28 Dec 2024 10:00 pm
Wordier, but my border comment still works, too. We are fixing the race problem here with DEI (the ugly cousin of Affirmative Action). It's going to be alright when AI takes over our souls and we become bodiless electrical impulses. No skin, talent, life, etc.Cannonpointer » 28 Dec 2024, 6:46 pm » wrote: ↑ Nations - until extremely recently - were all ethnic enclaves. Ireland was not for the French. Germany was not for the Spanish. Sweden was not for the Italians.
It was not until well into the American Republic that the term "white man" came about. The natives did not differentiate between a Scot and a Scandinavian - between an English and an Estonian. They were all one thing to the Indian tribes west of Indiana. And so, the fur traders rolled with it. They agreed to be "white men" - to help each other, regardless of race, in any pinch. To identify each other as kith, if not kin. That is the derivation of the phrase, "That's mighty white of you." It was incumbent upon any "white man" to help another in need - as if that "white man" were one's own countryman.
Before this, a German would NEVER identify racially with an Irishman or an Englishman. So, as nonwhite nations are allowed, still, to be, nation states were the homeland of a race of people.
Empires, not so much. They are about conquest, not about a racial homeland designed for the security of a race of people. That is why a nation state is more inclined to kill of the "other," whereas an empire simply wishes to extort and profit-seek from the other.