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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17804 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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I don't quite understand how it has come to this. In Germany at least the far-right has a convenient theory that they get this as punishment for WWII. That the victorious Allies ensured that Germany, by becoming multicultural, will never re-develop that ethno-nationalistic, militaristic ethos they had pre-WWII. But Britain won WWII. France won WWII. Who pushed them to do this?

I think the EU generally has been resting on its laurels. There was an assumption that the status quo which prevailed since the cold war would hold forever. That free trade in a rules based world is so profitable for everyone that there is no way anyone would want to jeopardize it with war. Eventually, other countries would see the light and follow suit. Once they did, they would be rewarded with free trade and be welcomed as an ally. It was okay to be dependent on the US for security and Russia for gas, as they would have too much to loose to abuse their leverage.

This assumption extended to immigration. Why would you move to a country only to ruin it? It makes no sense. Obviously, immigrants would assimilate to the local culture as the resulting standard of living is far superior to where they came from.

Under this worldview, providing foreign aid, outsourcing manufacturing to China, and accepting massive amounts of asylum seekers made sense. I don't think either the elites or a majority of the population really considered that things might get worse. The idea that people might take our resources and only to turn against us was just not a narrative that many people believed.

Cheaper labour obviously and then it went into overdrive when the unholy alliance between business interests on the right and progressives on the left emerged and pushed criticism of immigration outside the overtook window.

The US used anti-colonialist Third-Worldism to appeal to the third world in the Cold War. Part of this was making very clear that the old imperial powers were being dealt with. See for example the incident of the Suez Canal when Eisenhower threatened to crash the UK economy if we didn't withdraw. Increasingly craven displays of acceptance were the only way to retain any world influence at all, and nobody with influence foresaw (or wanted to foresee) how far things would go.

The same broad impetus was behind many Civil Rights decisions in the US as well: the US government was well-aware that overt Jim Crow style racism against blacks in America was being used to entice resource-owning African countries under the USSR's welcoming skirts.

Importing the third world to make up for their own native working class's low fertility, which looked like a good idea at the time, but wasn't.

Wasn't low fertility seen as good at the time? Population bomb, Paul Ehrlich etc?

Yes, but most of that was aimed at the third world. The panic about working class fertility was more to do with unsupervised youths(nobody wants zillions of teen boys running around doing whatever they want), welfare concerns, and teen pregnancy.

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