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[Loud Whispers]

Multiculturalism is at its simplest level, the idea of a community consisting of many diverse cultures and identities, whereas nationalism is the idea of all supporting and belonging to a single identity, making the two to almost always end up in opposing corners.
Many countries practice multiculturalism, with the most popular cities in the world like London where white English people are in the minority showing what a success it can be, whilst also controversially showing its shortcomings.
Nationalism in the modern world is mainly consisted of two forms:
Ethnic nationality, whereupon a certain ethnic group has strong cohesion and strict immigration laws and other such related legislation are enacted to maintain a majority of that ethnic group, like that of Israel.
Civic nationality, one on the rise with parties like UKIP in the United Kingdom, where a nationality is held in importance and ethnicity is not an issue, where immigrants are tolerated as long as they assimilate into the native culture. Usually accompanied also by stricter immigration laws.
Ethnic cleansing is the act of removing undesirable ethnic populations through various means, ranging from making life there more difficult, to deportation and in its most brutal form like that of parts of Africa, murder and genocide.
Supremacy is the belief in superiority and the idea that that inherent superiority inherits a right to rule over all others, often associated with extremists and radicals.

What are your opinions Bay12, what of these ideologies or actions acceptable?
Which is more likely to contribute to successful, peaceful societies?

1. Do not insult other members or nations or ethnicity or identity Just don't insult each other in any way possible for whatever reason.
2. Back up your claims with evidence, reliably sourced.
3. Everything here.

[Xantalos]

PTW.

[Graknorke]

Multiculturalism is pretty neat.

[Vector]

My family started mixing with other cultures 400 years ago, as Jews running from the Spanish Inquisition who screwed their way across Europe.  One last name is English.  The other one is a Norwegian Viking name.  I now apparently confuse people with my appearance and they spend lots of time debating at the dinner table "what I look most like" (Russian, apparently, though my father is constantly mistaken for Jewish; and his side of the family is the German/Norwegian one).  I'm also sometimes randomly asked in elevators "what I am."  The point is to say that I don't pass as something homogenized.  I'm white, but apparently a confusing kind of white.

Half of my family is half-white, half-Aztec-derivative-Mexican.  Some of my family is black.

I am a sixth-generation Californian.

Dear ethnic cleansers: what do you recommend doing with us?

[Owlbread]

I don't think civic nationalism is an obstacle to multiculturalism. Many cultures can exist under the umbrella of a nation, examples include Canada, the USA, the UK and so forth. Indeed, when British politicians attempt to unite these cultures under the wider banner of "Britishness" they are actually being civic nationalists.

They don't really cancel each-other out, but whether they are obstacles to coexisting as a whole is another issue. To be honest I don't really see any solutions to the problem, it's just going to be there for as long as mankind exists. We will always fracture and draw ourselves into groups.

[GlyphGryph]

To expand on Vector's point, are you yourselves willing to push "your kind" out of other people's countries? Should Scotland be able to say "No more English allowed to come to our country, existing English have to git out"

[Owlbread]

To expand on Vector's point, are you yourselves willing to push "your kind" out of other people's countries? Should Scotland be able to say "No more English allowed to come to our country, existing English have to git out"

It's absolutely despicable to do anything like what you've just suggested. According to the doctrines of the SNP, the only tangible thing defining you as a Scottish person is that you live here. That's why in 2014 the only people able to vote in the referendum are those with permanent residences in Scotland; it doesn't matter if your dad was Scottish or if you were born in Cumbernauld but now live in Croydon or Los Angeles or Melbourne.

That's why, in some ways, the SNP are less "ethnically nationalistic" than the opposition (Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats) who argue that Scots who don't actually live here should be able to vote. Being born here doesn't give you some kind of magical birth right, and they accuse us of getting caught up in fairy-tale medieval stuff. I don't care how important you think "your nation" is to you, if you don't live here you shouldn't be able to decide the futures of those who do.

[FearfulJesuit]

The thing is, you don't need repressive government policies to cause assimilation, if that's what you want. Look at the United States: we've absorbed millions and millions of Irish, Italians, Poles, etc. We married them, and now they're all just Americans.

(The exception to this, of course, is American blacks. I think the problem here is that even after we got rid of the one-drop rule in our legal systems, we kept it in society. There's a binary: if your family is black, you're black, even if you look pretty much white...)

[palsch]

I think reading Orwell's Notes on Nationalism is worthwhile here.

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’(1). But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

[MonkeyHead]

PTF, after my signifigant input to the discussion in the rage thread.

[GlyphGryph]

I was asking from the hypothetical point of view of the English nationalists - they are so keen on kicking out others, but do they think others should have the right to kick THEM out?

I don't actually think the Scots have any serious interest in kicking anyone out. That was pretty much explicitly why I used them as an example. If they convinced the world they were right, would they be willing to accept the consequences?

[Owlbread]

I was asking from the hypothetical point of view of the English nationalists - they are so keen on kicking out others, but do they think others should have the right to kick THEM out?

I don't actually think the Scots have any serious interest in kicking anyone out. That was pretty much explicitly why I used them as an example.

Oh I see, my apologies. Very good question, the problem is you'd struggle to find the right person to answer your question because so many channel their nationalism into the BNP or UKIP, rather than a distinctly English-focussed party like the English Democrats. If you put that to them they'd say "Oh but we're all British aren't we, it's those Pakistanis/Poles/Lithuanians/Romanians/Bulgarians etc that we're talking about". There isn't a party worth the name in England campaigning for English independence and the expulsion of immigrants, given that the English Democrats are more like English autonomists than English separatists.

[LordSlowpoke]

Delicious trainwrecks inbound; PTW.

[Owlbread]

Delicious trainwrecks inbound; PTW.

I'm sure they'll be gentle trainwrecks provided we don't start accusing eachother of being sympathisers with a particular ideology central to a particular world conflict in the middle of the 20th century. I think that was actually a 20-minute-ban reason I had from World of Warcraft many years ago.

[Vector]

Commie