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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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I know a Jewish family that has carefully acquired and maintained multiple passports across generations rather openly based on the lived experience of their parents (and grandparents, and great grandparents) during WWII. The cynics would say "rootless cosmopolitans" here (and maybe there is an element of that), but having heard their Holocaust stories second-hand, I see why they care so much.

WW2 affected more people than just jews.

This brings up feelings similar to when I see news stories from Ukraine of all their African migrants fleeing the country. A bunch of brown fighting age men who suddenly aren't Ukrainian like the others. All rhetoric of unity and shared humanity thrown out the window for a train ticket out of there. So they can, presumably, do the same song and diversity dance someplace else.

Are you suggesting German Jews should have proven their loyalty by fighting for the Reich? That wasn't really on the table for them.

They weren't migrants, they were German citizens, until they weren't, and they weren't given the option of proving how German they were.

No. How did you reach that? The point where jews could make inroads with Germans had long passed them by.

I'm suggesting that Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians for example, don't carry 12 different passports in case of another war, despite being victims of WW2.

There are no "inroads" they could have made with people who hate Jews for being Jews. You are implying there was a rational reason for Germans to hate them and want them removed or exterminated.

I'm suggesting that Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians for example, don't carry 12 different passports in case of another war, despite being victims of WW2.

That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

A convincing case has yet to be made that Jews are simultaneously unreasonably paranoid, disloyal, and also do not deserve to be considered fellow citizens and got what was coming to them.

That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

Except, you know, that millions of eastern Europeans literally did find themselves in that situation at various times between the end of WWI and 2022.

I get what you're trying to say but altered borders so that Russians find themselves outside Russia, or Poles outside Poland, has been a pretty constant problem.

Except, you know, that millions of eastern Europeans literally did find themselves in that situation at various times between the end of WWI and 2022.

Yes, people get displaced by wars, but if you get what I'm trying to say, you know that this is different category of problem and not something that happened to them because their countrymen decided they weren't countrymen.

I understand what you're saying, I don't really see it as a different category of problem. Germans and Poles and Russians and Ukrainians have all experienced living in places for centuries only to find that the government of that place suddenly no longer considered them citizens. So did Russian aristocracy, Cambodian bourgeoisie, East African indians, hell millions of Americans have arguments around this.

This seems like another special pleading case where the Holocaust is considered particularly exceptional and gives the designated descendants of the victims a gold card to break norms that everyone else is expected to observe.

Either way the argument that the Holocaust justifies paranoia doesn't really absolve anyone of anything. If I'm dating a girl and she refuses to commit because "she's been hurt before," I'm not obligated to tolerate it and consider her a loyal girlfriend despite her disloyal behavior. Commitment is commitment, and mixed loyalty is mixed loyalty, even if it is justified paranoia rather than pure avarice.

I don't think the Holocaust is exceptional as far as genocides go. All genocides are horrific. But the Holocaust happened and it was a genocide, and genocides aren't the same as other war displacements (even if leftists today like to call everything a genocide).

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