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So, most of the countries that have existed in the entirety of human history are not worth defending?
Inter-ethnic conflict that expresses itself in “cruelty as deterrent” is as historically common as the summer rain. It’s currently happening in multiple places, and depending on where you live, it’s happened in the recent past. In your backyard.
I find it rather hubristic to tell someone from the baltics, the balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, or Southeast Asia that their country isn’t worth defending.
This is very “rootless cosmopolitan” coded.
A lot of things are historically common, but we still condemn them as bad; inter alia, chattel slavery, spousal and child abuse, and many types of war crimes.
Fair cop; I'm the kind of person who, as Scott Alexander described, sees a headline 'Victory for Man United' and feels inspired until I look at the article and realise it's just some sportsball thing.
The difference between those things you’ve described as historically common, which I agree is accurate, and a more generic “deliberate cruelty as deterrent for mass illegal migration” is that the latter has not been supplanted by anything clearly superior.
The Industrial Revolution killed chattel slavery & most extreme institutional types of patriarchy. It substituted a physical technology in place of a social one; it was made possible to permanently discard old ways through sheer power of technology.
The same cannot be said about of the problem of mass migration and the erosion of the hosts’ social environment that it causes.
As I’ve stated before, the only possible way this can be completely ignored is if the framing simply doesn’t acknowledge or value the social solidarity provided by the nation at all; it requires a wholesale denial or blindness to the glue that binds various societies together since time immemorial.
As a former libertarian, I’m frankly embarrassed by how blind I was to these basic social truths. On X, a pithy little tweet described libertarianism as “truly the only equivalent of feminism for men.” Which made me chuckle; the theory only works if you’re willingly or unknowingly blind to social forces which make the political possible in the first place.
I endorse the rest of this take, but libertarianism has no problem with joint ownership, and countries can be conceptualized as intergenerational, publicly owned enterprise, so the doors are opened if you ever feel like coming back
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America isn't Lwow 1918 though. In Florida and Texas the majority of Hispanics voted the same way as the majority of whites.
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