DRUXXX posted:
there's some truth to that, and multiculturalism deserves a critique as much as any other sort of politics. still, i'm not sure why you'd locate the problem in multiculturalism rather than white supremacy itself. it's hard to imagine these states would have done any better had they pursued the alternatives to multiculturalism, i.e. attempting to enforce a monoculture or communitarianism. historically those have actually been worse.
DRUXXX posted:
Crow posted:
well, i was asking about the reverse. if nationalism is founded on exclusion of the subaltern, can't the bourgeoisie be designated as the new subaltern? is the nation founded on exclusion? and can the exclusion be ideas? ie. the restoration of capitalism, revisionism
not approaching this from stalin's theory, if we approach it from the theory of 'imagined communities', can't a nation be an imagined community of ideas ?
I think that's sort of what I was saying? I could give a fuk about Stalin's definition of what a nation is
i could give a fuck about what you think about Stalin, but i never will!
by the way, has anyone read/obtained a copy of Otto Bauer's The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy?
I'm now on my phone but when I get home again I will write a more comprehensive thing on why i think multiculturalism is bullshit
edit: and I think you have to look at it from a more than just am USAian perspective to see the full picture
littlegreenpills posted:
ineffectual state initiatives aimed at.....what? what has struck you about European "diversity" in contrast to that of north amrika. my adopted city of toronto is much more melaniny than my ol' london home but im not sure what else to make of it
canadian multiculturalism means chinese/jamaican/south asian faces keeping up some of the quaint superficial traditions of their homeland in 'vibrant' pockets of one of the three or four non-totally white cities in the entire country so long as they otherwise assimilate into degenerate english protestant society
it also means feigned ignorance of racial tensions compared to the more troubled history we have here in the states, so people can throw bananas at wayne simmonds or dress in blackface with subban sweaters
Crow posted:
vampirarchist posted:
unlimited power! Unlimited resources! Unlimited war! Valhalla!
jools posted:
UNLIMITED POWER!!!!
it's not wrong to worry about religious or nationalist movements being insufficiently leftist, instead becoming social democratic (first world) and/or fascist (everyone else), but actively rejecting religion and nationalism is ridiculous
Edited by Francisco_Danconia ()
Aha, but Protestantism everywhere allied itself with specific nation states, via their ruling dynasties, and as such became pro-nationalist (as against the Habsburgs). Salafism on the other hand doesn’t even recognise the concept of Arab nationalism. Salafism is ‘internationalist’. The Sauds don’t like nationalism, anywhere. Olivier Roy has written several short books about this in the last decade.
Insofar as members of Saudi intelligence probably organise the funding for the various Salafist organisations abroad, they may be said to be calling the tune, and in general even Muslim Brotherhood factions fall under this general spell of these paymasters. This is one of the broader reasons for wondering about the genuineness of al Qaeda. Their money came in exactly the same way.
Imperial ideologies are always anti-nationalist. They also always downplay their own national concern, viz the continued hegemony of the imperial centre, which is often a city, not a country, viz Rome. They tend to present the imperial centre as a mere ‘coordination point’ for global ‘helping’ strategies, using NGOs and charities as fronts, to further lessen the appearance of political control.
I said:
If Salafism is analogous to an “Islamic Protestantism”, the ties between Protestantism and nation-states needs to be transfered in the analogy as well. If the Reformation exhibited a combined Protestant-nationalist project to facilitate the eventual seizure of political power by the bourgeoisie (which freethinker unfortunately named “the Jews”), then Salafism should be tied not to nationalism, but to a socially analogous project of bourgeois politics in the Arab-Islamic world. I think that there’s probably something fruitful here that is worth examining.
There is a difference between the two historical events, and that is that Salafism is occurring in a neo-colonized environment, while the Reformation occurred under quite different circumstances. This needs to be taken into account when drawing comparisons for analytical purposes. The political drives and configurations will play out quite differently due to this factor.
I think it also needs to be questioned whether or not Islamist anti-nationalism constitutes a form of nationalism itself, at least for purposes of comparison to the nationalisms of the Reformation Protestants. Does pan-Islamism constitute a similar nationalism, or a substitute for it, in a neo-colonial context?