Thomas Huxley's map of racial categories from
On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind
(London, 1870)
One of the central ideas of the so-called New Right is that of ethnopluralism - this as a radical alternative to multiculturalism and as a means of ensuring human biodiversity. Obviously, it entails an essentialist and völkisch-organic understanding of race and culture and obviously it soon leads on to calls for separatism and ethnoregionalism.
Proponents, however, are quick to insist that ethnopluralism will result in a world of different but equal peoples living in peaceful coexistence. They vociferously deny they are racists and argue that the attempt to enforce a universal model of mankind has and will continue to result in violence as singularities that cannot be assimilated into a global world order assert their right to otherness and defend their unique identities.
Of course, whilst ethnopluralism may have recently become a fashionable idea within certain circles, it's nothing very new. We can find it, for example, expressed in the poetry of D. H. Lawrence. In 'Future States', Lawrence imagines a time when our ideal civilization is over and the will to universalism has ceased:
"the great movement of centralising into oneness will stop
and there will be a vivid recoil into separateness
many vivid small states, like a kaleidoscope, all colours
and all the differences given expression."
Whilst in the following poem, 'Future War', he writes that where there is an infinite variety of people, there is no desire for conflict: "Oneness makes war, and the obsession of oneness."
I happen to think that last line is true. But it doesn't legitimize the piss-poor scribblings of Markus Willinger, nor necessarily validate the more sophisticated musings of those intellectuals on the New Right.
See: D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 526-27.
