Wow, it’s almost like the rules are different for rich people…
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Although that is changing. They are becoming more open. Still hard, but much more possible.
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It’s really a whole other world. Wealthy people, whether they’re transnational nomads or those seeking investors’ visas or retirees, get special treatment from immigration authorities in most nation-states, ethno-states included.
To be clear, though, many of the retirees that @Loki is discussing are not wealthy by Western standards. They’re often middle-class olds who want to stretch their pensions or take advantage of cheaper (but still paid-in-cash) medical costs without having to deal with winters. The movie he mentions provides a typical cross-section.
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That’s could describe just about everything about the past 3 or so years since Trumpism began its rise into the American zeitgeist.
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So like… Native Americans? Shouldn’t all of us who came from European countries go back? What gave us the right to be hear and to very nearly have destroyed the New World cultures? How come it’s only bad to destroy cultures made by whites?
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That’s a favorite fantasy of every colonized people on the planet.
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You’re just trying to suppress my dream of a Pictish ethnic homeland! I’m going back to my crannog! /s
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I guess racists can tailor their views to their lands. Americans can say, “You can’t unring a bell, we’re here now, but let’s stop any more immigration”, whereas Brits can say, “This was our land, everyone else go home.” And if they meet they can cordially agree to disagree!
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I mean… Ireland sounds lovely, right? 
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what are you even talking about?
is japan proud of its unique history? of course. and why not?
is the country or are the people really seeking to isolate themselves? give me a break.
starbucks is just about the most popular thing ever. ( or maybe disney. it’s a toss up. ) written japaenese is a massive mashup of borrowed systems. ( as is spoken japaenese. ) one of the most popular modern japaenese writers started as a translator of english literature and makes no bones about breaking traditions. baseball. ohymygod baseball.
do conservatives there want to propogate some anti-factual japaenese only culture? of course they do. do they want to bury the atrocities committed during ww2. of course they do.
it’s hard to believe that anyone who’s actually lived there would buy into that.
[ edit: this even presupposes that there’s such a thing as a single, unified japanese culture. the country comprises over 300 inhabited islands. the language has several very distinct dialects. there are multiple regions, each with their own cuisines. the country can’t agree on a single electrical standard ( 60 or 50 depending on where you live. ) and people from different cities can’t agree on things as simple as walking on the left or right side of the sidewalk. ]
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People aren’t upset at Steve King because he prefers Hamburgers to Pad Thai. People are upset at Steve King because he’s explicitly defending white supremacy.
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I would also add that we are mad that he’s defending it as an inevitability of the modern world worth defending, instead of as a dangerous and destructive ideological choice.
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I have studied Israel’s history extensively, have been there a dozen times, speak some Hebrew, and have studied a range of perspectives on it too. It was definitely, absolutely not founded as a reaction to ethnostates. That’s fake history. Theodor Herzl and Ben Gurion and Golda Meir were not all thinking, “Oh it would be so great to end ethnostates so let’s create a state for Jews in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people and get all the Jews in the world to come there.” No… they were all dreaming of a JEWISH homeland, they didn’t care much about what was going on between the goyim (“nations”, non-Jews), and they certainly did not create a country that was open to Arabs. If they had been opposed to ethnostates why would they have violently expelled Arabs from Israel? Would make no sense, they should have welcomed Palestinians and made them full and equal citizens. Why not? Nothing wrong with being a Jewish minority if it’s a non-ethnostate, everyone is just people, no nations, right?
In fact they did whatever they could to expel Palestinians, they did whatever they could to promote Jewish (but not Arab) birth rates, and so on, and this has been true since even before 1948. Yes now Israel is finally in a position where they don’t need to conceal their vision of Israel anymore, whereas before they had to be… somewhat unclear about it, and so they did token actions like taking in some African Jews, and taking in a tiny number of Vietnamese refugees, but… my feeling is those things were always done more as PR moves than as sincere goals, and now they no longer do them.
And ethnostates don’t always become anti-Semitic. Not at all. A sizable number of Jews fled from Europe to Japan during WWII and were treated very well there, even though Japan was the worst kind of absolute fascist nationalist monarchy imaginable at the time. There’s even a book about this. Even under Mussolini, things were ok for the Jews, at least until he capitulated and the Nazis took over, and there were Jewish Fascists in Italy. Jews were perfectly ok under Apartheid in SA, in fact were better off and safer under Apartheid than they are now, and they are now having to flee the country. SA was so good for Jews that Israel and SA had a very warm relationship and conducted nuclear development together. I could list a lot of examples… I’m not saying that any of those terrible systems (Apartheid, Japanese nationalism, etc) were not terrible, just saying that … strangely, such systems are not necessarily anti-Semitic. That’s just historical facts.
If you want a country that has become explicitly and strongly opposed to ethnostates, Sweden is your example. Not Israel. Israel is no Sweden.
Are you really trying to tell us that pogroms and violence against Jews, especially the Holocaust had literally no bearing on the popularity of Zionism among European Jews? Because I’m fairly certain that’s what @gracchus is indicating…
You do realize that there are people from the middle east who are also Jewish, right?
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Of course, those are the factors that pushed Israel into existence. But that doesn’t mean that Israel cared about some higher principle, some higher ideal that “ethnostates are bad”. No… that was never the agenda of Zionists, from Theodor Herzl on. They just wanted their own ethnostate which could have its own pogroms if necessary…
Believe me, I’m extremely aware of that. Jews originally from Spain, many of whom went to Morocco called Sephardim, indigenous Middle Eastern Jews called Mizrahi, the Persian Jews, probably some other smaller groups I’m not thinking of right now. There are still small numbers of Jews in every country in the Middle East, including rumors (who knows?) of Jews in Saudi Arabia. I know many people from all these groups and I might be of distant Sephardic ancestry. I’m Jewish, I have been to Israel at least a dozen times, I’m not ignorant on this subject…
At the time of WWII? I don’t think they were the clear-cut “worst” fascists at that time.
They weren’t being actively gassed, if that’s what you mean by okay. They were still having their belongings confiscated, fired from their jobs, their kids ineligible to attend school, and on and on.
Your argument is that in 1938, some anti-semitic governments were good, as long as you only compare them to 1938 Germany.
Your pro-ethno-state arguments are pretty gross across the board, actually.
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I’m fairly certain it’s more complicated than that, actually. There is plenty to be critical of regarding the Israeli state, but to assume that the only reason Zionist wanted a state was so they could violently suppress others… well, yeah. It’s just not that simple. Were there factions who were or are keen to purify the Jewish state - yes. Did that drive everyone, even a majority… I doubt it. Self-protection is likely a bigger driver for many Zionists and it’s likely that which gives the more racist elements in Israeli society the power that they currently have.
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Meir Kahane and his followers are (quite rightly) considered terrorists. Israel has special police units to deal with this, as they are always worried about some crazy thing like an attack on Al Aqsa or such. But are they so far from the Irgun’s activities in the 40s? Even though Irgun was very secular and wouldn’t have gotten along well with the religious fanatics like Kahane? You’re right, there’s a huge internal schism in Israel between the religious fanatics and the secular Jews, and the religious fanatics seem to have the upper hand at this point, even though they were not the founding group.
No problem at all. I can’t define it. Many categories that are useful in the world don’t have precise, universally agreed definitions, and many useful categories have fuzzy borders.
Somehow 23andme is able to provide ancestry reports though… If there’s no such category as “English” is there also no such category as “Japanese”? It’s really the equivalent question. And my answer would be the same for both: the category is meaningful, even if it has fuzzy borders and no precise definition.
Maybe you can clarify how you want the US to put more effort into acting like an ethno-state, as you said.
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Which is also shorthand for those who perpetrate or sanction pogroms against ethnic minorities … if they find it “necessary”. Which according to you include the founders of Israel you claim to admire.
The Irgun’s activities in the 1940s, while they certainly had an anti-Arab element, were primarily political terrorism against the British Mandate government (e.g. the King David Hotel bombing) and Arabs (usually armed ones) who were living on land under the rules of the Mandate that the Irgun thought was Jewish.
If you want to equate that with Kahane and his yahoos rolling into an unarmed Arab village with safeties off on their automatic rifles, you either don’t know what a pogrom is or know all too well.
Not that fuzzy. If you can’t (or are afraid to) define a term fraught with such controversy, don’t use it.
Ancestry != skin colour != nationality. The genetic testing companies will categorise ancestry in a lot of ways, but “white” (a skin colour) or “English” (a nationality) is not a result they feel adds any value for their customers. They generally focus on ethnic groups or geographic origin.
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