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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

Not immigrants; refugees. There is a difference, and the Ukrainian new-arrivals to Poland are legitimately refugees.

The context is comprehensively different from Merkel's third-world invasion. From my reading, the biggest difference is that support for Ukrainian refugees is massively popular in Poland--not just right-to-left along a generic political axis, but importantly, top-to-bottom from the Polish elite to the grassroots.

The new arrivals are, indeed, refugees, but even before the war, Poland was actually swamped by “temporary” workers from Ukraine. But that’s not the point: the difference between Ukrainians in Poland vs Africans in Germany or Sweden is not so much based on legal status, but rather cultural similarity. If US today got mass immigration from English Canadians, who just happened to speak as incomprehensibly as rural Scottsmen, but quickly learn local dialect, it wouldn’t be seen as that big of a deal, compared to mass immigration from Latin America. This is closer to the today’s relationship between Poles and Ukrainians, despite recent history of genocide of Poles perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (unlike with Blacks in US, in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities).

The issue I see with it is that they're building an infrastructure and customs to welcome and accommodate refugees. This attracts a certain type of people that will not leave once the current Ukraine crisis is over.

It's a slippery slope.

What if Turkey has a civil war, or even Germany, which is starting to look a lot like Turkey, demographically-speaking, aren't they too 'neighbors' etc?

The current wave of refugees is women with children, which is much different than single young males from Africa. If they end up staying, then given cultural similarity, that’s a win too, considering the dire state of demographics in developed world. Germany will not have civil war, and if Turkey has one, Poland simply will not admit any of them, as it did not admit the big wave of Middle East refugees a few years ago, or the ones trying to illegally crossing through Belarus.

What you seem to be missing is that the current government of Poland, as much as they screw around with the rule of law and principles of republican government, they are not hostile to their average constituents, in a way that, say, US government often is. This reduces the downside risk.

They are not hostile to their constituents but deepening the ties to governments that are.

The power imbalance between Poland and US is not in Poland's favor, they will not be able to keep protecting their people.

I think the Polish people is underestimating the risk of staying in the same failing boat as the EU / US.

in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities

Not least because a typical European country has historical reason to have a grudge against most of their neighbours. Acting on all of those would obviously be a huge negative when it comes to economic and other prosperity.

I agree--I think that cultural similarity is one of the big factors that contributes to the widespread popularity of welcoming the Ukrainian refugees. A shared concern over an expansionist Russia and simple human compassion for a neighbor's plight are the others that occur to me offhand.

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