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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10478 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Shamima Begum is back in the news with news that the European Court of Human Rights are questioning the UK Home Office's decision to remove her citizenship on the basis that she may have been "groomed" and "trafficked" into joining ISIS.

In a document published by the ECHR earlier this month, it states that Ms Begum is challenging the decision to revoke her British citizenship under Article 4 of the European Convention of Human Rights - prohibition of slavery and forced labour.

The four questions posed by judges in Strasbourg to the Home Office, include: "Did the Secretary of State have a positive obligation, by virtue of Article 4 of the Convention, to consider whether the applicant had been a victim of trafficking, and whether any duties or obligations to her flowed from that fact, before deciding to deprive her of her citizenship?"

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said Ms Begum "chose to go and support the violent Islamist extremists".

He added: "She has no place in the UK and our own Supreme Court found that depriving her of citizenship was lawful.

"It is deeply concerning the European Court of Human Rights is now looking at using the ECHR to make the UK take her back."

If the UK is manoeuvered into allowing Begum to return at the the behest of the European courts it will be political suicide for the government, an open goal for the far right, but what gets me is how it will foreseeably be consequently counterproductive for the very demographics that human rights activists seek to defend! It will pour fuel on reactionary sentiment and division. I think that the functional part of Labour understand this, and will be working hard to make sure it doesn't happen, but I worry that the activist section of the back benches will work against them, ignorant (wilfully?) of the prospect of ushering in a Reform government on a swelling tide of rightist sentiment. It's like a moral puritanism that denies the political reality of trade-offs. Sure, there might be a hard right UK government, but it won't be their fault - they stood against it!

but what gets me is how it will foreseeably be consequently counterproductive for the very demographics that human rights activists seek to defend! It will pour fuel on reactionary sentiment and division.

The pro-human rights position (as I've seen it articulated by people like Krystal Ball) goes something like: you can't give an inch, because then you destroy the remaining taboo against the far right by validating their beliefs. Since you will never be willing to go as far, you'll inevitably be outflanked and worse things will come anyway. And, of course, every life saved is a gift. Especially if you think the rising tide of fascism is just some inevitable consequence of someone else's (usually the center left/neoliberals) economic policies, not your immigration position. Might as well save who you can.

The Kulak-ish take is: it's worked for decades. Yeah, the public keeps threatening to swing ("you don't know my mentality bro, when I see red...") but they are either easily diverted (Canada) or can hopefully be directed around in circles until it's just too late.

The defenses of Shamima Begum show how that can happen. People who had no stake in defending Islamic radicalism were quite rationally concerned with stripping potential dual citizens of status given just how large that had become as a proportion of Britons. If you raise that percentage high enough you have a large enough group to veto anything that would reverse the policies that would keep people like Begum around. You might be already there.

This reminds me of that sudden coordinated media blitz a few years ago to politically rehabilitate Nazi collaborators (female).

Nazi collaborators are so old that it's a waste of time to bother with anything else.

I don’t mean legal process for living Nazi collaborators. I mean the wave of drippy articles about how the French and Belgians shaving the heads of Nazi collaborators (female) was terrible because living in an occupied country is hard and stuff. Shooting Nazi collaborators (male) is ok though.

If something straightforwardly helps your opponent and harms you, any claims that it does the opposite are likely to be concern trolling or motivated reasoning.

Refusing to punish bad things done by a Muslim who was in an anti-Western group, on the basis of human rights, straightforwardly helps the left. Yes, it may hurt more than it helps because of backlash; that's not impossible. But I'd heavily doubt it, because it's too easy as a biased human to come up with wishful thinking and think "well, maybe my opponent isn't really winning" when he obviously is.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a real faction of the left which is actively opposed to competent center-left government on the basis that a reactionary backlash creates the necessary conditions for their own ideology to succeed? I'm not aware of this having ever worked out, but 'well grounded in history' is not a criticism that can be levied at anti-capitalists(which is well established among the activist portion of the labour party) anyways. It seems like 'intentionally leading to a far right government' is a thing which theory would expect lefty activists to occasionally do, and Keir probably doesn't have the party discipline to stop it.

isn't there a real faction of the left which is actively opposed to competent center-left government on the basis that a reactionary backlash creates the necessary conditions for their own ideology to succeed?

This is basically the thesis of Lenin's book What is to be done.

I can also think of a historical example where in a band of revolutionary socialists embedded within a wider workers movement were able to execute Lenin's plan to great effect. Unfortunately for Lenin and his movement, the socialist affinity for back-stabbing reared it's ugly head and the wider left has spent the intervening decades desperately trying to convince both themselves and everyone else that the evil mustache man was never a true leftist to begin with.

All sides have their accelerationists who imagine that just x% more of what they hate will shock the masses out of their false consciousness. What that strategy ignores is that the polity can remain unfavourable longer than you can remain politically relevant.

To "accelerate the contradictions" (or in other popular phrasing "heighten the contradictions" or "sharpen the contradictions") seems to be a Leninist idea originally. And to be fair, Lenin did get the total revolution he wanted rather than the more incremental improvements that occurred (and that leave extremists fuming) elsewhere.

There seems to be a continuous spectrum of these ideas in Marxist (and probably wider leftist) thought, though. The idea that you can bring about The Revolution faster by making things worse shades into the idea that you just shouldn't try to delay The Revolution by trying to make things incrementally better, and both are similar to but distinct from the idea that you can't do much either way because prophecy psychohistory dialectical materialism proves that The Revolution will come when it's destined to regardless.

Punishing people for taking part in an armed conflict is a war crime. She can be punished for things she has done, she can't be collectively punished for crimes committed by her faction in a war.

Instead of solving the actual problem of mass immigration, we are solving fake problems such as privacy, lack of police state and freedom of speech.

This problem should never have existed and only exists because of bad immigration policy. It can only be fixed through changed immigration policy.

Creating special rules where for certain groups such as terrorists is a slippery slope. The west is slowly recreating Saddam Hussien's Iraq and justifying the policies that will turn us into Iraq with being tough on muslims.

Punishing people for taking part in an armed conflict is a war crime.

Isis are unlawful belligerents and so its members can be prosecuted.

Punishing people for taking part in an armed conflict is a war crime.

Certainly it is not. In fact, one of the most well-defined crimes in the US Constitution is just that. I imagine the British have similar crimes.

She can be punished for things she has done, she can't be collectively punished for crimes committed by her faction in a war.

She can be punished for joining that faction.

Seems like a way for the uk to shirk the responsibility of punishing her. It's not like she's annommigrant, so just to go and revoke her citizenship and make her stateless seems like a very 2bit dictatorship sort of thing to do.

If anything they should take her back and prosecute for treason. Isis was actually waging a real war (unlike drug cartels or whatever), so i feel like those charges should stick.

Au contraire! Making someone an outlaw has a rich, august history in democracies (See, eg, the Icelandic Sagas, Thucydides).

Lots of things have long and rich histories in all kinds of historical civilizations which are now totally not acceptable in polite company.

Sure but it isn’t obvious this ought to be one of them. When something has a long rich history behind it, the party claiming to change the approach bears a strong burden besides “it’s uncouth”

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