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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36242 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I do believe that ethnically-homogeneous European countries are an obstacle to these people, and they actually let us know by transparently publishing it in the Guardian, NYT, HuffingtonPost, etc.

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

Also the population of Russia is a mix of ethnicities, 'ethnic Russian' would cover quite a varied array of phenotypes.

It is true that many ethnic groups live in Russia, but ethnic Russians make up 81% of the country's population and they are relatively homogeneous. Chechens, Kalmyks, etc. are not ethnic Russians; they are part of the remaining 19%, which is the "mix of ethnicities" with "a varied array of phenotypes".

It's hard to tell what exactly their issue with Russia is

The obvious answer is "they're invading a neighbouring country for no reason and murdering civilians". The cynical answer is "Russia is a historical political and military rival and they're taking this opportunity to weaken them". You seem to have skipped both and gone straight to the batshit-crazy answer of "they hate Russians because they're White".

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

I haven't seen this, best I could find was this one where they insist on the racial homogeneity and call people that value it 'extreme nationalists'

The blood-drenched harrowing of the war, followed by post-war border shifts and ethnic cleansing, created a racially pure Poland for the first time in history — fulfilling the dreams of earlier generations of extreme nationalists.

This is the type of piece they are pushing against white people in the US, the country the Poles are making the choice of allying themselves with instead of Russians :

How whiteness poses the greatest threat to US democracy

I don't see why they would not similarly attack Poland in the future, to the tune of 'Poland took the money of multicultural democracies to defend itself from evil nationalist Russia, but they still refuse to accept multiculturalism'

The obvious answer is "they're invading a neighbouring country for no reason and murdering civilians".

The US do the same to countries they are not even neighbors of, and defend their allies engaged in the same practices, in Yemen notably.

What is so special about the borders of Ukraine that needs to be defended at all cost?

Plus Russia actually has a reason in protecting the Russian minorities

in the East shelled by the Ukrainian government since 2014.

While I understand due to historical reasons why this is not a popular sentiment in Poland, I think it would be better for the Polish people to get annexed by Russia -which I do not see as likely- than to spend another 50 years under EU/US dominion.

There is already a case study with the FRG vs GDR, with the Soviet-dominated side faring better in preserving original German culture and demographics, as demonstrated by this map of mosques

The continued existence of the Polish people is at stake, but I understand that that is not what most people are immediately concerned with.

I do find it amusing that some leaders of Poland explicitly said that they do not want to turn into Brussels (from 1st link):

Błaszczak warned that EU pressure on Poland to accept refugees “is a straight road to a social catastrophe, with the result that in a few years Warsaw could look like Brussels.”

It seems that they made the same connection as I do, regarding at least migrants and safety, but they apparently don't think leaning further into EU/NATO is compromising that position, or that position is not taking priority over the perceived Russian threat.

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

Here's an oldie but goodie

Huh, 20 years ago? I thought it'd be something new, looking at the title: "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Polish".

Also "By: authors", lol.

Everyone here is white. They are not ostentatiously white the way, say, Swedes are;

Most obviously, there aren’t many Africans, Arabs, or Asians. The rest of Europe seems a wonderfully Technicolor place these days—the metro in Paris, Rome, and London could almost be mistaken for the subway in New York. Heterogeneity is a tonic; it adds the energy of unexpected combinations—the woman in chador chatting with the blonde woman in jogging gear on the tube. Ah, cosmopolitanism! But alas, Poland is merely Polish, an experiment in ethnic deprivation; the unbearable whiteness of being.

Speaking of cosmopolitanism—Stalin’s favorite euphemism for Jewishness—there aren’t many Jews here, either. There used to be three million, but the Nazis took care of that. Forty percent of Warsaw was Jewish; the deficit now seems overpowering, they fill the empty spaces in the streets. And not just the Jews: Thousands upon thousands of Polish Catholics were killed at Auschwitz, thousands more were worked to death in Siberia; the officer class of the Polish army was slaughtered by the Nazis and the Soviets. Poland was the charnel house of the 20th century.

This doesn't even seem accusatory at least until this point. "Authors" seem to just really, really fetishize 'diversity'.

The economy stopped growing, as market economies will sometimes do. Unemployment stands at more than 18 percent. In the parliamentary election of 2000, the center did not hold. The former Communists, who had gained power posing as social democrats, remained in control, but the center-right opposition—largely composed of Solidarity remnants—collapsed. Two rather unique populist parties suddenly materialized as significant forces. One was the League of Polish Families, a party of Catholic nationalist extremists (which received 9 percent of the vote); the other was called Self-Defense, a frightening mixture of nationalism and socialism led by a bully named Andrzej Lepper (it received 10 percent, but its strength has nearly doubled in recent public opinion polls). By contrast, Freedom Union—the party of the former Solidarity intellectuals—received only 3 percent and has disappeared from the Polish parliament, the Sejm.

And so, the Polish jitters. Pessimists abound in Warsaw and around the country. There is a war between the government and the still-strict central bank over monetary policy. Lepper is making news every day, usually involving scuffles with the police (last Thursday, he tried to stop imported grain from entering Poland by rail) or with his fellow parliamentarians (he was removed from the hall after a scuffle last Friday). It is likely that the former Communists, led now by prime minister Leszek Miller, will attempt to move left, sloppily, in an attempt to ease the pain, outflank the populists, and keep their apparatchiks prosperous.

“Poland is becoming more and more like Latin America,” says Jaroslaw Kaczynski , leader of the Law and Justice party, a reformist center-right political remnant of Solidarity. “People succeed here not because they’re talented, but because they know the right people. There is a Polish saying: Thousands gain, millions lose. This is an oversimplification, but we do pay an enormous corruption tax, and no one seems interested in reform. So we have an economic crisis that threatens to become a political crisis—my fear is that unless the economy improves, the populist parties will become very strong.”

And now he rules, thanks to blatant populism.

Huh, 20 years ago? I thought it'd be something new

You looked at something explicitly described as an "oldie", and thought it was new? Why?

This doesn't even seem accusatory at least until this point. "Authors" seem to just really, really fetishize 'diversity'.

I don't think having a problem with homogeneity requires for the tone to be accusatory.

And now he rules, thanks to blatant populism.

I'm sorry, I'm physically incapable of pretending media's boogeymen are uniquely bad, or that there is something wrong with populism.

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