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So, "we" might currently view the BJP that way. But at what point did Western consensus about "what nationalism in India is" change? I'm thinking about the Inte

So, "we" might currently view the BJP that way. But at what point did Western consensus about "what nationalism in India is" change? I'm thinking about the Intermediate Value Theorem here. I think it started with, "anti-imperialism, yay!" Or -- another example, because I don't want to pick on India. "We" now tend to view China as a Han-supremacist ethnostate (I think?), despite the Communist trappings. Nevertheless, at a point not long in the past, French students were carrying Mao's "Little Red Book". North Korean "communism" is supposedly like this too -- very ethno-nationalist in character -- if you believe the analysis in The Impossible State. Somewhat likewise, Soviet Internationalism turned into Soviet Imperialism and Russian Nationalism. Somehow now it's Putinism and the Orthodox Church is involved. So then you move to other "leftist" and "indigenous" movements in South America, and, sure, there might be some red stars, but it seems to me that the force actually binding people together is ethnic nationalism. This is especially true for "indigenous" tribal identities. It's hard to get more "blood and soil" than their rhetoric. Hell, "#LandBack" is literal revanchism. And every country that "fought (Ottoman) imperialism" in the Balkans, under the banner of "self-determination" (pop-quiz: What is the collective "self"?) did so using nationalism, which, half the time, quickly turned on local minorities. So I am deeply skeptical of claims, by anyone, to be "on the left", or, even more than that, an "anti-imperialist". I think it's just a temporary and contingent thing, representing instantaneous balances of power, not fundamental principles. I am much more comfortable with liberal universalism. Even the Nazis themselves marketed themselves as anti-imperialists to the left. Lots of people fell for it. People as smart as the ones in Robert Oppenheimer's social circles. "Yeah, we don't like the Nazis, but we'll use them to break the back of the British!" So when, say, well-meaning white people go "Yeah! Africa for Africans!" I go: "Wait a minute. I mean, I get it. But have you really thought about this principle?" I think they cheer because, subliminally, they think the place isn't worth going to; they don't feel they're losing anything. They are also unaware that this means "expropriation without compensation" from a large class of South-Asians. So I'm saying that a lot of this ethnic, "blood and soil" stuff seems to exist quite happily on what Westerners currently consider "the left". And then it grows, and then it gets powerful, and then later, retroactively, they go, "oh, I guess that was bad (== right)". There's a blindness to this that I get tired of. So to finally get back to my point, not only is there modernism on the right; there's anti-modernism, and even (barely-concealed) ethnic nationalism, on the left. And then I worry about these centrifugal forces.

bitwize 5y ago
> So I'm saying that a lot of this ethnic, "blood and soil" stuff seems to exist quite happily on what Westerners currently consider "the left". And then it grows, and then it gets powerful, and then later, retroactively, they go, "oh, I guess that was bad (== right)". That's because it's non-Western ethnic blood-and-soil stuff. Marxism was a critique of economic capitalism; the Frankfurt School pivoted that to a critique of Western civilization as a whole, as a social complex based on domination which secured capitalism against revolutionary overthrow by means of a form of psychic domination -- domination of consciousness. This is the puzzle that Gramsci considered and started to solve: why hasn't Western civilization gotten with the program and chosen communism over the chains of capitalism? And if your entire civilization is standing in the way of that revolution, then hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. See, the intelligentsia have already chosen Marxian socialism as the successor to the liberal democratic system. It's like X11 vs. Wayland. Whether what exists works for your use case doesn't matter: the people who Really Know A Lot About This Sort Of Thing have chosen the clearly superior option, and you should too. Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer were all addressing the problem of: why hasn't everybody chosen the clearly superior option? And the answer they arrived at is that Western civilization is fundamentally, thoroughly oppressive, and it brainwashes people and keeps then from realizing that there's a path to freedom through socialism and that's where nationalism in a Western context comes from, giving rise to fascism. But the Africans and indigenous South Americans, all those peoples that Western Civ oppresses because it's in its nature to oppress, those are fine. There is no need to worry about tribalism, nationalism, or hostility to outsiders from those groups because they don't have the domination and rationalization impulse that Westerners do. Which is why the "stolen land" myth persists. It's partially true, but it's not the whole story. Native Americans were not peaceniks, and the land occupied by a tribe was, likely as not, conquered by that tribe's ancestors from a displaced or now-unknown other tribe. But in the mythos of the new left, Westerners are uniquely prone to want to conquer and colonize, so that pre-Western-contact history needs to be, and often is, elided.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  It might be worth pointing out that when the New Left arrived on the scene in the late 60s people like Marcuse (who wrote in the 50s early 60s mainly) were seen as overtly pessimistic and not terribly useful theoretically. Adorno and the Frankfurt School was never a darling of actual activists, just academics. Marcuse was booed at the Free University of Berlin in 1968.

bitwize 5y ago

> So I'm saying that a lot of this ethnic, "blood and soil" stuff seems to exist quite happily on what Westerners currently consider "the left". And then it grows, and then it gets powerful, and then later, retroactively, they go, "oh, I guess that was bad (== right)". That's because it's non-Western ethnic blood-and-soil stuff. Marxism was a critique of economic capitalism; the Frankfurt School pivoted that to a critique of Western civilization as a whole, as a social complex based on domination which secured capitalism against revolutionary overthrow by means of a form of psychic domination -- domination of consciousness. This is the puzzle that Gramsci considered and started to solve: why hasn't Western civilization gotten with the program and chosen communism over the chains of capitalism? And if your entire civilization is standing in the way of that revolution, then hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. See, the intelligentsia have already chosen Marxian socialism as the successor to the liberal democratic system. It's like X11 vs. Wayland. Whether what exists works for your use case doesn't matter: the people who Really Know A Lot About This Sort Of Thing have chosen the clearly superior option, and you should too. Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer were all addressing the problem of: why hasn't everybody chosen the clearly superior option? And the answer they arrived at is that Western civilization is fundamentally, thoroughly oppressive, and it brainwashes people and keeps then from realizing that there's a path to freedom through socialism and that's where nationalism in a Western context comes from, giving rise to fascism. But the Africans and indigenous South Americans, all those peoples that Western Civ oppresses because it's in its nature to oppress, those are fine. There is no need to worry about tribalism, nationalism, or hostility to outsiders from those groups because they don't have the domination and rationalization impulse that Westerners do. Which is why the "stolen land" myth persists. It's partially true, but it's not the whole story. Native Americans were not peaceniks, and the land occupied by a tribe was, likely as not, conquered by that tribe's ancestors from a displaced or now-unknown other tribe. But in the mythos of the new left, Westerners are uniquely prone to want to conquer and colonize, so that pre-Western-contact history needs to be, and often is, elided.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
It might be worth pointing out that when the New Left arrived on the scene in the late 60s people like Marcuse (who wrote in the 50s early 60s mainly) were seen as overtly pessimistic and not terribly useful theoretically. Adorno and the Frankfurt School was never a darling of actual activists, just academics. Marcuse was booed at the Free University of Berlin in 1968.