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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   30680 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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The term "ethnic cleansing" comes out of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, but unless it is supposed to be a proper name referring only to those conflicts, it can apply to other things. Even if the imagery of the cleansing is different. And it does. It is not a stretch at all. Members of one ethnic group used force and intimidation to remove persons of other ethnic groups from the areas. Your own examples ("You’re the last white person in the neighborhood.") demonstrate it. It is not, obviously, the index example. It is a central example.

But there are differences between white flight and Srebrenica that make me hesitate to call them by the same name.

According to Wikipedia, the Srebrenica event is known as a "massacre" or a "genocide". I would agree the events in the US of the 1960s and 1970s were not that. But I maintain that they were ethnic cleansing.

The victims of 1960s urban violence were disproportionately black. The people doing most of the dying were black. Do you see where I’m coming from when I say that this is kind of odd for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against whites?

The essential thing about "ethnic cleansing" is the removal of people from an area, not killing or dying. There wasn't a whole lot of dying during the race riots -- several hundred people in total. But there was a whole lot of moving, both as a result of the race riots and as a result of general criminal violence towards whites by blacks, and (justified) fear of same.

The local authorities in some ways promoted white flight, as in my anecdote. In other ways, local governments practically begged whites to stay, and invented things like magnet schools to tempt them back. There was no government, army, paramilitary, or even mob deliberately displacing whites. Instead there were many uncoordinated individual criminals or perhaps badly coordinated gangs, whose primary motivation was usually your wallet or your electronics, not your skin color. This isn’t the level of coordination and intent most people picture when they hear “ethnic cleansing.”

I disagree. There was violence, and refusal to do anything about the violence by the local authorities -- either because they supported the removal of whites or because they wanted to appease blacks (e.g. to prevent more rioting). Perhaps not all local authorities were on board (though "begging whites to stay" is not incompatible with doing things -- or not doing things -- which resulted them in leaving) but enough were.

Could you please engage with these differences instead of just repeating a definition at me?

A definition is what we're arguing about.

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