It has come to my attention that a disturbing number of people think that ethnostates, or ethnocracies, are fine as a concept, and an effective and ethical way to protect the ethnicity in question. This is wrong. I believe that the inherent nature of such a system is such that no matter how noble the intentions may be (and I have my doubts about that), it will inevitably lead to some form of ethno-supremacist fascism. The world being what it is, I should also state that ethno-supremacist fascism is bad and destructive, and a threat to all of humanity, and most life on the planet.

An ethnocracy is a system of government that operates for the benefit of one ethnic group above all others. It is not a country in which the overwhelming majority of people are of one ethnicity. The ethnocracy with the most mainstream acceptance in my lifetime has been the nation of Israel, and it’s also the one that I believe is the closest to being defensible based on the way most people understand history. For that reason, Israel and Zionism will take up more space here than other examples. While most of humanity is horrified by what Israel has become, there are still a great many people who believe that an ethnocracy can be done “right”.

The idea of a Jewish state was born in an era when most of the European world believed in so-called “race science”, and ethnocracies were considered more or less normal. The US, South Africa, and Australia all fit that definition, as did Rhodesia. It had long been commonly accepted that there were racial and national traits that were not just a matter of social evolution, but of biological evolution. Crucially, the state of the world, after centuries of colonialism, was seen as evidence of white superiority, while the reluctance of oppressed or enslaved populations to be enthusiastic supporters of their oppressors’ interests was seen as laziness, or irrational intransigence. With this belief came the idea that social strife, while not unique to multicultural societies, was inevitable within them unless a racial hierarchy was maintained. This was also generally tied to an ideology of Christian supremacy, and Christian indoctrination was a regular, usually mandatory part of the ethnic domination.

Many horrors arose from these ideas that we’re dealing with to this day, and it was in this setting that the virulent antisemitism of Europe came to a head with the Holocaust. At this point, it is important to understand that while there were certainly things that set Nazi Germany apart from its enemies, it was also unremarkable in many other ways. The bloody conquest of the American west and American eugenic policies informed much of what the Nazis did, and the empires fighting against the Nazis were involved in their own white supremacist colonial domination. The Nazis did it in Europe, and they tried to do it at industrial scale and speed.

Antisemitism was a centuries-old problem in Europe, and the idea of a Jewish state was gaining popularity both among Jews who believed it was the only way to be free of European antisemitism, and among European antisemites who loved the idea of finally expelling all the Jews from Europe, and sending them somewhere else. This ethnic cleansing was far from an untested idea. Pogroms and other purges fill European history, and England famously expelled all resident Jews in 1290, without any noticeable increase in peace, prosperity, or security as a result.

I’m talking about all of this because it makes sense that those cultures, when presented with the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust, decided that the solution was to create a Jewish state outside of Europe, and since the British Empire “owned” Palestine, they could just use that land for it, with a few adjustments to the existing population. The founding act of the nation of Israel was the Nakba, in which thousands of Palestinians were killed, and hundreds of thousands were forced out of their homes, to make room for the new Jewish ethnocracy.

This was, I should note, a year after the British Empire exited India, where the “solution” to tensions between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority was partition. Two ethnocracies were created, and millions of people were forced from their homes in order to create a Hindu state in India, and a Muslim state in Pakistan. Ever since, the border between the two countries has been a site of endless tension, and regular fears of a war that could turn nuclear. It does not seem to have promoted peace, nor has it led to any unusual level of unity within the majority group. The downsides abound, but the upsides never seem to actually manifest.

Turning back to Israel, here are plenty of Zionists who would defend the hideous violence of the Nakba, but the people to whom I am writing today are those who believe that while murderous ethnic cleansing was the wrong way to go about it, there is a right way to have an ethnocracy. I disagree. I believe there is no way to do it that does not result in fear, hatred, and oppression, all of which tend to create violent conflict.

I was tempted to play out an ideal scenario, in which we start with a perfectly homogenous country, but the problem with that is that it’s not a thing. Various nations have tried to force homogeneity within their borders, but every effort, without exception, has used oppressive violence to do so. Every effort has also utterly failed to bring about peace, unity, and safety. There is a sort of No True Scotsman fallacy going on here, in which ethnocracy supporters refuse to acknowledge and consider the history of their ideas, and instead insist that we engage in their idea on a purely theoretical basis – that we pretend history isn’t relevant because it “should work in theory”. I think they also have some fantasy of a world neatly divided into ethnic regions and categories like a children’s geography book. This is supported by the large number of Americans who apparently think most people in the continent of Africa are (a) the same ethnic group, and (b) live in mud huts, both of which are (a) racist and (b) incorrect to an absurd degree. The ethnic diversity on that continent is off the charts, because we’ve been there the longest, and humans diversify.

The closest we can get to homogeneity is to throw out an umbrella label, and pretend that everyone who fits it has roughly the same beliefs and interests. History has shown that that’s not how anything works, but that has never stopped corrupt, bigoted, and misguided people from trying it. Humans don’t abide homogeneity. We explore new ideas, and we try new things. An area may achieve some level of superficial homogeneity through isolation, but even that has to be constantly and coercively maintained. If difference didn’t exist, it wouldn’t need to be continually punished out of existence. There will always be people who think and act differently, and question the way things are, as there always have been. Ethnocracy has to be maintained by domination through both law and culture, and suppression of challenges to that status quo.

So here’s the next problem:

If you have a society that, as a matter of law and culture, privileges one group of people over all others, you need justification. Because people naturally question things, you need to constantly re-state the reason why this inequality must exist.

As I see it, any argument for this stems from fear, either of violence, or of cultural dilution. In the case of Israel, it is the very reasonable and historically supported fear of European antisemitic violence. The problem here is twofold. First, it’s an inherently militaristic motivation. It’s not just the promise safety in political dominance within a nation, it’s also the use of that political power to develop enough military might to defeat any force that might seek to continue that bigoted violence. Second, in order to justify both ethnocracy and military development, you have to maintain that fear of persecution, otherwise, why not relax and invest in peace? The fear must be maintained, and that is not without consequences.

If you are constantly convinced the rest of the world is out to get you, the rest of the world ceases to be fully human. WE know that Our People are good, it’s obvious to us, so if the rest of the world hates Our People, then they must be deranged and evil, incapable of the rational consideration that would lead them to see Us as just other people. To paraphrase a famously sagacious puppet, fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hatred. It’s a recipe for dehumanization, which brings us to the next problem: thinking that Our People are better. Remember, we’re not just defending Our People in an ethnocracy, we are also privileging Our People above all others within our borders. Goodies for Us, guns for Them.

And if it is right and good that We are treated better than Them, then does that not imply that We simply… are better?

If we’re not better, how can we say it is just that Our People may own property, or wield power, or receive government benefits, but others may not? Historically, people have usually claimed some version of divine favor, but even without that, we as humans generally need to believe that we are good, and our actions are righteous, or at least justifiable. For billionaires, the tendency is to believe that they are simply more intelligent, and harder workers than everyone else. They deserve their wealth, no matter how they got it, and the flip side of that is that those in poverty deserve the suffering that comes with it. If you treat a group of people as if they are better, most of them will believe it. This will create an ethno-supremacist feedback loop for a large portion of Our People, which, if coupled with militarism, is a recipe for eventual imperial conquest. If We are so much better, and They are so violent and hateful, why should we let such unworthy people rule anything? Don’t a Great People such as Us deserve a little more living room?
When England ethnically cleansed its Jewish population in 1290, it didn’t become safer or more prosperous because of it, but it did become more antisemitic, and fancied itself “better” due to its supposed purity. While it is not solely to blame, the notion of British superiority served as justification for incalculable violence all over this planet.

So here’s the next problem:

All of this is challenged by familiarity. If we live in community with people who are different from ourselves, those differences become less mysterious, and tend to matter less over time. Eventually, the people in a minority position will find supporters within the majority, who cannot see any good justification for the unequal treatment. If your country is an ethnocracy, then there is no recourse for those people. Such a country might be a democracy in the sense of ancient Greece, with many people living in something like serfdom or some form of slavery, but it’s nothing close to the modern ideal of autonomy – government by the people, for the people. Eventually, such a nation will have the kinds of liberation movements we’ve seen in South Africa, the US, Ireland, and many, many other countries around the world. That is the case for any form of systemic domination.

What’s more, because the “serfs” in this scenario are defined by their exclusion from Our People, we need to maintain a clear distinction. If we are committed to treating people differently based on their category, we must know to which category a person belongs, so we know how to treat them. That gets tricky if you have Our People forming relationships with Their People, so you have to ban intermarriage, or at least make sure that mixed couples and their children are excluded from the rights and protections reserved for Our People. What if people want to intermarry? Well, we can avoid that problem, and the issue of familiarity if we don’t let them mix, right? So, we have different areas with different rules. Their People get to live where we tell them, in the conditions we provide, while Our People get to live in better places, under better conditions. Maybe Their People even get some level of representation in government, but only with the understanding that They will never be allowed actual equality.

We will also have to severely limit immigration, as everyone who isn’t Our People is one of Them, and must not be afforded Our privileges, allowed to mix with Our People, or allowed to build enough political power to challenge the ethnocracy.

At the end of the day, the idea of an ethnocracy is one of appeasement. It’s the belief that those among us who cannot feel safe around people different from themselves can be satisfied through exclusion and oppression. The reality is that such people will never be satisfied.

If everyone who’s not Our People is somehow removed as a threat, then they’ll be afraid of those members of Our People who think or believe differently from themselves. Large portions of history can be described as failed efforts to impose homogeneity on regions of the world in the name of stability and security, and the result has always been injustice, oppression, and failure.

And even if, in our fantasy world, we achieve a country with total cultural homogeneity and internal harmony, those people perpetually afraid of the Other will look for problems elsewhere. We already know that outsiders are Bad, otherwise we would let them live in our country, but what if the outsiders OUTSIDE our country are causing problems? What if some of our politicians are under the influence of outsiders? They must be, otherwise why would there still be problems in our nice, homogenous ethnostate? It’s still the outsiders, and those who sympathize with them. We’re under siege! We’re being undermined from the outside, so we have to isolate ourselves further, and we have to suppress those who sympathize with the outsiders.

And when problems persist, well, maybe the outsiders need to be forced to stop, and we already know they’re irrational monsters who want us destroyed, so really, attacking them is self defense. Homogeneity can also lead to an echo chamber problem, where dissenting voices become rarer and more marginalized, and so the ignorance, hatred, and misconceptions of Our People can spiral into the kind of insanity that lets people believe a minority ethnic group is secretly controlling the world and causing all of its problems on purpose, because they are evil.

Ethnocracy is a death spiral of paranoia and stagnation. It is inherently opposed to ideas like equality, freedom, and self-governance. You can support those things, or you can support ethnocracies. You can’t support both.

As I close, I want to clarify something, since opposition to ethnocracy is currently considered antisemitism by a great many Zionists. I do not believe any nation has a right to exist, but I do believe that every person has a right to exist in freedom and safety. As I hope I’ve made clear, freedom and safety are incompatible with ethnocracy. I want the Jewish people to live free from persecution or oppression as I want that for everyone else, and the way to make that happen is to do the incredibly hard work of building peace and justice for all.

“No justice, no peace” is a statement of fact as much as it is a good chant, in in the same way, none of us is free until all of us are free.

That doesn’t mean we go invade ethnocracies to make them change. That’s just continuing the cycle of violence, and that’s not what we want. It does mean we stop supporting and justifying such projects, and instead support genuine efforts to bring justice and equality in both the short-term and the long term. Ethnonationalists tend to believe that a world of freedom, democracy, and open borders will result in the loss of their cultures, but the reality is that such a world is the only way for us to exist peacefully with the diversity that is a natural and unavoidable part of our species.

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