Would prohibition of mixed marriages preserve Lithuanians?

[Violet]

Quote:It seemed that the slogan “Lithuania to Lithuanians”, beaming with solid platitude and platitudinous solidity, went under the sod for good, writes David Skarolskis for Delfi.lt However…

When browsing the Internet, my attention was caught by a fairly good minimalist style picture – a poster which transmitted two messages black on white: “Lithuanian women for Lithuanian men” and “Lithuanian men for Lithuanian women”.

Below, a smaller font text said “NATIONIA – the movement for the survival of nations”. On the official website of the movement, the address of which is also indicated in the virtual poster, the aforementioned slogan is accompanied by an English caption. It says that Nationia is a movement of peaceful nationalism. On the main page, I found an idea that is of particular interest due to the first three elements: “Nation diversity → Human diversity → Ability diversity → Mankind progress, essence”. The interplay of these messages encouraged me to spend more time looking into the movement Nationia.

Under “Philosophy” you can read some random rallying cries on how nations and, in particular, their patriots should act to preclude their disappearance. In parallel, it is proposed that diversity is a prerequisite to discussion and progress, which manifests as the diversity of abilities, leading to the faster resolution of problems and issues. At this point, everything looks nice but the idea is followed by a new proposition stating that human diversity is determined by internal and external factors.

The external ones cover social, cultural, and political elements, while internal ones are of an anthropological, mental-psychological, and physical nature. The internal factors are illustrated by three samples of dominant features, including hair, eyes, physical, and character features. A parallel is drawn between these samples and nations. I set aside the reading at this point, as footnotes from the tracts of Nazi eugenics started running through my mind.

The invisible footnotes from the aforementioned literature do not stop here. To preserve diversity as described above, Nationia suggests the collaboration of nations without mixture, i.e. avoiding the formation of mixed marriages. This is based on the premise that a child born in a mixed marriage formed by people coming from different national backgrounds shall be unable to choose either of four potential identities.

The authors of this philosophy claim that such a person could become the citizen of one country but nationality is not language, choice, or opinion. According to Nationia, nationality is “a fusion of human behaviour, physical features, temperament, and outlook, inner and uncontrolled, natural reactions to the surrounding world and which are characteristic to a particular group of people who evolved alongside”.

Why am I speaking about all this? The reason is that it offers a perfect illustration of what I call failed nationalism. The real face of such nationalism that conceals archetype symbols and historical tracts is unveiled in the emblematic movie “American History X”.

The silhouette of a blond blue-eyed girl dressed in the national costume, something that has turned into a barely attainable ideal, is the only thing that protects us. With reason, Lithuania is in the heart of Europe. The motley history of expansion and fatal strikes saw the existence of multiple cultures and nations on the Lithuanian territory. It is no wonder that my mother is brown-eyed with dark-hair, I am green-eyed with brown-hair, and one of my cousins is the ideal blue-eyed blonde although for more than four generations the names in our family have been entirely Lithuanian.

Now, we can be surprised only to see a representative of another race on the streets of Vilnius. From early childhood, we got accustomed to the variety of face shapes, the absence of which was utterly shocking to me when travelling in Hungary. Despite this diversity in Lithuania, people interested in phenotypology easily attribute most of the Lithuanians to the Baltic phenotype.

The question of what makes us a nation, given the variety in our physical appearance and character features, can be answered with the simple description by the theoretician of nationalism, Anthony D. Smith, which remains intact despite being rewritten a thousand times. According to Smith, the nation defines and perceives itself as a community with common myths, common collective memory, values, and traditions, which resides in a territory to which it feels specific historic attachment, creates its own public culture, and shares common law and duties.

This definition is valid for most cases, and Lithuania is definitely not the most extreme case. Hence, we can state that it is easier to describe a Lithuanian by answering several relatively basic questions rather than in terms of an individual’s looks or behaviour.

There is another issue that the guardians of Lithuanian identity confront. Who is a more legitimate Lithuanian: a Vietnamese child adopted and raised by a family of Lithuanians, or a blonde, blue-eyed offspring of a Lithuanian family who learnt his/her first words from a South African couple? Due to their physical appearance, both children are aware of their external differences but the essential attributes of a community (and, as stated, a nation is a community), such as the language, morale, and the perception of aesthetics, will be incorporated from the environment in which an individual grows up.

Despite painstaking efforts, these children will hardly be able to identify themselves as part of the nation of their origin. There is a remarkably higher likelihood that a biological Lithuanian shall barely remain a Lithuanophile and, respectively, a Vietnamese person shall nurture affection for the people and culture of Vietnam. In the light of this example, the phrase from the movie Gattaca says it all: “Blood has no nationality”.

To sum up, there is no doubt that the concept of a “pure nation” is permeating our streets and courtyards through the subcultures of skinheads and mobs of the 1970s, reaping their lion’s share from Hitler himself. One way or another, we are the result of a mixture of different genes, but genes, as depicted in the movie Gattaca, are not a factor that determines the rest of our lives. Much depends on external factors, proper education and, in particular, our own resolution. We should protect our traditions and culture instead of forbidding an ash-haired girl from starting a family with a Brazilian who is resolved to stay in Lithuania in pursuit of love.

Nations cannot be conserved as they remind of continuously-evolving unicellular organisms: they mutate, change, vanish, and separate into two similar but different particles. Looking through the time prism, this play is fascinating. Let us not create a synthetic history, because fate tends to play tricks on us. Even the more so, the diversity, which Nationia claims to be pursuing, shall never bloom in the mechanisms of constraint. The result of such a type of nationalism would be a bunch of people thinking within the limits of the same national pattern.

The nation is important; however, let us not forget the great Lithuanian interwar philosophers, including Maceina, Girnius, and Šalkauskis, who never sought to sacrifice an individual’s freedoms for the prosperity of a nation or the unity of the state.

Finally, and quite patriotically, I am certain that the Lithuanian nation is prudent enough to sift through the multitude of nationalist concepts and choose the most rational and morally-correct ones.

Would prohibition of mixed marriages preserve Lithuanians?

[Kernunnos]

Is the Gattaca movie some kind of new Gospel?

Who says that blood is an outdated concept? A vietnamese girl I know of , even if adopted as a child and grown up as an italian, choose to have a vietnamese child when married and forced to adopt a child. This even if she had married an italian.

Chinese say you are what you see in the mirror. it is a more apt piece of wisdom I think.

[Dussander]

Quote:There is another issue that the guardians of Lithuanian identity confront. Who is a more legitimate Lithuanian: a Vietnamese child adopted and raised by a family of Lithuanians, or a blonde, blue-eyed offspring of a Lithuanian family who learnt his/her first words from a South African couple? Due to their physical appearance, both children are aware of their external differences but the essential attributes of a community (and, as stated, a nation is a community), such as the language, morale, and the perception of aesthetics, will be incorporated from the environment in which an individual grows up.

What about countries like France? Surely there are many blacks there who consider themselves French and many natives of Gallo-Romance stock who accept them as such.

But I do understand the Lithuanian point of view, as mine is largely the same. Ethnicity = Folk = Nationality. Nothing else works for me.

[Torkilsdottir]

It didn't work in the United States. Many mixed race people were born during the Jim Crow period.

[Temnozor]

Quote:There is another issue that the guardians of Lithuanian identity confront. Who is a more legitimate Lithuanian: a Vietnamese child adopted and raised by a family of Lithuanians, or a blonde, blue-eyed offspring of a Lithuanian family who learnt his/her first words from a South African couple? Due to their physical appearance, both children are aware of their external differences but the essential attributes of a community (and, as stated, a nation is a community), such as the language, morale, and the perception of aesthetics, will be incorporated from the environment in which an individual grows up.

Despite painstaking efforts, these children will hardly be able to identify themselves as part of the nation of their origin. There is a remarkably higher likelihood that a biological Lithuanian shall barely remain a Lithuanophile and, respectively, a Vietnamese person shall nurture affection for the people and culture of Vietnam. In the light of this example, the phrase from the movie Gattaca says it all: “Blood has no nationality”.

What a pathetic example. Lithuanian born children who grow up in a Non-European country will never perfectly assimilate in the nation they grow up in. They might become more familiar with the realities of this country than with those in their ancestral lands, they likely will learn to speak the country's language as their mother tongue, but their identity will also be shaped by the different introspection they will have and the different perception and treatment by others they will face in countries with a Non-European majority. They always will be "different".

And although it's also true that, when these children grow up, they can't be called "Lithuanians" as well, what the author concludes from this fact is utter shit. The conclusion isn't that "blood has no nationality", but that nationality is defined by blood AND culture. Take one of this parts out of the equation and you will create a person that doesn't belong to ANY collective identity.

[Cinnamon]

(2013 Feb 08 15:27)Temnozor Wrote:  

Quote:There is another issue that the guardians of Lithuanian identity confront. Who is a more legitimate Lithuanian: a Vietnamese child adopted and raised by a family of Lithuanians, or a blonde, blue-eyed offspring of a Lithuanian family who learnt his/her first words from a South African couple? Due to their physical appearance, both children are aware of their external differences but the essential attributes of a community (and, as stated, a nation is a community), such as the language, morale, and the perception of aesthetics, will be incorporated from the environment in which an individual grows up.

Despite painstaking efforts, these children will hardly be able to identify themselves as part of the nation of their origin. There is a remarkably higher likelihood that a biological Lithuanian shall barely remain a Lithuanophile and, respectively, a Vietnamese person shall nurture affection for the people and culture of Vietnam. In the light of this example, the phrase from the movie Gattaca says it all: “Blood has no nationality”.

What a pathetic example. Lithuanian born children who grow up in a Non-European country will never perfectly assimilate in the nation they grow up in. They might become more familiar with the realities of this country than with those in their ancestral lands, they likely will learn to speak the country's language as their mother tongue, but their identity will also be shaped by the different introspection they will have and the different perception and treatment by others they will face in countries with a Non-European majority. They always will be "different".

And although it's also true that, when these children grow up, they can't be called "Lithuanians" as well, what the author concludes from this fact is utter shit. The conclusion isn't that "blood has no nationality", but that nationality is defined by blood AND culture. Take one of this parts out of the equation and you will create a person that doesn't belong to ANY collective identity.

Hum, this works between different races. But in the same race, for example the White one, it doesn't works. A Lithuanian child that grown up in Britain, for exampel, wll be more British than Lithuanian.

[Peasant]

Culturally maybe, but not ethnically.

Marriage laws will not do much to preserve 'purity of the race'. Immigration laws will do more.

[Cinnamon]

(2013 Feb 08 12:53)Dussander Wrote:  

Quote:There is another issue that the guardians of Lithuanian identity confront. Who is a more legitimate Lithuanian: a Vietnamese child adopted and raised by a family of Lithuanians, or a blonde, blue-eyed offspring of a Lithuanian family who learnt his/her first words from a South African couple? Due to their physical appearance, both children are aware of their external differences but the essential attributes of a community (and, as stated, a nation is a community), such as the language, morale, and the perception of aesthetics, will be incorporated from the environment in which an individual grows up.

What about countries like France? Surely there are many blacks there who consider themselves French and many natives of Gallo-Romance stock who accept them as such.

But I do understand the Lithuanian point of view, as mine is largely the same. Ethnicity = Folk = Nationality. Nothing else works for me.

France has another view on Nationality then Lithuania, Croatia or even Germany. France definies its people more by the values of the Republic. Whoever confesses to the values of the French Revolution, is a Frenchman for the French government. In Countries like Lithuania, Croatia or Germany, people defines more about the heritage then collective idealistic values.

I'm German/Frisian because my forefathers were it also. You are Croatian, because your forefathers were it, too. And because we all were educated in the known of that heritage.

[Cinnamon]

(2013 Feb 08 17:20)Peasant Wrote:  Culturally maybe, but not ethnically.

Marriage laws will not do much to preserve 'purity of the race'. Immigration laws will do more.

Can you see in a blood sample and say me where the person comes from in Europe? An ethnic group is more definied by its culture, its language, its Religion etc.

You are right when you say, we should ban non-European immigration as far as possible. But that inner-racial war isn't necessary.

[Peasant]

A DNA sample, to an extent, yes. Mass immigration and mixing with Poles is much as a threat to my cultural and ethnic identity as that of non-Europeans, as an example. That is not taking into account that which is shared with them by what is common on a pan-European scale. There are small towns in England that are up to 25% Polish.