It’s a matter of degree though. Your average Brazilian triracial varies from about 60% to 80% European, more in the South and South-East, less in the North, North-East, and Central-West. His remaining ancestry is typically some mixture of African and Amerindian, with the former more common near the coastline, and the latter more dominant in the interior.

Whites make up the next largest group, and they are still a very significant segment of the population. Blacks as a recognizable minority are much smaller. Large-scale intermarriage among the lower classes after the abolition of slavery in 1888 significantly diluted their identity and heritage. Outside of certain regions and cities, Blacks tend to make up less than 6 or 7% of the population. Even Bahia, the state with the closest links to African culture more closely resembles the Dominican Republic than a New World Africa. The Whites in Bahia make up a substantial part of the population because they never left the land or abandoned the cities after the old system fell apart. What happened was that the population (of all colors and phenotypes) adopted elements of African culture, music, and cuisine but also altered it as needed. It has very little parallel with the experience of African-Americans in the United States, and the only neighboring country that sort of resembles it is Venezuela.

Brazil’s birthrate crashed in the late 1990’s and has never recovered, and it hit almost all segments of the population equally. It has been rather stable in composition for a long while now. Large scale Venezuelan migration into the North region may be the biggest change to Brazil’s demographics in over 50 years, but I wonder if the Brazilians will passively allow themselves to be overrun.

All of the above probably means little to outsiders who see Brazil as just another Third-World loser country that will never be able to reach its full potential. But within Latin America it is a very distinct bloc with its own unique high culture and folk traditions. It stands out from its neighbors in many positive respects, and rarely fails any harder than they do. The nation is in crisis right now, but my own feeling is that it will be limping along long after most of its rivals are gone. That is the nature of Brazil, a slow and lukewarm but enduring simmer.

Artur Avila, the Brazilian you are referring to may very well have African ancestry, about half of all Brazilians do. How much of his total ancestry is African is up for debate unless he ever bothers to take an autosomal DNA test and publishes the results. Like many of his countrymen, his appearance can change greatly due to the tanning of his skin or the styling of his hair.

Massachusetts was 73.7% White in 2014, maybe around 65-67% in the age range for the PISA test. Of those roughly 1/3 are full or part-Irish, a group that gets a lot of grief historically for not being as intellectual as other Northern Europeans. Italians (descended from Sicilians and Calabrians) are number two in size, making up over an eight of the total population. The English are a distant third, and I am not sure how many are old stock Colonial Yankees, because from 1850 to 1965 over 2.5 million Englishmen settled in America and many would have ended up in Boston for practical reasons, but most of these were working-class folk who flocked to the textile mills. The next group down are “French”, which in this case means French Canadians who came down from Quebec to do all sorts of menial, low-skill labor. Neither Jews nor Boston Brahmins are particularly large segments of the White population in this state, despite their outsized reputation. The Jews who settled up there were not even considered the best of that community, being predominately Litwaks who were seen as far more illiterate and backwards than the German, Austrian, Polish, or Ukrainian Jews.

Clearly, something very remarkable happened in Massachusetts during the 20th Century that allowed the children of the above groups to achieve such high outcomes in education and cognitive ability, but what that was I am not sure. No one is ever going to claim modern Mass is a pillar of clean, cleared-headed government, so my educated guess is that the communities they were very good at organizing themselves towards self-improvement and economic development in same way many German and Scandinavians communities did out in the Midwest during the same time period.

I have a lot of respect for the Portuguese. Despite being located next door to the Spanish, they have a distinctive national character that sets them apart from their neighbors. The food, the architecture, and certain aspects of their artistic heritage (Azulejo mosaics) are all first-class. They are in my opinion a seriously underrated people.

On a point not yet brought up on this thread; looking into their military history, man-for-man the Portuguese may be the toughest fighters in Southern Europe. Since pre-Roman times the people from what is now Portugal were exceptionally disciplined and ferocious in the Art of War. They played a major role in the Reconquista and the defeat of Napoleon in Iberia. The reason Brazil is so large is because the Portuguese colonists were both aggressive and more importantly competent in pressing their territorial claims against all rivals. The Portuguese involvement in WWI was doomed from the start, but that they managed to put such a relatively large force on the Western Front in spite of the disastrous state of their domestic affairs shows a lot of willpower. In the 1960’s and 70’s they fought with some success in repelling the anti-colonial insurgencies in their African domains, far better than they had any right to considering their country was poor and operating under great pressure from their allies in NATO to pull out. That the Soviets and Cubans provided a lot of material support to the rebels is relatively well known, but how the U.S. influenced the course of events is often flushed down the memory hole.

I guess much of this is overlooked because it was considered peripheral to what was going on in the rest of Europe and the West in general, but it is impressive when you take time to look into it. Few nations accomplished so much in feats of arms working off of so little in terms of resources and geography.

Ilyin’s view on Ukrainians seemed to be thus.

1) They exist, they are related to but are somewhat different from Russians on points of language and culture.

2) They are still similar enough through shared origins and common religion (Orthodoxy) that they should stay united with Russia against other civilizational blocs.

3) The people of the ‘Russian World’ (of which Ukrainians are a part of) should be ruled under a common government, as they gain more from it by contributing to each other both on a personal and communal level.

4) This government should respect the unique identity of these varied ethnicities in the ‘Russian World’ while protecting them under a strong umbrella of common laws to resolve disputes between communities.

5) This government would preferably be a monarchy, which has the best chance of being immune to mono-ethnic passions and transcend them.

6) An independent Ukraine would be an abomination and threat to Russia since it would be used to undermine the common values of the Russian World.

Notice Putin and the Russian government generally try to follow points 1 through 4 in their domestic policies towards ethnic minorities (a clear sign of Ilyin’s influence), but ignore points 5 and 6 at their convenience and comfort. Modern Russian political identity is very much a Frankenstein’s monster of various conflicting ideas stitched together in a shambling mass. Ilyin sort of predicted this would be one of the results of Communism collapsing:

“There will pass years of national remembrance; settling in; solace; coming to reason; becoming informed. There will come a restoration of an elementary sense of justice; a return to the principles of honor and honesty; personal responsibility and loyalty; a feeling of one’s own dignity; to incorruptibility and independent thought – before the Russian people will be a condition to carry out sensible and not ruinous political elections. And until that time it can be led only by a national, patriotic, hardly totalitarian, but authoritarian – cultivating and reviving – dictatorship.”

‘On Forms of Sovereignty’ (1948)

I think his major weakness as a philosopher was how much he underestimated both the allure and corrupting power of international capital and how common markets can be used a tool of entrapment and subjugation more subtle, encompassing and harder to throw off then any police-state tyranny.

I wish I could have replied a few hours ago, but if you want to read some of Ilyin’s essays in English, go to this website.

https://souloftheeast.org/tag/ivan-ilyin/

This was how I was introduced to his philosophy several years ago after coming across his wikipedia article. It was good to see the archive is still up for other people to discover.

In particular, you should start with ‘On Forms of Sovereignty’ (1948), which cuts to the heart of how Ilyin perceived the international order and Russia’s place in it.

https://souloftheeast.org/2015/04/24/ivan-ilyin-on-forms-of-sovereignty/

You should really read up on him, Ilyin was one of the great conservative philosophers of the 20th century. As others had mentioned, he was no Eurasianist but rather someone who tried to balance what he felt was the best of the European legal tradition with the potential and challenges of modernity.

In so far as Putin quoting him, that seems to be related to Putin’s own belief that he is following in the course of Ilyin’s “Third Way” for Russia that combines respect for national tradition with caution towards liberal democracy, while denouncing despotism and total centralization of power.

Personally, I think Ilyin would hate what Russia has become. He would accuse Putin of putting on a big show of being a responsible leader with very little action to back it up. Someone who puts up the front of being an enlightened ruler who defends the conscience of law, but has only a hazy understanding of what that law means.

Yes, we did discuss that back in 2014, along with many other debates on Ukrainian social achievement in the Hapsburg and Russian Empires. I never mentioned back then that part of my family came from Galicia (Ottynia), so the subject has a degree of personal interest to me.

Would that be the phenomenon by which the Ukrainian Statistical Service claims that the country receives about 10000 more migrants per year than it loses? That would make a certain amount of sense. But detractors claim that these migrants are returning for only a week or two every few years to normalize their citizenship status and then taking off again to the countries they truly reside in. I have seen that trend in certain other post-Soviet Republics, in particular Georgia where the last census noted a big difference between registered citizens and those who were actively living on national territory at the time of the count.

I do not trust Ukrainian statistics as much as other countries in the region because no census has been carried out since 2001, and the government seems to put a new one off whenever the demand for it arises. Regular censuses are needed to calibrate population estimates, and I imagine the events of the past four years caused an even greater drift on the old calculations. I would not be shocked to find out that the country has one to two million people less than officially claimed, especially when you factor in the disruptions in Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts.

Kiev also seems to be growing in part of sustained internal migration. This must be causing a hollowing out of lots of mid-sized cities and small towns. A country where the capital achieves ever-growing and undue demographic weight is generally bad for births (I include Moscow as an example of this, but also London, Tokyo, and even Riga).

One of my goals for the rest of Anti-Bolshevik Month is to write a comprehensive alternate history in which the Russian Republic survives WW1.

I spent some time last year thinking about this proposition as well. What would it take and how would that be accomplished? The answer I came up with was fairly decent but I never wrote more than about twenty pages on it, since I only have so much free time. Anatoly, maybe a brief summary below could help you in your project, which can hopefully reach a wider audience than my efforts could.

In this alternate universe, the major diverging point was Brusilov having a major revelation in April-May 1917 about the long term viability of the Provisional government. He acknowledged that the monarchy could not be restored at that point, but also recognized that Russia would not be able to continue fighting the war with the current political situation in Petrograd. This leads to a series of events where he quickly mobilizes a number of units from his South-Western Front for the purpose of seizing the capital.

However, the old general is not a fool. The vast geographical distances and the timing involved means that if he does not have support from other quarters in the Russian Army, his plans will die in the planning stages if he does not gain support from other senior generals. On a meeting to the capital to discuss strategy (which from my research was in our real history a precursor to Brusilov being appointed Commander-in-Chief just a few months later), he approaches Kornilov, who was far more popular than Brusilov and commander of the Petrograd Military District. Kornilov is swayed by Brusilov’s logic, and is not unwilling to support the coup but he will not give his support unless his conspirator is willing to push for some major social reforms in the government. Brusilov is desperate to achieve any sort of successful push against the status quo and agrees.

Alekseyev is brought over when he realizes this might be the only way to keep the army from falling apart, since the conspiracy is too large for him to squash at this point and is going to have major consequences even if he could. He is also given a seat on the junta, along with the other Front commanders who are lesser personalities who go along with the flow.

The coup happens on May 25th, 1917 and the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet are both caught off guard by it. Only a small portion of the Russian Army actively participates in it, but the rest are bought off not to act by promises of land reform and better conditions in the trenches, among other bribes. Petrograd, Moscow, and a number of western provincial capitals are seized. Since Brusilov’s South-Western Front covers much of the modern Ukraine, may key cities are captured there as well. It is not a flawless or bloodless action. May rogue soldiers and various leftist revolutionary groups fight back, and a small number of army units do resist but in the short term they are driven back. Keresnky and his clique managed to arm a small clique of them, and some run off to continue the fight against the army.

Lenin is arrested, and he along with a number of members of the Petrograd Soviet are executed for inciting against the war effort. Since of course no one will ever see what Lenin is really capable of, he becomes a martyr to the Left, one of many. The junta begins to stabilize its rule, but a Civil War is brewing on the horizon and Brusilov and Kornilov are left with the stark realization that they can either fight to pacify Russia or fight the Germans, but not both. Under very tense circumstances they call for an armistice with the Germans…

I have more, and it actually goes up to the 1990’s. If you are interested I can contact you with further details through your website. Again, I remain respectful of your own opinions and if you want to plot your own path it is within your full rights to do so. Anyway, hopefully Russia can continue to reconcile with its past, as no nation can ever truly move forward until it does. May the grim centenary of the Revolution be that catalyst.

(My original username was blocked by the system, but I am back.)