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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Jewish people have been subjected to a long, long, pattern of persecution, and were unable to escape after the implementation of modern border controls in the wake of the First World War.

Jews are also one of the oldest ethnoreligious groups in the world, and I'm pretty sure by far the oldest that has spent most of it's time as a merchant minority. Once you take those factors into account, I don't think their history indicates that they are currently or in the near future will be predictably in more danger as Jews than other merchant minorities. Armenians are in the same boat, if you look at the past 100 years.

I specifically mentioned a lot of the above groups since many of them faced persecution in the very recent past. The Hutu and Tutsi were butchering each other as late as the 2000s in the Congo. Rather than try and force a Hutu or Tutsi ethnostate, you have largely had a stop to the massacres by changes in government policy and culture instead.

Asking for an ethnostate is a pretty big ask; it's asking for all people in a given territory to either leave or be ok with the state and culture being made to service the needs of a particular group of inhabitants of an area often at the expense of other inhabitants. While sometimes it is the lesser of two evils, such as some post WW1 and WW2 settlements, it's always at best the lesser of two evils. Typically the other evil has to be brutal international war and/or crimes against humanity.

Asking for the establishment of an ethnostate, rather than just the maintenance of once which is a far more moderate and reasonable ask, is so extreme that if Israel didn't exist today I would object to it. Given Israel already exists, it should not be destroyed since that would require great tragedy, but it doesn't have a right to exist in perpetuity given all that goes into an ethnostate. No nation does.

it doesn't have a right to exist in perpetuity given all that goes into an ethnostate. No nation does.

That's a lot of assumptions you have there. One could more easily make the argument that, granting that nations exist and have a right to exist, ethnostates must by necessity also exist to actually enforce that right.