Borzivoj
4mo ago
I gather that trans/furries/trans furries are greatly overrepresented among the relevant nerds.
Borzivoj
3mo ago
I don’t think we know this - I don’t think Hizbullah & Hamas together can take Israel. Iran would have huge logistical difficulties intervening directly and it is… not obvious that would succeed, even if Israel didn’t have nukes.
Borzivoj
7mo ago
I don’t think you have to a be a leftist to oppose a different people consciously forming an ethnic enclave on your current territory, regardless of the means. Would you really accept that if done to you? It seems like the sort of thing that might not turn out well.
To my knowledge, the right wing support for this in Europe derived mostly from a desire to be rid of the Jews.
Borzivoj
6mo ago
A thorny and ambiguous political question in many, many cases, but not particularly so in this one. None of the three parties (overlords, inhabitants, incomers) considered themselves to share ethnicities with one another. I don’t believe that either Turks or Jews would fail to notice or act if the same sort of thing were done to them. Even if the incomers are initially peaceful and they’re no worse (or even better) than the natives in tit-for-tat violence, this tends not to turn out well for recipient people.
I think the Turkification of Anatolia was bad, and would have a favorable opinion of the First Crusade if it had aimed at restoring Anatolian territory to the Byzantines instead of conquering a difficult-to-defend coastal strip of primarily symbolic significance.
Borzivoj
3mo ago
Agree it can be anyone willing to take them in, or even anywhere they're strong enough to conquer themselves.
Borzivoj
13d ago
I feel like I only ever see the following messaging these days
This is probably milieu-dependent. The denouncing Israel thing is something I only ever hear of at second hand, typically in media articles that (IMO) massively overstate the risk to American Jews. This is a rare occasion where I agree with Hanania:
What’s notable to me is the combination of a complete lack of violence along with the hysterical accusations of such and hyperbole going back and forth between the two sides. Everyone deep down knows that no one is going to get hurt, not by the police and not by the protestors, but that it is to their advantage to pretend as if this isn’t the case.
This is in a well-to-do professional environment (without many Jews to account for the pattern thanks to being in a nondescript Midwestern city). I was aware of the existence of pro-ethnic cleansing arguments among online ethnonationalist types, but I’d never encountered it in meatspace before last October, let alone from non-Jewish (!) normies.
Conversely, my Brother, who has similar object-level views on Israel-Palestine but works in Brussels, has had to explain that massacring Israeli civilians is bad, actually, regardless of what you think about the overall conflict.
Borzivoj
3mo ago
I actually disagree with RR’s response here - allowing refugees to return after a war is historically normal, not allowing it is somewhat unusual (though by no means unheard of). Rulers usually didn’t care what ethnicity their subjects were in the past, and usually preferred mass forced conversion to expulsion except in special circumstances. Why not let the expelled Palestinians return (since their expulsion probably wasn’t actually planned)? Democracy creates a very strong incentive to engage in (relatively soft in this case, to the Yishuv’s credit) ethnic cleansing.
Borzivoj
5mo ago
Second the evil cardiologist point. Don’t agree that Gazans in Gaza are the relevant comparison group - this behavior wouldn’t be as bizarre or noteworthy coming from some Israeli official living in Israel, where it makes more sense for tensions to run hot.
Random related detail - looked up a very prominent IR professor, Bruce Hoffman, the other day due to a favorable reference in another book. His twitter was full of retweets of pictures and videos of people tearing down the missing signs with requests to identify them (still has a similar one as his top tweet as of this writing). Hard to picture what the point of that is if not to encourage targeted harassment, so it’s not limited to this guy. Still just anecdotal though, not hard to evil cardiologist a group in a setting like this.
Borzivoj
3mo ago
Broadly on your side in this sub-exchange, but puzzled how ‘thirdly’ fits with the claim that a Jewish state would have prevented the Holocaust. Palestine was not only well within Germany’s reach, but it was right next to their primary goal in North Africa. If the Germans had taken Egypt and the British had withdrawn to Iraq, it seems like the Palestinian Jews would have been screwed regardless of their relative population share - if Anita Shapira is to be believed, the Yishuv’s plan (such as it was) was to cooperate so as not to give a pretext for reprisals.
I, too, have never seen any fights when working construction. Edit: checked with a career tradesperson. When fights occasionally occurred, they would be offsite, usually while drunk. In rare cases of on-site fights, people would quit preemptively or be fired.
Borzivoj
5mo ago
So you’re pro the expulsion of Germans from Hinterpommern and Upper Silesia? I think it was a textbook example both of the nationalist spiral and of people absurdly ‘reclaiming’ land they had no legitimate title to from the descendants of people who’d been there since before the region entered history (the Silesians and Pomeranians having finished Germanizing culturally and linguistically only in early modern times, and presumably being at least 30% descended from Slonzoki and Pomorzonie (as in modern Vorpommern).
I came to history with a pro-Czech and pro-Polish bias (despite being neither) - before I knew enough about history to not be exactly pro-anyone. It was the history of hard and soft ethnic cleansing here the gradually turned me against the nationalist approach despite my initial sympathy.
Borzivoj
6mo ago
The phenomenon of foreign groups arriving and displacing natives long predates the appearance of nation states, and I don’t think the impulse to resist it does or should depend on having one. The details will depend on the technology levels of the parties and also their mode of subsistence (so that if the natives are pastoralists or mixed hunter-agriculturalists, the issue won’t be land rights in the same sense as with pure agriculturalists).
Conflicts over who constitutes an ethnicity for the purpose of forming a state can often be extremely murky, e.g., with Southern Slavs. I don’t necessarily have an opinion on exactly how Serbo-Croatian types should be split up any more than Levantines. But if members of some Illyrian ethnoreligious diaspora that had left the area more than a thousand years earlier started showing up in Montenegro or Bosnia to buy up land to form an ethnic enclave, I expect they’d get a chilly reception.
I don’t think the people now called Palestinians played their cards very well, and I condemn killing of civilians when the parties are operating within a system where the distinction is meaningful (I do include this whole conflict, including during the Ottoman period - contrasting with, e.g., native warfare in what’s now the Eastern U.S., where no such distinction was generally established or observed). My original point was there’s nothing left or right wing about opposing a self-consciously distinct ethnic group from acquiring your home from under your feet, whether with or without violence, whether legal or illegal by the prevailing standards of the time and place. People will tend to oppose this happening (to themselves, at any rate) regardless of the flavor of their own ideology - a right wing ideology will serve as well for this as a left wing one.
Borzivoj
1yr ago
Second Dave Sim reference on this site today. Which book are you thinking of?
Borzivoj
3mo ago
The opposing argument will be that “Palestinian” as a distinct and/or overriding identity didn’t crystallize until the mid-20th century (there exist people arguing for earlier, have not read, can’t comment on quality of argument). Of course, pre-nationalist identity for non-Jati-like groups* was generally more local/regional than what replaced it, so it still wouldn’t make sense to “repatriate” them to other Arab countries.
To anticipate another counter-argument, there was some migration between Muslim regions (especially at urban and elite levels), so that some Palestinians have surnames indicating, e.g., Egyptian origin at some point. This is accurate, though the scale can be significantly exaggerated. My main complaint about this line of argument is that (except with very recent migrants) it makes about as much sense as “repatriating” all the Slovak Horváths to Croatia.
*Actual Hindu Jatis, but also Bosnian Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, Druze, Zoroastrians, etc. - (at least mostly) endogamous, religiously-defined groups with severe intercommunal purity barriers that reinforce common identity at a relatively early date.
Borzivoj
3mo ago
Thank you for 1-2, those are the sorts of reasons I’d be looking for. 3 seems like a reason for us to neuter them, dominate them, or nuke them ourselves before they can do it. As for 4, if they were somehow driven out of Israel, most of them would probably come here. Unless someone simultaneously nukes Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, we should have plenty of time to evacuate the more useful Ashkenazim during any semi-realistic genocide scenario (obviously if it somehow came to that, I’d support evacuating all of them on moral rather than practical grounds).
Borzivoj
3mo ago
The charges he’s making are too vague to be interpretable (as currently stated), but you’re also not giving a substantive answer. What’s are the concrete benefits we derive from their clientage that justifies the consumption of money and influence on their behalf? I don’t have any relevant background and don’t actually have an opinion on whether they’re worthwhile clients. If there are solid realpolitik reasons to support them, I’d respect that more than the moral arguments.
Borzivoj
5mo ago
… IIRC the U.S. military regretted supporting the population transfer more or less immediately and the officers involved recommended against allowing similar moves in future. If anyone’s still defending this, it’s presumably on the basis of ‘Nazis’ rather than some general principle.
Borzivoj
6mo ago
I really appreciate your thoughtful answers, which I found helpful in several respects. I’ll try to jump in on the battle of the sexes conversation earlier next time instead of waiting until it’s winding down like I did this time (sorry!)
The area was never ethnically Turkish, so no? Like when the new German Empire attempted to Germanize Posen/Poznań, the local ethnicity organized to prevent it even though the Germans owned it? As any sane ethnicity would, since their overlords wanted to cement their dominance by changing the ethnic character of the territory? People tend to resist deliberate attempts to displace them by other ethnicities, regardless of who the overlord happens to be. (Incidentally, the parties & politicians that came to prominence fighting the Poznań debacle were apparently much more virulent in their nationalism than those from other regions, which had unfortunate knock-on effects after independence. Almost like people are radicalized by people trying to replace them (to be clear, Hamas are ISIS-tier murderer-zealots, and I’m not too fond of Dmowski or Endecja either).
To the extent they do, I think they should knock it off. Creating new ethnic enclaves has tended to be bad news since the rise of nationalism & nationalism-adjacent ideologies.
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