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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

You’re creating a false dichotomy between multiculturalism and right-wing extremism. Most people in the world believe in “exclusionary nationalism and cultural homogeneity” insofar as they believe that their ethnocultural group should have a country of their own to govern according to their culture and values. My home country of Bangladesh was created on this principle. Most people in Asia and the Middle East take it as a given. That’s what the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights calls “the right of self determination.”

That doesn’t make them right wing extremists! Bangladeshis (and Japanese and Chinese) don’t believe that they’re superior to everyone else and that entitles them to rule over others. That’s what crosses into right wing extremism.

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> Most people in Asia and the Middle East take it as a given.

It's funny that you give Asia and the Middle East as examples, because many of the countries and borders there are the result of European colonialism and not "natural" borders between ethnocultural groups. Take India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iraq , Syria, Afghanistan, China as examples - they're either with significant ethnic or religious minorities (often multiple of them, like Syria and Iraq, China, Myanmar) or straight up with hundreds or thousands of different ethnic groups (India, Indonesia).

Right, and folks in these countries are constantly cursing the British for that. Few people are happy that they have to share a body politic with different groups. The Hindu population in Bangladesh has dropped by half since independence. India is moving towards integrating its disparate groups along the lines of Hindu identity, marginalizing it’s substantial Muslim minority. And the Chinese have decided that nearly its whole population is “Han” and nearly all speak “dialects” of Chinese in order to erase these internal divisions. In Syria, the Alawite minority has gained power during the Assad dynasty and is taking it out on the majority for past oppression. In Iraq, voting in Parliamentary elections falls largely along ethnic lines.

I was answering a question asking for a link between xenophobia and democracy. This article establishes the link through an analysis of right-wing supremacy in the United States. Could you explain how your reply applies that that context?

However, you do touch on an interesting point regarding the link between Nationalism and democracy. This review paper [1] might be of interest to you. The underpinning question seems to be the moral implications of this relationship in regards to climate change, and I'd love to hear you thoughts on it.

[1] https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/c...

My point is that this analysis conflates ordinary democratic nationalism with anti-democratic right wing extremism.

Most people in the world don’t like outsiders, and don’t like the idea of people from outside their country immigrating and changing their country’s culture. Take for example the Japanese. Maybe that makes them “xenophobic” (although I don’t think even that’s accurate) but they certainly aren’t “anti-democratic.” To the contrary, it’s a Democratic sentiment. The people broadly agree that they like their culture and it wouldn’t be good for outsiders to change it. India is a another good example. Hindu nationalism is highly democratic, insofar as it’s broadly supported by the body politic. By contrast, Indian secularism is anti-democratic. It was established by an elite, British educated minority, and is crumbling as ordinary people attain greater political power in the country: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...

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