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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25585 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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It’s interesting to look at this in the wider context of Zionism, because of course the greatest mistake the Zionists made was believing that the Holy Land could be held by the Jews easily and forever onward. But you have to understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many bourgeois Jews and gentiles in Europe considered the Muslim world to be a largely passive, defeated people. By the end of World War 1 pretty much every single Muslim country in the entire world was subordinate - whether under colonial rule or indirect suzerainty - to a European empire of one kind or another (the UK, France, Soviet Union) all led by non-Muslims. The young elite of the Muslim world were secularizing, Europeanizing, going to private schools run by French missionaries, urbanization seemed to see declines in religiosity. Many early Zionists, especially on the Anglo-French side, expected that Europeans would rule over the Arab world, including the Levant, forever. After all, the Ottoman Empire was over, the region was largely scarcely populated, local rulers were most fine with serving European foreign policy. Revolts were regular but mostly easily put down by modest European forces. Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism were yet major forces to threaten Israeli dominance of Judea and Samaria. Israel had a bright future as an informal outpost of empire surrounded by the statelets of various other client peoples.

To be fair, at the time nearly everywhere on earth was under the thumb of a European empire(or the USA or Japan). South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.

They did not predict how much the world would change, and now it seems hopelessly naive to imagine it would not. In hindsight it was very stupid to pick a fight with that many people.

Except Jews have a local majority, and, significantly, are winning. Perhaps not in the court of public opinion, but Israel is essentially getting what it wants.

South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.

I'm still trying to figure out what changed.

In South Africa specifically, it was a numbers game. A South Africa which banned contraception among the white population in the 70s might still be under minority rule.

Globally, that’s part of it, but part of it is also catch up growth. Europeans are generally better at things which actually matter than Africans and Indians, but not by a factor of 25 or so. Just because Britain got there before India doesn’t mean India won’t eventually get a lot closer- and there’s a lot more Indians than britons. Add to that that European countries are very, very tired.

In terms of the main empires, Britain and Russia lost theirs due to debt related structural problems(Russia’s being caused by structural issues with their economy, Britain’s by war). Germany lost a war. The US decided it preferred economic domination. That leaves France, which had some insurgencies to deal with but largely withdrew of its own accord.

A South Africa which banned contraception among the white population in the 70s might still be under minority rule.

The South Africa birthrates situation is interesting but I doubt this would be the case. Even when whites had relatively high birthrates (3+ tfr), the black population were at 6+ tfr. Today they’re converging and both white and black South Africans have pretty low birthrates, but without mass immigration from Europe the Boers would have had to have Amish-tier tfr to maintain their demographic position. I think the main issue for them was that they largely opposed non-Boer European immigration pretty much from the 1880s onward and - certainly after home rule was substantially granted in 1910 - acted consistently to block the settlement of other Europeans in South Africa to preserve the Afrikaner position. If they had allowed millions of poor Europeans to settle in SA in the early 20th century, the situation there would be very different today.

Romania managed to double it's TFR through decree 770. It's not totally implausible that white South Africans could have had a 5+ birthrate with similar policies- it was higher than Romania's in the mid 60's, which is probably high enough to make the bantustan plan work.

Of course the South African white population weren't going to undergo decree 770, Romania did it because it was a dictatorship. But sudden very large increases in TFR are what happens when you ban contraceptives. Wiki says that the white South African fertility rate was 3.1 in 1970, which if banning contraception had the same effect as decree 770 would give a fertility rate above 6. Of course contraception was probably somewhat less prevalent to begin with because of an already high fertility rate, so the effect would probably be more mild, but even a tfr of 4-5 would give a lot of breathing room for the Boers to figure out how to adjust their population to increase the white percentage.

As an aside, it's interesting how the apartheid government never even tried to adjust population. Not through white immigration, not through population control programs for blacks, not through attempts to boost the native white fertility rate. Obviously it's a hard problem, but it's interesting that they didn't even try.

As an aside, it's interesting how the apartheid government never even tried to adjust population. Not through white immigration, not through population control programs for blacks, not through attempts to boost the native white fertility rate. Obviously it's a hard problem, but it's interesting that they didn't even try.

It seems like governments mostly focus on solving acute problems rather than long-term progressive ones. The payoff for fixing birthrates wouldn't come for at least twenty years after the fact, only once the added batches of children begin reaching maturity, while the costs would begin immediately. Governments are typically run by people who only expect to be in power for short durations, so for them it's better to deal with staving off coups and electoral defeats. That means focusing on who gets the $$$ and making the right noises.

There's also a weird tendency for normies to deny all matters pertaining to biology in pretty much any context. Possibly, this due to narcisism. Or maybe it's about optimizing for personal social advancement over coordinating against civilization threats. It is as though they sit at the very precipice of oblivion maintaining attitudes of perfect nonchalance. As long as they do not fall in, they are content; and those who do fall in do not have the luxury of further action. That's essentially what happened to the white South Africans, and probably all other fallen societies.

The apartheid government did try to limit birthrates through population planning policy from 1974. But attempts were mainly messaging; my suspicion is that many Afrikaner leaders were deeply religious Protestants and would have resisted more radical methods to limit black fertility. Promoting white fertility would have also been tough, because the country had pretty porous borders and contraception would also presumably still be available to the black population, who could obviously sell it.

I’m also very skeptical of the decree 770 approach, birth rates began falling again soon after as people began circumventing restrictions and altering behavior. Also I think incentives are very different in a communist society, if the state strongly recommends you do something it’s the singular route to professional/social advancement. The threats the state can levy are typically weaker in a capitalist society.

In terms of big mistakes for the Boers, first place is not being in favor of more European immigration even if it meant diluting Afrikaner power and second place is probably not retreating to the Western Cape en masse from the late 1960s. What white South Africans needed to pursue was a two state solution on non-bantustan terms. Hand over the majority of the country, retreat to Western cape, sign single market and economic integration. This would probably have been internationally acceptable until the mid/late-1970s. I agree that by the time the serious anti-apartheid movement reached its height in the late 1980s there was pretty much no alternative course. The problem was they were an agrarian people and didn’t want to leave all that good land in the rest of the country.

Well yes, I don’t think decree 770 would have worked as well in South Africa as it did in Romania, but given that apartheid fell apart when it did due to a demographic time bomb for a regime that did, at the end of the day, have moral scruples, a rise in birthrate could have bought the Afrikaners enough time to find a third option between ‘let the kafirs in charge’ and ‘cartoonishly evil enough to make us blanch’. And banning contraception probably would raise the birthrate enough to make a difference. Ultimately communist Romania is our only datapoint for direct comparison, and that’s unfortunate because it’s apples to oranges for a variety of reasons. But the large birthrate decline over the course of the seventies among SA whites is probably due almost entirely to contraception becoming more widely available, and IIRC the example of similarly-low-state-capacity Latin America shows that legal restrictions on contraception really affect how quickly it penetrates the population, so I think at the very least a South African decree 770 for whites would have kept Afrikaner birthrates above 3 for much longer, and in a best case scenario for continued boer dominance results in a baby boom over the seventies that allows apartheid to find a third option when it becomes clear it’s not a tenable long term system in the eighties.

Some possibilities:

  1. West went through demographic transition first. Not enough warm bodies (and fewer top-tier people) to hold up the economy and preserve the West's lead.
  2. The military gap still exists, but it's smaller, or just different. It's no longer Maxim guns against spears, it's missiles against AKs and IEDs, and that makes it harder to hold large amounts of territory.
  3. Social structures and memeplexes evolved to resist white colonisation. I think that one of our Indian regulars made the point once that the Westerners who went to the third world a hundred years ago were usually from our top 25% or so. They were handpicked administrators, adventurers, traders and soldiers. Which made Westerners seem more impressive and intimidating, and harder to resist. As colonies persisted, and especially now with the internet, people from the Third World had more contact with Westerners and more opportunities to find effective methods of resistance.
  4. Two world wars sapped the West's resources (excluding America) and made most Westerners very cynical about their own right to rule; the USSR also supported anti-Western movements and ideologies.

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