"A world of 2050 where most European countries have Israel-style racialist citizenship policies and a formal ‘remigration’ policy, perhaps with some kind of Gulf-style rotational labour system, seems far more conceivable."
“To be a Turk in Kemalist Turkey was to take on a civic identity anchored in language and culture. It was highly assimilationist in expecting minorities to melt into a single Turkish civic identity…”
The word “civic“ is unnecessary here. Occam’s Razor. Minorities were being asked to assimilate into the Turkish nation. Nations are ethnic groups. If minorities assimilate into the dominant ethnic group, they become part of that ethnic group. If numerous different ethnic groups merge to become a group with a common identity, that is ethnogenesis.
Ethnicity is not about genetic purity. The fact that the Turkish ethnic group has great genetic variation within it because of its diverse origins does not mean that it is any less of an ethnic group.
Civic nationalism is a fiction. That fiction can only be maintained in nations where one ethnic group is dominant (as in 1980s Britain). When that ethnic group loses its dominance, members of that dominant group become conscious of their ethnic identity and begin to abandon “civic nationalism” (as in contemporary Britain).
The fact that Kemalism denied the ethnic distinctiveness of the Kurds and labelled them “Mountain Turks”, as this article points out, proves that it was an “ethno-nationalist” ideology. A Turkish “civic identity” would presumably have allowed Kurds to celebrate their language and culture as long as they subscribed to Turkish Values.
The most glaring proof that Kemalism was an “ethno-nationalist” movement is, of course, the population exchanges of the Treaty of Lausanne.
Population transfers don’t prove ethno-nationalism. They prove states will do ugly, coercive things when ideology meets geography. The Soviet Union deported entire peoples while insisting nations were temporary, racial categories meaningless, and socialism universal. Unless you want to argue Stalin was secretly an ethnic romantic.
Whatever about the Turkey analogy for a future US I would propose that it's not truly fair to compare Europe and America.The latter is a zionist military and economic superpower which occupies Europe and continues to interpret the laws of their country through the 1960s civil rights legislation. Europe and the UK are its vassal states who push DEI relentlessly.
It also promotes the concept of the eradication of whiteness.
Trump spouted about his European ancestry at Davos but his own half Czech daughter converted to Judaism to marry Jared Kushner. While his VP JD Vance now has 4 children with his Indian wife. Eradication indeed
Quite far from being some sort of "assimilation machine", as a member of the ethnic group that immigrants to America would, in theory, be assimilating to, I don't feel that we've managed to assimilate very many people at all.
If you told early british-americans that mass numbers of Germans, Swedes, Irish, polish, Italians, etc. all see themselves and are aeen as mostly the same as their descendants (not to mention the intermarriage), I think they'd disagree.
Turkey is America of the 1900s. This is genuinely more like Russia and this is coming from a guy who ardently defends the least white part of the US.
They’re raging at Europeans because they’re afraid, not of you but of what I’m covering. If you subtracted the American Southwest including Texas and California; you would get a U.S. with a very similar demographic structure to Britain and France young and old alike. Mostly white and old with an urban minority cluster though with the U.S. it looks more than it is because whites are more suburban and there metropolitan re designations. Hence practically probably like those countries. They’re afraid because American empire has always viewed itself through demographics and whites our populating the rest; but the southwest was historically very Hispanic and indigenous and the American right told itself that it took the Mexican land and wiped out the natives. I legit have people tell me from the east coast thinking natives are extinct when they’re literally a quarter to third of all the human beings I encounter in my daily life. The states of New Mexico and Arizona (bar some American imperial strip malls) is so insistent on local regional and ethnic identity that has probably resisted globalized homogeneity the most of any part of the industrial world; if not anywhere on the planet outside of absurdly poor places that can’t afford to be modern. This is important because America finds itself in a situation similar to Russia. America is a continental empire which is overstretched in a land it does not know how to cover with the local minorities beginning to out populate the imperial group in their own homelands again similar to the central Asians and the Russian mir. This is made extra painful by the fact America spent most of its identity on pretending it was a nation state just like Europe, and that it will never ever be like a “despotic multiethnic empire” unlike Russia which knew it was an empire all along. The reassertion of Hispanics and indigenous culturally and ethnographically over the area is a direct challenge to this core narrative, a direct attack on the American identity. Certain MAGAs will cope with this by calling them white Christian such as your oaxacan comment of earlier Twitter after betraying them constantly. I am white, and I do genuinely believe I’m culturally more like the Hispanics and indigenous as a white Anglo in the Southwest due to my upbringing and familial history; but that’s just as much because I’ve mutated to them and their forms and their landscape not the other way around. A race has roots and men do not. A race doesn’t move but men do. I am a man of this land such as them. They lash out at Europe and us because they just can’t admit the fucking truth, because if they did they’d have to confront the nature of their own country. They lash out at a Texas sport team saying “Tejas” in a new line of jerseys even though that’s a very historic rooted name of the place in question whom people have been identifying with for centuries. Or they get mad at California for identifying with Mesoamerica, when even the early Anglo intellects of California wanted to do that and celebrated Mexico defeating the French at Puebla.
They’re mad at Europe, but really it’s that they’re afraid of their own frontier which they’re losing political and cultural hegemony over, because that frontier is beginning to re awaken to its actual identity and soul. They are still tied to you euros as kinship, but as for me I’m of the deep continent and boy are they panicking about the echos coming from deep continent which they hear getting louder. This isn’t Turkey, it’s legitimately Russia. The white American identity is euro-Turkishness and manifest destiny. America has been Turkey most of its history. This is the age which that caves. I’ll destroy it myself if I have to.
It is highly misleading to say that 'the bulk of the Turkish population is Muslim'. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Turks. if not all, are Muslims. Tiny minorities like the Armenians are numerically insignificant. It may satisfy certain liberal-minded folks to say that but the reality is that to be a Turk means to be a Muslim.
This is false: many Western Turks are either outright atheists or are (as is now often preferred) ‘deists’, who claim that all Abrahamic faiths are ‘true’, despite not believing in practice in any of them.
Yes but atheists are numerically insignificant. As to 'deists', I have lived in Turkey for two years way back and I would opine that again such people are a minority. Turkish idenity is linked to Islam, in my opinion, and of course the political and cultural success of Erdogan spell out the enduring significance of the Islamic heritage in Turkey.
The parallel between Ottoman millets and America's emerging corporate-states is striking - both create parallel societies with their own governance structures, just trading religious identity for brand loyalty. What happens when these corporate millets become more fundamental to identity than the nation itself, and does the Ottoman precedent suggest we're heading toward a similar fragmentation where the center exists mainly to mediate between powerful subcultures?
Dream on. You really think the British are capable of saving themselves, while they cling on to liberal democracy????
It's an exponential process... the demographic change. Like boiling a frog in water slowly... by the time the frog realises what's going on, it's too late. That's where we are at now.
Very thought-provoking, thank you, and persuasive. It's still curious that much US Anglophobia on twitter still comes from the more right-wing Democrats, who aim to distinguish themselves from the tankie Left by periodically refighting the battle of Bunker Hill. Perhaps that will change as maga concern-trolling over military spending and free speech spills over from the EU to the Starmer regime.
"A world of 2050 where most European countries have Israel-style racialist citizenship policies and a formal ‘remigration’ policy, perhaps with some kind of Gulf-style rotational labour system, seems far more conceivable."
Damn. I had thought the same thing yesterday!
“To be a Turk in Kemalist Turkey was to take on a civic identity anchored in language and culture. It was highly assimilationist in expecting minorities to melt into a single Turkish civic identity…”
The word “civic“ is unnecessary here. Occam’s Razor. Minorities were being asked to assimilate into the Turkish nation. Nations are ethnic groups. If minorities assimilate into the dominant ethnic group, they become part of that ethnic group. If numerous different ethnic groups merge to become a group with a common identity, that is ethnogenesis.
Ethnicity is not about genetic purity. The fact that the Turkish ethnic group has great genetic variation within it because of its diverse origins does not mean that it is any less of an ethnic group.
Civic nationalism is a fiction. That fiction can only be maintained in nations where one ethnic group is dominant (as in 1980s Britain). When that ethnic group loses its dominance, members of that dominant group become conscious of their ethnic identity and begin to abandon “civic nationalism” (as in contemporary Britain).
The fact that Kemalism denied the ethnic distinctiveness of the Kurds and labelled them “Mountain Turks”, as this article points out, proves that it was an “ethno-nationalist” ideology. A Turkish “civic identity” would presumably have allowed Kurds to celebrate their language and culture as long as they subscribed to Turkish Values.
The most glaring proof that Kemalism was an “ethno-nationalist” movement is, of course, the population exchanges of the Treaty of Lausanne.
What a pretentious comment.
Population transfers don’t prove ethno-nationalism. They prove states will do ugly, coercive things when ideology meets geography. The Soviet Union deported entire peoples while insisting nations were temporary, racial categories meaningless, and socialism universal. Unless you want to argue Stalin was secretly an ethnic romantic.
Turkish values according to Atatürk included speaking Turkish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen,_speak_Turkish!
Whatever about the Turkey analogy for a future US I would propose that it's not truly fair to compare Europe and America.The latter is a zionist military and economic superpower which occupies Europe and continues to interpret the laws of their country through the 1960s civil rights legislation. Europe and the UK are its vassal states who push DEI relentlessly.
It also promotes the concept of the eradication of whiteness.
Trump spouted about his European ancestry at Davos but his own half Czech daughter converted to Judaism to marry Jared Kushner. While his VP JD Vance now has 4 children with his Indian wife. Eradication indeed
Quite far from being some sort of "assimilation machine", as a member of the ethnic group that immigrants to America would, in theory, be assimilating to, I don't feel that we've managed to assimilate very many people at all.
If you told early british-americans that mass numbers of Germans, Swedes, Irish, polish, Italians, etc. all see themselves and are aeen as mostly the same as their descendants (not to mention the intermarriage), I think they'd disagree.
Well yeah, of course. I don't see myself as integrated and in fact see myself as less and less integrated as the time passes by.
Turkey is America of the 1900s. This is genuinely more like Russia and this is coming from a guy who ardently defends the least white part of the US.
They’re raging at Europeans because they’re afraid, not of you but of what I’m covering. If you subtracted the American Southwest including Texas and California; you would get a U.S. with a very similar demographic structure to Britain and France young and old alike. Mostly white and old with an urban minority cluster though with the U.S. it looks more than it is because whites are more suburban and there metropolitan re designations. Hence practically probably like those countries. They’re afraid because American empire has always viewed itself through demographics and whites our populating the rest; but the southwest was historically very Hispanic and indigenous and the American right told itself that it took the Mexican land and wiped out the natives. I legit have people tell me from the east coast thinking natives are extinct when they’re literally a quarter to third of all the human beings I encounter in my daily life. The states of New Mexico and Arizona (bar some American imperial strip malls) is so insistent on local regional and ethnic identity that has probably resisted globalized homogeneity the most of any part of the industrial world; if not anywhere on the planet outside of absurdly poor places that can’t afford to be modern. This is important because America finds itself in a situation similar to Russia. America is a continental empire which is overstretched in a land it does not know how to cover with the local minorities beginning to out populate the imperial group in their own homelands again similar to the central Asians and the Russian mir. This is made extra painful by the fact America spent most of its identity on pretending it was a nation state just like Europe, and that it will never ever be like a “despotic multiethnic empire” unlike Russia which knew it was an empire all along. The reassertion of Hispanics and indigenous culturally and ethnographically over the area is a direct challenge to this core narrative, a direct attack on the American identity. Certain MAGAs will cope with this by calling them white Christian such as your oaxacan comment of earlier Twitter after betraying them constantly. I am white, and I do genuinely believe I’m culturally more like the Hispanics and indigenous as a white Anglo in the Southwest due to my upbringing and familial history; but that’s just as much because I’ve mutated to them and their forms and their landscape not the other way around. A race has roots and men do not. A race doesn’t move but men do. I am a man of this land such as them. They lash out at Europe and us because they just can’t admit the fucking truth, because if they did they’d have to confront the nature of their own country. They lash out at a Texas sport team saying “Tejas” in a new line of jerseys even though that’s a very historic rooted name of the place in question whom people have been identifying with for centuries. Or they get mad at California for identifying with Mesoamerica, when even the early Anglo intellects of California wanted to do that and celebrated Mexico defeating the French at Puebla.
They’re mad at Europe, but really it’s that they’re afraid of their own frontier which they’re losing political and cultural hegemony over, because that frontier is beginning to re awaken to its actual identity and soul. They are still tied to you euros as kinship, but as for me I’m of the deep continent and boy are they panicking about the echos coming from deep continent which they hear getting louder. This isn’t Turkey, it’s legitimately Russia. The white American identity is euro-Turkishness and manifest destiny. America has been Turkey most of its history. This is the age which that caves. I’ll destroy it myself if I have to.
It is highly misleading to say that 'the bulk of the Turkish population is Muslim'. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Turks. if not all, are Muslims. Tiny minorities like the Armenians are numerically insignificant. It may satisfy certain liberal-minded folks to say that but the reality is that to be a Turk means to be a Muslim.
This is false: many Western Turks are either outright atheists or are (as is now often preferred) ‘deists’, who claim that all Abrahamic faiths are ‘true’, despite not believing in practice in any of them.
Yes but atheists are numerically insignificant. As to 'deists', I have lived in Turkey for two years way back and I would opine that again such people are a minority. Turkish idenity is linked to Islam, in my opinion, and of course the political and cultural success of Erdogan spell out the enduring significance of the Islamic heritage in Turkey.
The parallel between Ottoman millets and America's emerging corporate-states is striking - both create parallel societies with their own governance structures, just trading religious identity for brand loyalty. What happens when these corporate millets become more fundamental to identity than the nation itself, and does the Ottoman precedent suggest we're heading toward a similar fragmentation where the center exists mainly to mediate between powerful subcultures?
Dream on. You really think the British are capable of saving themselves, while they cling on to liberal democracy????
It's an exponential process... the demographic change. Like boiling a frog in water slowly... by the time the frog realises what's going on, it's too late. That's where we are at now.
Demography is destiny! Demography is destiny!
Sorry to sound replacementy!
It's all down to fertility
Maternity, fecundity
A proclivity to nativity
Rule Britannia is history
Enoch Powell a memory
Coz demography is destiny
An inexorable certainty!!
Very thought-provoking, thank you, and persuasive. It's still curious that much US Anglophobia on twitter still comes from the more right-wing Democrats, who aim to distinguish themselves from the tankie Left by periodically refighting the battle of Bunker Hill. Perhaps that will change as maga concern-trolling over military spending and free speech spills over from the EU to the Starmer regime.