Ignatieff’s lesson from the crypt

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, 25 January 2006 14:08.

One interesting result in the Canadian election was the victory of Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard academic who has written widely on the issue of nationalism.

Ignatieff set out his views on nationalism in his book Blood and Belonging, published in 1993. In this work Ignatieff explains that whilst he himself is a cosmopolitan, he nonetheless supports a civic nationalism.

Why a civic nationalism? Ignatieff is a liberal. As such, he believes that individuals should be self-defined. Therefore he rejects ethnic nationalism (in which national identity is based on a common ancestry, culture, language and so on) because,

“Ethnic nationalism claims ... that an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited not chosen. It is the national community that defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community.”

The kind of nationalism preferred by Ignatieff is the “official” one operating today based on a common citizenship. He believes that it functions within liberal ideals for the following reason:

“According to the civic nationalist creed, what holds a society together is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape their own lives with their need to belong to a community.”

For traditionalists, the Ignatieff view seems radical. It spells the end of the European ethnies, as it opens up membership of a nation to anyone who can obtain citizenship. It allows no principled basis for maintaining the distinct European peoples and cultures.

However, the unfortunate fact is that Ignatieff is actually at the more conservative end of the liberal debate on nationalism. Ignatieff still believes in making a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Many liberals believe that such a distinction is immoral according to liberal principle.

And they have a point. After all, it is a myth that most people choose their citizenship any more than they choose their ethny. In other words, most of us are born into membership of a civic nation, just as much as we are into an ethnic identity.

Furthermore, civic nations still place restrictions on who may or may not become citizens. This means that civic nations are practising “discrimination”, by excluding some people from certain benefits and impeding what they can choose to become.

The more radical position, of rejecting even a civic nationalism, has been explained in a more difficult, academic style by Jeffrey Friedman as follows:

“In attacking the privileges of birth, political or economic, liberals of both classical and contemporary vintage give voice to the conviction that one’s humanity, rather than accidental circumstances, should determine one’s rights.

“This egalitarianism is traduced by the inescapable particularism of the modern state. A truly liberal society would encompass all human beings. It would extend welfare benefits to all humankind, not just to those born within arbitrary boundaries…” (Critical Review, Spring 1996).

The former Australian Prime Mininster, Paul Keating, supports the radical Friedman view. He has lashed out at civic nationalism, complaining that its “exclusiveness” relies on,

“constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it is “citizenship”. Who is in and who is out.”

Not all liberals, then, support a civic nationalism. Why does Ignatieff?

There are two factors involved in Ignatieff’s answer. The first is straightforward. Ignatieff declares that he is not a nationalist at all, but a cosmopolitan and that cosmopolitans require a strong nation state to enforce social stability and human rights. In his own words,

“It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted ... The cosmopolitanism of the great cities – London, Los Angeles, New York, London – depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation state ...

“In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation-states to provide security and civility for their citizens.”

“I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives.”

This is not an illogical argument for a liberal to make, but it’s quite a formal and dry kind of reasoning. There’s a more direct and personal reason given for Ignatieff’s reluctance to totally discard the nation state later in his book when he describes his visit to Ukraine.

Ignatieff’s great grandfather was a Russian aristocrat who bought an estate in Ukraine in 1860 when he was the Russian ambassador to Constantinople. The Ignatieffs lost control of the estate in 1917, and they became Russian emigres who settled in Canada.

When Michael Ignatieff visited Ukraine after it gained independence from the USSR, he toured the estate once owned by his ancestors and described his experiences as follows,

“Then to the church, where the bell is tolling and the parishioners are assembling for a special pannihida in memory of our ancestors.

“... Now another feeling began to steal over me, a feeling that, like it or not, this was where my family story began, this was where my graves were. Like a tunneler, I had gone through suffocation, and I had tunneled myself back to at least one of my belongings. I could say to myself: the half-seen track of my past does have its start, and I can return to it.

“The choir sings, the priest names my father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, the names, some of them Anglo-Saxon, peeking through the seams of his prayers, the choir and their voices singing, the sound filling this church my great-grandfather built.”

The priest then shows Ignatieff the crypt in which his aristocratic ancestors are buried and he learns that under the communists it was used as a slaughterhouse. There are cuts made by butchers’ knives in the marble of the tombs. Ignatieff continues,

“We stand and sing the viechnaya pamyat, the hymn of memory, the priest blesses the graves and then they leave me alone, with a candle.

“Nations and graves. Graves and nations. Land is sacred because it is where your ancestors lie. Ancestors must be remembered because human life is a small and trivial thing without the anchoring of the past. Land is worth dying for, because strangers will profane the graves. The graves were profaned. The butchers slaughtered on top of the marble. A person would fight to stop this if he could.

“Looking back, I see that time in the crypt as a moment when I began to change, when some element of respect for the national project began to creep into my feelings, when I understood why land and graves matter and why the nations matter which protect both.”

So Ignatieff is not entirely denatured. As an emigre, he might not respond to the Canadian ethnic identity, nor, given his Russian origins, to the Ukrainian. But he has illustrious ancestors. And in the crypt of these ancestors he feels a connection to a larger identity which it is right to defend.

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Posted by friedrich braun on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:08 | #

Ignatieff was parachuted into that riding…I’m surprised that he won…additionally, he spent the last thirdy years in the U.S.

He identifies as a Liberal because he supports gay marriage, abortion on demand, etc. He’ll fit right in.

Posted by friedrich braun on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:09 | #

thirty*

Posted by Alexei on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:37 | #

Yes, he’s for gay rights and <a >torture</a> (as the “lesser evil”) and the Iraq war. He would pass for a right-wing Democrat in the US. It is only in his allegedly “anti-Croatian” views that his Russian heritage may be reflected; other than that, he seems very mainstream. You might want to look through his <a >Tanner</a> lecture on human rights for a taste of his thinking.

Posted by Andrew on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 17:43 | #

The dead giveaway was in his Education: Harvard. That these days are like stating you came from Berkley. “The Alien Intelligence”
Yep Frederic, he will fit in very well, just a larger portion of the population won’t.
Mark, Your Police Commissioner was indoctrinated at Harvard, so that would go a long way explaining things down there.
We seem to have the same anti Intellectual Elites in our Police “Service” in NSW. Well, anywhere in Australia, probably USA, and UK etc.
We have seen the damage they cause, as a Prime minister inculcated with such Surreal attributes, the damage is inconceivable, even to contemplate. Depressing new.

Posted by Luniversal on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:47 | #

Has he a Jewish bloodline? His reverential biography of that old windbag Isaiah Berlin (Emeritus Professor of the Bleeding Obvious and master of the Fog Factor) implies as much.

IIRC Ignatieff was sicked on to Etobicoke, a dismal enough semi-industrial suburb of Toronto when I stood surveying it from the windswept platform of Etobicoke North station over 20 years ago—God knows what it’s like after so many more douches of multiculti. But I’m sure the eyebrow-arching telly pundit and Toronto, citadel of Diversity, deserve each other.

I gather too that the Canuck tories have caved in completely to the regnant ideology, for which they were rewarded by not winning any seats in the three largest cities (are you watching, David Cameron?), so in practice nothing that matters will change in the land of the withering maple leaf except that Harper will suck up to the Great Satan a little more avidly.

Posted by Matra on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 23:16 | #

Alexei:

He would pass for a right-wing Democrat in the US. It is only in his allegedly “anti-Croatian” views that his Russian heritage may be reflected; other than that, he seems very mainstream.

I’m unaware of any anti-Croatian views. In the TV series that went along with Blood and Belonging he seemed as critical of the Serbs. He also supported the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999; not something one would expect from an ethnic Russian.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 23:29 | #

“Destroy man privilege!” (—Svy)

Different Ignatiev. That one’s Noël (“destroy white-race privilege,” a devious way to call for genocide of white Euros) and this one’s Michael. I don’t remember if they’re related or not.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Wed, 25 Jan 2006 23:56 | #

“But this has never been about winning the Ethnic vote. This is where Sailer’s famed political analysis goes wrong. It is about winning the wealthy Metrosexual vote, the women (especially young women), young professionals, the Homosexuals (who are actually far more pervasive in the Conservative party than you would imagine) and all those who run away at the sight of anything that looks like old style nationalism. These things are governed by fashion and fads. Multiculturalism is a fad. It is supposed to be ‘cool.’ Being anti-Multicultural is being ‘uncool.’ “ (—Phil)

Phil you’ve got that exactly right, and for the record Steve Sailer has said exactly what you say there, in various different ways and any number of times over the years: it’s not entirely, or even mostly, about winning the non-white vote but about winning some of the votes cast by liberal-leaning white women and so on, votes which very easily could go to the Democrat Party. A lot of this non-white-worship among certain white “demographics” is just a fad, exactly as you say, a kind of stupid, destructive game whereof part of the goal is to see who can appear the most “moral” to other whites playing the same game, by convincing them he loves non-whites, even loves them more than whites. In fact none of them could give two squats about non-whites and wouldn’t give them the time of day were this game-playing not a preoccupation of theirs. The sort of white mentality that plays this game is really a kind of chav mentality, very close to the one discussed in the link you posted satirizing chavs, in the part where they satirize the choices chavs make of names for their kids. Chavs think, for example, that choosing really ridiculous, and in fact low-class first names for their sons and daughters make them appear superior, wealthy, intelligent, or whatever. In exactly the same way these middle-class, semi-educated chavs think they dazzle other white middle-class-semi-educated chavs of their ilk by their utterly phoney demonstrations of non-white-worship, believing it makes them seem oh so moral, elevated, educated—oh-so unlike the nasty rednecks, in other words. They’re assholes, is all they are. Complete assholes. I vastly prefer rednecks, myself.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:18 | #

Fred, Svy’s point, I think, was to follow Michael Ignatiev’s and Jeffrey Friedman’s liberal positions to a logical end point: that if unchosen forms of identity and “privilege” are illegitimate, then so too is any privilege and identity accruing from being human, rather than non-human, as this too is unchosen and therefore “arbitrary”.

In fact, there are some liberals who have already taken this line, among them Professor Peter Singer.

I wonder too if it helps to explain the typical reaction in Australia when someone is killed by a shark, which is nearly always to feel sympathy for the shark whose space is being trespassed upon.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:31 | #

The advantage the left has always, always had over Harper/Cameron-style copycattery is that it can analyse, critique and philosophise anew. It can re-target the liberal schwerpunkt on new oppressions. The process is never-ending AND IS ACTUALLY GENERATED, IN PART, TO CREATE POLITICAL DISTINCTIVENESS AND SPACE. If Conservatives would just stand still and be true to themselves the left’s peripetetics would cease, new ideas with the capacity to refresh would scarcely arise and left politics would stultify.

This takes the courage of Conservative conviction, of course. In the end, the right wins or loses according to its moral fibre. Does Cameron look like a man of moral fibre? Does Harper? Win or lose, all they will wind up doing is revitalising the left’s drive for new political goals.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:34 | #

Phil, the young-white-women vote bestowed on the Tories will be the kiss of death, because to get it they have to jump through all the clueless society-destroying, nation-destroying radical left-wing hoops.

Where women are concerned, what you want to strive for is the vote of wives( * ), not of young women. The Tories go after the latter and they sign their own death warrant. Nothing in this life is more certain.
______

( * That’s married wives, not divorcées. And it’s also preferably mothers, not upwardly-mobile barren childless foolish mannish female yuppie “wives” married to quasi-“male” eunuchoids who cheat on them four nights a week, who know it and don’t even care because they can’t be bothered with men or marriage, not to mention kids, only with their idiotic “career.” We’re talking about the Tories needing to get the real, honest-to-goodness, genuine wives on their side, the genuine article—more precious than silver and gold, by the way, to any man lucky enough to find a woman who qualifies for the appelation: wife. Where women are concerned, that’s what the Tories want to attract.)

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:39 | #

Mark, thanks for that explanation of Svy’s point—I hadn’t thought of it, and I think you’re right.

Posted by Voice on Thu, 26 Jan 2006 01:17 | #

Fred

I just emailed that to my wife as it is a classic. I have saved quite of few of your very perceptive descriptions of women

Classic stuff..keep it up!

Posted by Voice on Thu, 26 Jan 2006 06:06 | #

Fred

You are correct. I do have it all. She is certified Mensa with 155 IQ , feminine, beautiful and a wonderful mother. I respect all that she stands for.

BTW, I knew you appreciated real women, but had the same disdain that I have for the politicised, masculine power hungry intellectual adolescent “women.”

Posted by Amalek on Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:37 | #

I don’t know if Ignatieff has Jewish blood, but judging by this contribution to The Observer in 2002, he’s no suckup to ZOG, even if his demand that Bush send GIs in to evict settlers is a mite unrealistic. His proposals sound topical today:

“The Americans now face a historic choice. For 50 years, they have played the double game of both guaranteeing Israel’s security and serving as honest broker in the region. This game can’t go on. Either America gave a tacit green light to the Israeli operation, or it tried to restrain Sharon and failed. Either way, now that the Powell peace mission has failed, the American president looks ridiculous or devious, or both. He can’t withdraw and he can’t stand the embarrassment of continued diplomacy without result. The prestige and leadership of the United States, its vital national interests, are now on
the line. Without a settlement in the Middle East, it has no possibility of support from Arab governments in its campaign against Islamist terrorists. Middle East peace has moved from a desirable option in American policy, to an utter necessity.

“The Saudi offer of eventual recognition for Israel in return for a state in Palestine is an opportunity that must not be lost. The only way to seize the opportunity is to impose a two-state solution now, before the extremists succeed in removing it from the realm of
possibility forever. The Europeans have funded much of the Palestinian Authority. They must now help to rebuild it quickly. Otherwise there will be no authority in the West Bank at all.”

Posted by Troll Watch on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:29 | #

William / Luniversal / Amalek / Effra

Why do you change moniker mid-thread? How long until we see:

albion4ever
alovesupreme
bonjourmesamis
larrythelurker

et al?

Posted by Lurker on Sat, 28 Jan 2006 03:31 | #

I thought Effra had stormed off in a huff ages ago, but I see something familiar in the style.

Posted by Matra on Thu, 05 Oct 2006 07:35 | #

For those of you who are fascinated by Canadian politics Misha Ignatieff is now the favourite to lead the Liberal Party - “the natural governing party” of Canada. The son of White Russian emigres has called for a massive increase in immigration to Canada.

Yet here’s what Ignatieff wrote in 2001:

The hate stops here

October 25, 2001

Canadians tell the story of immigration to our country in terms of two myths: that we are a welcoming people, and that we are welcoming because those we welcome are only too happy to leave their hatreds behind. When the two myths are put together, they allow us to imagine Canada as a haven, a place where people abandon their own hatreds and escape the hatreds that drove them from their homes. This double myth is both self-congratulatory and self-deprecating. A safe haven is not necessarily a very exciting place—but better to be dull than dangerous. Most newcomers have lived our dullness as deliverance.

But now we must ask two other questions. Were we ever as welcoming as the myth made us out to be? And now, in a world transfigured by terror, are we sure that newcomers are leaving their hatreds behind?

A multicultural Canada is a great idea in principle, but in reality it is more like a tacit contract of mutual indifference. Communities share political and geographical space, but not necessarily religious, social or moral space. We have little Hong Kongs, little Kabuls, little Jaffnas, just as we once had little Berdichevs, little Pescaras, little Lisbons. But what must we know about each other in order to be citizens together?

In 1999, a moderate Tamil intellectual I greatly admired was blown to pieces by a car bomb in Colombo by an extremist Tamil group. His offence: seeking a peaceful solution to the Sri Lankan catastrophe through negotiations with the Sinhalese government. After I went to Colombo to denounce the act of terror that had claimed his life, I began receiving Tamil magazines arguing that anyone from the Tamil community who sought non-violent solutions to political problems was a stooge or a fool.

The French call this strategy la politique du pire:endorsing strategies to make things worse so that they cannot possibly get better. I came away from these Tamil magazines feeling that I could say nothing to the persons who had written them. The punch line of my story is that the postmarks were Canadian; they had been printed and published on my native soil.

The point of the story is not to turn on the Tamil community; most members despise the sort of rhetoric that I, too, despise. The point is that we need to rethink larger Canadian myths about the passage to Canada as a passage from hatred to civility. Is it true now? Was it ever true?

In the 1840s, the Irish brought their hatreds with them on the emigrant ships. Emigrants from the Balkans did not forget or forgive the oppression that caused them to flee. After the Second World War, emigrants from territories under Soviet tyranny came to this country with all their hatreds still alive.

It is an innocent, liberal assumption to suppose that hatred is always bad. It’s a necessity to hate oppression. I think, for example, of the Baltic Canadians who, whenever the Soviet Bolshoi Ballet toured Canada, held up signs outside the theatre protesting Soviet tyranny. These people now seem more morally aware than those, and they included me, who thought it was time to acquiesce in the facts of life, i.e. the permanent Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.

It is not always right for exile and emigration to be accompanied by political forgetting. Remembering a conquered or oppressed home is one of the duties of emigrants. The problem is that exile can freeze conviction at the moment of departure. Once in exile, groups fail to evolve; they return, once their countries are free, speaking and behaving as if it were still 1945.

A case in point: Croatian exiles, who escaped to Canada in the 1940s to flee Josip Broz Tito’s imposition of Communist rule over Yugoslavia, remained more nationalistic than they would have in Tito’s post-war Croatia. In exile, few could bear to learn that the country they had lost was also guilty of atrocities against Jews, Serbs, Roma and other minorities. Facing up to the reality of Ante Pavelic’s wartime regime was hard enough in Zagreb; it was harder in Toronto. Indeed, it was often said in Zagreb that the chief support for the most intransigent and aggressive Croatian nationalism after independence was to be found, not in Zagreb, but in Toronto.

Dual allegiances are complex: A newly-minted Canadian citizen who would not dream of assassinating a fellow citizen from some oppressor group does not hesitate to fund assassinations in the old country.

Sometimes emigration is accompanied by the guilt of departure. This guilt makes diaspora groups more violent and more extreme than those that live in the country where the oppression is taking place. Diaspora nationalism is a dangerous phenomenon because it is easier to hate from a distance: You don’t have to live with the consequences—or the reprisals.

Canadians, new and old, need to think about what role their diasporas play in fanning and financing the hatreds of the outside world. The disturbing possibility is that Canada is not an asylum from hatred but an incubator of hatred. Are we so sure that acts of terror in Kashmir do not originate in apparently innocent funding of charitable and philanthropic appeals in Canadian cities? Are we certain that the financing of a car bomb in Jerusalem did not begin in a Canadian community? Do we know that when people die in Colombo, or Jaffna, there’s no Canadian connection?

I don’t have answers to these questions and it would be inflammatory to make allegations without evidence. My point is only to ask us to rethink our myths of immigration, particularly that innocent one that portrays us as a refuge from hatred. It is clear that this was never entirely true: Many immigrant groups that make their lives here have not been extinguishing, but rather fanning, the hatreds they brought with them.

It would be a good idea to get the rules for a multicultural Canada clear to all. Canada means many things—and in the debate about what it means, new voices are as valuable as older ones—but one meaning is indisputable. We are a political community that has outlawed the practise and advocacy of violence as an instrument of political expression. We have outlawed it within, and we need to outlaw it without.

Just as we have laws against racial incitement or the promulgation of ethnic hatred in order to protect our new citizens from bigotry, abuse and violence, so we must have laws for the prosecution of anyone in Canada who aids, abets, encourages or incites acts of terror. There may be political causes that justify armed resistance, but there are none that justify terrorizing and murdering civilians.

The distinction between freedom fighters and terrorists is not the relativist quagmire. There are laws of war governing armed resistance to oppression, as there are laws of war governing the conduct of hostilities between states. Those who break these laws are barbarians, whatever cause they serve. Those who target civilians to cause death and create fear are terrorists, no matter how just their armed struggle may be. States that use terror against civilians are as culpable as armed insurgents.

Coming to Canada is not the passage from hatred to civility that we have supposed. And frankly, some hatred—of oppression, cruelty, and racial discrimination—is wanted on the voyage. But Canada must keep to one simple rule of the road: We are not a political community that aids, abets, harbours or cultivates terror.

So it is appropriate to say to newcomers: You do not have to embrace all our supposed civilities. You can and should keep the memory of the injustice you have left firmly in your heart. But the law is the law. You will have to leave your murderous fantasies of revenge behind.

Michael Ignatieff is Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Posted by Igor Alexander on Fri, 18 May 2007 21:30 | #

“These things are governed by fashion and fads. Multiculturalism is a fad. It is supposed to be ‘cool’. Being anti-Multicultural is being ‘uncool’.”

And who sets these fads? Or do they just develop spontaneously, kinda like how an 11-year-old white girl watching Murray Rothstein’s MTV “spontaneously” decides that it’s “cool” to have sex with black boys?

Posted by Igor Alexander on Sat, 19 May 2007 03:08 | #

“Yet here’s what Ignatieff wrote in 2001:

“The hate stops here ...

“... We are a political community that has outlawed the practise and advocacy of violence as an instrument of political expression. We have outlawed it within, and we need to outlaw it without.

“Just as we have laws against racial incitement or the promulgation of ethnic hatred in order to protect our new citizens from bigotry, abuse and violence, so we must have laws for the prosecution of anyone in Canada who aids, abets, encourages or incites acts of terror.”

Blah blah blah… more propaganda for the multicult. Ignatieff’s concern is that fresh immigrants might not be assimilating quickly enough into the “cosmopolitan” hodgepodge he wants Canada to become, and that this might spell the end for multiculturalism in Canada. He’s advocating that the federal government use draconian measures to wrap the noose of multiculturalism even tighter around our necks (this is why Ignatieff is in favor of “civic nationalism”; it’s because he understands that without government coercion, the multicultural experiment in Canada will fall apart, and he doesn’t want to see that happen). Though he doesn’t explicitly say so, I bet he’s just as keen to nail white nationalists who might consider using “violence as an instrument of political expression” with these “laws for the prosecution of anyone in Canada who aids, abets, encourages or incites acts of terror” he’s in favor of. Guys like Ignatieff are scared shitless that the white populace might get a clue and reject the left-center-right electoral shell game in a favor of a militant, race-based nationalism. He knows it’s coming, that we’re entering the era of radical racial politics, which is why he wants such laws in place.

I’m stunned that some of you here can’t see through this guy’s doubletalk. He condemns “political violence,” yet he’s advocating the state use violence against people who aren’t rootless and “cosmopolitan” enough to his liking. He condemns “oppression,” yet he’s more than ready to oppress people in Canada who are not hip to his multicultural agenda. He’ll be a “nationalist” for as long as it takes to destroy traditional white Canada and make it ripe for the global plantation. This guy isn’t just a “liberal,” he’s a godamn crypto-commie who wants to impose “diversity” and globalism on the rest of us at the point of a gun.

Michael Ignatieff, a patriot? Try again!

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