In Defence of Ethnonationalism: Uberboyo’s Critique of John McGuirk
With Uberboyo’s permission, MEON is proud to present a partial transcript of his critique of John McGuirk’s article entitled ‘Hardline Ethnonationalism is a Political and Intellectual Dead End’
We thank Uberboyo for granting us permission to upload this transcript.
Uberboyo’s complete critique can be found here.
John McGuirk’s article can be found here.
So let's take a look at John McGurk's article, [arguing] that “hardline ethno-nationalism is a political, and intellectual, dead end”.
John says that:
“Ethnonationalism is, in essence, the idea that nationality is inherently linked to the race and the DNA of the individual who claims it. The clue is in the name: that a country like Ireland exists for the primary benefit of people who are ethnically Irish.
Looking at this proposition superficially and at first glance, it makes some sense, and may even seem attractive. For the most part, modern nation states evolved around ethnic identity and most people would intuitively agree that Germany is the modern homeland of the Germanic people who have occupied that region since before the time of the Roman Empire, or that Greece is the home of the Greek people who were the first to develop democratic government.
Most Irish people would agree, I think, with the basic proposition that Ireland is the ancestral homeland of the celtic people who have lived here, without interruption since before the time of the Romans.”
So this has set off my first red flag. It seems Mr McGuirk is not up to scratch with the current science; he's basing it off quite vague literary and historical conceptions of Irish identity, which is what we did an awful lot in the 19th century. But genes, genetics, and science has actually advanced quite a bit since then, and we don't have to turn around and say that we're something vague like Celtic, which is hard to define [and] that reaches back into the shadows of prehistory, where we don't have information about it.
In fact, if you remember during Barack Obama's days, there was this announcement that we're going to sequence the human genome. This has only happened in the last 20 years, and in these last 20 years enormous advancements have been made, which has allowed us to actually understand our populations in a much more sophisticated way.
If people like John want to present an air of intellectuality and laugh at the stupid working class people who are upset that their country is transforming, they should really catch up with the current science — that's what an intellectual would do.
I'll give you a rundown of the science as we understand it. We have peered inside the very flesh of the Irish people; we've done it to a couple of thousand people now at this point, and we've discovered, lo and behold, that the Irish people have an incredibly stable genetic makeup that goes back not just to the Roman Empire, not just to the Celts before the Roman Empire, but back to to the times of ancient Egypt, at the very beginning of the Bronze Age — this is four and a half thousand years ago, this is before ancient Israel existed, and this is the majority of the genetics within the Irish male population. Over 90% of Irish males carry the genetics from these people. That's very big and it has not changed since, even though there's been influxes of other people, this has still not changed.
But before we go on, we should take a look at what some of these dudes looked like 5,000 years ago. This is [one of] the lads roaming around Ireland and guess what: this particular guy, who's been modelled off a real corpse, his genetics have been studied, and he carries many of the traits us Irish carry that makes us unique, even to the rest of European populations. He had the genes for hemochromatosis, which is a problem in Ireland. He has incredibly good levels of lactose persistence — he can handle raw milk; the Irish, the British, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Dutch have the highest capacity to tolerate lactose in the entire world. We are an island of milk drinkers; almost 97% of our population [are lactose tolerant], that's very very big and that's a genetic trait.
Again, for context, the ancient Israelites only showed up in Canaan 1,300 years after the arrival of these Beaker people in Ireland. These Indo-Europeans, who set up the foundation of our population, have been here this long. This is not a joke. This is not small. This is not irrelevant. This is very ancient. Now you should know this if you're going to make hard comments on these topics, because otherwise you will look like a pseudo intellectual.
Now let's look at your next point. Your next point follows on from that previous statement, where you say:
“Most Irish people would agree, I think, with the basic proposition that Ireland is the ancestral homeland of the celtic people who have lived here, without interruption since before the time of the Romans.”
One: that is incorrect. The genetics, very recent genetics, have actually shown it to be much older than that, much more sophisticated than that, and much more interesting too. Despite that interruption, 95% of our genome com[es] from these people, who are Indo Europeans. So it has not been a massive shift. So, there's a lot wrong with that previous statement.
Your next statement is:
“Yet most of us might also agree that there are many people whose ancestors are much more recent additions to the island who are, nevertheless, Irish. My wife, for example, has a surname of Flemish origin; my colleagues Fatima Gunning and Jason Osborne bear surnames of Anglo-Norman extraction; there are many people in Waterford descended from French Huguenots who arrived as refugees in the 1600’s; our national parliament building is named for the Fitzgerald family, Dukes of Leinster under the British Crown, many of whose descendants and distant cousins retain the name today and consider themselves 100% Irish. Many more of us than know it likely contain norse blood deposited, often without the consent of the recipients, by viking raiders in the 9th and 10th centuries.”
Now [in] your next statement you say:
“From an intellectual perspective, this is where modern ethnonationalism falls flat on its face. If Irishness is in fact tied to racial and ethnic heritage, then the descendants of Huguenot refugees in Waterford have no more claim to Irishness than somebody who arrived into Dublin airport yesterday claiming asylum”
Now there's a hell of a lot of intellectual problems with this. In fact, this is so full of egregious mistakes that the instinct of some working class Irish grug, who we are supposed to look down upon for not being very intellectually sophisticated, their instinct to be like: “Mate, I'm Irish and I love this country” — they're actually closer to the truth than what's going on here. Because there is a very significant difference between some random asylum seeker showing up from Syria or Arabia or Nigeria or Latin America, [and] the people coming from the French Huguenots or the Norse Vikings.
I think you might remember that I mentioned earlier that the people with the highest lactose tolerance in the world would be the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the British, the Irish etc. Now, there's a reason for this: [it] is because we're all essentially the same race; those Indo European people who swooped across Europe and deposited all their genetics and created the modern populations of Europe during the Bronze Age, around about the time of ancient Egypt, before ancient Israel existed: they left their residue everywhere. When you go to Europe and you meet all those European people, they're all the same people; that R1b Haplogroup that identifies the male lineages of Indo European origin — that's in all of the Western European people. Now you can go beyond mere haplogroups and look at the actual genomes, the entire genetic spectrum within all of our flesh, and you will discover that the Irish are incredibly close to the people in Britany and France, the people in Holland and Belgium, the people in Denmark, the people in Norway, obviously the people all across Britain, [and] the Scots. We’re all very closely related.
Now we may not get on; we may have gone to war with each other before, but brothers fight all the time — that doesn't change the genetic outlook of things. So, the incoming of Vikings, Normans from northern France, Flemish people, Huguenots — these are not big changes. These are not these enormous genetic transformations. These people are incredibly close [to] us. They come from literally the same ancestral group. There was a time in the past where all of these people were in this little tribe: they were all brothers, then they split out thousands of years ago, and have now formed into nations — that's how closely related they are.
Now a Nigerian, God bless them, my favourite country in the world, does not have that connection to Ireland — they are significantly different. The Japanese do not have that connection to Ireland — they are significantly different. An Arabian does not have that connection to Ireland — they are significantly different. Now I'm a big respecter of the Nigerians, of the Arabs, of the Japanese, as I said, but it's not correct to say that they are just the same as a load of Normans or a load of Huguenots coming in. That's ridiculous. In fact, if we're going to bring up intellectual perspectives, the average Joe on the street who looks at a Palestinian guy and says “you know that guy doesn't look Irish, he's probably not Irish” is more correct than what you were saying, so I'm going to go around and I'm going to start handing out lab coats, ‘cause apparently everybody can be a decent scientist when they start using their eyes
Now the next part of your statements are, again, very problematic, and you allude to this. Because the arrival of these Norse, these Vikings, these English, - the Irish population is still fairly stable, even though these people came in - did leave a genetic imprint, that is absolutely true; they especially formed the ruling caste which gives them the capacity to progenerate themselves an awful lot. But all of this clever talk about the arrival of these other migrants and how our identity is [comprised of] migrants — this is completely ignoring the fact that the Norse came in as conquerors; the Normans came in as conquerors; the English came in as conquerors. The English murdered an enormous amount of people under Cromwell. The Vikings were taking slaves out of the Irish population. Brian Boru had to wage a war against these people. You're trying to be sneaky by suggesting that the Huguenots came over as refugees. And of course that means that we should just accept all refugees that come up towards us without discretion. Now, again, that first of all blankets over the idea that French Huguenots are pretty closely related to the Irish. They're not going to be a huge problem compared to taking people from random parts of the world.
The second problem with this is that the Huguenots were treated as a problem, because the native Irish believed that the Protestant French Huguenots were being brought in by the state who had just conquered Ireland, and they were trying to replace the Catholics with Protestants; in Ireland at that time there were laws where Catholics could not own land, and all of a sudden these random people from France were coming in, speaking a different language, and starting to set up their own systems — they were Protestants, so they were allowed to own property. That was a pretty big issue for people back at the time, and of course it's it's so facetious and so dishonest to not point to Northern Ireland and realize that bringing over those Scottish Protestants 300 years ago and moving them into their plantations has literally led to the loss of the northern half of the country. We don't own that part of the country because of the movement of people into it, and this is precisely what's happening now. There is an operation going on where the state has a vision for Ireland: which is [a] multicultural open project, and it's a ruling class, who have access to the state, who are using the state in order to impose new populations on the people.
You have a line here where you say:
“Almost everybody accepts the notion that while it is not always successful, nations can assimilate and have assimilated divergent ethnic and cultural groups over time without any real threat to national, ethnic, or cultural identity.”
“[A]lmost everybody” — what is this appeal to [a] random concept of social consensus? Now, I'm trying to talk about the science. You were throwing around this word ‘intellectual’, so I'm trying to refer to as much hard evidence as I can in order to support the frameworks that I'm presenting here. Now you're doing stuff like saying: “well almost everybody knows” — that's not thinking, that's not intellectual, that's a logical fallacy. I know it's pretentious to say stuff like this, but you know it is. It's the appeal to authority. It is not the way you're supposed to conduct yourself if you're going to act intellectual, so if we're going to throw around these big words, like intellectual and very clever, well let's try to act like it then at the very least.