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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

>It's a little unclear where the distinction lies between the two. "White nationalist" overlaps with and kinda implies "white supremacist".

I don't think this distinction is unclear.

In and of itself, a racial nationalist's beliefs might be something close to "I prefer to live in a country with my own people."

In and of itself, a racial supremacist's beliefs might be something close to "My people are inherently superior and should rule over others."

Anyway, I'm mainly just interested in this person's starting point and the effect that his trip had on him, as well as calling out the media for not being precise about these issues. Nationalist and Supremacist are not synonyms: that's lazy click-baiting journalism.

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The distinction is unclear because "my own people" is such a nebulous concept when you're talking about a nation of millions. For example, for a "white nation", does "my own people" include Dutch Quakers? What about Irish Catholics? What about Italians? What about Jews? You will get a different answer depending on which white nationalist you ask. Thus the common element among many white nationalists is not actually wanting to live with one's own people, but exclusions of specific outgroups that are deemed inferior.

"my own people" in this case means "people that look like me, and have a somewhat similar culture/lifestyle". So obviously it is a bit unclear and you won't be able to get a perfect list of allowed/not allowed group, but it does not imply inferiority at all.

The average Christian white nationalist has more in common, culturally, with a Muslim immigrant from the Middle East than with a staunch atheist like myself. But I would probably be welcomed in a "white nation" because of my appearance. If we're being very generous, white nationalism is intellectually lazy since it uses superficial traits like skin color as shorthand for culture/lifestyle when the two are, at best, loosely connected. But I think it's extremely naive to look at the history of white nationalist ideas and assume that superiority/inferiority is not implicit in the ideology.

It is definitely lazy and superficial, but it does not necessarily make for a terrible indicator. We are much more receptive to color than small shape variation, by removing the former you are preventing (or at the very least mitigating) comparison and the creation of stereotypes.

Now I am not from the US so I won't comment about history, and I can fully believe that there is some link between being a white nationalist and believing one "race" to be superior to the others, but I do not believe that this is a reason enough to disqualify the idea.

Do we really need journalists and readers spending effort dwelling on the intellectual distinctions between white supremacism and white nationalism? Is that a topic of discussion our society needs to focus on? What practical difference does it make in describing existing political movements?

If there were some white nationalist group that espoused moving to predominantly white countries (or really starting their own country [0]), while being completely tolerant of the domestic state of affairs and distancing themselves from those who seek to turn this has-always-been-diverse country into their desired ethnostate, then perhaps the distinction would be relevant. But lacking that, it's a distinction without a difference.

[0] I don't know that there are any countries that are predominantly "white" but not better defined by a more specific term. It would seem that "white" nationalism is itself the product of "miscegenation" between various traditional nationalities. Nobody really balks at "$traditionally_white_nationality pride", or even larger pan- terms like European or Slavic pride. It's the attempt to take credit for nothing more than a lighter skin tone that is the problem.

Dwelling on the minutiae is necessary for those who espouse such beliefs as part of the process of (re)normalizing their views.

> In and of itself, a racial supremacist's beliefs might be something close to "My people are inherently superior and should rule over others."

Supremacism in this context means wanting your group to have control in a multiethnic state. It’s not intrinsically tied to questions of inherent superiority or global domination. So not that different from nationalism.

White nationalists are usually ethnostate advocates with a veneer of "peaceful displacement" - a thing that doesn't exist. When pressed, their ideology always turns into white supremacy, genocide or both.

So does that mean that the peaceful displacement of whites in their own countries in Europe is a genocide or non-white supremacy?

Ah, we've reached the great replacement.

No, it is not. Populations naturally evolve, but they never spontaneously evolve to whatever your arbitrary definition of pure white is. Nobody is orchestrating this, and "white" people (quotes because that's quite a moving target) aren't going extinct. Low birth rates aren't replacement, and unless you want to blame our standard of living, they aren't genocide either.

I guess it'd be a more interesting question if you asked who caused the upcoming global climate refugee crisis.

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