? And yet you claim no land ownership?

So what gives citizens these rights?


About your cartoons - I don't care by whoom it was arranged, the important thing is that those people rioted due to some atavistic and irrational religious sensibilities. And there are many other examples of the danger of religious fanatics.
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You'll be an excellent target for anti-theist separatists.
 
S.A.M. said:
(ie Russia belongs to ethnic Russians).
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Defenetely

Russian land is Russian an NO ONE ELSES.

And every soil will be fought for and the rivers of this soil will turn blood red with enemy who dared come and take our land.
 
So you define citizens as separate from inhabitants?
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Of course, there's a world of difference. Simple inhabitants don't have a strong connection with the state.
And yet you claim no land ownership?
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That's a purely philosophical stance with regards to human arrogance about their status in the Universe. In the real world I think the land should be legally owned by the state as a whole and inhabitants should be able to only rent it.
So what gives citizens these rights?
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The internationally recognized power to do it.
 
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