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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Erik Prince was on Tucker Carlson. It was nearly two hours, and I enjoyed most of it. They talked about Ukraine, the CIA, republicans, Afghanistan, drone warfare, surveillance, smartphones, and much more.

https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1792963714779426941

https://rumble.com/v4wl5or-erik-prince-cia-corruption-killer-drones-and-government-surveillance.html

Also youtube, somewhere.

I wanted to transcribe this part, and talk about it. Approximately 1:09.

EP: There's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American citizens.

TC: I agree with that completely, but an actual American, someone who grew up here.

EP: Fair. But the left has devalued American citizenship, it should mean something to be an American. I mean, a Roman citizen: it meant something.

TC: I mean a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, who was born in Western Michigan, so yes, I'm quite aware of that.

EP: Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.

TC: Yeah, you wonder if we've reached where that is impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.

EP: I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies, and corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people but it's still possible.

I have not been shy about voicing my thoughts on citizenship, so to hear them echoed in some part on a platform like this was interesting and unexpected.

What other societies is he talking about? I am most familiar with the Reconquest, where the mohammadeans were driven out of Iberia over centuries. That fits pretty well with what Prince is saying. I'm less familiar with the partition of India, by religion, then the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. This seems less relevant. What else is there? And what would that look like in the USA and Europe?

There's plenty to talk about from this conversation. The parts on drone warfare were particularly interesting to me, but didn't seem to fit with the rest of this post. And I'm out of time, so I post this as-is without any further commentary.

As far as historical examples of ethnic cleansing go, there's the expulsion of the Acadians by the British, pretty much everything that happened in the Balkans from 1821 to the present including the expulsion of Muslim Turks and Albanians from newly independent Christian nations and vice versa, Soviet deportations of Crimean Tatars, Koreans, Ukrainians, etc. to Siberia and Central Asia, the partition of Cyprus, and most recently the flight of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh after its conquest by Azerbaijan. The last time Western leaders condoned such a campaign was the removal of Germans from Eastern Europe, and in addition to being the culmination of the largest war in human history it was Soviet boots on the ground actually carrying it out, not Americans and Brits.

For such a thing to occur in America today would require either the rise of an authoritarianism as overwhelming as China's or a level of interpersonal animosity and cultural segregation much greater than I have observed in my travels (I can't speak much for Europe and suspect that their Muslim communities are more separate and alien to the majority than any immigrant enclaves here), and in either case the lines would be drawn in ways orthogonal to simple ethnic identification i.e. a government that could would deport whatever groups it found troublesome regardless of their background and any sort of civil war in the US nowadays would feature Hispanic Trump voters on one side and white progressives on the other and I'm honestly not sure which faction would be more diverse by the progressives' own standards.

Forcible transfer of populations is considered a crime against humanity, so expect any nation that does it to have all kinds of sanctions leveled against it.

Black crime being unpunished due to racial considerations drives whites out of productive suburbs to leave impoverished wastelands in its wake. If that doesn't count as population transfer then stripping property rights of criminal noncompliants doesn't count either.

...Is this a genuine question?

Suppose the police stop enforcing most laws in an area. They'll still show up for murders or rapes, after the fact, and they'll respond to gunfire, but they ignore threats or assault and battery or destruction of property or theft. Their clearance rates for crime are low, and after a while people stop calling them for "minor" offenses because they won't arrive in time and certainly won't do anything about it. They continue to arrest people for really serious crimes, but not in proportion to a very significant increase in serious crime and arrests for the "less serious" crimes drop through the floor. The crime rate is now ten, fifty, a hundred times what it was before. Crime is now ubiquitous, and the area is fundamentally unsafe to live or work in, and the police clearly have no intention of changing this state of affairs.

How would you describe the above scenario?