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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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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?

You're conflating two different things: the inability of the police officers to address crime versus their unwillingness or willful disregard.

I don't think I am. I didn't say anything about why the police stopped enforcing the law, and I'm not sure why it matters much whether they do it through inability or through unwillingness or willful disregard or for some other reason. Nor is it obvious that those categories can be easily disambiguated. If a community refuses to cooperate with the police, the police will be less effective. If prosecutors refuse to file charges, or judges and juries refuse to hand down appropriate sentences, the police will be less effective. If mayors or governors order the police to stand down, perhaps because racial tensions create the risk of rioting or other serious violence in response to police action or because policing is percieved as unjust, police will again be less effective. If police feel that they are unsupported or at significant risk from criminal violence or from unfair treatment by the system, or as you say underfunded, understaffed, underpaid, they will be less effective.

Of the above factors, I am extremely skeptical that "underfunded, understaffed and underpaid" accounts for a significant portion of the policing failures we observe currently or historically. Likewise, I am quite skeptical that "unwillingness or willful disregard" is a sufficient explanation. Racism is the standard explanation, but fails to explain why the same patterns persist when both the cops and the civil authority commanding them are themselves black.

Ethnic cleansing suggests a deliberateness, i.e., desegregation was enacted to introduce crime into white communities and force them to relocate.

Alternatively, desegregation was executed by the authorities because they believed it would result in peace and harmony. When the results were otherwise, they doubled down on ideology rather than admit error or change course. Desegregation was supported by institutional actors, through "blockbusting" for example, because it gave them a way to directly profit from the situation through actions that would be generally perceived as virtuous. It was supported by normal black people because it offered them the promise of a better life, which they wanted desperately. It was supported by black criminals because it gave them a ready supply of victims. It was supported by the police because they were ordered to support it.

I do not see why specific motivations enter the picture. Desegregation was mandated, and when the immediate result was a rapid and uncontrollable increase in black-on-white violent crime, authorities and institutions refused to engage with the actual nature of the problem, but simply continued implementation of the mandate.

From Scott Cummings' Left behind in Rosedale, excerpts here, full book here.

"Do you think the elderly whites are getting singled out as easy marks?" I asked. Thinking for a minute, he responded, "Probably." We talked more about the problem. He thought that both elderly whites and black elders in Rosedale were being victimized by teenagers. Both were easy marks; but old whites were likely considered easier. The people downstairs, he thought, were exaggerating their problems only insofar as many laid the blame at the doorstep of the youth program. "Our kids are pretty good," he said. Otherwise, he observed, "Yeah, they're probably gettin' fucked over." "What do you think can be done about the situation?" I asked. "With old white people living in a black neighborhood?" "Do you want a straight answer?" he asked. "Yes," I replied." He said that in a couple of years the problem would go away. Pretty soon there would be no elderly whites in Rosedale. Consequently, it wasn't worth investing a lot of time and energy worrying about it. There were too many other issues and problems confronting the neighborhood and black people generally.

[...]

At that time, these events were abstractions, newspaper accounts of racial crises in some other community, hatred in someone else's backyard. I had even heard liberal, white colleagues within the university rationalize these events as somehow being just retribution for America's violent legacy of racial oppression. One colleague remarked to me: "Their ancestors were probably yukking it up when blacks were being lynched by Klansmen."

Whites left because they were being beaten, robbed, raped and murdered at an appalling rate, and no one who mattered was willing or able to do anything about it. They were driven out through unrestrained, lawless violence, which resulted from the deliberate policies of the authorities and powerful social institutions, and which those authorities and institutions did nothing to address or prevent. All of this had an explicitly racial component in both the motives for implementation, the disastrous effects, and the reasons those disastrous effects went unaddressed. How is that not ethnic cleansing?

Okay, look, this topic obviously incenses you, but while we welcome your contributions to the discussion and you are certainly allowed to take a contrary position, you are not allowed to put uncharitable words in other people's mouths. @FCfromSSC did not say he wants the US to be a white supremacist state with blacks as second class citizens, and if you want to claim that that is what he's really endorsing, you need to back it up with a lot more evidence, not just come in swinging because you assume everyone arguing with you is a white supremacist.