A civilization is neither a country’s land and soil, nor its built environment of skyscrapers and bridges, nor its laws written on paper. Civilizations are always and everywhere made of people. And consequently, if you remove the people from a country, you will inevitably remove their civilization along with them.

I. On the Composition of Civilization

Similarly, if you replace those original people with others, you inexorably replace the civilization itself. The land and soil will remain, and for a time also the buildings and perhaps even the law books. Maybe the country’s name will persist. But the civilization will be gone.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine a situation where the entire population of Japan disappeared from their islands, perhaps because a terrible disease rendered Japan uninhabitable. And the disease persists there such that no new people can take the departed Japanese’ places. Would you ever say that “Japanese civilization continues in Tokyo?” Of course not — because there are no Japanese people in Tokyo. It’s just a bunch of buildings, not a civilization. The law books still exist in the law libraries, and the mountains and rivers are all precisely where they’ve always been. But that ineffable magic that makes a society has vanished.

Now adjust the thought experiment slightly. Instead of merely removing the Japanese, replace them one-for-one with Sioux Indians from North America. Would you now say that “Japanese civilization continues in Tokyo?” Again, of course not. That would be a preposterous claim. Something would be happening on the islands we call Japan, and perhaps we could even call it a civilization, but it would certainly not be Japanese civilization.

Let’s adjust the thought experiment further still, by replacing only N% of the Japanese with Sioux Indians. For N = 0% replacement, it’s obvious that the thing happening in the Japanese islands is inarguably Japanese Civilization. Conversely, at N = 100% replacement (aka the case above) it’s obviously not Japanese Civilization. As we increase N, we find a hybrid civilization, with some Japanese characteristics, and some non-Japanese characteristics. At some point, we’ll pass a critical threshold, what’s called in the layman’s literature a “tipping point,” beyond which Japanese civilization has ceased to recognizably exist as such.

The critical premise of Ethno-Nationalism in all its incarnations is that the threshold value of N should be identified (noting it likely varies per-civilization) and not exceeded. Of course, some incarnations are more controversial than others. We’ve chosen Japan as an example here because in Japan, it’s a mainstream idea that Japan should remain substantially Japanese. And in fact even the smuggest and most sanctimonious social-justice types in New York and Seattle don’t particularly oppose this idea. Similarly, it’s quite rare to hear an objection to the idea that Libya or Ghana ought to remain Libyan and Ghanaian.

But if you swap Japan for a country in the White man’s homeland, you’ll suddenly meet terrifyingly virulent resistance from many quarters. We leave it as an exercise for the reader to examine why this is so.