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I really wish people were more capable of noticing, let alone publicly agreeing, that the presence of substantial numbers of blacks is just generally a social catastrophe. How many prominent men in American history had great compassion for the negro and despised slavery, but were straightforward in their belief that sending them back to Africa was best for everyone because an integrated society could not possibly work out? Have they not been thoroughly vindicated? And yet the position is so far outside the overton window that afact it's literally unimaginable to most whites. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to propound it here without any amount of pussyfooting. But in this case I think consensus is appropriate.
At some point we need to be prepared to call a spade a spade.
And the social damage whites inflict upon ourselves as we struggle to reconcile our high-minded optimism with reality is likely even worse. I'm in mind of Dan Carlin's point about how 9/11 was as a flea biting a dog, compared to the unbelievable amount of damage the dog then did to itself tearing at the itch.
I'm not sure the West was long-term viable after the decision was made to keep millions of blacks in the US. We simply cannot be ourselves with them here, and they're not going anywhere. I don't think segregation was long-term viable either but golly it sure did help!
What now? I guess at this point every thought experiment gets derailed by the AI wildcard, and bracketing that out for the sake of conversation seems masturbatory. It's just so unbelievably tragic, how this has all played out.
IDK, if you think I should be more nuanced about this by all means let me know.
I feel like the vagueness of your pronouncements here ("social catastrophe, "we" cannot be "ourselves", lack of imagining a counterfactual to some of the historical gestures you're making) weakens this to the point that it's hard to reply.
Very fair. I'm badly underslept and overheated atm.
The decline of our cities, communities, culture, educational system, academia, politics, etc. -- all ruined by black presence or poisoned in reaction to the horror experienced when black outcomes are observed. Thus, we cannot be ourselves.
Imagine a US where ~all the blacks had been sent back. Where the great cities of the East and Midwest are still glittering beacons of civilization. Where Academia never caved to blank slatism. Where young couples promenade in the town square in the evenings, unconcerned about violent crime. Where people still felt invested in their communities and the 'bowling alone' effect never kicked in. Where our schools pursue excellence instead of dumbing themselves and everyone else down in pursuit of equal outcomes. Where politics isn't influenced by a racial spoils system.
Can you imagine that? I can't, even. We never got to find out what America might have been.
We cannot be ourselves.
My read of the historical evidence is that, in this scenario, we probably would have gone Communist in the 20s-30s, and things might well have been considerably worse.
I... I'm sorry. What? I cannot even begin to fathom how someone could come to this conclusion.
I'm not being disingenuous, or anything like that. If you have any articles and/or references to point me at, I'd love to read them.
Without the history of slavery, probably there's a lot less conflict in American history. Most likely the Civil War doesn't happen, and the country is much more cohesive rolling into the 1900s. You have no bitter division to pre-seed conflict with modernism as it rolls out; in our actual timeline, a large proportion of elites went hard for socialism/communism around the turn of the century, through the 20s and into the 30s, and the south generated much of the serious resistance to Communism in the 40s, 50s and 60s. How much of that resistance is catalyzed by the acrimony of the civil war, reconstruction and the Jim Crow years?
No articles or references, just a lot of reading about modernism and its leading lights.
What about Australia and Canada? They had no history of slavery, were they leaning communist in the same timeframe? I genuinely don't know, just asking for some points of reference in anglo societies.
My understanding is that the US provided a very large amount of the anti-communist energy throughout the Cold War. Canada I think is too close to the US to disambiguate. Australia I don't know much about. My understanding is that England was profoundly compromised by Communists top-to-bottom, and that's in the real world where the US is working as hard as possible to drag them back.
Interesting, thanks. Yeah, the US was probably overflowing with so much anticommunist juice that it ended up spilling through the anglosphere, so I guess we'll never know outside of alt-history fanfiction.
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