Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> the last time that xenophobia was not stoped it cost over 80 million lives

I assume you are referring to WWII - it is a strong assertion to claim that was a xenophobic war. The Nazis were xenophobic, but one suspects their driving motivations for actually doing something about it were economic. They were expanding because they famously thought they needed more space and resources, and the German economy prior to the war was famously horrible and probably the major contributing factor to the Nazi movement gaining any traction at all.

In fact, I'll assert based on a hunch that aggressive wars powered by xenophobia are vanishingly rare. "[color] people are bad" is a good propaganda slogan for the troops, but nobody is going to stump up the funds to actually deploy them if there isn't some sort of economic justification.




[flagged]


Yeah, the United Arab Republic turned out so well...

For the countries you list, the only time in history that they ever were all in the same country was a brief period during the Abbasid Caliphate, which quickly broke apart. There is a lot of bad blood between Persians and Levantine Arabs that is going to prevent any sort of stable long-term stability.


I think you're just proving my point. Justifications such as you proffer do nothing to convince me otherwise:

We in the West are very xenophobic when it comes to assessing those nations we've destroyed in the last 20 years. We're not really being fair about such propositions as 'long term stability', really, when we do everything we can to make sure the region stays unstable...


If you're trying to project the future of the Middle East based solely off of knowledge of the last 20 years, you are very well out of your depth. The Middle East is a region of immense history--we can count back over 5000 years of recorded history--and people can nurse grievances accumulated over that span of time, especially as they are emphasized and deemphasized in mythmaking.

Ever since the rise of nationalism in the Long 19th Century, and the collapse of the multiethnic empires that ended it, the ability to forge a common national identity has been the key to state survival. There is no hard and fast guideline to how to do so, and so it can be perplexing as to why Languedocs and Bretons can feel affinity in a French state whereas Serbs and Croats cannot feel affinity in a Yugoslav state--especially since, I will note, the first two groups do not speak the same language (at least, pre-French Revolution) but the latter two do!


There's a language they all would have spoken just fine, had America not meddled in its implementation: the African Dinar.


The idea that those countries could get along is hilarious.

And by Asian do you mean Pakistan as per British terminology?


>The idea that those countries could get along is hilarious.

One has to be pretty blinded by ones own hubris to think this is hilarious, in my opinion.

>Asia

Afghanistan, Iran, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia


If that's so clear could you provide sources to sustain that claim (with which I disagree strongly)?


Surely you must have an idea why the 5-eyes nations have applied their armed forces as a coalition, towards the destruction of the Middle East and parts of Asia?

I mean, you know that Iraq was demolished. Afghanistan too. Libya, Syria .. and now Yemen.

Why do you think the 5-eyes forces are there instead of defending their homelands? Its not xenophobia?


Coddling their local allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia?


Two ultra-xenophobic states, yeah..


Lebensraum was long, long before the Nazis. It was the goal of Imperial Germany in WW1, and became policy again under the Nazis. Probably dates back to the 19th century. The economics were irrelevant to the policy.

Economics had nothing to do with pursuing the idea of racial purity and a superior race either. Untermensch goes back to the twenties and intertwines with the US eugenics that the Nazis cribbed from heavily.

Originally from a translation of a 1922 KKK book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch

US eugenics influence on Nazi ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: