I don't understand the "white nationalist" position.

Great Debates
1

I’ve spent some time recently browsing a certain forum for “people of Germanic heritage.” It is not the notorious one with a name involving a type of unpleasant weather. I won’t say which one it is, specifically, because that would be against board policy.

The site clams that it is “not a white nationalist, white supremacist, pan-European, pan-Aryan, Hollywood Nazi or racist forum…[and] it considers such and similar unitizing, collectivist, totalitarian, oppressive and anti-pluralist ideas incompatible with our freedom-loving Germanic spirit and our diverse and enlightened Germanic societies.”

That’s what it says, anyway. And it’s true that outright Nazism is not advocated on it, and there aren’t people with Nazi names or even “88” or other Nazi codes. But it’s quite disdainful of anyone who is not of “Germanic” heritage, and there is a whole lot of talk about the parasitic, civilization-destroying Jew.

They have an interesting and very thorough method of classifying various European facial features and cranial types, an elaborate system of racial taxonomy with all sorts of categories: “Brunn,” “Kelto-Nordic,” “Alpinid,” “Borreby,” etc. People on this forum dedicated to the physiological classification seem to be able to pretty accurately pin down the genetic makeup of someone based on things like the forehead, nose, chin, mouth and other facial features.

What I don’t understand about these very dedicated enthusiasts of Germanic racial purity is this: they say they’re not Nazis, and that they’re not trying to exterminate the Jews from the world (in fact, they often claim that the Nazis didn’t even try to do that.) But they’re not okay with Jews living among them. They don’t want Jews to live in Europe. They don’t want Jews to live in America, as they claim that the Jews corrupt American society and encourage racial mixing. They don’t really seem to want Jews to be anywhere, as so much of their philosophy is based on the idea that Jews are a parasitic people that invades other cultures and corrupts them.

Okay. So they don’t want Jews living among them. Fine. But then they’re also against the idea of a Jewish state in Israel. They talk about how Israel has no right to exist, how it’s occupying land illegally, etc. They criticize “Zionism” constantly, declaring it to be just about the worst evil the world has ever seen.

In other words, they are obsessed with the idea of a homeland for themselves, but they are against this same idea for someone else.

If the Jews aren’t supposed to live among the Gentiles, and they aren’t supposed to live in a Jewish state (Israel), then where are they supposed to live?

Oh wait - you’re saying they’re not supposed to live.

In other words, I feel it is impossible to subscribe to this theory of “white nationalism” without, either explicitly or implicitly, favoring the non-existence of the Jewish race.

2

And this is a remarkable insight because . . . ?

I have heard arguments, not persuasive but plausible, that it is impossible to subscribe to Communism without favoring, either explicitly or implicitly, some form of socioeconomic equality.

I’ve also heard Libertarians want to legalize pot, but that is almost certainly a libelous UL.

3

Is there any legitimacy to their taxonomy of physiological features? Or is this just a pseudoscience they made up? I notice they seem to cite Carleton Coon a lot.

The study and classification of facial features is fascinating to me, from a completely impartial and non-ideological standpoint. Are they correct in assigning various facial and cranial characteristics to certain hyper-specific European ethnic “sub-races”?

4

Well, at any rate they didn’t make it up recently.

Coon’s racial theories are not taken seriously by anthropologists today.

Nor is Lombroso’s anthropological criminology.

However, craniofacial anthropometry is still considered useful in forensic anthropology and in paleoanthropology. That’s the “study and classification of facial features” you were talking about.

5

That last link, the one you said is still in use, is much broader than what I’m talking about. I’m talking about very subtle differences in facial structures within the “caucasian” type corresponding to different ancient European populations.

6

I’m guessing they wouldn’t object to giving the Jews Antarctica. Hmmm, but Antarctica is so white and pure… Never mind.

Plan B… Atlantis. If it’s sunk into the ocean, all the better.

7

Well, I guess if you go back far enough it might be possible to clearly distinguish the “Teutonic,” “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” types – but Europe has been a white melting-pot for so long, and has so many barbarian invasions/migrations in its history, that it seems futile to try such a simplistic analysis on any living population.

8

I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if the Joos all moved to Ethiopia.

9

Since they’re obviously not fit for human company, the clear choice is New York City – which, fortuitously, requires little in the way of relocation! :slight_smile:

10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_race

Sounds like you’re talking about Nordicism, which is controversial even in white supremacist circles. What’s really interesting is the way that racialist movements invariably break down into finer categories.

As you know, the United States used to define itself as an essentially northern European Protestant nation. There was fear and hostility not just towards people of African and Native ancestry but towards people of Southern and Eastern European ancestry as well. Italians, Greeks, and other peoples of Mediterranean origin weren’t defined as “white” in the way they are now. Some were even the targets of racially motivated lynchings in the South. So for example, when the title character of Henry James’ novel Daisy Miller takes up with an Italian lawyer, she’s actually “race mixing” by the standards of her upper class WASP social strata.

But Nordicism now is an archaic philosophy, not a movement worth taking seriously.

11

It’s like…

Does one have to have ancestors from some specific European population in order to have a profile like this? Or can it just pop up among any European?

In a broad sense, I would say that is a very “German” profile to have. Since the English have German ancestry, by extension, it could be English also. But many Germans don’t look like that at all.

Then within that German ancestry, there are other groups to consider, namely, the Nordic group that would make up some of the ancestors of the inhabitants of Northern Germany and Denmark.

Therefore you might find Germans with that kind of profile, you might find English (and Scots and Irish) with it too since the English spread DNA to those other British lands. And you might also find Russians with it, as the Russian gene pool was influenced by the Rus, who are thought to have been Norse.

So is it safe to say that if you saw someone with that kind of profile, they would pretty much have to have, at some point in the past, Nordic ancestry? That would include a hell of a lot of different European peoples, but my point is, the specific facial trait had to come from somewhere.

Right?

Or am I totally off base here?

12

Funny, I was doing a completely unrelated to the topic search on wiki on Riffains (Berber like populations of Northern Morocco) and here’s what I found:

(source: Rifians - Wikipedia )

I didnt think anyone outside of crypto racist sites would ever use terms like Alpinid or Nordic. Seems I was wrong.

13

These sorts of bozos have always had the same problem: Defining what their group is in a narrow-enough way to exclude different groups. That’s why it gets so tricky for them to include themselves and still get rid of those pesky Semites.

I don’t think you’ll rustle up much debate on whether or not such theories should be subscribed to, though. At least, not from any thinking individual.

If their core proposition is that phenotypic features can vary by population groups…well, sure it can, as some sort of group average.

If their core proposition is that “white nationalism” is a worthy goal…well, I’m guessing most of us in ordinary society–particularly pluralistic societies–would tend to dismiss them as idiots, and probably paranoid racist idiots at that, regardless of how much they try to dissociate themselves from Nazis.

It’s pretty natural to feel some sort of connection to your own kin. I think that’s an atavistic response built into our genes. When it crosses the line to excluding what you see as non-kin from society or success at large, you’ve crossed a line from simply being a part of your private culture club to being destructive. Not to mention being a jerk and not to mention severely limiting the fullness of your own life experiences. And at a practical level, over the long run e pluribus unum will outperform “my-kin nationalism” every time.

14

One has to have access to the various genes which combine to form that profile in their genetic library pool–the cluster of genes–from which they are drawing. He’s not gonna pop up de novo from the African cluster without the help of a (European) milkman.

We don’t all draw from the same library, obviously. To answer your question more precisely, you’d have to get at the exact genes coding for that net appearance profile. Since there may be many ways to combine individual genes to get there, I think it would be a difficult task to prove an exact ancestral population from an overall appearance, within a genetic population cluster. It’s much easier to take some really specific individual feature, and if you isolate the gene for that particular feature, try to prove that a particular ancestral population must have been the source of the specific feature at hand.

15

Those Normans did get around . . . I wonder if they ever invaded Morocco?

16

Dunno about the Normans, but the Vikings went on trading and raiding expeditions to North Africa and had regular trade routes across what is now Russia to Constantinople.

17

It’s true, at least to the extent that Jews encourage race mixing. The story of anti-racist action in America is largely a Jewish one.

Nobody has done more than the ADL and the Wiesenthal Center to advocate for minority rights in the US, or to encourage the view of minorities as people, rather than niggers or spics or wops or chinks or whatever.

This is obviously partly a self-interest thing; when you’re Jewish, there’s always a chance that in the right political climate you’ll stop being white and start being a subhuman who’s responsible for all the nation’s ills. Ensuring that people who are never classified as white have equal rights is good, because it means you get to keep your own rights no matter what else happens.

As a non-Jewish minority, I’m endlessly grateful for what Jewish political action has done. America is undoubtedly a better place for me to live because of it. That’s the funny part, though; by scapegoating Jews, anti-Semites turned them into what they claimed they’d been all along: a force for social change, quietly manipulating society from within.

18

Really? Not even the Warren court?

19

I wouldn’t call that advocacy, per se.

20

Not to take anything away from the ADL, which I totally respect, but I would argue that the NAACP has done a lot for minorities as well, especially in the legal realm during the 50s and 60s.

I would think that craniofacial-based “taxonomy” would be overshadowed by DNA-based geneology, which can use genetic markers to trace people’s ancestors to specific ethnic groups. It’s certainly more expensive than studying’ someone head shape, but I would think it would be a robust way of going about it.

I also don’t get it. I know why black people are often interested in tracing their roots back to specific places in Africa, simply because that question is a big unknown to many us, but why would white people be on such a hunt? I guess I’m making the incorrect assumption that most white people know their ancestry at least back to their great-great grand parents? I wouldn’t think that you’d see much phenotypic contribution from anyone beyond that generation.
Especially in the shape of your face and head.