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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1386 thread views

Transnational Thursday for August 29, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Because Russian society does not normalize ethnomasochism.

I encourage you to google-translate Russian rhetoric aimed at their own people.

The one white Christian country where the state sanctions native ethnic supremacism and supports traditional religion is... Ukraine, currently being invaded by Russia.

From a white ethnonationalist perspective, any European expression of ethnonationalist sentiment is immediately suspect if the Washingtonian globohomo empire / GAE not only permits it to exist but actively encourages and bankrolls it as a local enforcer of its overseas aspirations. It's doubly suspect if it's justified by claims of ethnogenesis that have no basis in reality, unlike those of Polish, Baltic and Finnish nationalists, to be fair to them.

Western Ukraine(and the astroturfed "Ukrainian" identity is mostly Galician supremacy) was not, historically, part of Russia, it was part of Poland(well technically Austria for much of the period, but you get the point). Claiming there to be no real distinction from Russia is simply dumb; the closest culture is a western Slavic one.

Now anti-Americanism as a basis for supporting Russia at least makes sense, but 'Ukraine isn't really based' doesn't.

Correct. Galicia is certainly distinctive. Preserving Galician identity makes complete sense there. But the Crimea, the Donbass, Novorossiya are not Galicia.

Neither is the Chechen Republic Russia, yet if you say that in public in Russia you'll be charged with advocating for secession. Borders are even more fake than ethnicities. And certainly, the only reason the Russian government has started to trump up the "historical Russian cities" bullshit in the past few years is the geopolitical convenience.

False equivalence. Galicia was never a nation, not even a sovereign entity as far as I know, and probably shouldn't be one either (but that's another matter). You can say Chechnya was never a part of Muscovy, and that'd be correct.

Muscovy didn't spawn from the ether as an ethnic atom, either. The rules are made up and the points do not matter. What matters is that some countries take a bloody war to convince being/remaining a part of another country and some don't. Out of pure personal pragmatism, I consider only the latter arrangements legitimate.

Ethnicity is a meme. There is never any essential, objective "basis in reality". In that regard, if the Ukrainian nationalists can meme it like the Finns did, they they have it.

Unlike the Ukrainians, unfortunately (for this point of view, that is) the Finns aren't Slavs, aren't Orthodox Christians and have their own peculiar language.

And?

You're regurgutating Russian justifications for their very mundane geopolitical ambitions, not any real obstacles that would prevent ethnogenesis. Humans are evolved to break themselves apart into groups much smaller than a modern nation-state.

And?

And that means that Finns are markedly different from Russians in multiple aspects. Ukrainians, on the other hand, aren't.

Demographic projections predict Russia to be Muslim majority towards the end of the century, at roughly the same time Western European nations will become majority non-European. Moscow and St. Petersburg might achieve this much earlier, similar to other European capitals like London. Russian (ethno-)nationalists have been angry for years about the higher fertility of Muslim minorities and Central Asian migration that are the causes behind this.

The Kremlin's line on this has vacillated between vague overtures towards blood-based nationalism and civic nationalism à la 'no such thing as an ethnic Russian' in their rhetoric and doing basically nothing to stem the tide or even facilitating it with migration treaties in practical terms.

Despite the similarity to examples of Western race-themed cuckiness, the line about 'no such thing as an ethnic Russian' is at least aligned with the reality of the traditions of the Russian state, so I can't fault them for that. While the Putinist system obviously comes across as lame-ass from the perspective of a blood & soil nationalist, that doesn't disprove my original point.

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