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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11120 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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So the EU has renewed the general refugee status of Ukrainians in Europe. Obviously this is reasonable on humanitarian grounds, war is terrible and if we can shelter people safely away from it it is the decent thing to do. (Just try not to apply similar standards to Gaza, a conflict which has a far higher casualty rate among the civilian population.)

However, there is a new provision:

On 15 July 2026, as part of the extension of temporary protection, EU countries also agreed that, recognising both the need to protect displaced persons and Ukraine's need to defend itself against Russia's illegal war of aggression, temporary protection should be granted only to those complying with their military obligations in Ukraine. This change applies only to new applicants and does not affect people already benefiting from temporary protection in the EU.

Personally I am a bit of two minds about the Ukraine war. On the one hand, I am all for my taxes paying for Ukrainian weapons for as long as Ukraine cares to fight Russia. Punishing a defector against the rule based international order while also weakening the main NATO adversary seems an excellent investment.

On the other hand, Ukraine seems like the kind of meat-grinder conflict like WW1 where the best option is not to fight it, and the second best option is to stop fighting sooner rather than condemning another few hundred thousands to death in a likely futile attempt to change the strategic picture. In WW1, among millions of volunteers butchering each other in the trenches, the wisest were probably the few who decided that they did not give a fuck about any dead archduke and would try to reach a neutral country rather than being compelled to murder and get murdered by the crazies who had taken over their countries.

My understanding is that Ukraine (unlike the German basic law) does not recognize conscious objectors to military service. Yet we only extend the right to refuse military service to the Ukrainian men who had already fled from the draft, but not the ones coming now.

Most of the risk of death is actually to military personnel. Numbers are contested, but it seems that being in the armed forces probably increases one's risk of death by more than 10x compared to civilians. If anyone has a claim that they are in physical danger from the war, it is military-age men.

I am also wondering what the long term plan of the EU is. In two years, will Merz and vdL tell the Ukrainian boys who fled to Germany at age 12 that they are now old enough to die for their country and ship them back?

Just try not to apply similar standards to Gaza, a conflict which has a far higher casualty rate among the civilian population.

I strongly suspect that most people with "FREE PALESTINE" in their Instagram bios don't want to let Palestinian refugees into Europe (or anywhere outside of Gaza), because that would constitute "ethnic cleansing".

I do not think that this is a common objection.

Providing a better alternative to anyone living in shitty conditions is generally not considered ethnic cleansing, especially not on part of the party providing the alternative (unless it is also responsible for creating the shitty conditions).

"We can't take you, because then we would be complicit in ethnic cleansing" is a reasoning on par with "I can't unlock your shackles, because then you might resist and I would be responsible for a violent rape". I do not recall seeing either in the wild.

From AP News, Why Egypt and other Arab countries are unwilling to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza:

Their refusal is rooted in fear that Israel wants to force a permanent expulsion of Palestinians into their countries and nullify Palestinian demands for statehood.

Arab countries and many Palestinians also suspect Israel might use this opportunity to force permanent demographic changes to wreck Palestinian demands for statehood in Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, which was also captured by Israel in 1967.

El-Sissi repeated warnings Wednesday that an exodus from Gaza was intended to “eliminate the Palestinian cause … the most important cause of our region.”

“All historical precedent points to the fact that when Palestinians are forced to leave Palestinian territory, they are not allowed to return back,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Egypt doesn’t want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing in Gaza." [emphasis mine]

Obviously I don't believe these people. The reason Egypt doesn't want to accept refugees from Gaza is the same reason they built a massive wall along the border which extends several feet below ground level: they know that if Gazans come into Egypt, they will cause trouble. But the stated position of the Egyptian government is that accepting Gazan refugees into Egypt is tantamount to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and plenty of Western people seem to accept this reasoning at face value.

See also this article in The Journal (kind of like the Irish equivalent of the Guardian):

The language employed in Katz’s statement is an example of what Baoumi called “humanitarian camouflage”, or as the Arabic saying goes, “poison in honey”.

By this he means that Israel often attempts to “conceal criminal behaviour in the guise of a humanitarian cause”.

In this case, he said Israel is trying to justify “the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing” of Gaza [emphasis mine] by cloaking it in the language of international legal principles.

Palestinians in Gaza: do they have a right to seek asylum elsewhere?:

UNHCR has not overtly espoused this argument, which is belied by the fact that some Gaza residents are paying large amounts of money to leave, and which effectively denies them the right to exercise freedom of choice. Even so, there is an indication of such thinking in the statement provided by UNHCR, which prioritizes ‘final status issues’ over the question of asylum, and which asserts that an exodus from Gaza will make the resolution of the Palestinian refugee situation as a whole “even more intractable.”

In other words, the people of Gaza should not seek protection elsewhere, because to do so would complicate and compromise the UN-endorsed principle that Palestinian refugees have a right to return to and establish their own state. And that is an awkward position to take for an organization that simultaneously affirms that people have a universal and non-negotiable right to seek asylum.

A final point to be made about the UNHCR statement concerns its suggestion that if the Palestinians currently trapped in Gaza were to leave the territory and seek asylum elsewhere, this would facilitate any intention that Israel might have to deport, forcibly transfer or ‘ethnically cleanse’ those people [emphasis mine]. As many commentators have pointed out, if that were to happen, Israel would almost certainly not allow them to come back, and would be likely to repopulate Gaza with militant Jewish settlers, as is happening in the West Bank.

This was just a cursory Google on my phone, and it wasn't difficult to find three completely separate sources making the same basic argument: that allowing Palestinian civilians to flee Gaza amounts to ethnically cleansing it, and that it is only just to sacrifice said civilians on the altar of an independent Palestinian state, even if they would prefer not to be so sacrificed.

When Arab countries say this, they are not sincere. They don't care for the Palestinians specifically to any degree, they just care about using the Palestinians as a weapon against Israel. Actually caring about the Palestinians is limited to the Palestinians themselves and to left-wing Westerners, and I don't think left-wing Westerners mind them immigrating any more than other immigrants (though they may be inconsistent about immigration in general).

Maybe we should ship them to Madagascar or something.

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