# I don't understand the "white nationalist" position. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 7, 2011, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715 "2011-01-07T04:40:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2011, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/41 "2011-01-07T23:08:20Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > 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. It’s pretty much impossible to build up your own racial/ethnic/religious identity as superior to others, without developing disdain/hatred for others and desiring an advantage over them. Feeling most comfortable among your “own kind” is understandable and not necessarily bad. When you determine that your comfort zone has to encompass an entire community (or nation) by force, we have trouble. > [@Brain Glutton](#): > > I have not the slightest doubt most Jews do have gentile blood Yes, it makes a tasty breakfast drink, and… oops. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/42 "2011-01-08T02:08:36Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > It’s pretty much impossible to build up your own racial/ethnic/religious identity as superior to others, without developing disdain/hatred for others and desiring an advantage over them. Feeling most comfortable among your “own kind” is understandable and not necessarily bad. When you determine that your comfort zone has to encompass an entire community (or nation) by force, we have trouble. Put another way: There’s racism and there’s racism. It is one thing to feel a certain esthetic or social distaste for persons of certain ethnicities, to avoid association with them and keep them out of your country club or whatever. We all **feel** that way sometimes. It is not to be defended, but it is understandable, and, most of the time, mostly harmless. It is quite another thing to form your whole political and social and even, perhaps, spiritual world-view around concepts of “racial identity,” as WNs do. That is at best extremely silly and at worst . . . well, we needn’t dwell on **that.** ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/43 "2011-01-08T03:00:18Z")
> [@Shmendrik](#): > > Ask Richard Elliot Friedman. There was no such thing as a rabbi until about 2000 years ago. Whatever. As Himmler said to the lazy-ass _Hauptscharfuhrer,_ “You ain’t never caught a rabbi and you ain’t no friend 'o mine!” ---
**Author:** ![Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b38774/32.png) [@Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Attack_from_the_3rd_dimension)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/44 "2011-01-08T04:15:06Z")
> [@Argent\_Towers](#): > > I don’t want someone searching for that forum to find this thread. > > I’ll post the address of the forum backwards: ten.idaks Wow. Thanks for the address. After a few minutes searching around, I can reasonably say: “What a bunch of racist assholes”. On the plus side, **Ms. Attack** and I were just discussing to what charities to give our pittance. Thanks to the dope, it’s looking like the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose jerks like these, and the Chordoma Foundation. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/45 "2011-01-08T05:09:37Z")
> [@Acid\_Lamp](#): > > snip. > > You’d be surprised how many people have big blank spots in their family trees. Then there are people like myself who are adopted, and only have rather shallow records to draw from. In my case for example, my birth father’s side is listed as “mostly Prussian extraction”. My Birth mother’s as “English and other western European”. It turns out after doing the DNA thing that I also have significant amounts of Native American and Central Asian in me. From my father and mother’s sides respectively. Well, there you are. The whole thing is pointless. We’re all mongrels, and “racial purity” is a chimera never photographed outside of Iceland . . . and just maybe Japan . . . but, even there, there’s always an Ainu in the woodpile. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/46 "2011-01-08T05:13:36Z")
> [@Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](#): > > Wow. Thanks for the address. After a few minutes searching around, I can reasonably say: “What a bunch of racist assholes”. > > On the plus side, **Ms. Attack** and I were just discussing to what charities to give our pittance. Thanks to the dope, it’s looking like the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose jerks like these, and the Chordoma Foundation. Not clear from that sentence whether the “Chordoma Foundation” is racist or anti-racist . . . I Google it and it’s neither, it’s about research into treatment of rare tumors . . . Just goes to show, there are always important problems completely unrelated to the ones you’re obsessing about this week. Perspective. Keep it in your pocket at all times. ---
**Author:** ![Capitaine\_Zombie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e95f7d/32.png) [@Capitaine\_Zombie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capitaine_Zombie)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 6:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/47 "2011-01-08T06:34:01Z")
Darn, was wandering on their site, it’s not even Chick comics funny, it is just sad people looking for a way to explain the mess in their head. ---
**Author:** ![Belowjob2.0](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Belowjob2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belowjob2.0)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 6:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/48 "2011-01-08T06:37:55Z")
That forum is awesome. They’re rocking the old school, Nordicist racism in it’s purest form. There’s a thread from a guy who’s pissed cause his sister dating a Polish man. Poles, in his opinion, are too mongrelized to be white. Argent Towers, you’re worried about their hatred for Jews? They hate the Slavs too. They even talk about how the Germans were behind all the development and progress in Eastern Europe, which they colonized for the benefit of the savage Natives, just like the Brits and French did in Africa. There’s another thread about guy who’s furious because his sister’s dating and Italian guy. It seem like it’s got to be spoof site, but it seems to be the real thing. [Madison Grant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Grant)ain’t dead, he’s only sleeping. > [@](#): > > Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the “racial history” of Europe. Coming out of Grant’s concerns with the changing “stock” of American immigration of the early 20th century (characterized by increased numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western and Northern Europe), Passing of the Great Race was a “racial” interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, stating race as the basic motor of civilization. > > Similar ideas were proposed by Gustav Kossinna in Germany. Grant promoted the idea of the “Nordic race” — a loosely defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia — as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history. As an avid eugenicist, Grant further advocated the separation, quarantine, and eventual collapse of “undesirable” traits and “worthless race types” from the human gene pool and the promotion, spread, and eventual restoration of desirable traits and “worthwhile race types” conducive to Nordic society: ---
**Author:** ![Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b38774/32.png) [@Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Attack_from_the_3rd_dimension)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 11:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/49 "2011-01-08T11:05:23Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Not clear from that sentence whether the “Chordoma Foundation” is racist or anti-racist . . . I Google it and it’s neither, it’s about research into treatment of rare tumors . . . Just goes to show, there are always important problems completely unrelated to the ones you’re obsessing about this week. Perspective. Keep it in your pocket at all times. The Chordoma Foundation does good work, but it would be too much to expect them to fight disease by day and hunt nazis by night. 😉 That should have been more like: “On the plus side, Ms. Attack and I were just discussing to what charities to give our pittance. Thanks to the dope, it’s looking like the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose jerks like these, _and of course, thanks to **Marley** , the Chordoma Foundation to oppose chordomas_”. ---
**Author:** ![scruffycat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scruffycat/32/200_2.png) [@scruffycat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scruffycat)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2011, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/50 "2011-01-08T17:04:41Z")
> [@](#): > > I think that England is not much of a Germanic nation in terms of peoples ancestry/genetics. The language and alot of tradition and culture is definately most Germanic, but even then one might argue that American English is more Germanic, we don’t have Cul-de-sacs and other oddities which I can not think of right now ! > As for the people and their awareness of themselves & their tolerance of race-mixing (particularly with black people) … It is shocking for an American, because this is unthinkable in most American places. > It’s like the less cultured, supposedly more dumb & impoverished white londoners are actually much much smarter in this respect than their counterparts stemming from rich family and generally more ‘less ghetto’ places such as counties to the West of London (and I suppose in all other directions within 2 hours out of London, but I have not been there) > > My ancestors came from England, and I feel that the old country inhabitants are thicker than say… the French people - even they are seen as culturrally bad/foreign to germanics, and the history doesn’t exactly favor the French as ‘friends’ of germanics. This is a direct quote from that forum. These people are utterly ridiculous and best ignored. They are trying to punch out tide, racial ‘purity’ has never really existed and certainly never will. As for their position, I would suggest - Stupid Idiocy. ---
**Author:** ![Capitaine\_Zombie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e95f7d/32.png) [@Capitaine\_Zombie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capitaine_Zombie)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/51 "2011-01-09T03:35:22Z")
Lol, France was founded by Germanics. Are they aware of that? The insane identity tags with mentions of each poster as Kelto-Mongolian or even subrace profiles is incredible. One other thing that I noticed was that apparently if you cant claim Germanic ancestry you cant post on the forum (and it is funny to see how all French are denied any Germanic ancestors, and thus cannot post, by some Americans from Texas). Also a sizable part of the posters seem to have a drug/prison history (it really comes up frequently). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/52 "2011-01-09T03:45:45Z")
Thing is, they’re not quite just a bunch of harmless cranks and it is worthwhile to keep half an eye on them at all times. Because without such vigilance, their way of thinking has a way of sometimes . . . quietly and subtly leaking over into the mainstream. From [_Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies,_](http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Class-Nostalgia-Anglo-American-Ironies/dp/0374114439) by Christopher Hitchens, discussing the “official English” movement of 1988: > [@](#): > > U.S. English, it emerged, was a project of “U.S. Inc.,” a tax-exempt body which underwrote a number of other groups, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, Americans for Border Control, and Californians for Population Stabilization. There was no mistaking the timbre of this joint output, which had little to do with the teaching of “the Queen’s English” except as this bore upon the connection between that English and certain inherited conceptions of race and tribal security. Dr. John Tanton, the originating author of this cluster of groups and initiatives, was himself in no doubt that “the question of bilingualism grows out of U.S. immigration policy.” > > So much might have seemed obvious, at least until Dr. Tanton wrote a paper which, phrased in the poor and affected English which is often found among the language’s more ostentatious upholders, created a crisis for his hitherto blue-chip WASP and Jewish campaign. As he coarsely put it: > > > [@](#): > > > > _“Gobernar es poblar”_ translates as “to govern is to populate.” In this society, will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? Can _homo contraceptivus_ compete with _homo progenitiva_ if borders aren’t controlled? > > Having rather clumsily Latinized or Romanized his argument, Tanton moved to a more demotic style. He warned sternly of such alarming cultural imports as "the tradition of the _mordida_ (bribe), the lack of involvement in public affairs, and Roman Catholicism with its tendency to “pitch out the separation of church and state.” He continued to skirt around these aspects of the problem – the most conspicuous opponents of church-state separation in the 1980s have been fundamentalist Protestants – making an excursion through allegedly low “educability” before returning with relish to his main theme, which was, as ever, sex and fertility: > > > [@](#): > > > > Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down. As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? > > This piece of inadvertence – the shift to “white” as the key word speaks volumes in the extract above, as well as showing the secondary significance of ideas like “culture” and “language” – led to the resignation of many of the U.S. English board members, among them Walter Cronkite and the neoconservative Hispanic Linda Chavez. It also led to closer scrutiny of the network of which Dr. Tanton was the convenor. The chairman of the Florida English campaign, for example, had advocated the elimination of emergency telephone services in Spanish in order to supply what he called an “incentive” to the learning of the tongue of Shakespeare and Dickens. His Dade County equivalent had warned that “the United States is not a mongrel nation.” Rusty Butler, an aide to Senator Steven Symms of Idaho, had forwarded the senator’s call for an English-language amendment to the Constitution by saying that “the language issue could feed and guide terrorism in the U.S.” Finally, it was discovered that among the donors to Dr. Tanton’s network was the Pioneer Fund, established in the unpropitious year of 1937 to proselytize for what it then called “applied genetics in present-day Germany.” [Pioneer Fund](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund) [John Tanton](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tanton) ---
**Author:** ![Argent\_Towers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e8c25b/32.png) [@Argent\_Towers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Argent_Towers)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/53 "2011-01-09T04:15:08Z")
> [@Capitaine\_Zombie](#): > > One other thing that I noticed was that apparently if you cant claim Germanic ancestry you cant post on the forum (and it is funny to see how all French are denied any Germanic ancestors, and thus cannot post, by some Americans from Texas). It seems to me that most of that forum’s members are from Europe. It is certainly a far cry from the bad-weather-related site. It has a strong intellectual bent to it and it is sufficiently polished that under the right circumstances it could be mistaken for academic. The facial taxonomy section is meticulous, if based on now-discredited science. Certainly they’ve mastered the aesthetic distinctions even if they are not anthropologically provable. On further inspection, though, it is full of the same anti-Jewish propaganda and Nazi sympathies that all white-nationalist sites have, despite claiming otherwise. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/54 "2011-01-09T04:40:12Z")
Not all. There’s a strong divide in the white nationalist movement (in the US) between the “urban” groups - neo-Nazis, skinheads, etc. - and the rural ones (Klan, Aryan Brotherhood, Church of the Creator, etc. - over the Nazi sympathy stuff. The Klan types often hate it because it’s un-American, and makes it harder to recruit veterans. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/55 "2011-01-09T04:45:09Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > 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. Mmmmm. Antarctica. Ice, snow, bitter winds. I would think THEY would want to live there themselves, to be closer to Thor, the Frost Giants, etc. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Argent\_Towers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e8c25b/32.png) [@Argent\_Towers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Argent_Towers)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/56 "2011-01-09T04:56:35Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > Not all. > > There’s a strong divide in the white nationalist movement (in the US) between the “urban” groups - neo-Nazis, skinheads, etc. - and the rural ones (Klan, Aryan Brotherhood, Church of the Creator, etc. - over the Nazi sympathy stuff. The Klan types often hate it because it’s un-American, and makes it harder to recruit veterans. I’m under the impression that Aryan Nations/Aryan Brotherhood is, first of all, a prison gang, and second of all, totally full of Nazi imagery. I’m surprised you’ve grouped them with the KKK and on the side against the Nazi sympathy. The Aryan Brotherhood seems to me, from everything I’ve read, to be more of a vehicle for white prisoners - who are often a vulnerable minority because of their race in prison - to blast intimidating attitude and strength in numbers, than any kind of genuinely ideologically driven white supremacist movement. I’ve read that they’ve even had Jews among their members, and that they make alliances with blacks and Mexicans. This seems diametrically opposed to the attitudes of the people on the Germanic forum. Those individuals seem to be coming at it from an intellectual, pseudo-academic standpoint. ---
**Author:** ![Capitaine\_Zombie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e95f7d/32.png) [@Capitaine\_Zombie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capitaine_Zombie)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/57 "2011-01-09T05:31:42Z")
> [@Argent\_Towers](#): > > It seems to me that most of that forum’s members are from Europe. > > It is certainly a far cry from the bad-weather-related site. It has a strong intellectual bent to it and it is sufficiently polished that under the right circumstances it could be mistaken for academic. The facial taxonomy section is meticulous, if based on now-discredited science. Certainly they’ve mastered the aesthetic distinctions even if they are not anthropologically provable. > > On further inspection, though, it is full of the same anti-Jewish propaganda and Nazi sympathies that all white-nationalist sites have, despite claiming otherwise. You can be such an Alpinid sometimes. P.S: on most of the threads I was it was forty per cent US people (the identity file can be confusing as they all claim specific European ancestry. Besides the irony was to have people even further removed from Germany commenting on the un-Germanic nature of the French). Salutations from a 14 per cent Monkey/ 56 per cent Gorilla. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/58 "2011-01-09T07:00:49Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Those Normans did get around . . . I wonder if they ever invaded Morocco? Dunno about Morocco but Sicily was at one point a strong Norman bastion in the Med. sea, and they had a long-standing antagonism with the various Muslim caliphates of northern Africa. Which isn’t surprising, considering the reason there were Normans down there in the first place was that they’d been hired to get rid of the Muslims that had invaded Sicily earlier. I don’t think they ever got around to invading the Barbary coast however - the wiki states they seized a Tunisian coastal town in the 12th century but that’s about it. Mostly they just sunk Muslim junk around the Med. and launched plunder expeditions & raids. ---
**Author:** ![Capitaine\_Zombie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e95f7d/32.png) [@Capitaine\_Zombie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capitaine_Zombie)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 7:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/59 "2011-01-09T07:07:41Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > Dunno about Morocco but Sicily was at one point a strong Norman bastion in the Med. sea, and they had a long-standing antagonism with the various Muslim caliphates of northern Africa. Which isn’t surprising, considering the reason there were Normans down there in the first place was that they’d been hired to get rid of the Muslims that had invaded Sicily earlier. > > I don’t think they ever got around to invading the Barbary coast however - the wiki states they seized a Tunisian coastal town in the 12th century but that’s about it. Mostly they just sunk Muslim junk around the Med. and launched plunder expeditions & raids. The Amazighs (the Berbers) supposedly came from Northern Europe (probably during Prehistory). I dont know exactly how Riffains fit in the Beber family tree but I know Northern Morocco rather well, and there are a lot of fair skinned redheads or blondes with clear eyes there. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2011, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715/60 "2011-01-09T16:13:14Z")
> [@Argent\_Towers](#): > > I’m under the impression that Aryan Nations/Aryan Brotherhood is, first of all, a prison gang, and second of all, totally full of Nazi imagery. I’m surprised you’ve grouped them with the KKK and on the side against the Nazi sympathy. Yes, so am I. Should have previewed that post. It’s true that anti-Jewish sentiment is almost ubiquitous, regardless of how each group feels about the Nazis. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-dont-understand-the-white-nationalist-position/566715.md?page=4)