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Notes -
UK, are you OK?
Labour councillor calls for people to 'cut the throats' of 'Nazis and fascists'
Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’
Probably anyone reading this is familiar with the story so far: three gradeschool children in Southport were knifed to death, and ten others injured, on July 29th at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club. The alleged perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, is reportedly the son of Rwandan immigrants and was 17 years old at the time of the incident, but has apparently since passed his 18th birthday. The events, allegedly in part as the result of some false reporting concerning Axel's identity, led to a number of protests, which led to a number of counterprotests.
Why would you counterprotest a protest against the knifing of schoolgirls? Well, apparently the original protests were racist. It's pretty important to not be racist. Sufficiently important, I suppose, that people would rather talk about that, than about the dead schoolchildren who, but for recent immigration from Africa, would likely still be alive. Not that Axel is an immigrant, of course. He was born on the magic soil of the UK, so it's apparently racist to notice that his parents weren't. I saw one article suggesting he might be autistic? Good sources are hard to find.
That brings us to the current events! Labour councillor Ricky Jones apparently found some inspiration in Axel's extracurricular activities, as he is very clearly articulating additional knife violence as the proper response to people protesting the murder of little girls. I actually had a surprisingly difficult time finding the original video; most of the articles throwing around the word "alleged" did not judge me fit to judge for myself. I assume Ricky was born tone deaf because throat cutting seems like an especially poor choice of words given the circumstances--though I guess I don't know for certain that Axel managed any literal throat cutting in the process of (EDIT: ALLEGEDLY) butchering schoolchildren. The UK does not have any particularly meaningful or toothy Free Speech legislation, either, though in this particular case I can imagine Mr. Jones facing consequences even here in the United States. Remind me, is it still okay to call for the punching of U.S. Nazis? Was it ever? I seem to have lost track.
Axel's knifework is not being treated as a terrorist attack (yet?), but here's where things get weird.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:
Taylor Swift shows in Vienna canceled over alleged planned terrorist attack
Suspects in foiled attack on Taylor Swift shows were inspired by Islamic State group, officials say
Will we hear more about Axel's motivations? I suppose Taylor Swift is just so famous that at this point any plot to kill large numbers of people would, statistically, run into Taylor Swift events eventually. But now I'm wondering if Axel was just, you know, reading the same weird terrorist handbook as the Austrian terrorists. They were even the same age--the two arrested in Vienna are 19 years old and 17 years old. If I had a nickel for every time a 17 year old boy tried to murder Swifties en masse, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice!
I'm sure much smarter and well-connected analysts out there are way ahead of me on this one. And probably it's nothing! And it wouldn't really matter if it was something, beyond maybe bankrupting a handful of Taylor Swift event ticket scalpers in the near future. But it's all very weird.
Especially the part where counterprotesters started literally calling for and cheering on more knifings.
Just a quick point which has been bugging me in several of these Motte threads about the issue...
Isn't it definitely worth mentioning that if he were born in the UK, it's not at all a "recent" immigration? That's just flat out wrong!! Objectively! I don't know why all the comments seem to conveniently gloss over this. Even if we're playing the counterfactual game, which is always epistemically suspect in the case of individuals, the debate would be about immigration policies 18 years ago, not current immigration policies. Now, given, the PM at the time was Tony Blair, who was Labour, so maybe there's a connection there, but still (it's not like Labour has been in charge for long enough to meaningfully affect immigration policies themselves, and instead it's the Conservatives who were in power for much more than a decade). The situation also pretty much requires asking "how well does assimilation work in the UK"? Answering that is pretty much required context if you're going to connect it to immigration, because otherwise the local UK culture is presumably just as much "to blame" as his parent's upbringing.
But yeah, Taylor Swift being repeatedly brought up is a little odd. But if your goal is to create maximum media attention to an act of terror, choosing as your target a bunch of sympathetic young people and even kids at a Taylor Swift event ( a figure who has a ton of built in attention already) is probably close to the "ideal" target. Now, of course, this kind of terrorism is consummately counterproductive, but to the more delusional kind of terrorist (such as a 17 and 19 year old) it might seem attractive.
From the point of view of the Britons, the Saxons and the Normans are recent immigrations, recent meaning in the last thousand years. The Romans only get a pass because they immigrated before the time of Christ.
Right, of course context matters, but in the realm of politics two decades is almost never recent. You usually mean something within the last few months to a year, and sometimes 5 years at most, 10 if you really stretch. This holds true virtually 90% of the time, probably even higher, 99% wouldn't even surprise me. A simple search of literally any news article will demonstrate my point quite succinctly. Or even books.
If you use "recent" to mean 20 years ago it's almost explicitly dishonest.
For example, if I tell you that I "recently" moved -- even if I am catching up with an old friend I hadn't seen in like, 40 years, you'd still probably assume recent = last 5 to 10 years at most. I struggle to even come up with any sort of comparable example outside of literal world history where recent would acceptably mean almost two decades ago.
And in terms of ethnogenesis, centuries pass in the blink of an eye.
There's an unfortunate saying that goes something like this: 'a dog born in the stables is not a horse'. I am Chinese in origin, and I can confidently say that if outsiders moved in and learned and spoke Chinese and did so for a thousand years, they would still be foreigners. (No one thinks that Mongols are Chinese.) That is the problem when creedal New World colonial nations cross-pollinate their civic nationalism into the old. They simply do not understand that a nation is more than a mere economic zone of free association.
For the British, they still haven't gotten over William the Conquerer (the difference between the posh and chav class distinctions in England is largely how much francophonian loanwords each uses). Anyone else is an outsider to this culture-struggle. Their cosmopolitan rootlessness precludes them from partaking of a nation's blood and soil, of which nearly all Old World states are in their essence.
I'm pretty sure nobody can tell Manchus apart from Han anymore without looking at the ethnicity listed on their ID, and they were assimilated less than 300 years ago.
I remember an incident from a Chinese culture class in college, where the professor was Han, and talking about how Han are the majority... then asked a Chinese student, assuming he was also Han. Surprise: he was actually Manchu. Unless there was some subtle unstated communication going on that I missed, I'd call that at least one thorough assimilation.
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