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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29998 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I was following the Irish protests against asylum seekers on various Telegram channels for months. It was something rarely reported in the media but it must have scared TPTB, hence the draconian anti-speech bill.

I think Irish nationalism suffered from two main flaws. First, it was based on Catholicism against the English Protestants, in a world where Pope Francis is trying to outdo himself at every turn in how liberal he can be. Second, it was based on an ethnicity which, let's be frank, barely has any distinction from the English at this point. Even the language war was lost ages ago.

So the old rationales for Irish nationalism have faded one by one. It will take time for the Irish to re-tool and re-adjust. Another fact that needs to be acknowledged is that Ireland has taken in a lot of European migrants. So we may be at the start of a new "melting pot" in Ireland, where various white ethnicities meld into one larger white identity, the way it happened in America during the early 20th century. I suspect this process has just begun and will need time to play itself out.

Even the language war was lost ages ago.

The language was lost even before Ireland gained independence, Irish nationalism is based more on a hope of reviving it rather than asserting it as a fact that already distinguishes us.

So we may be at the start of a new "melting pot" in Ireland, where various white ethnicities meld into one larger white identity, the way it happened in America during the early 20th century. I suspect this process has just begun and will need time to play itself out.

That may happen but the Poles especially are very patriotic and a lot of them either have plans to go back one day or have already done so as Poland catches up economically. They're also surprisingly disinterested in Irish politics, unlike white immigrants in the US who changed the political landscape the Eastern Europeans have mostly kept to themselves (not in daily life, but politically). Having the rights of citizens of an EU member state a lot of them don't even see the point in applying for citizenship.

I suspect most Poles will stay, though the wave of emigration has almost certainly stopped. Your point about EU membership superceding the need for citizenship is well-taken. It probably will act as a break of further rooting themselves. In a way that is a success of the European project, which aims for all Europeans to see the entire continent as their homeland.

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