So this was pretty bad.
Wilders’ PVV did increase its share of the vote by 3% points relative to the last elections, but considering the hopes and fears getting pum pumped up, this was certainly a defeat for populism – as Hollande, Merkel, Juncker, Macron, and all the other Respectable Politicians recognized as they rushed to congratulate Mark Rutte.
Poroshenko hailed his victory as a peremoga against the forces of populism in Europe.
But ultimately, the idea of the Netherlands (or Germany) playing any significant role in reversing the rising tide of population replacement in Europe has never been realistic.
Consider this. By the standards of European far right parties, the PVV is an unusually socially liberal, economically neoliberal, and philo-Semitic party. They support drug legalization, they support gay marriage, they not only completely disavow anti-Semitism but avidly support Israel (Wilders’ own opposition to Islam, which is much more hardline than even Le Pen’s, grew out of his travels across Israel’s kibbutzes during the his youth). All these things generally appeal to the higher IQ part of the electorate.
Even so, however, it was still the dumbest who voted for Wilders.
Only 14% of PVV voters have a higher education, versus 57% for the trendy left-liberal pro-European D66. This is completely in line with the demographic profile of the post-Trump Republican Party, with the Front National, even with the LDPR in Russia, and explicitly nationalist parties pretty much everywhere else in Europe.
This is a crazy theory that will anger pretty much everyone, but I think there’s something to it, so here goes.
With some of the highest (native) IQs in Europe, the Dutch are too intelligent and too smack dab in the center of Hajnal Europe, with its associated modern-day psychological complexes (e.g. pathological altruism), for their own good. They have been a country of literate merchants since even before Great Britain. They are the Eternal Merchants of Europe.
Since cuckoldry is an intellectual fetish, perhaps there is simply no hope for the Netherlands, or for that matter, for similarly native high-IQ Germany.
There might yet be hope for France, though, since they’re a bit dumber on average, and as such, haven’t had the self-preservation instinct so completely brainwashed out of them by liberal academia and the globalist elites.
Though he was made fun of it, Trump was not incorrect to state, “We love the poorly educated.” It is, of course, a rather inconvenient reality that the people most committed to European demographic continuity tend to the unlettered. But it is a reality that has to be recognized and catered to.
High IQ is the mindkiller. The working class will save the white race!
Practical implications: Wilders should have dropped all the neoliberal austery rhetoric and gone hard hard on protectionism, like Le Pen and even Trump. Tone back criticisms of Islam that are rooted in its opposition to free speech, which is not something that lower IQ people very much care about. One suspects most Dutch nationalists don’t care overmuch for Israel either. Do that, maybe get your share of the vote up to a not entirely embarassing 25%, or something.
In modern society, it is the mediocre & easily manipulated mass-man – not the under-man or the super-man – who is the greatest threat!
Cuckoldry is not indicative of either high or low intelligence, but of mediocre intelligence. It is those with the most mediocre intelligence who are most easily indoctrinated and who therefore most easily conform in a slavish manner to whatever social standards are imposed upon them.
Dissident thought is most common among the intellectual outliers : those with very little intellectual capacity and those who qualify as geniuses. Those at the bottom end of the Bell Curve fail to be easily indoctrinated, because their minds operate as a more instinctive level, which even the most advanced forms of indoctrination have little access to. Those at the high end of the Bell Curve similarly fail to be easily indoctrinated, because their minds are far more logic driven than the average, mediocre individual.
So it’s really mediocre – not high or low – intelligence that is the mindkiller.
Years ago, during a discussion of the movie Bend it Like Beckham on iSteve, a commenter observed that women’s soccer is a eugenic sport. Hitting a ball with one’s head a lot leads to concussions. That lowers a girl’s IQ, likely raising her future fertility. But it doesn’t decrease the IQ of her children.
Dummies of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but … but, hell you don’t have anything to lose!
I don’t know AK, it has prospects, but I think it needs a little work.
I don’t understand why anti-immigrant parties in Europe are also anti-EU. To me that is a big turn-off. I don’t see a problem with united Europe (EU or some other federal or semi-federal form). I consider myself also as European and a lots of people in 21. century think like that and why is that a problem. Why can’t we be German/Italian/French/etc. and European and patriotic and anti-mass-migration all at the same time? Problems with EU are current policies of mass migration, disregard for demographic problems, modern leftist regressivism in other spheres, not the EU itself and idea of united Europe. How european nations as separate entities can possibly compete today with billion+ China and India, USA and potentialy other countries in the future? Germany as most populous (and even Russia which is double-Germany) is modest in global context. Goal should be to come to power and change EU policies not crash and burn EU itself. Also one day maybe Russia can integrate more closely with EU, but unfortunately not in the near future because of russophobia in most of EU and i think ambivalence on Russian side.
If a patriotic party comes to power in a single Western European country, it would not be able to cut off immigration because of free movement within the EU. A lot of Africans now in France, Germany and the UK came in through Italy for example.
The Dutch election confirmed the populust-nationalist trend. Wilders got more votes than last time. If this trend continues long enough, some nationalist party will break through somewhere in Western Europe eventually. And this win would be almost meaningless without a [name-of-country-abbreviation]xit vote beforehand or soon after, because changing the entire EU would take much longer. If nationalism wins, it will be gradually, country by country.
Of course it would make a lot of sense for future patriotic governments to create a union of their own, which, if the trend continues, could gradually grow to the size of the current EU.
A properly-executed header shot, in which the ball is struck squarely with the forehead, carries very little risk of a concussion; that part of the skull is quite thick. Concussions are more likely if the ball strikes the head at an angle, or in head-ground collisions.
I wish that we could stop equating “education” with “schooling.” Some highly-educated people have little formal schooling and some highly schooled people are abysmally educated.
If there is hope, it lies in the proles?
Higher IQ is positively correlated with high degree of cuckoldry and negatively correlated with nationalism? By that logic, higher IQ East Asian countries such as Japan, S. Korea, China and Singapore will be full of African and Arabs. Obviously, cuckoldry is fetish only for Western intellectuals aka the parentheses people.
Rutte should send flowers to Erdy for giving him the opportunity to look as though he possessed a backbone.
Some of the NRX people I know are extremely high IQ. I suspect that medium high IQ leans toward liberalism, with the outliers going in both directions, or even leaning right.
The EU is pozzed and bears unbelievably liberal values. Competing with China would never be possible, not with an overbearing EU with economy-killing policies; agility as smaller and more economically flexible nations would be more realistic. Might as well preserve the things which matter: culture, family, and a good life.
South Korea is pretty bad. Both China and Japan can be said to be putting up resistance, while S. Korean just laps up degeneracy and it really doesn’t seem like they’re going to stop it.
The nationalist parties are anti-EU because they reject the dictates of the non-elected semi-Soviet bureaucracy of Brussels. And because ‘europa’ is a fiction. There is no historical affinity or interest among its peoples. Any british or dutch has more in common with a native of his former colonies than with a blue-eyed blond ukrainian.
The creation of the EU, into its intended final state as a “United States of Europe”, necessarily requires anti-nationalist indoctrination and policies, to destroy existing national loyalties. Among the most powerful of those anti-nationalist ideas and policies is free movement and its corollary mass migration.
In due course, once the existing national loyalties have been destroyed, a new nationalist loyalty to Europe will have to be created (this process was also visible in the most apt precedent – the creation of the USA). Indeed that process is also occurring to some extent already, in part naturally as a result of free trade and movement. The propagandist use of Russia as a unifying external (supposed) threat is part of it.
But the attack on existing national loyalties can’t easily be pursued with sufficient force without active demonization of border controls. The biggest weapon against such loyalties is mass immigration of peoples with few loyalties to the existing state, and a large part of this has to come from outside the EU. European migrations work to some extent if they are big enough, but are not sufficiently divisive and corrosive to national unity.
The parties of national survival (PONAS) arising across Europe represent those who have recognised the process (not necessarily intellectually), and are growing to meet it. They recognise that both mass immigration and the increasing power of the EU are threats to their survival as sovereign free nations. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen, but there is no possibility that the Euro-elites themselves will close the borders until and unless they are forced by the threat of the PONAS to choose between the very existence of the EU and holding up their process of dissolution of the nations. Even then, they will resume the process as soon as they can.
Of course, the very creation of a United States of Europe will likely end in war anyway – the precedent of the US is very unpromising. That process succeeded in the end, but only at the cost of a horrific civil war to seal the transformation from voluntary union of states to coercive superstate, and the deaths of up to a million people. And the cultural differences between the colonies that formed the US were chickenfeed next to Europe’s differences.
“Since cuckoldry is an intellectual fetish,”
I thought the whole cuck meme wasn’t meant literally…this almost sounds like you think immigration enthusiasts are really into cuckoldry porn…
But yes, depressing results in the Netherlands. I’m afraid Germany’s election in September will be similarly disastrous, AfD probably won’t get much more than 10%.
In theory I agree (even though I’m in favour of the EU more as an alliance of mostly sovereign states, not some sort of “United States of Europe”), and I believe we need close European cooperation, not least because of outside threats. Problem is the kind of people running the EU, their whole ethos (if one can call it that) is inimical to the interests of actually existing European nations.
“Any british or dutch has more in common with a native of his former colonies than with a blue-eyed blond ukrainian.”
I think that’s a ridiculous statement (even though plenty of cucked people in Britain seem to believe it due to misguided empire nostalgia…well, good luck with your Pakistanis and Nigerians then). Europe isn’t a fiction, if one limits it to what once was Latin Christendom it’s clearly a common civilization; the status of Orthodox countries like Greece, Serbia and of course Russia may be more ambiguous…but they definitely aren’t as alien to the average European as the Islamic world. Of course belonging to a common civilization doesn’t have to imply a common political structure like the EU.
These “national loyalties” themselves were created by hard nationalist indoctrination and terror just few centuries ago. Your ancestors lived all their lives in their native village, spoke the village dialect, knew nothing about the world outside few nearby villages and cared even less.
Then their village built a school, and everyone had to go there, learn they are “French” “Italian” “German” or whatever, they must wave the flag and sing the anthem, love the “motherland” and hate all foreigners, the “true man” is one who puts on brightly colored clown costume and walks slowly into machine gun fire, the “true woman” is one who happily sends her father, husband, brothers and sons into poison gas and machine gun fire.
You want this back?
You describe state-building, not the creation of nations. Granted, in the nation state there is crossover but nevertheless your description is deliberately misleading. And your implication that “hate all foreigners” is a necessary part of nationalism is of course a straightforward lie.
Also, of course, the process of enforcing national loyalty and obedience is not one that vanishes if the nation states of Europe are replaced by a European superstate, any more than flags, anthems, uniforms and coerced obedience to central authority vanished in America with the creation of the USA – quite the contrary in fact.
This is bogus and demonstrates lack of knowledge of history, which is very disappointing for someone here; even though I might not agree with you, I was hoping that you’ll be equally well read as many of us here.
Nationalism replaced personal loyalty, so prior to it, loyalty was extended to a monarchy or at its more local level, an aristocrat. However, the monarchies did indeed extend to roughly cover the same areas and there was definite coherence of a macro-identity: there were obvious and distinct references to Frenchmen during the Ancien Régime and this extends even as far back as Emperor Charlemagne’s Frank vassals. Even the polyglot Prussia area which would become Germany, was composed of real and distinct areas, and by Frederick the Third had a clearly defined culture.
Gender roles exist in mammals without even language, let alone education.
Ha! Well it is a joke.
Mostly… I mean…
But okay, I do think there’s a correlation. Its been reported in the mass media that higher IQs are associated with the cuckoldry fetish, and its also well known that higher IQ is positively correlated with greater support for open borders (curiously, this seems to remain true even within already very high IQ groups, such as the readers of Scott Alexander’s blog).
Open borders, open twats.
Who needs Freud?
Self-reported IQ there sounds like it would fail most notions of accuracy.
“there were obvious and distinct references to Frenchmen during the Ancien Régime and this extends even as far back as Emperor Charlemagne’s Frank vassals. ”
Yes, but during much of the middle ages Francia only referred to some nothern parts of modern-day France (where Frankish settlement had been strong during late antiquity/the early middle ages and/or where the king retained rights and power during the nadir of West Frankish/French kingship in the 10th and 11th centuries, that is the Ile de France). A southerner during the time of the Albigensian crusade would probably have regarded Franci as foreign invasors from up north, distinct in speech and customs, not as compatriots.
Darin’s basic point that modern nationalims replaced or even obliterated earlier loyalties and identities seems hard to disagree with imo…I disagree though about the wider implications.
You’d think so, but S.A. has good arguments against that.
They also have impressive consistency in that IQ data by race, education level, and even religion reconstitute the same hierarchies as in real life (as expected from probability).
I remain dubious at least when it comes to asking about the SAT. Anyone who answers positively on the SAT will likely answer positively for the ACT, and I believe the ceiling effect is notable here. I have a perfect SAT and ACT scores; I’ve only had my IQ tested once, but it was not in the top 99% percentile as my score would imply.
Only point #3 would seem relevant, which does potentially reinforce its legitimacy. I remain dubious, though. An IQ of 130 plus for the commentators does seem really high, no?
“Darin’s basic point that modern nationalims replaced or even obliterated earlier loyalties and identities seems hard to disagree with imo”
Apart from the (deliberately?) misleading aspects presumably intended to demonise nationalism that I’ve mentioned in my reply to him, he has completely mis-described the chronology.
Obviously modern national identities replaced earlier loyalties (that’s why they are modern), but it’s not the case that there were no loyalties above village level previously, as he implies. Before the nation state, there were multi-ethnic empires, which nevertheless ruled over nations or parts of nations, and there was still nationalism even if the nation in question did not have a state.
“Any british or dutch has more in common with a native of his former colonies than with a blue-eyed blond ukrainian.”i
I think that’s a ridiculous statement (even though plenty of cucked people in Britain seem to believe it due to misguided empire nostalgia
I doubt that there is much nostalgia.
There is a great deal of guilt and a willingness to “atone” for the sins of the fathers.
You have clearly read just one book in your life, or more likely the summary thereof on a website.
“but it’s not the case that there were no loyalties above village level previously, as he implies.”
True, but I’m not sure those larger identities were that relevant for the large mass of the population who were peasants and who may indeed have had rather restricted horizons. Obviously it was different for the elites, that is the nobility, clergy, burghers etc. In any case for me this is a historical discussion only…I don’t believe a return to some imagined pre-national utopia is either possible or desirable.
The only way a truly pan-European identity could exist if through a history of common hardware and warfare against yet another entity. Its not happening. You can only define the Self through the Other, and the pan-EU identity struggles to have any notion of the Other that isn’t self-condemning.
I don’t think so…if Britain’s elites feel so “guilty” about imperialism why are they so enthusiastic about shameful neo-imperialist projects like invading Iraq or helping bring Yemen to starvation? Seems more like the public school-educated cretins that run Britain never got over the loss of empire and decided to recreate it in Britain itself so they could delude themselves about their own importance. They should have followed Enoch Powell’s advice who, after being an ardent imperialist in his youth, realized it would be better for Britain to decisively break with that imperial past.
Allegiance to the King or Queen was extremely common, though, even or especially among the peasant classes. In many ways, it served as a bulwark against aristocratic control, since even as a rhetorical concept, it was the notion of the enlightened monarch against his predatory locals(and familiarity breeds contempt).
I don’t think its utopia, but I think its a superior method of organization than the European Union’s mess. Farage said it correctly, it should not be a political union, and makes no sense to be one.
Honestly, sometimes, China’s internal provinces seem to have more autonomy than entire nations in the EU.
Yes, you’re probably right about that. “European” identity as envisaged by most of its proponents is basically supposed to be just a negation of one’s own national identity, just another step to being a citizen of the world. When people in Germany say “I’m European” they mean “I’m not really German and don’t want to be” (whereas for me it would imply “I’m not an Arab, a Turk or an African and I don’t want them to have power over me and people like me”). Such an identity based on self-negation probably will never be attractive to most people.
“In many ways, it served as a bulwark against aristocratic control, since even as a rhetorical concept, it was the notion of the enlightened monarch against his predatory locals”
I’m not really sure one can state this with much confidence for much of the pre-modern period (at least before about 1500), apart from exceptional episodes like England’s peasants’ rising in 1381 when peasants appealed to the justice of the king (and in any case England was exceptional in already being somewhat discernible as a nation in the 10th century)…our sources, being written by the elites (mostly clerics at that), simply don’t tell us much about the thoughts or loyalties of peasants.
But in any case I’m somewhat of a nationalist myself…the United states of Europe definitely sounds like a nightmare to me.
My ancestors probably lived in a village in the SE of England and probably thought of themselves as Englishmen a thousand years ago. Even the peasants would have thought of themselves as part of something more than just an isolated village, both as Englishmen and as Christians.
That English identity probably came suddenly into sharper focus in 1066, of course, but it probably long predated the Norman occupation.
I don’t see it quite that way. I see it as perfectly possible that a United States of Europe nationalism could in theory be created in Europe much as a US nationalism was created in North America, if it isn’t throttled early.
I see it as a disaster if it happens, and not as something that could be created without much bloodshed, coercion and repression, but still as something that is a real threat. We dismiss it as laughable now, and it is, but the flags and the existence of people who identify as “European” are there in proto form already, and the project has barely started.
As for wars against others, such wars and external enemies don’t have to be credible threats. The US never faced an external enemy that was a really credible existential military threat in its entire early existence, but nevertheless managed to build an identity by brutalising tribes of primitives and waging expansionist wars. Interventionist wars in the ME and elsewhere would surely serve the purpose for Europe, along with a Russian “menace” and perhaps a Chinese or even African one on the future.
“That English identity probably came suddenly into sharper focus in 1066”
I suppose it did for all those Anglo-Saxon thegns and other landowners who were dispossessed by the Normans and saw their world destroyed within a single lifetime…whether it mattered that much to those lower down the social order, who knows? Though of course being ruled (and exploited) by one’s own kind is preferable to being ruled by foreigners, and that probably was already the case in the 11th century.
England however is in any case somewhat exceptional since its nationhood can plausibly be traced back to at least the 10th century when Alfred and his successors unified the country; with its shires it had strong local institutions connected to the centre, also a vigorous literature in the vernacular. It’s one of the oldest nations in Europe; on much of the continent political order was much more fragmented and identities probably more fluid.
But anyway, none of this means I’m in favour of open borders or the EU.
Never thought of it that way before. You have a thoughtful and plausible perspective on this. Thank you.
As an American descended from white Europeans on both sides, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Intending no hatred against anybody, honestly I’d far rather live in a ethnic-Russian-majority town or country than in an African- or Islamic-majority town or country. Not even a close call.
I’d like to increase trade, tourism, and student-exchange programs with people from every race and culture, but then we can each return to our respective homes and homelands — hopefully on friendly or at least neutral and profitable terms.
The life-and-death struggle against the Islamic and African invasions present the perfect opportunity for Europeans to unite and forge that strong European identity that some of the EU’s supporters want.
But then, Europeans would have to unite around the proposition that they are entitled to defend their lives, territory, culture, languages, religion, values, and interests all together — not, as they seem to be uniting, around the proposition that they should all go together in sanctimony into a sharia-ruled or violence- and poverty- and corruption-ridden darkness dominated by non-Europeans.
Well put. You have captured my own Weltanschauung on this score: “I don’t hate or want to harm anybody, but I don’t want them to have power over me and my children and people like us.”
As long as you oppose “self-preservation” to the Left you will always lose….as Nietzsche noted long ago, self-preservation has never been a very strong motivating force and people are quite willing to die for a noble cause…..or even for relatively useless polar expeditions, mountaineering ascents, or pointless journeys to find the source of the Nile. “Practical” concerns simply have never galvanized anyone.
The Left offers a vision of perfection, a Platonic Ideal, a sense of meaning and purpose….self-preservation, or any other “practical” right-wing consideration you can come up with, even “safety”, simply won’t cut it. People are quite willing to sacrifice safety for a noble ideal of perfection.
If the right cannot come up with its own Platonic Ideal, its own vision of perfection, it will lose, and lose decisively and completely, as has been happening for the past few decades.
All the Right had to offer for the past few decades were practical considerations, reasonableness, and prudence…that isn’t enough for humans.
why are they so enthusiastic about shameful neo-imperialist projects like invading Iraq or helping bring Yemen to starvation?
White man’s burden. Many of them are sincere, especially in the supporting public; they actually believe that they can bring democracy to many of these countries. That doesn’t mean that there are not ruthless Machiavellian types scattered about. And the numbers that are true open border types who disdain nationalism in any form is not trivial and is growing.
(even though I’m in favour of the EU more as an alliance of mostly sovereign states
NATO without the US should work.
The US never faced an external enemy that was a really credible existential military threat in its entire early existence, but nevertheless managed to build an identity by brutalising tribes of primitives and waging expansionist wars.
I can agree with the first part, after the very early years, but I object to the idea that the Indians Wars “built” an identity. The existing identity allowed and facilitated the execution of the Indian Wars and especially the expansionary wars.
Identity first, then aggression.
The Marxists were right all along.
“The US never faced an external enemy that was a really credible existential military threat in its entire early existence…”
Apparently you’re defining “early existence in such a way that it starts in 1781, not 1776. Even then your statement is questionable.
And that’s why the whole “European” idea is a giant lie. This may be the history of France or Germany but it sure as hell is not the history of most nations. Most of us belong to small ethnic groups that were historically forced to live in those kind of states ruled by some other ethnic group. Our nationhood isn’t exactly a product of school indoctrination when all the schools ever taught us was that our identity, language and religion need to die and get replaced by someone else’s.
This “European” project really only draws from the history of a couple of great powers and the rest of us have the status of colonies. Less than colonies, actually, as now we are forced into this absurd double colonization where we need to erase the memory of Germanic tyranny and rewrite our history as if we’re one of those culturally aggressive state-owning Germanic peoples with a militant past to lament so that we can join Germany in self-hatred…
It’s neither our fault or our problem if Germans cannot handle nationalism, this is the era of nuclear weapons and Germany can be contained without the EU.
“But okay, I do think there’s a correlation. Its been reported in the mass media that higher IQs are associated with the cuckoldry fetish, and its also well known that higher IQ is positively correlated with greater support for open borders (curiously, this seems to remain true even within already very high IQ groups, such as the readers of Scott Alexander’s blog).”
Anatoly,
I don’t think these are related at all. You can support very liberal / sex positive sexual mores and also support mostly closed borders and ethnic homogeneity. I’m very liberal on most sexual ethics issues and also a skeptic of mass immigration and within-society ethnic/cultural diversity. In fact, my opinion on these two issues comes from mostly the same place: I think the pre-agricultural ‘tribal’ mode of organization, characterized both by fairly lax sexual ethics and by intense suspicion of outsiders, is probably the most natural for our psychological and anthropological makeup. I also think closed borders and ethnic homogeneity can help redirect people’s loyalties towards the state and away from the family, which would tend to contribute to laxer sexual ethics. At the practical level, welcoming more Islamic immigration in Europe is not likely to make them more sexually ‘open’, quite the contrary.
At the level of cross-national comparisons, I don’t really see that IQ correlates all that well with open borders. Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia are high-IQ societies that are also fairly ethnocentric.
In the long run though you might be right about northwest Europe. I think if eastern Europe wants to preserve their current ethnic/demographic/cultural makeup they would be well adviced to exit the EU so that they’re protected from the effects of mass migration to western countries.
The populist parties come off as being a little too nutty and wild to be trusted with power (Wilders wasn’t helped by his brother publicly declaring he couldn’t vote for him) so they will probably stay more or less on the fringes while mainstream politicians co-opt as much of their agenda they can stomach e.g. Merkel deciding it would be a good idea Tom start deporting people and planning the face veil.
Wildly over-stating the historical dynamic. But for the sake of argument, let’s agree that it’s true. Doesn’t the fact that it took but a century or two to unite peoples previously separated for millennia demonstrate that they had much more in common than even they realized?
There’s a natural limit to uniting peoples, fuzzy boundary rhetoric aside. Even if your version is historically true (which it isn’t), the teleology of early modern nation building is not one-worldism or even one-continentism. At some point, the would-be leaders of the world are going to have to realize that as easy as it may have been to unite the Germanic speaking fiefdoms, there’s no grounds on which to unite Germans and Italians . . . or Germans and Berbers.
Excellent comment.
This is an argument for smaller and more locally focused loyalties, not for broader and more continental/universalist ones.
When will people stop bringing in the Hajnal line argument? Obviously, Hajnal himself did not expect that his observation would grow into a whole pseudoscience theory, another meta-theory, among others, that “explains everything”. Was it half-crazy “hbd chick” with broken Shift buttons who had pushed that theory into existence? It irks me every time when normal people take her lunatic ideas seriously.
Prepare for shattered infrastructure, ugly architecture and bad city planning, litter everywhere and dirt. I mean DIRT; especially in late autumn and late winter/early spring.
Russians overall are decent people, but they have no idea about cleanness and tidiness of the public places. As a result most Russian cities (and villages) have more in common with Third World countries than with Western Europe/Japan/Canada (the USA is a whole lot different story, it also has got many enclaves of the Third World). No doubt you’ll feel safer and nicer in Russia, but your aesthetic senses may suffer greatly.
If your people was larger, if it had an opportunity, it would have probably behaved like a stereotypical empire-building nation.
Cubicle drones like myself sometimes think that if we were CEOs, company owners, etc., we’d be nicer than the big bosses we’ve known. No, on average we’d behave like the current bosses and owners.
I agree with you that national consciousness does not have to come from indoctrination from above. Actually I think that it arises naturally in most cases. People notice differences and stick up for their own.
Nationalism is at least as old as written history, most likely older. Ancient Egypt was a nation state 5,000 years ago. It had xenophobia, wars of national liberation, wars of imperialist expansion. I cited some examples of all of the above in this book review of mine:
http://lazyglossophiliac.blogspot.com/2017/01/review-of-oxford-history-of-ancient.html
During the Greco-Persian wars the ancient Greeks thought of themselves as a nation. Their opponent was a multi-ethnic empire, but that empire’s many peoples had their own nationalisms.
I cited an example of grass-roots, anti-establishment nationalism in early-16th-century Spain at the end of this book review:
http://lazyglossophiliac.blogspot.com/2016/02/review-of-rivers-of-gold.html
There was an increase in nationalism in Europe after the French Revolution, but not from a zero level.
The modern powers that be in the West hate Western nationalisms. So they denigrate them. And one of the ways to denigrate something is to say that it arose recently, that it has no deep roots in nature and history. That’s a lie. People have always stuck up for their own, and people have always recognized much larger kin groups than villages.
Well it was clearly an ongoing process, which began before independence and was still not completed by the time of the beginning of the civil war 80 years on from the British recognition of independence. It was also surely a mutually reinforcing one, with national identity both justifying and being reinforced by external conflict.
As for the various wars against Indians, these fortified institutions such as the US Army and concepts such as Manifest Destiny. As, of course, did the expansionary and neo-imperial wars, which also promoted centralisation generally.
I don’t see it as always or necessarily being that way. I see aggression often used to buttress and reinforce an identity that is still weak.
Yes, after the British recognition of US independence, following which there was never again (for political reasons as well as military) any prospect of Britain trying to reconquer the US, even when the countries were at war and Britain had to occupy the US capital and force its government to flee, in a peripheral campaign whilst mainly preoccupied with major conflicts against Napoleon.
Well I did use the phrase “really credible existential military threat” to indicate that the definitions might be arguable.
What, in your view, were the “really credible existential military threats” to the US in its early existence? Britain aside, for the reasons of political reality mentioned above.
This is true, but it must be noted that what you refer to as mediocre intelligence, is actually above average in every country on earth (lets say the 95-115 range). There are far, far more “too dumb to indoctrinated people” than “too clever to be indoctrinated” people. Moreover, the latter group are a lot more likely to become full on commies as NRX, since this gives them luxury of having a consistent ideology without being social pariahs.
Also, the Fvd and Vnl parties, which combined got 2.5% of the vote ran on similar themes to Wilders. According to a more left leaning site that I follow, both the CDA and VVD were making at least some superficial moves to try to appeal to Wilders supporters so one wonders just how many of that center right electorate could possibly vote for a more pro-Dutch party.
There was the whole Citizen Genet/XYZ Affair business with the French.
It’s true, East (and South) Europeans don’t much like the concept of the Hajnal Line – I suspect much for the same reasons that Non-Asian Minorities don’t tend to like the concept of IQ.
I think the weather has something to do with it. But there is a laxity in both design and execution of the details of street features. When footpaths are next to soil, there could be curbs. Potholes could be filled. Grass could be watered. etc etc. Russia is not that wealthy. Paying for street cleaners is challenging alongside other priorities.
It’s not about liking the “line”, it is about its further interpretations have no scientific ground, the interpretations which are mostly confined to amateurish blogs of amateur HBD bloggers. You are not going to take seriously loonies like “hbd chick”, aren’t you? Not to mention the data, on which the line is based, is questionable.