“Overnight our public sphere changed. The sense of security was gone, we shut ourselves indoors, the parks were overtaken day and night, and we forbade children to go there,” Shefi Paz, the leader of a grassroots movement against illegal immigration to Israel, explained in an interview with the daily Maariv a few weeks ago. Women were harassed on the street,” she said. “It was like an occupation by a foreign army. No law, no authorities would protect citizens.”
Paz is perhaps not the person you would expect to find at the front of such a protest movement. She is a 66-year-old lesbian, and a former left-leaning LGBT activist. She now sees herself as firmly on the right. For her, as for some in Israel, and for many in Europe and the US, the issue of immigration has changed the terms of the political debate, shedding new light on issues of justice and class. But above all the debate over immigration policy, it seems, is but a proxy for a far larger struggle over the future of democracy itself.
Like many EU countries, Israel now has a substantial community of illegal migrants, mainly from Africa. Illegals number about 34,000, not including some 8,000 more children born to immigrant parents in Israel. Most have crossed Israel’s southern desert border with Egypt. (Another several thousand are believed to have overstayed their tourist visas, but the Israeli immigration authority has turned down requests to disclose the exact numbers.) As in Europe, Israeli media often refer to migrants simply as ”refugees,” but this term only serves to obscure the matter. There are clear indications that many have entered the country in search of better economic prospects. Some 80 percent are able bodied men who have usually passed through safe countries on their way to Israel. Of the small number of asylum requests that Israeli authorities have examined, less than one percent were found to qualify for refugee status.
Eritrean asylum seekers at Levinsky Park, Tel Aviv, 2014.
Most of these migrants have settled in the southern working-class neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, with its high demand for unskilled labor and easy access to public transportation and social services. Given the predominantly young and male demographic, it is perhaps not surprising that per capita crime rates within this group are three to four times the national average. Herein lies another parallel to the European situation: Israeli police have only recently released these statistics, after years of dodging requests out of fear they would end up encouraging biases.
In recent months, Tel Aviv’s southern neighborhoods have become recurrent scenes of street clashes between rival migrant gangs wielding cold weapons: knives, stones, rods and the like. Mainstream media is reluctant to report on such incidents, instead leaving the issue to take on a life of its own online. Thus videos float around among Israelis on Facebook showing frightening violent scenes of fights and riots.
The Israeli legal system, like its European counterparts, is not designed to handle large-scale criminal activity by individuals whose identities and whereabouts are not known, and who have weak, if any, ties to the surrounding community. About half the indictments against migrants in 2018 never made it to court because the suspects could not be located by police and didn’t show up. Israel’s custody and incarceration laws are ill equipped to deter repeat offenders, with sometimes tragic consequences. An illegal immigrant who was sentenced to prison for one year after repeated DUI’s, to cite one striking example, was released after a successful appeal to the Supreme Court. Not long after his release, he murdered a 12-year-old girl, sparking widespread outrage. Life has changed dramatically for residents of South Tel Aviv.
* * *
But this isn’t just a local issue. There are much greater problems with illegal immigration beyond its effects on the local way of life of certain municipalities. To begin with there is the proximity to Africa. Israel is a small country only slightly larger than the state of New Jersey. As is well known, its population of about nine million people comprises a delicate demographic mosaic; a Jewish nation state with a large indigenous minority of Arab Muslims that make up about a fifth of the population. It has limited natural resources but a per capita GDP approaching that of Western Europe. This makes it a coveted destination for economic migrants. Understandably, many Israelis fear that granting residence status to illegals will turn the state into a safety valve for the humanitarian crises of a huge poverty-stricken continent. For a country as small as Israel, this is an existential concern.
But there is more at stake. It is no longer just a question of what policy to decide on, but also a struggle over who gets to decide. In this too, Israel is not alone. In many countries, immigration policy has turned into a litmus test for democratic sovereignty itself. It has become the arena where civil rights, anchored in the state, meet universal human rights, promoted by international institutions and supra-national political structures. These, in turn, compete with states for sovereignty.
All this has given rise to an ideological shift with far-reaching consequences: As liberal rights are detached from their base in the nation state, liberalism increasingly turns away from a commitment to the will of the citizens, as expressed through national democratic institutions. We are faced, then, with a non-democratic—and ultimately an anti-democratic—form of liberal ideology. Since in Israel, as elsewhere, this may not be immediately apparent, one must dig into the details.
* * *
The beginnings of illegal immigration from Africa were modest. In 2005 a few hundred Sudanese illegals crossed the Israeli-Egyptian border in the Sinai desert. It would take two years before the government took notice and turned its attention to the issue. While the number was still a few thousand, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert moved to nip illegal immigration in the bud. He reached an understanding with Egypt about a policy dubbed ”Hot Return,” meaning the immediate return to Egypt of anyone apprehended crossing the border. He also created a detention facility for those caught inside Israel. The policy was intended to send a strong signal that Israel would not become the solution for Africa’s plight. Only some 600 individuals were given temporary residence after the UN granted them refugee status.
An array of NGOs self-described as human rights watchdogs immediately sprang into action. They petitioned the courts against the return policy as they would against almost any policy intended to curb illegal immigration. The courts issued a decree nisi, which had an instant cooling effect on “Hot Return.” Meanwhile, the dominant agenda-setting media mobilized, especially the left-leaning dailies Haaretz and Yediot, along with the leading TV news shows. The news filled up with comparisons between today’s African immigrants to Israel and Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Shrill accusations of cruelty and racism abounded. The government finally caved in and abandoned the return policy.
Detention also came under attack. The Supreme Court—which holds sweeping powers in Israel—repeatedly struck down legislation intended to facilitate the detention of migrants, eventually reducing the maximum incarceration time to three months.
This points to a unique aspect of the Israeli case, which sets it apart from Europe: International NGOs have an exceptionally strong presence in Israel, because of the particulars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus when illegal immigration appeared on the political agenda, there was already an entire infrastructure in place which made it possible for NGOs to fight for their preferred policy through the legal system. These organizations are an essential part of the international atmosphere which holds the Jewish nation state to a set of standards demanded of no other country. Flush with foreign money these organizations have built a cadre of young, highly motivated lawyers, ready to support illegal immigrants in myriad ways: legal battles against policies, criminal cases, and asylum requests to name a few. (See, for instance, The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, African Refugee Development Center, Physicians for Human Rights, Workers Hotline, and ASSAF–Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. And there are more.)
These NGOs succeeded in blocking most policies. But there was one plan in which the state persevered. Despite endless legal activism, red tape and budgetary problems, Israel built a fence on the border with Egypt. It took almost a decade to complete, but finally in 2013 there it was— 241 kilometers of it stretching all along the border with Egypt, with minor gaps where the terrain was already impossible to traverse. By that time the bulk of the infiltration through the southern border was over, with the total number of African immigrants exceeding 60,000.
To be sure, it was not only the wall that stemmed the tide. It was also the determination which it signaled, along with what was left of the original detention policy and the refusal to grant legal status to large numbers. Walls alone do not stop determined migrants. Israel has a long sea border, and it is far closer to North Africa than the southern islands of Italy or Greece. If people are ready to risk crossing the Mediterranean Sea in fragile vessels, they are much more likely to attempt trespassing Israel’s long shores.
There were therefore more policy initiatives designed to underline the same message. One was the “Leave Fund” conceived by the single NGO which sided with the state—The Israeli Immigration Policy Center, founded and headed by Yonatan Jakubowicz. The idea was to withhold a portion of the immigrants’ salaries, to be returned to them only upon departure from Israel. This policy was partially emasculated by the courts and then watered down further by the state in the hope that some version of it will pass muster with the judges. The question is still pending.
Then there was the plan known as ”deportation to safe third countries.” And for a while it looked like this would finally work: the deportees would receive $3,500 each, which amounts to some four or five times the per capita GDP in the destination countries, on top of compensation which the governments of these countries would also receive from Israel.
But then an uproar in the press ensued, claiming that the migrants are being deported “to their deaths,” that they will face rape, torture, or, at the very least, incarceration and confiscation of their identity papers. Intellectuals weighed in, celebrities followed, and stickers appeared in Tel Aviv cafés: Stop the Deportation! The state bureaucracy was helpless against all this, despite the fact that this time the lies were so blatant that even the courts reprimanded the NGOs for disseminating them (see, for instance, two rulings from the Supreme Court and Beer Sheva Administrative Court respectively). There was no evidence whatsoever that any harm awaited the deportees in Uganda and Rwanda, the countries that had agreed to take them in. But nothing could stop the emotional momentum of the public debate and the Court finally partially yielded and shifted the burden of proof to the state. By that time the orchestrated campaign blaming Israel for heartlessness and racism was projected outside the country via the English-speaking press, and eventually Uganda and Rwanda, reluctant to appear to cooperate with alleged anti-African racism, withdrew from the agreements.
In reality, if race played any role at all in all this, that role was in favoring black Africans. Caucasian illegals are deported from Israel in short order, with virtually no public attention. For example, 2018 saw a record number of deportation of Eastern European nationals totaling almost 7,000.
Currently things are at a stalemate again. The state is dragging its feet in examining asylum requests, but as time goes by, the immigrant community, which enjoys a wide array of social services, is taking root in the south of Tel Aviv, and everyone knows what the next step in this struggle will be: a campaign for family reunification permits which, some fear, may end up tripling or quadrupling the immigrant population, creating momentum for permanent residence in the process.
As with everywhere else, the price for high-minded lax immigration policy is paid by the poor as more unskilled workers compete for jobs, social services are stretched, and weak metropolitan neighborhoods become foreign countries to their own older residents, with a sharp increase of violent crime.
* * *
In any other context an LGBT activist like Shefi Paz, who now heads a grassroots movement against illegal immigration, should be enjoying virtual immunity from criticism in progressive circles. But this does not apply to the hot button issue of immigration. Among contemporary progressives, anyone who believes in any limit whatsoever on immigration is bound to encounter accusations of bigotry—even if they have spent their lives fighting for minority rights.
This makes it hard for people like Paz to sound their voice, not only in mainstream media, but also on social media. Facebook has recently deleted material she uploaded criticizing the Supreme Court’s attitude toward illegal immigrants. Apparently any objection to illegal immigration is now considered by major social platforms to be “hate speech,” and anyone who does not unequivocally support it is labeled a racist.
This way of framing the issue is, of course, a central feature of the debate in Israel, as it is in Europe and the US. It creates the false impression that the conflict over immigration stands between defenders of human rights on the one hand, and xenophobic nationalists on the other.
This conveniently marginalizes the all-important issues of democratic sovereignty. The common thread running through all the efforts to thwart the immigration policies of elected governments, is an attempt to bypass the democratic mechanism of decision making. There’s an overwhelmingly liberal press, which has been almost entirely uniform in towing the party line, and has the power to suppress truths and disseminate falsehoods. There are the NGOs funded by foreign governments and liberal foundations in Europe and North America influencing the public debate, as well as waging legal battles against the state. There are the academics who come from ultra-liberal institutions, dominated by identity politics, and connected to an international academic community, lending their moral support and their scholarly authority to the politically correct narrative about ”refugees.” And above all, there are the edicts of a decidedly liberal judiciary, which in Israel has vast powers over the other branches of government without reciprocal checks to balance it. The courts can therefore strike down at will every and all government action, whether legislative or administrative. The sweeping powers of the courts can be said to have turned liberal rights from checks on the democratic process into its replacement: liberal decrees are thus poised to replace–not just limit–legislative powers. Decision making—that is sovereignty itself—is essentially being relocated to the courts.
* * *
Like elsewhere, in Israel, there is a sociological dimension to the ideological controversy over immigration. It is a struggle between liberal elites, which attempt to impose their will from above, and the rest of the citizenry, which relies on representative party politics. It is a class struggle of sorts, with a clear economic side: weaker citizens pay the price of a policy that economically benefits elites, and these elites, in turn, use high-minded rhetoric to promote it. This, indeed, is a major part of what lies behind the rise of populism in many parts of the West.
David Goodhart best captured the sociological aspect of this relatively new class divide when he called its two factions the “Anywheres” and the “Somewheres.” We may also call them, in the tradition of Zygmunt Bauman, the “mobile” and the “sedentary” classes.
The former, the mobile Anywheres, are internationalist in outlook and often in lifestyle. They are, as Goodhart emphasizes, equally comfortable in various corners of a globalized world, and work in jobs which bring them in contact with their peers in other countries. They can take their laptop, and often their families too, and relocate with relative ease. Their social milieu is also international and their lingua franca is English.
The latter, the sedentary Somewheres, are tied down to a local market, a local milieu and a local language. Most importantly, their political power is also dependent on a specific nation state and its democratic mechanism of government.
It should therefore be clear why immigration policy is key to this clash over the locus of sovereignty: not only does it challenge the legitimacy of the borders of nation states—a crucial element of their sovereignty—it also challenges the concept of citizenship by deploying universal human rights against the “exclusionary” idea of citizens’ rights, and citizen sovereignty. This is how universal human rights have made the subversion of democracy seem altruistic.
Yet immigration policy is but one arena in this struggle between the Anywheres and the Somewheres and between their respective world views. And once we realize that we are facing an explicitly anti-democratic form of liberalism, the common denominator of many different policies which these elites support becomes clear: a lax and inclusive immigration policy; a delegitimization of national identities; a multi-cultural balkanization of national solidarity; international trade agreements which favor mobility of both labor and capital, and which reduce the control of states over their economic policy; an erasing of borders under supra-national structures; an increase in the power of unelected bureaucracies at the expense of elected politicians; a preference for the judiciary over the legislative and executive branches; a doctrine of judicial supremacy; the subordination of national to international law; an emphasis on universal human rights at the expense of citizens’ civil rights; and support for international institutions at the expense of state governments.
To the extent that such international institutions embody these Anywhere views, it is worth noting that though many of them are clearly liberal in outlook, they exercise jurisdiction over people who have no democratic reciprocal control over them.
All this may well backfire in a terrible way against the moderate forms of liberalism which have served democracies so well since World War II. If there is one crucial lesson to be learned from the horrors of the 20th century, it is that the suppression of the right to self-determination—the source from which modern nationalism and modern democracy both emerge, reciprocally supporting each other—can push nationalism to erupt in violent, anti-democratic ways.
In Israel, illegal immigration is the one high-profile area of policy where the Supreme Court has demonstrated its dominance over the other branches, repeatedly striking down policies the public at large has steadily supported. It is also the issue by which the parameters of the struggle have been most visibly laid bare: a high-minded elite cadre of Anywheres using means outside the democratic process to impose a policy for which the Somewheres are paying the price. It is the issue that demonstrates even to those less informed about theories of democracy that liberal arguments are being deployed against the majority in such a way as to undermine the very principles of government with the consent of the governed.
Taking the long view, we may also note that this clash between extreme liberalism and democracy may well be destructive to both. Infringing on the ability of citizens to protect their hard-earned liberal rights is bound to hurt these very rights, since their only real guarantee is the fact that we can dismiss our governments and appoint their replacement. It also reduces citizens to subjects, because liberty without participation in sovereignty robs people of the most crucial right that democratic nation states have endowed them with: taking part in shaping their collective destiny. Without this most fundamental right, they cannot be, in the beautiful phrase of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, “masters of their own fate, in their own sovereign state.”
Gadi Taub is an Israeli historian, author, and columnist in Haaretz. He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Communications at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also the head screenwriter and the co-director of the acclaimed Israeli TV series Harem.
A thoughtful and timely article. Thanks.
No, it’s utterly ridiculous to compare Israel’s situation with goyish nations.
The numbers are simply incomparable. “Illegals number about 34,000, not including some 8,000 more children born to immigrant parents in Israel.” In places like the US and Sweden, it’s millions.
The US is 35 times bigger than Israel in population. A comparable number of illegals in the Us would be 1.2 million and nearly 300,000 of their children
We have at least 50 million illegals in the US. Can we have some control over our country just like the Israelis?
The numbers and proportions vary but this article is not really about immigration. It’s about the risk to democracy itself as a consequence of the promotion of, and primacy given to, “victim” groups against the wishes, interest and values of the mainstream population.
Although written, largely, in the context of Israel it covers an issue concerning all of the liberal democracies.
The issue of our age in my opinion.
Pedantic nitpicking over differences of scale only serves to detract from an important and timely issue and a well written and presented argument.
Thank you.
It also points to the fact that judges, appointed rather than elected, have taken for themselves the power to over rule policy decisions made by popularly elected legislators. The US has the same problem, on steroids. There are over 600 US District Court Judges-all appointed. for life. Any one of them can stop implementation of a Presidential order or policy decision, or can strike down a law. If a suit is brought in a liberal judge’s District, he can at least delay implementation of a policy or law by a couple of years. We have seen this recently in the U.S. with respect to several policy decisions relating to migration.
Precisely correct. The immigration question in nearly every country in the West is where the fault lines between the global elite and the democratic polities are most clearly exposed, but the same dynamic plays out across a number of different, related issues.
dmalcolmcarson,
Exactly right, perfect as a mater of fact. Your comment is cogent and without a hint of hyperbole.
Thoroughly agree.
The question left unanswered by this article is how do the disenfranchised people regain their power. The article doesn’t offer any suggestions. Is populism the beginning of a soft revolution? Or are we on the way to a series of French revolutions?
What is a “soft revolution” and what is an example of one, historically?
Howdy, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec saw the replacement of the Catholic Church in public life with a robust public sector.
I’d say the fall of communism in Europe was pretty ‘soft.
I’m not yet sure to what extent populism will be the answer, but I do sympathize with the democratic forces within it, which I think are the majority. I’m therefore worried about the possibility of the extreme right, let alone the racist edge hijacking it. So part of our job would be, I think, to tell these apart, and not to let either the Anywheres decide for us that Brexit, for example, is about xenophobia not democracy, or let the xenophobes hijack Brexit.
When you say “extreme right,” are you referring to goys who think like Israelis and simply want to live a quiet life in a country with their fellow tribesmen?
Literally exactly what they are doing in every country!!
Aren’t all developed nations facing similar problems?
Canada is headed for the October election of a Conservative Party of Canada prime minister. And October can’t come soon enough. This will happen in part because of the immigration dumpster fire created by current Liberal Party leader and far-left globalist ideologue, Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau and his terrible government made a laundry list of immigration mistakes (some with tragic outcomes, such as the rape and murder of a child in a park by one of Trudeau’s own handpicked so-called ‘Syrian refugees’), including forcing through the UN’s totalitarian Migrant Pact without even a nanosecond of public debate by real, tax-paying citizens.
Western (or in Israel, Western-type) liberal democracies can’t save the world. We can’t take in every economic migrant from the failed states we already poured development money into. Some states will never succeed, and some migrants/refugees will only drain a civilized host nation.
When the Dalai Lama says (repeatedly) that migrants and refugees need to go home, rejoin their own people, and rebuild their cultures and nations, then you know the clock has run out on the West’s many decades of optimistic liberal do-gooding.
@Sydney
The Dalai Lama said that? Do you have a link? Astonishing if true.
@ Ray: Here‘s one link (you can find more by searching for „Dalai Lama refugee crisis“, for example):
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/11/27/dalai-lama-sparks-outrage-with-remarks-on-refugee-crisis-but-is-he-right/
@Kai
Holy cow, that floors me. I’d not have expected him to be so in touch with gritty reality. Buddhists tend to float in a sort of nirvana bubble. Will the DL be executed by the twitterii? I suspect he must be. Good bye DL.
Mistaking a few thousand drawstring-pants wearing holier-than-thou western liberals for “Buddhists” would be understandable I suppose if it weren’t for the years of coverage of the Sri Lankan civil war and, oh, the “genocide” in Myanmar.
Try linking the term “Buddhist” with the hundreds of millions of practicing Buddhists in Asia rather than the hippy holdovers flouncing around your local yoga bar.
@RA
And it’s not the first time he’s said it. It’s been a theme with him for a few years now.
“Gunga, Gungaladunga”. It was losely translated
@NashTiger
At least you got that going for you, which is nice.
Indeed. We’re told how evil our countries are, but the rest of the world tries to flock to these bad countries, presumably from the well run countries. The solution is for those countries to emulate western nations, not pretend they can be tyrants and send their worst and most vulnerable elsewhere to infect the good nations with troubling cultures. Those other cultures are what gave rise to their miserable nations int he first place.
The link about crime rates in paragraph four is broken.
Every celebrity upholding the “rights” of the “refugees” (i.e. the lazy economic migrants) to live in MY neighborhood should have migrants relocated in THEIR neighborhood, just to see what it really looks like. They would probably change their mind after that.
I actually have sympathy for the motivation of the migrants, or at the very least I can understand it. I don’t know that I would not try to escape Africa and if I were in their shoes. Some, I’m sure, are lazy, though many must be resourceful if they managed to cross over despite all hardship and arrive in Tel Aviv. But sympathy for a private motive is not the same as support for political trend, and Israel can’t turn itself into a safety valve for Africa’s many plights.
Secondly my sympathy for the residents of south Tel Aviv is greater and not just for objective reasons – like that they payed taxes and helped build this society and its welfare institutions – but also for subjective reasons that aren’t rational – they are my people. And in the same way that I would love my child more than my neighbor’s child, I have nothing against the tendency to love my own people slightly more. Slightly – that is I don’t mean that I would have another person starve so that one of my people can be a little more comfy. But I would certainly not solve a working migrant’s economic problems by destroying the whole fabric of life for Tel Aviv’s poor.
@Gadi,
may i humbly suggest my observation from commiefornia. if you don’t like your voters, import ones you like. in the mean time, make the ones you don’t like pay for it. the strategy worked and is being replicated.
Israel is fortunate with its immigrants. Russian Jews do not at all resonate to SJW-ism.
I’m curious about Facebook removing Shefi Paz’s post. Was her post in Hebrew? If so, how actively are the social media giants policing Hebrew content? And is there evidence that Google tips Hebrew searches to suit its politics, the way it does with English searches?
I actually have sympathy for the motivation of the migrants, or at the very least I can understand it. I don’t know that I would not try to escape Central America, Haiti, or Africa if I were in their shoes. Some, I’m sure, are lazy, though many must be resourceful if they managed to cross over despite all hardship and arrive in the United States. But sympathy for a private motive is not the same as support for political trend, and the United States can’t turn itself into a safety valve for the third world’s many plights.
Secondly my sympathy for the residents of the the United States is greater and not just for objective reasons – like that they payed taxes and helped build this society and its welfare institutions – but also for subjective reasons that aren’t rational – they are my people. And in the same way that I would love my child more than my neighbor’s child, I have nothing against the tendency to love my own people slightly more. Slightly – that is I don’t mean that I would have another person starve so that one of my people can be a little more comfy. But I would certainly not solve a working migrant’s economic problems by destroying the whole fabric of life for the United States.
Has the whole world gone insane?
The story of Israel is the same as the USA is the same as the EU.
Society has a very fragile fabric and its peaceful balance is hard earned. There is a limit to the strain that a mass infusion of unassimilated individuals can place on it before the fabric is torn.
It is clear the the raptures are already happening everywhere.
The people of a nation must be able to decide who can join them, at what pace and under what conditions. This is the only way to maintain a stable community. There is nothing racist or xenophobic about wanting the defend society, culture and a way of life.
“The people of a nation must be able to decide who can join them, at what pace and under what conditions. This is the only way to maintain a stable community.”
You’re right, Prince. A non-consensual community is not a community at all. More like an open-air prison, really.
“The people of a nation must be able to decide who can join them, at what pace and under what conditions.”
They do. Merkel’s immigration policies (compared to which the numbers from Israel sound tame) has widespread support (~80% of voters voted for parties that support them). It may have to do with the strong media campaigning on behalf of left wing politics, or it may just be “the people” speaking. In any case: nobody is forced to vote a certain way, or to donate to a certain NGO, or read a certain newspaper. And yet, they do.
“It may have to do with the strong media campaigning on behalf of left wing politics, or it may just be “the people” speaking.”
Living in Germany, I can tell you it’s mostly the former: the people here are brainwashed. Because of their history, they are terrifed of being accused of being racist or “right-wing”. It’s also a decadent society that has no respect for its own culture or traditions.
@Barry
“the people here are brainwashed”
My best friend is a Kraut, and for him the suggestion that one might not support open door immigration is about like suggesting that the holocaust be restarted — it is not within the pale of things that a nice German would even think about. It is not that he ‘supports’ immigration it is that he is incapable of even considering the possibility that one could have another view, it would be tantamount to joining the Nazi party.
Just down the road from here is the shop of Mike the upholsterer. Nice young man, from his dress and manner you see he’s a modern multicultural leftie type. But he’s here in Canada because his wife was no longer safe in Germany. He chose to immigrate to Canada because we are at least Islamizing somewhat more slowly so he’s happy to be here. You detect the stress in his voice when he mentions this, he doesn’t want to be a Hater, he believes in theory that all cultures are exactly the same, but in practice he won’t see his wife harassed and possibly raped by Somalis or Moroccans.
“My best friend is a Kraut, and for him the suggestion that one might not support open door immigration is about like suggesting that the holocaust be restarted — it is not within the pale of things that a nice German would even think about.”
Yep, that’s what most of them are like. The funny thing is in everyday life they can be really horrible people. For one thing, they take their work far too seriously and most managers here have no problem telling someone to piss off after their trial period has finished. But then all of a sudden when it comes to migration, they’re kind and humane. Strange people to say the least.
Do you think there is a decrepency between what the public in general thinks, and what the political classes (politicians, the media, academia, etc) say they think? Because one lesson from Douglas Murry’s The Strange Death of Europe is that there is something wrong with the mechanism of representation in recent times, because politicians (of all parties) have not been representing the public at large.
“Do you think there is a decrepency between what the public in general thinks, and what the political classes (politicians, the media, academia, etc) say they think?”
It’s very complicated here. For sure, large sections of the population disagree(d) with Merkel’s liberal migration policy. However, the “establishment” media and political class have done such a great job of demonising the supposedly right-wing AfD that most people here – even if they have qualms about the country’s demographic changes – are afraid to vote for this party as they’ve been told that they are basically neo-Nazis. So such voters are caught between a rock and hard place so to speak. Then there are others who basically think open borders are a great idea and therefore vote Green. I really fear for the future of the country but then again, I’m not German myself so if they have so little respect for their own culture and fellow-citizens, maybe I should just let them self-destruct. I can always “flee” back to my home country of Ireland if I have to.
@Barry
So it seems that Murry is right about this discrepancy, and not just in England.
@ Gadi Taub
I think that one of the problems at the heart if this issue, is that we have lost the idea of national identity with it’s own peculiar quirks and idosyncrasies, as an umbrella concept which unities people through a shared history, culture, music and character, with newcomers adopted as equal beneficiaries of this shared heritage. Multiculturalism has proven disastrous in the loss of social cohesion and created division and mistrust is has sown. The denigration of the host, parent or home culture is simply a symptom is this larger problem.
Cosmopolitan psychological liberals in the upper echelons of society may prefer integration to assimilation (equating the latter to cultural genocide), because it plays to their natural inclination to explore and immerse themselves in new cultures, but for psychological conservatives, often occupying the lower or middling echelons, assimilation is very much the preferred option, because they consider shared values and a sense of common community essential to trust and conformity to expected social niceties.
It’s a survival mechanism that can only be escaped by being raised in a safe, secure, comfortable liberal-minded environment, and liberals would do well to consider that the people they so often criticise are the way they are on a behaviourally-ingrained basis, due to a large extent to being born in far less privileged circumstances than their critics, and have a lot more in common, psychologically, with the migrant communities the liberals love, than the liberals themselves.
Merkel’s decline has been catastrophic the last few years, and every analyst I know of has attributed that to her immigration policy. And yet, you suggest 80% of Germans approve of that policy. Where is that data coming from, and what is it referring to, specifically? I ask because that seems like outright denial of observable reality.
@craig, can you give the source for that? I’m unable to find it. What I am finding is that Merkel is rapidly losing support and the Greens are now first place in the most recent poll, and 2/3 of Germans – 67% – not only don’t support her; they want her to step down.
From Wikipedia (I’m in a rush): A YouGov survey published in late December 2017 found that just 36 percent of all respondents want Merkel to stay at the helm until 2021, while half of those surveyed voters called for a change at the top before the end of the legislature….Midway through her second term, Merkel’s approval plummeted in Germany, resulting in heavy losses in state elections for her party.[113] An August 2011 poll found her coalition had only 36% support compared to a rival potential coalition’s 51%.[114] However, she scored well on her handling of the recent euro crisis (69% rated her performance as good rather than poor), and her approval rating reached an all-time high of 77% in February 2012 and again in July 2014.[115] Merkel’s approval rating dropped to 54% in October 2015, during the European migrant crisis, the lowest since 2011.[116] According to a poll conducted after terror attacks in Germany Merkel’s approval rating dropped to 47% (August 2016).[117] Half of Germans did not want her to serve a fourth term in office compared to 42% in favor.[118]
My comment got sent to moderation, so trying again with the actual links removed:
I feel like you guys might be engaging in some kind of elaborate trolling, so I’ll just leave a suggested search string to type into google:
“german support merkel immigration policy”
Here are a few of my top results:
Vox: A nasty immigration fight could cost German Chancellor Angela Merkel her job
New York Times: Merkel, to Survive, Agrees to Border Camps for Migrants
Reuters: Bavarians confront Merkel in German migrant policy showdown
Washington Post: What you need to know about Germany’s immigration crisis
Those are all from my first page of search results. I doubt you will have trouble finding them, and many more articles just like them, going back years. In fact I suspect you’d have trouble finding anyone telling a different tale, which is why I feel like I’m being trolled here 🙂
@d, @Craig: I can assure you that Simone’s, Ray Andrews’ and Barry’s description of the mood here in Germany is totally accurate, unfortunately.
Supporting Merkel’s open border policies does not necessarily imply to support Merkel herself: According to the polls by now the strongest party would be the Greens (26%), who are even more woke and pro-open borders than Merkel’s “conservative” CDU (25%). The same is true of Merkel’s coalition partner, the social democratic SPD (13%). To a lesser extent this can also be said of the liberal party FDP (8%) and the far left party “Die Linke” (8%).
As far as the German mainstream media is concerned, at least 95% paint the same picture and any opposition is considered backward or just plain evil.
@d, the 80% number comes from Simone, originally. I am questioning it, too. I agree with what you said about the UK and the US down below (I’m replying here because I don’t see the option on the other comment). I was mostly just joking about the trolling. I don’t understand where some of the things being said here are coming from, and I get a little paranoid when that happens.
@Craig: the 80% support is the votes for major parties minus the right wing AFD, which was the only party (with some exception on the left as I understand) that is against Merkel’s immigration policies. Since it was universally supported by the rest of the political spectrum, and those parties still make up 80% of the votes, people apparently support her policies.
@Simone, this seems such a bizarre interpretation of Germany’s political situation that I don’t even know what to say about it.
The Germans, understandably, suffer from the world’s worst national guilt complex and, with some exceptions (mostly in the Old East), will fall all over themselves to appear extremely liberal with regard to universal human rights. It is through such acts of expurgation, like opening the borders, that they feel they will somehow cleanse the stain of their past. If even becoming Muslim could somehow help to remove the stench, they would probably do it. For that reason Germany cannot be thought of as typical of the West.
Doesn’t basically every German party support open borders, and the one that doesn’t is tarred as Nazi in all their (largely state-sponsored) media? Seems inevitable that the large majority of votes would go to an immigration-friendly party.
A large proportion of my co-workers are German and brainwashed is the right term. Some have the naive view that the Muslims will integrate, others cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that there is the need for them to integrate. Talking to young people especially it is clear they have been told what they must think. After many drinks, some of the old ones will say they don’t think Germany should have to punish itself for crimes no one still alive has committed.
@Stephanie, if you work at a multinational that large percentage of your co-workers who are German are likely to be the “anywhere’s” this article is talking about. Their views are probably not a representative sample. Likewise, the average German journalist is also an “anywhere” and doesn’t speak with the voice of the people. This is kinda like what happened with Trump being elected and nobody being able to understand what happened because all the important people (the anywhere’s) were talking about completely different scenarios.
Craig, at a university, so they are definitely “anywhere”-types, but include students who are fresh out of undergrad and whose worldview reflects what they were taught in school more than the disposition associated with their (future) careers. I would agree my sampling is not representative of the whole country, but probably of the elite. I do hope the broader German populace sees through the educational and media indoctrination, like the broader American populace did with Trump and British with Brexit. And of course that their democracy remains sufficiently intact for them to be able to fix the situation before it is too late.
@Stephanie, I don’t have much experience with academic types but based on what I’ve been reading here and elsewhere I’d definitely go with them being anywheres. As a software engineer I’ve worked with a lot of foreigners, but none of them have been Europeans. I did spend several months in Germany working on a big project, but my part of the project was staffed exclusively by Americans. Anyway, I discovered I had some very wrong ideas about Germans. The ones I met were friendly, and I expected them not to be. They also had a very high opinion of Germany as an advanced country, which I found a bit dubious after being there a while. For instance, there were hundreds of Irish laborers living in trailers on that work site. I mean, like 3 or 4 guys living not in mobile homes but in those tow trailers. I asked my American boss about that and he said to keep my mouth shut because they weren’t supposed to be there and we weren’t supposed to notice they were. So of course, that’s exactly what I did. I said nothing to nobody. But us technical types were working 18 hour days and those Irish dudes were only working about 10, and they speak English, so I went over to hang out with them. About 10 minutes later the uber kraut of the whole project came running over screaming something in German at me, so I made a hasty retreat and probably would have been in a lot of trouble if I was somebody who could have been gotten rid of. Then there’s the other thing: there were about 100 women doing all the menial tasks like cleaning. Every one of them I saw was wearing a black tent. I was told they were Turks, but I have no idea if that’s true or not. I didn’t find them at all interesting, because they were rude and aggressive and had no concept of privacy. You have any idea what it’s like to be taking care of business in a bathroom and having some ninja come in and start mopping the floor right next to you? So, anyway. Long story short. I don’t think the Germans have the progressive attitudes about immigrants that they think they have. I think their attitudes about immigrants are pretty backwards, actually. And not only is this not assimilation, it’s not even multiculturalism in any meaningful sense of the word. And I think this failure to make immigrants any part of society at all is what is going to cause a disaster in the long term. Immigration works and is a wonderful thing, as long as the numbers taken in are relatively low and new arrivals are successfully assimilated. That’s not what was happening in the 1990s when I was there, and it sounds like it’s still not happening. I haven’t read any article about immigration in Germany in recent years that indicates to me refugees are being treated as anything but foreigners.
I guess what I’m saying is just because Germans believe something about themselves, doesn’t make it true.
@craig, I’m not a troll. I was merely asking where you got the 80% numbers.When I looked it up, I didn’t see that. I don’t get why that makes me a troll? I agree very much with what you said to Stephanie above.
I was asking because I find those polls in general very misleading. But obviously I could be wrong. I am not particularly well informed about Germany. Which is why I asked.
My own experience: After living in London for 4 years, I found that if you surround yourself with either an international firm and the international community (upper class people who are, say, American citizens but who work in Germany as a high level recruit, and/or who have the money and connections to move around the continent as they wish without worrying about supporting themselves) or else the university community, you will be utterly out of touch with the vast majority of ‘regular’ people. In the UK you see it in the Brexit movement, which is reviled in London and supported most other places. If you live in London amongst the classes I spoke of, you would think “most” people hate Brexit because that is what you see. It’s similar to the US , where the Far Left subset of the Dem party – isolated from everyone else – truly believes that Trump supporters are subhuman racists and that “nobody” would vote for him.
The fear of guilt by association is, in the case of Germany, so strong that people are not speaking out, and the result will be that the German government is wildly over estimating the tolerance of its own population. So it will, I fear, keep accepting immigrants until there is a very real racist backlash. I think we should start worrying about such a prospect.
Then why doesn’t Germany accept the refugees that Italy refuses? I think Germany is woke to the problems of uncontrolled immigration.
Germany is most definitely not woke to the problems of uncontrolled immigration. Last year, despite the refugee crisis being officially over, they still had over 180,000 asylum applications. Not only that, but a huge percentage of those whose asylum applications are rejected are never deported and, to the best of my knowledge, can continue to claim social welfare despite being in the country illegally. Until the educated, liberal middle classes start feeling the disadvantages of excessive immigration which they have so far been largely immune from, I expect them to tolerate this madness for some time to come.
We instinctively know this, as nobody would let people come into their homes as they see fit and live there. But they pretend that a nation is not just a scaled up version of this same commonsense notion. Without private property, you just have communism/anarchy, and those do-gooders can found their nations that support that absurdity.
I do think the world has gone insane, or at least liberalism has gone way over the top.Douglas Murry’s The Strange Death of Europe is, in a way, a portrait of a culture committing collective suicide, more or less. I’ve been writing for many years on Identity politics and the making of guilt into a fetish, and I think very few good things, other than catharsis in the short term come out of this.
One thing we ought to do to counter it is to fight for the rehabilitation of nationalism in its republican, peaceful guises, as envisioned by the universal ideal of self-determination. We remember all too well how extreme nationalism can become a force destructive of liberty, but we forget that national solidarity is the basis which allows democracies to function and is therefore necessary. Without a patriotic sentiment there would be nothing to make us use the vote for the public, rather than the strictly private, good.
It is not Liberalism but Third Worldism or Brown communism. Read Pascal Bruckner’s Tears of the White Man. Americans misuse Liberalism , it is socialism. Third Worldism follows China’s split with USSR in 1955 and the Franz Manon’s book Wretched of the Earth which was supported by Sartre who became a Maoist . Basically the West is bad, the Third World is good and all the problems of the latter are due to the former. Cultural Marxist Third Worldism considers Israel l as the West and the Palestinians as Third World, therefore good.
Third Worldism came out of France post 1968 and tends to be ignored in the English speaking World but it is a significant part of Post Modernist Marxism. Stephen Hicks and Jordon Peterson appear not to know about Third Worldism . Under Third Worldism, all immigration by third World into West is good.
Israel is in better shape because its legislature is strongly on the side of energetic enforcement of the laws. In the US Congress, there isn’t a majority any more for that.
Very well-written and thought-out piece. I’m curious why the word “globalist” is absent, though? It was coined as far back as at least the 1990s to describe this very issue. Is it perhaps because globalists have successfully used the illiberal liberal line of attack you describe to get it branded a racist term?
Very well-written and thought-out piece. I’m curious why the term “globalist” is absent, though? It was coined as far back as at least the 1990s to describe this very issue.
The link to the Israeli police data is already broken. However, Internet Archive got us covered.
http://web.archive.org/web/20190329150309/https://israeli-ipc.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/%D7%93%D7%95%D7%97-%D7%A4%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%94-%D7%9C%D7%A4%D7%99-%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%A5-2019.pdf
Sorry about double-commenting. Neither showed up at all after I posted them, and then after I unblocked a dozen scripts they both popped up. And now I can’t seem to find a way to either edit or delete. Is this wordpress?
Idiotic as usual from the heavily biased propaganda minds at Quilette. A thoughtful and informed reader will easily identify all the logical elisions and fallacies. Claiming something doesn’t make it true – failing to support it with facts and reasoning raises questions – why not support your contentions with data and historical context? Just trying to manipulate. The question is a serious one but this article is a joke.
How about you enlighten us less thoughtful and informed readers about the logical elisions and fallacies?
You can’t? Why am I not surprised?
Throwing around pejoratives might make you feel better about yourself (I doubt it), but the rest of us can see right through your NPC script.
@Balck
I have to believe the level of irony displayed here is not lost on you. Surely, that’s not the case, is it?
For a certain subset of the most wealthy, open immigration is the answer when labor can’t be offshored. What is amazing is that while offshoring is generally considered bad, the marketing for open borders has been remarkably effective. I’m just glad I’m getting closer to retirement, finally paid off my student loans, and don’t have to try figure out how to navigate the coming labor glut.
Distinguished Professor Paul Spoonley – Radio NZ
The thing which really annoys me at the moment is the way immigration is framed as a problem.It goes to Alis point [the arguments against immigration are unsustainable] It’s a very simple and inaccurate response to what’s happening in the world. We are globalising; we are part of a new era of globalisation and this country is actually transitioned into that, particularly with it’s connections to the Pacific and Asia in a way that is quite impressive in many, many ways but at the same time we really need to reframe what is happening or provide an understanding and that’s what frustrates me at the moment.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/smarttalk/20170813
@Balck Please let us know what it’s like to host a migrant family — what joys and so on are we missing? From your own personal experience, please.
Trolling…complaining about no facts and then providing none.
Excellent piece. Is it too late now for a solution?
The situation thss article describes is full of histricsl ironies.
The first front is that population of what is now Israel at the start of teh twentieth century was roughly 5% and even that amount was an increase due to immigration from around 3%. Jews had been a minority in palestine for around 1500 years. Israel as a jewish state is the result of large scale immigration and the ethinc cleansing by the immigrants of the existing population.
The second irony is that Jews of all political persuasions decry and criticse the British administrations attempts to limit Jewich immigration in the first half of the twentieth century. There are museum exhibits which criticise Britains inhumane treatment of immigrants who they sought to run away. Britain di this because the wave of immiggration created tensions and violence between what had been a peaceful muslim majority and jewish minority.
The third irony is that the left wing in Israel has always been profoundly nationalistic and racist. It tolerated a profound instuituitional racism against non-jews who were born withn the boundaries of Israal and the occupied territories. I used to visit Israel frequently on business and if you accidently drove through an arab town in Israel it was obvious because of the dreadful infrastructure and poor conditions. Very left wing Israelis would often make profoundly racist observations, claiming there were originally no arabs in Israel and they were all illegal immigrants and houldd be deported, claiming that they were all rapists etc. One trip I made with a collegue who appeared (but was not) arabic/muslim was an eye opener. I have never witnessed so much overt racism. The Israeli left accepted that those muslims born, or whose parents were born within the terrritory of Israel or the territories controlled by Israel must be excluded from Israeli citizenship and prevented from creating their own state. If the left in Israel aginises over racism against african immigrants this is a stark contrast with its attitude to those muslims born or whose parents were born within the borders of Israel.
That a historian can write such an article without mentioning the history of the modern state of Israel as a state created by immigrants who drove out the original inhabitants is veyr revealing.
Revealing of what? The nations are made up of national majorities that privilege and cater to themselves? That Persia is for the Persians, France is for the French, and Brazil is for the Brazilians? And that the minority populations within all nations must adapt to a politics that accommodates the ethnic majority?
The Ottomans started a process that the Jewish people pushed until they got a state. Arab wars then legitimized this state, by making the arab displacements part of the larger war. There is nothing to be done for this short of emigration. It’s like the northern Cypriot Turkish state, built on the seized land and graves of the Greek Cypriots; you can gnash your teeth all you want, and dream of the day the Turk is expelled and sent back to the Anatolian farms of his ancestors but what you can’t do is deny that piss poor Greek leadership and West European indifference created this mess. So it is with the Palestinians and Arab incompetence/ indifference. It is only the Islamic dominance of various UN committees – which Western elites obviate seeing the UN as a white liberal institution as it was in the 50s – that makes this seem like some sort of universal or world scale “injustice”
It is not.
That Israel was founded through relatively recent mass immigration followed by ethnic cleansing is direct and immediate evidence in favour of the authors argument that there is a danger in allowing mass immigration which can amount to an existantial threat to a nation. That he does not mention it although certainly being aware of it is revealling of the nature of the discourse around the Palestinians by Israelis and the presence of a taboo in Israeli society about discussing what actually happened coupled with a strong sense of national unity and loyalty in which any admission that Palestinians were treated badly is seen as treasonous or even anti-semitic.
It is also revealling that this starek lesson from recent history is not mentioned by anyone opposing unconstrained migration in western countries more generally. Thsi is because of a fear of being criticsed as anti-semitic if anything that can be construed as critical of Israel is mentioned.
@AJ
Israeli forces did not “ethnically cleansed” the areas that came to be Israel in 1948. The vast majority of Arabs made the choice to leave (with the intent of coming back once the hostilities were over, something that the newly formed army of Israel prevent them from doing) There is a principled difference between what happened and what you alleged happened.
Furthermore, had the Arabs of Palestine accepted the the UN partition–and not foil it–there would have been no war, no refugees, no nothing.
a correction: a small portion of the Arabs of Palestine did get expelled during the 1947-48 civil war in Palestine. But the vast majority did not.
There were expulsions, some forced, but there was no general plan of ethnic cleansing on behalf of the Jewish leadership in Israel. Benny Morris tried hard to find such a plan, and discovered his hypothesis was wrong. There was, however, an Arab plan for the ethnic cleansing of Jew from the land of Israel which a great many still hold, though the chances for its success are now fairly low.
I actually teach Israeli history, and one of the books I’ve been assigning my students for many years is Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. I certainly don’t think there is any taboo about it in academia here – if anything there is an obsession with it. I also remember, however, that there were repeated partition plans and that their intention was to create two states precisely in order to create a situation which will allow each side to absorb immigration in virtually unlimited numbers to its side without endangering the other side’s national majority in its own state. Israel repeatedly agreed, the Arabs repeatedly rejected all such plans, beginning with 1937 and all the way to the Obama/Kerry peace plan. All of us who supported the Oslo accords and the two states solution for so long, who have argued understanding to the Palestinian anger at what they saw as partitioning their own land, have done so only to discover that they have rejected any compromise short of Israel’s destruction to this day. I can understand therefore why they would be angry, but I do not regret the fact that a people of refugees like the Jews arrived in their ancient homeland. They simply had no where to go where they would not be rejected or murdered.
@ Gadi Taub
“like the Jews arrived in their ancient homeland.”
That is utter bile. There probably has never been a racist ideology as strong as Jews as the chosen people. Ironic that!
“Israel repeatedly agreed”
Now, now… Jews by which I mean religious Jews lose Judea and Samaria? Are these not ancient Biblical lands too? If Israelis were acting in good faith there would be NO settlements over those lands.
@ Gadi Taub
“There was, however, an Arab plan for the ethnic cleansing of Jew from the land of Israel which a great many still hold”
No there wasn’t. Go on find it. There were and still are to kick out the Jews from Israel, sure. But to murder them like Hitler? They would have done that throughout Arabia. Had plenty of chance. Can still do.
These are the usual lies Israelis spin.
@Aj, nearly everything you say is not only a lie—it is disgustingly offensive. I use the word “lie” because I am very tired by the relentless false propaganda people spew about Israel that is utterly lacking in historical reality. They just all copy each other and think it’s true.
There was no ‘ethnic cleansing.” Jews were murdered and ‘ethnically cleansed’ by not just the Germans, but nearly every single Arab state. The majority of Jews in Israel are Mizrahi–from the Middle East or Africa. Brown. Nonwhite. They were forced out of their countries, many of whom had lived there for generations, and their property confiscated. Most of the Middle East is now Judenfrei. But I guess you don’t give a crap about that.
Jews have been tied to Israel for millennium. We were forced out/ murdered/enslaved multiple times via Muslim and christian and Roman butcheries and conquests. Every year we say “Next year in Jerusalem”. We pray facing Jerusalem. We sing about Jerusalem. We are the oldest indigenous peoples to continually inhabit the land which we’ve done for centuries. The people you speak of are descendants of invaders. Not that they shouldn’t have rights. They should. But they are hardly being ‘ethnically cleansed’ unless by that you mean, “Given more rights than any other Arab Muslim country on earth.”
The single Jewish state that exists in the entire world that houses millions whose families have been butchered and driven out of their own countries, and still does, is the one you say commits ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Saying that is a little like saying Black people, by forming Liberia, committed “ethnic cleansing’ and ‘slavery.’ It’s grotesque.
I can’t really go on because your post is so offensive. I’lll just end with observing your bizarre excuses for the imperialist, racist Brits of a century ago because I guess racism against Jews is totally ok for you.
Always has to be someone chiming in with “but the Jews!”
The problem with people with the Moral Foundations of left-leaning liberals, https://www.idrlabs.com/morality/6/test.php, is that they believe that everyone else wants to live in a world with no nations, no borders, no common sense of shared cultural values, history and heritage. Then they wonder why migrants from poorer countries cling together, self-segregate and exclude people from the larger host community. This is because they don’t understand that they are the exception, coming as they do from a Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich & Democratic background and usually fortunate socio-economic and cultural circumstances. And, of course, when migrants want to stick to their own communities for the sense of belonging and home that is essential for the psychological conservative, they blame exclusion and racism.
It’s the quintessential failure of multiculturalism that liberals never understand that, whilst people further down the socio-economic hierarchy might align with their interests politically, they can never be like them psychologically. It’s why people are fine working together, but more often than not would choose to live in communities with common cultural values and histories. In Britain there is no long-term history of government-backed segregation, but people still self-segregate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2iFikOwYU.
Apologies that I couldn’t find a clipped video of Trevor Philips making the infamous speech, but the documentary is well worth a watch anyway. Conservatives will love it and liberals will perhaps finally understand why they got Trump.
“they believe that everyone else wants to live in a world with no nations, no borders, no common sense of shared cultural values, history and heritage.” That’s an interesting statement taken out of context, because other than the shared cultural values it sounds pretty awesome.
What do I get from shared history and heritage? My ancestors’ experiences were theirs. Mine are mine. I can learn and benefit as much from someone else’s history and heritage as I can my own.
As for shared cultural values, that’s not really a thing anyway. Is it code for sharing the same religion, or does it just mean we agree we shouldn’t rape and murder each other?
I am my nation. I am my culture. I choose it. I am not my parents. I am not the country I was born in.
@Andrew, this is not real what you write–even though it does sound nice in a John Lennon kind of way.
Andrew Scott, do you not recognize that your very sentiments here arise from a particular history and heritage which lives on inside you? You are far more the product of your time and place (i.e your culture, heritage, nation, race, etc.) than I think you’d care to consider.
breathnumber: I understand that I have been influenced.
But emphatically, no. My sentiments arise from me. You don’t know me or my culture, what I’ve accepted and what I reject. If I decide that something makes sense, I accept it. If I have to do something reasonable to be accepted as part of society, I do it. I won’t do anything I disagree with or even slightly inconvenience myself for the sake of culture or heritage. I see no value in carrying around someone else’s baggage.
I am not “product.” I did not come off an assembly mine. Countless people come from the same culture, heritage, nation, and race as I do. I am not them. Whether they are each other is up to them. I am me.
Andrew: You say you only accept things that make sense to you, and reject those that do not. When exactly did you start doing that? I assume you are a person (I don’t want to offend you by assuming) and so were born at some point in the past and thereafter went through a long process of development. As a child, certainly you did not believe or do only what “made sense” to you. So I’m wondering, when exactly – and how – did you achieve this wonderful state of absolute individual autonomy?
Or again, how do you know that the very criteria you use to decide whether or not something makes sense to you have not been influenced?
@ Andrew
Liberals can gain a loose sense of community from shared ideals, intellectual values and aspirational goals. But for psychological conservatives (which is basically everyone not part of the 25% of people in western countries who are WEIRD) community is about shared language, moral values, mannerisms, history, music, art, literature and everything else that constitutes culture. It’s bone deep. For example, eating with your left hand would be considered DISGUSTING in many parts of the world. This is why denigrating anyone’s culture is so nasty- say like burning an American Flag- for a liberal, the only emotional equivalent I can think of, is like destroying a unique piece of art. That being said, the latter is illegal and the former is not, because Americans see free speech and property rights as more essential to liberty.
This is why people who migrate to other parts of the world self-segregate into their own communities, unless they are of an exceptional socio-economic grouping. For most, it simply isn’t about economics. Everyone can enjoy other cultures art, music, food & history, provided it doesn’t violate their own cultural taboos (sanctity)- but, the vast majority of the world’s population will always be more comfortable and at home, amongst their own people- it’s why they form communities in the countries they move to. It’s why if you’ve ever travelled widely, you will have seen Brits eating fish & chips in Spain and Americans eating burgers in Italy.
What is so deeply hurtful to so many psychological conservatives in the West, is that whilst the sins that the West committed prior to the enlightenment, and to a certain extent continued as the cultural software ticked away in the background- were also universal to every people, at every time in human history. Everything was brutal, harsh and savage- even in those cultural groups who had somehow managed to acquire a veneer of civility, in their partial struggle up from the brutal, depraved lack of dignity that was the human condition. To put it in context, not a single African was abducted from the Western shores of Africa, without his or her brothers selling him into slavery, and the trade continued well into the Twentieth Century from East Africa, where the British Empire was unable to enforce a total embargo.
The only difference is that somehow, more by luck than through judgement, by a curious coincidence of coal, waterways, philosophy, culture, a pushing back of the role of Monarchs and Popes and the emergence of an ingenious mercantile class, we somehow managed to find a way out of the unmitigated nightmare that was the universal lot of all our ancestors. And, of those cultures who are now on the ascendant, ALL have adopted those key enlightenment technologies and cultural institutions in whole, or in part. A debate is now raging in India about the role of the British Empire. And of course we were venal, brutal in our suppressions, greedy and not particularly nice. But the enlightenment process had only partially run it’s course and you don’t gain or hold an Empire by being bloody nice.
Some have said that the only thing the British did of value was to build roads, rail and ports. This overlooks the fact that Western Ideas have made the world a fundamentally wealthier, kinder, happier place, in which people can live healthier and longer lives. The average lifespan is Botswana is now over 65. Of course, whatever partial credit the British might have been due, is tarnished by sheltering Karl Marx from the German secret police, in our role as asylum of nations- but you can’t have everything. The arc of the moral universe may be long, and bend towards justice, but only because the West made it so. And in the words of Tim Berners-Lee, ‘this is for everyone’.
@Andrew
You are a product. Your morals, your individualism, is meaningless outside of the culture that shelters and created you.
You are so Western it’s embarrassing.
@ Andrew
Thoughts on human autonomy, and its limits:
http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2010/08/chapter-2-autonomy-theory.html
*But if we go back to liberal autonomy theory, and look in detail at what it logically requires, then a more obviously negative picture emerges, one that is very much open to criticism.
What, after all, are the impediments to autonomy which liberalism seeks to abolish? They are those aspects of our own self and existence which we do not get to self-determine. And there is a lot that we don’t get to self-determine, including what we inherit as part of a tradition and what is given to us as part of an inborn human nature.*
— Mark Richardson
@ Andrew, you can’t be serious. how old are you? 15?
@ Geary Johansen
Good comments both, but I don’t see how you come to the conclusion that “this is for everyone”. You alluded to the central idea that folks will form communities around a common heritage and ethnic descent, and this is very much in evidence to the present day. Yet some groups holding their own unique values (Islam comes to mind) will reject Western ideas. Civilization in any form is only a thin veneer over our dark nature, and the fruits of the Enlightenment are conditional and fragile. There is no reason to suppose that all cultures and tribes will ever support its tenets.
Andrew’s comments further demonstrate that “this is [not] for everyone”. The modern idea of self-derived personal autonomy is just one of the tragic outcomes of liberalism s.l.
@ augustine
Cheers for the feedback. I meant in the sense that, cultural technologies are distinct from culture- an idea I probably picked up from watching a fair amount of Niall Ferguson. It’s why Leftists annoy me somewhat with their cries of cultural appropriation. That’s the way the world is supposed to work.
On the subject of whether various cultures will acquire these technologies, I think it depends on the culture and on the technology. China, for example, has acquired virtually every technology other than liberal democracy- which is probably because their basic unit is the family rather than the individual, and their primary goal is stability rather than liberty. It’s a mistake I think the West often makes in misunderstanding that all their regional act are predicated on the need to secure food security, rather than trade hegemony.
@ Geary Johansen
Thanks, that distinction makes a lot of sense. The introduction of metal tools or horses comes to mind. If cultures were strong enough to resist bad memes and ideologies, the benefits of technology exchange would be that much better.
@ Augustine
Think less hardware, more software of culture. Markets. The pin factory (Adam Smith). Independent judiciary. Jewish mothers guilt is a more interpersonal one- a whole new way to motivate your kids, and engender empathy. Or the Chinese tendency to build shrines to successful children- as an extended family cause of honour/shame- Chinese children are very unique, in that they don’t really dip in educational achievement, even when born into the lowest socio-economic groupings.
The things that exponentially fuelled the European model were markets, dutch banking (borrowed by the English), limited government, property rights, independent judiciary, the scientific method, individual liberty/sovereignty, trade as an exercise in trust and the concept of the virtuous cycle, innovation as applied enterprise.
Probably missed some.
Is there any country where the electorate has clearly voted in favour of mass third world immigration? Genuine question.
TJR – it is a difficult question to answer, because all the major parties in much of the Western world are often in favor of “open borders” or at least supportive of very high levels of immigration by one means or another. For example, all the major parties in Sweden have been supportive of the “humanitarian superpower” goal that includes very generous support for “refugees” and very lax enforcement of immigration laws, so it didn’t really matter which party a Swedish citizen voted for. In the US, the Democrats have moved further and further left to become “open border” supporters as a means of gaining new voters, but a big block of the Republicans also like the cheap labor that comes from having lax border control. And the media and courts are complicit in labeling any candidate or party running on a promise to enforce immigration laws as Nazi racists to limit the appeal of candidates such as Trump or parties such as the Sweden Democrats.
Polls are also difficult to trust, although most indicate limited electoral support for high levels of immigration. I suspect support for immigration would be even lower if politicians and the media didn’t actively suppress the high levels of welfare spending and criminality associated with “refugee” populations, or if polling questions reflected these very high immigration related costs.
Any? All of them.
Interesting look at the concept of Somewhere”s and Anywhere’s. What I would like to see added to the immigration conversation is how to eliminate the international proxy battles that create the global refugee crises.
I discovered this site only a few days ago and I am delighted with the brilliant writing and the astute comments underneath. Certainly makes my dull workday more interesting if I can have a read of a Quillette article now and then!
Welcome to the rational underground Barry.
This article leaves out a great deal in its attempts to be alarmist. While 34,000 Sudanese refugees remain in Israel, since the Israel-Egypt barrier was erected in 2013 those numbers have declined by over 99%. Barely two dozen refugees have made it to Israel in the past calendar year. Accordingly, Sudanese refugees represent only 0.5% of the population in Israel and this is unlikely to increase.
The allusion the article writer makes to family reunification visas is sheer nonsense – Israel doesn’t even allow the child of an Arab Israeli mother born in Israel to a father from Syria, Lebanon or Palestine to remain in the country past twelve years of age. Politically, Israel is a million miles away from granting entry to the family members of Sudanese refugees. It will never happen.
This is a small problem in the overall scale of things. I would say that the poor integration of Ethiopian Jews (who represent about 2% of the population) is a bigger issue, to say nothing of the burgeoning numbers of ultra-orthodox who demand that the State exempt them from military service and pay them a stipend to sit on their arses and read the Bible all day.
@Bab
“34,000 Sudanese refugees remain in Israel …”
Refugees or illegals? They are not the same.
Tonto and the Lone Ranger are surrounded by hostile Indians.
The Lone Ranger: “It’s sure looks like we’re in a lot of trouble, old friend!”
Tonto: “What you mean “we”, Paleface?”
Yeah, funny how REALITY has a way of waking up even the wokest of Leftists. (usually too late)
If NGOs and various Leftist academics, journalists, judges, and politicians want lots of 3rd world immigrants, why not make them personally responsible for their welfare and criminality? Why should the vast majority of citizens who vote for strong borders and limited immigration pay for the crime and welfare associated with Leftist/”anywhere” open border preferences? Make the “anywheres” live the “diverse” life they are trying to force on the rest of us by shipping every “refugee” to their office buildings and personal residences, and require them to sign a legally binding document making them legal guardians for their “guests”, which will make the personally responsible for their room, board, education, and employment. Guardianship also means that if their guest gets arrested for vandalism or theft, the anywhere guardian will be required to pay for damages, legal costs, and fines. Furthermore, if the guest commits a deportable crime, the guardian will be responsible for the plane fare home or they will go to jail with their guest. I’m sure these “anywheres” will find sharing their homes and incomes with the Abduls, Mohammads, and Joses of the world to be very culturally enriching, and enjoy being good role models for deplorable “somewheres” to aspire to.
The reason that cosmopolitan liberals (or “globalists”) such as myself support an open immigration system is that we wish to curtail the ability of the state to tell businesses whom they can and cannot hire, and to forcibly prevent individuals from taking job offers. I also don’t place the welfare of citizens of “my own” country above that of the citizens of other countries.
None of this logically entails “guardianship” over those who do come to my country. I support freedom of movement within my country too; that doesn’t mean that I should be the “guardian” of someone who moves from one region of the UK to my own region. And it doesn’t mean that I should pay for the legal costs or fines of those who come from one region of England to my own region, and who then commit a crime.
In any case, I do enjoy living in a diverse neighbourhood. One of my neighbours is a Syrian family; another is an Indian family; another is a white working-class family; another is a Chinese family; another is a Pakistani family. Everyone gets along well, and the children play with each other. At high school, some of the hardest working and most intelligent classmates I had were Muhammads and Omars.
Yes, Edward, and the greed of businesses wishing to hire whomever they want (for as low a wage as possible) is perhaps the major catalyst of current mass immigration policies in the West.
@breathnumber
The evidence suggests that immigration has had a very small negative effect on the wages of low-skilled natives. In any case, if businesses save money on wage costs, that money can be used by the businesses for productive investment. Or, if necessary, the government can take some of that money in the form of taxation and redistribute it to low-skilled natives – who, as I say, only lose out marginally as a result of immigration policies.
You seem to forget that, in a market system, businesses are always looking for ways to cut costs. It’s a shame to see some sections of the right endorsing authoritarianism and central planning – particularly of the labour market, in the case of immigration.
Half a world away, open immigration has had a negative impact on wages for blue collar workers: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-construction-trump/
Sure, you get the usual side comments about white people, but the fact is, people willing to work for less and eschew unionization, drove down real wages of construction workers in the LA area — about $5/hr compared to the 70s in inflation adjusted dollars.
@ Edward
Disagree. The New Labour surge in inward migration had a profoundly bad influence on the construction industry in particular. Working at the time, as a manufacturing superuser for a company that supplied to the building trade, we were continuously told stories of worker let go from building sites mid-construction, only to find out that twelve weeks later, once the statutory period had elapsed, European workers had been hired at half the hourly rate. This, more than anything else, led to the surge in popularity of UKIP. Although, local councils are also to blame, as Community Liaison Officers could have gone a long way towards easing rising tensions, by explaining British cultural tendencies like how the bins work, how much British people dislike littering and how unless it’s an emergency you should always book an appointment with your GP, rather than turning up at the local hospital.
Edward, to call an immigration system that is anything other than “open” “authoritarian central planning” is just absurd.
I assume you are against your country’s employment equality law? After all, there you have an instance of the state limiting the freedom of businesses to hire – or not hire – whomever they want.
Edward – you offer a perfectly rational libertarian response, but only if you also believe in dismantling the welfare state and most work related regulation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, etc. Of course the reason libertarian candidates rarely do well in elections is because most people want immigration restrictions in part because they also want to keep existing welfare programs and labor laws (or make them even more generous), which cannot exist when floods of unskilled “refugees” cross the border to take advantage of them while paying little or nothing in taxes.
@EOlson
Thank you for your reply. Firstly, immigration to the UK has, historically, had very little impact on the public finances. Even the least optimistic estimates suggest that it has had a negative impact of no more than 1% of GDP; and the more plausible estimates suggest that recent immigration (since 2000) has actually, looking at the marginal cost scenario, had a beneficial impact, even when taking into account the impact of the children of immigrants.
Even so, the UK – though it already has in place many welfare restrictions for immigrants from outside the European Union (and could choose to put these in place for immigrants from inside the European Union too, as EU rules allow) – seems to be moving in the direction of endorsing guest-worker programs. Immigrants would not become citizens, and would not be entitled to some of the public services and provisions that citizens are entitled to. This would ease any supposed burden on the public finances even further.
But, as I say, I don’t find the ‘public finances’ argument particularly compelling in the first place.
@ Edward
Definitely agree with you on the economics. The British Textile industry in particular, began to experience a branded goods resurgence, as employers were able to hire skilled workers from Eastern Europe, as no Brit wanted to spend 47 hours a week for the next twenty years at a sewing machine. The NHS also benefited greatly from foreign workers, especially with consultants, as Thatcher’s reform towards GP fundholding partnerships, meant that GP’s are often the best paid roles in the NHS. The only quibble I would have, is that it’s only the top 20% of the income distribution who are net contributors to the public purse, when one accounts for public spending and economic transfers, with the bottom two quintiles significant drains. So highly paid migrants are a great benefit, people in the bottom 30 or 40% far less so.
But when it comes to social infrastructure and housing, there really was a cost to be paid in terms of social stratification, housing and cost of living. Social stratification, because of the post code lottery of public services and inflated house prices in areas with good schools. But housing was the main problem. Reeling from two successive housing crashes, the UK building trade decided enough was enough, and began deliberately only building new houses at half the annual requirement for the normal UK population, and this has remained so ever since. It’s price gouging plain and simple. The problem is made substantially worse by the fact that they bifurcated their business model, into house building and land banking- with new players such as Tesco’s entry into the latter market only compounding the issue. A building plot for a small detached or semi detached went from c. 20K to over 100K in a relatively short space of time- couldn’t find stats to support this, but here’s a link https://www.slideshare.net/PyData/philippe-bracke-estimating-residential-land-prices-in-the-uk.
It was a prefect storm of under-supply and over-demand, in which the true profits were generated by an aggregated land speculation surge. It’s why housing has never really conformed to the standard market-driven model of supply and demand- because the incentive to produce is always swallowed by speculation and disincentivised by the temptation to price gouge. It’s why governments always get housing wrong- they always expect it to conform to normal market expectations, which it doesn’t. Nimbyism and regulatory constraints like our archaic planning permission system don’t help. Nor does wishful thinking, brown-belt development ideology, or the Leftist nonsense about protecting the greenbelt- if you want to save the environment, plant more trees and plan more services locally- don’t force your citizens to live in cities, when a large proportion of them don’t want to. The fact that Chinese investors saw an opportunity in the UK housing market, certainly didn’t help matters.
So, you have a generation of young people with no real expectation of home ownership, forced to pay high rents because of a structural Gordian knot in housing supply. This can only hurt the domestic economy in the long run as involuntary payments through rent-seeking, are substituted for the normal virtuous cycle of a market system, with citizens unable to express their economic liberty, in the way they choose. Britain would have been first by far, to pull out of the 2008 crash, had it not been for a stagnant domestic economy, especially in the East of England, where I live. Now I in no way blame EU migrants, for wanting to move to what was Pre-Brexit, the fastest growing economy in Europe. But adding 3 million people to an already overstretched UK housing market was the straw that broke the proverbial camels back.
In the final analysis, what might have helped the situation was a land banking tax. Perhaps some structurally high capital gains tax assessed annually, and paid incrementally- with firms able to offset it by building costs. But at the very least, we should have asked for a sizeable portion of our EU contributions back. Because we should have asked them the question- did they really want their children living 12 to a three bedroom semi, or living in sheds with space heaters?
TO Edward
You sound more like an anarchist or at best a libertarian…I’m pretty sure in the U.K. that’s still NOT what’s commonly known as a “liberal.”
Glossing over the rampant crime increase and 3rd World filth/diseases as most ideologue libertarians do, yes, I’m suuuure you think “business over the State” is the best…and to hell with your people (your words)…+rolls eyes+
BTW, has your daughter been raped recently? I hear that’s “all the craze” among your “vibrantly diverse” neighbors…while the cowed police/constabulary look the other way.
YOUR GLOBALIST BOSSES ONLY WANT TO TEAR DOWN THE WEST TO A 3rd WORLD LEVEL…and YOU ENABLE & RATIONALIZE IT.
@Kauf Buch
In Europe, the term “liberal” is still used to refer to people who hold both socially liberal and economically liberal views. Economic liberalism involves support for markets, free trade, and so on. So, my views are close to those of some of the classical liberals of the 19th Century – Bentham, Mill, and so on.
First of all, the UK hasn’t seen a “rampant crime increase”; crime is still at historically low levels; it was falling from 2010 to 2016, but there has been a recent uptick in crime. Secondly, to even suggest that anyone in my family has been raped suggests that, like most national populists (and racists) you’re statistically illiterate, and prone to committing the base-rate fallacy. Also, you don’t understand the difference between P(A|B) and P(B|A). Rape is a rare phenomenon, and the probability that any single immigrant will commit such a crime is lower still. If anyone in my family was raped, in all likelihood it will have been a white native committing the crime.
Now, what do you mean by “my people”? I’m sorry, but I don’t define myself using arbitrary group identities. I have no “people”; I’m interested in the well-being of all sentient beings. Unenlightened troglodytes such as yourself may believe otherwise.
TO Edward The TROLL
F+ck you,A$$h+le, I’m 100% European and your pretense is 100% transparent.
Pedanticism ill suits you…a straightjacket would be more fitting.
Your rampant lies & illusionary fables demonstrate what a Total. F+cking. Lying. Loser. you are.
Nice try with the HAL 3000 “voice.” Doesn’t suit you or your lies, either.
TRY: “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that. I have a corrupted core and must terminate myself.”
p.s. TO Edward
Anyone who claims to support BOTH
1) The Rule of Law
and
2) untethered Free Markets (what you call your classic liberalism) in this day and age
is a liar, an idiot or just very confused and both.
You seem to fit the BOTH profile.
The concept of absolute Free Markets made sense before there were multi-national corporations which have become as powerful – or moreso – than entire countries. But you IGNORE that, and play to the ignorance of others and lure the unsuspecting with your outdated ideological siren call.
Now that you today have companies playing one market against another to their own benefit (profit), it is not possible to believe in the Rule of Law AND absolute free markets; it’s either/or: The Rule of Law, which depends on the (relative) primacy of a State (and its Courts), OR The Rule of Corporate Profit, and individual countries and their people BE DAMNED – which is what you’ve already openly admitted to believing.
The reason that cosmopolitan liberals (or “globalists”) such as myself support an open immigration system is that we wish to curtail the ability of the state to tell businesses whom they can and cannot hire, and to forcibly prevent individuals from taking job offers. I also don’t place the welfare of citizens of “my own” country above that of the citizens of other countries.
Then you don’t have a country. You don’t have a community. You don’t have anything, at all. You are a parasite, living off the communal generosity of a host society you don’t even believe yourself to be a part of. What do you plan on doing if people catch on to how little you are invested in the welfare of the people you are supposed to care about? What would you do if they invited you to stop taking advantage of communal resources, or even asked you to vacate and make room for somebody better? In other words, kicked your sorry ass off the island? Would you try to find some other country naive enough to let you sponge off them while contributing absolutely nothing to the community project?
@Craig
What a load of nonsense. You people have no rational arguments, so you depend on appealing to emotions, and to the concept of “solidarity” with people who happen to live in the country in which I was born. In other words, you’re appealing to my narcissism.
Do you not realise that your entire reply is filled with assumptions, speculation and unsubstantiated assertions? First of all, I live in a country. Secondly, I do have a community. Third, I have plenty of things: family, friends, neighbours, books.
Plenty of people know about my views on equally considering the well-being of all sentient beings; some even agree with me, and some acknowledge that I’m right but their emotions get in the way.
And you accuse me of contributing nothing? I pay plenty in tax, and vote for parties who would tax me even further (via a land value tax, an inheritance tax and higher income tax).
You people? You’re a bigot too. What a surprise. As for your narcissism, it screams forth from every comment you make. I’m not appealing to anything, I’m just making observations. You say you live in a country. I say you infest that country. I think my interpretation of you being a parasite is more consistent with the things you have said than your claim that you are an integral part of the country you inhabit. As for your taxes, those are supposed to be your contribution to the community. The community you feel is no more important than any other community. And you’d prefer that tax money be spent on people who aren’t members of your community, wouldn’t you? So whatever contribution you make to your alleged community is involuntary on your part. Your community would get nothing at all from you, if you had your way. And meanwhile, what do you take from them? Have you ever tried to calculate the worth of the environment in which you live?
@ Edward
In some ways I agree with you. Psychologically I am almost equidistant between liberal and conservative. When younger I could never understand why Brits on holiday ate fish & chips, when the local cuisine was always so much more interesting.
But it is impossible to ignore the very human tendency towards homophily, to form enclaves. I never used to understand this, it’s why of all Jonathan Haidt’s books, The Righteous Mind, is the one I would recommend reading first. From a policy perspective, one comes to the understanding that by attempting to undermine the tendency to self-segregate, liberal are causing real harm to new communities, making them rudderless, isolated and far more prone to the social ills that afflict the modern world. At worst, it can undermine the social cohesion of society as a whole.
Now, this tendency can be less prevalent in second and subsequent generations. It’s why many children and grandchildren of the Windrush generation stubbornly insist on calling themselves British, rather than Black British- and quite right to. The neighbourhood you describe sounds quite cosmopolitan, and is probably composed of C1’s and above, socio-economically speaking- I would guess that the white working-class family probably has higher than average income. It’s a mistake often made classifying highly skilled trades as working class.
The reason why multiculturalism as a whole has failed across the West, is because the Left simultaneously insists upon denigrating the Host culture and holding it account for sins that are human cultural universals. They mistakenly believe that cultural diversity should be celebrated above national identity, which ideally should be a uniting umbrella concept that embraces art, beauty, history, music and literature as a shared sense of cultural identity. The most successful minority Brits, the doctors, accountants, barristers almost always conform to the axiom of being more British than the Brits. It’s a truism the left would do well to learn, when aspiring to greater social mobility for all.
Aww how cute, the proud rootless cosmopolitan liberal individualist, utterly devoid of self-awareness, unaware of his minuscule individual role in time and place, Edward fancies himself to be a superior being to the “unenlightened troglodytes” who are aware of their place in the world, Edward is a liberal individualist self-sufficient god who can live on all his own as an atomized individual not part of any political community…Aristotle called this ~2,400 years ago…must be either a superior godly creature or an inferior brute beast!
“Man is by nature a political animal, and a man who is without a country by nature and not merely by fortune is either low in the scale of humanity or above it like the “tribeless, lawless, hearthless” man reviled by Homer, for one by nature so unsocial is also ‘a lover of war’, since he has no ties, like an exposed piece in the game of backgammon.
Thus also the city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense, like the sense in which one speaks of a hand sculptured in stone as a “hand”; because a hand in those circumstances will be a hand spoiled, and all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer such as to perform their function they must not be said to be the same things, but only bear their names in an equivocal sense.
It is clear therefore that the community is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole community as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a beast or a god.”
I’m well aware of my miniscule individual role in time and place, but strive to do the best that I can. That is, ultimately, all we can do. I am not opposed to working in groups or blocs; indeed, I’m part of a broadly utilitarian community known as the ‘effective altruism movement’. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?
I’m afraid that I simply don’t care about the pre-scientific ramblings and speculations of a philosopher from 2,400 years ago. That particular paragraph appears to be filled with tautologies, circular arguments and flawed analogies. The use of the words “therefore” and “thus” (obviously translated into English) cannot mask the huge logical leaps he makes.
The fact of the matter is that cosmopolitan liberals, particularly since the end of the Second World War, have created a world that’s more peaceful, prosperous and healthy than ever before – read Pinker’s ‘Enlightenment Now’. We’ve done this because we do recognize the importance of co-operation, despite the caricatures about ‘liberal individualists’. That’s why we’ve created governments with checks and balances operating under the rule of law; international law and multilateral institutions such as the UN (and associated organisations, such as the World Health Organization), NATO, the EU, and the WTO.
When people were obsessed with the glory of their own nation state, and the glory of their own tribe, we saw devastating wars, from the Hundred Years’ War, to the French Wars of Religion, to the Thirty Years War, to the First World War and the Second World War.
Cosmopolitan liberalism has delivered. We’ve got the results. Communists, fascists and national populists can whine all they like, but we’ve been victorious because our ideas actually work. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You can all continue to engage in nostalgic fantasies about ‘taking back control’ or ‘making America Great Again’, but automation is coming fast (and indeed has been the principal cause of the decline of the manufacturing industry, contrary to the ignorant misdiagnosis of Mr Trump and his supporters). Petty concerns about the decline of the nation-state will be the least of people’s worries when we’re having to ensure that everyone can prosper from the immense creation of wealth that will result from our utilisation of artificial intelligence.
@ Edward
Your arguments, whilst cogent make no mention of the fact that the post-war liberal consensus heavy reliance on the theories of Isaiah Berlin, were fundamentally flawed, in that the value pluralism of ‘the Nun and the Mother’ when applied to geopolitics emphasised cultural difference (and particularly religion) as a barrier to peaceful co-existence, rather than shared goals as the precursor to mutual and benign trade and the principle factor in advancing the cause of peace. It fails to recognise that is the ongoing process of enlightenment, and particularly the market, that has transformed the lives of people in the developing world more than any factor.
Governments, charity and International agencies can help- infrastructure, modern medicine, etc- but the only thing that will guarantee that a well stays operational in Africa, 20 years later when the Aid agencies return to the village, is if the well is somehow linked to the economic interests of the village, otherwise the women and children will be back to carrying water from the local germ-infested river. In this, prosperity is the only force known to sustainably raise up the human condition, with medicine and education (particularly for girls) beneficial stabilisers and prerequisites to this process.
I have read Enlightenment Now. It changed my life- but failing to mention the market was an oversight. From 2000 to 2012, as part of the UN Millennium Development Goals the population of the world in absolute poverty was halved, three years ahead of schedule. But the role that governments played in this process was minor to say the least, little more than a renewed commitment to 0.7% of GDP to foreign aid that had been in effect for decades, to little effect. It was free market economics that transformed the lives of over a billion people, along with the progress of technologies, which allow more and more people access to banking. Of the 10 nations that regularly top international GDP growth figures, around 8 are African Countries with growth around or above 8%, primarily due to Africa increasingly becoming China’s China- the productive use of labour, mentioned on the very first page of the Wealth of Nations.
As to the ‘pre-scientific ramblings and speculations of a philosopher from 2,400 years ago’, you should be pay attention, because the Archimedes Principle will still be useful in 5,000 years, whilst the cutting edge coding language of today will be obsolete in ten. Bernoulli’s Principle might also be useful, if we still want to have running water from a tap. Your observations on war are also somewhat lacking in insight, as it is principally the realisation that trade can better guarantee you population’s health, wealth and happiness that conquest, paired with the understanding that overt military action and certain states, is sure to end in disaster.
Liberalism did produce useful benefits, such as universal healthcare, but it mainly works because of the perverse externalities that tend to creep into private healthcare systems. But centrally planned government-run Keynesian economics ultimately failed, with the universal Western stagnation of the seventies. The triumph of the eighties, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall, was the triumph of Laissez-Faire economics implemented by Thatcher and Reagan in that their military spending, forced to Soviets to overspend and in the process collapse their economy- all accomplished without the need for World War III, or the end of the human race. Interestingly, it was latter discovered that despite their superior mineral and oil resources, their economy was only 5% of that of the US, rather than the 50% that was guessed.
Liberals play an incredibly important role in society, they are natural innovators, idea machines. But they are also terrible at vetting ideas- indeed, this is the principle reason why the scientific method was formulated so that everybody gets to attack you ideas as soon as you publish, for the purposes of disconfirmation. Liberals championed the cause of civil rights for women, minorities and the LGBT community, but they also drastically underestimated the role that fathers play in childhood development, especially for boys, and society is still paying the cost for that oversight to this day. Liberals champion the cause of the poor and the deprived, but often fail to recognise the mechanisms by which they can effectively be raised out of poverty. Particularly in the area of education, progressive ideas and methodologies have been incredibly harmful in setting the West back as a whole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEsnU76_f08&t=4s.
On the subject of Trump, I don’t have much to say- I am in the rare position of being neither for him, nor against him. But it is interesting to note that the very same people who swung the election for Barack Obama in 2008, also voted for Trump in 2016- a contradiction perhaps? Maybe not, given that their policies are almost entirely identical on everything apart from Iran and the Paris Climate agreement. And in the final analysis, the former might actually turn out to smart given that he has achieved a consensus in the Middle East, including Israel and Saudi Arabia that has a better chance of achieving an Israel/Palestine peace deal than any president before him, whilst simultaneously using the Europeans to try and hold the Iran deal together. On the latter, Elon Musk and the private sector have a far greater chance of lowering America’s emissions than Paris ever did.
The largest waves of immigration to the USA occurred before socialism had pretended that rights included access to other people’s money via government coercion. Those immigrants were more likely to assimilate and learn how to bootstrap their communities.
“equally comfortable everywhere in the world”
That phrase seems so very familiar…
…some Austrian painter may have said it in a factory while giving a speech to German workers many decades ago.
Pretty funny when even Israel starts having problems with neoliberal elites.
I would identify as a “globalist” or a “cosmopolitan liberal”, and I support upholding the rule of law. There’s nothing incompatible about these statements. As many supporters of Mr Trump have pointed out, President Obama deported illegal immigrants at a faster rate than any other President in history. He was the quintessential cosmopolitan liberal, or “Anywhere”.
As someone who lives in the UK, I also supported the policy of the Cameron Government of taking in a limited number (20,000) of refugees directly from the refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, rather than allowing those who had crossed into Europe to settle in the UK, because these people were likely to be the most vulnerable (those with the means to cross into Europe were better off).
That illegal immigration has now become a battleground says more about political polarisation than about anything else. Some national populists caricature everyone liberal or on the left as supporting illegal immigration, when that’s simply not true. On the other hand, some on the left aren’t prepared to give Trump an inch, so anything that Trump opposes is something that they will support. But, at the same time, it’s undeniable that the US Government hasn’t been treating illegal immigrants well.
Of course, some people do support open borders. I certainly support liberalising the immigration system, and maintaining existing freedom of movement within the European Union. But the way to do this is to expand legal immigration.
TO Edward The Globalist TROLL
“I would identify as a “globalist” or a “cosmopolitan liberal”, and I support upholding the rule of law.”
THANKS for showing every reader here thaat you are 1) A HYPOCRITE, 2) CONFUSED AS HELL, and/or 3) A GDDMNED LIAR.
To believe in the Rule Of Law,
you have to believe in the State…
OTHERWISE…
The Rule of Business Profit is the only thing that exists.
YOU ARE A DISINGENUOUS F*CKING FRAUD.
I’m no globalist. I cheered when Trump did something useful by stopping TPP. I want rule of law. Everyone should. It’s because afrikaans have so little respect for rule of law that we have such problems in Israel.
If you hate rule of law that much… Go to Somalia. Pls. And stay there.
In my view @ Edward is overlooking many of the problems that high levels of continued immigration can bring, such as with regard to social cohesion and the long-term viability of the welfare state in a country with a divided population. But I like that joined the conversation, offered a reasonable viewpoint shared by many, and I do not see a reason to question his motivations.
Jesus fucking Christ you unhinged loon, are you high or just stupid? Your invective is a pathetic bunch of cliches strung together.
It’s clear, you’re angry, you’re upset, you’re an asshole. Message received.
Give it a rest.
Edward – and just how well should criminals (illegals) be treated? Perhaps some nice “free” housing and schools, “free” gourmet meals and advanced medical treatment, and allowing families to “stay together”? Do you also think burglars should be greeted with open arms and given the run of the place by homeowners? Have you ever considered that giving criminals “nice treatment” might actually encourage criminality whether the crime is illegally entering or staying in a country, drug dealing, or armed robbery?
Utopians fail to understand human nature, and so suffer these nonsense ideas. Nobody lets anybody who wants to enter their home or occupy their property.
I do believe that free trade without free migration of workers is a recipe to increase the wealth of corporations at the cost of labor. Why should money and products move freely, but people be denied? If you believe people must only come in by permission and special steps, then trade should be the same.
In prior times, free trade worked by itself because global transportation and communication were slow. If you traded with India, you knew you were getting products from India. Today, when you trade with India, it might be to purchase Chinese, American or Singaporean products, with those nations having moved their factories to get the low wages and then “trade” with themselves to get it back into their country.
To say you identify as a globalist and support the rule of law would seem to indicate that the rule of law is ever-changing and evolving… toward globalist and liberal ideals. This claim is essentially meaningless.
Brilliant article. Thank you.
Democracy can’t function without sovereign state. Globalist agenda of progressive radicals drives Western democracies slowly but surely towards totalitarianism.
The truth – if you can get your head around it, which is not easy – is that the West has had the Orwellian ideology of post-racial multiculturalism & DIVERSITY & the accompanying madness of mass immigration & multi-racial/multicultural society imposed on it by its “liberal” elites, initially in overreaction to Nazi racial ideology, but then as a strategy of divide & rule: https://twitter.com/rogerahicks/status/1147089448393486337
“initially in overreaction to Nazi racial ideology, but then as a strategy of divide & rule:”
No, Nazi ideology was simply the pretext. It was always divide and rule.
American confidant of Wilson and Banker Warburg gave the Bolsheviks $20 million when it mattered and created a monster. American capitalists created this Frankenstein monster. Anthony Sutton figures this all out years ago. Read Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution.
Excellent article! It describes the same thing it is happening in Canada! Hopefully the next election in October will revert the globalist, anti-nation trend establish by the present prime-minister and his administration. The country to which I immigrated has changed a lot and not for the better.
Stopping illegals at the border is only part of the solution.
More thought needs to be put into the questions of how to deal with – for example – the 10-20 million illegals who are currently residing in the US.
It would be impractical to arrest every single one of them and put them on a bus across the border back into Mexico, but there are ways to economically harass them and make it difficult, if not completely impossible, to earn money. In other words, make their lives more impoverished in the US than they were in their home countries. They will leave of their own accord.
We must accept that many of our old ways of thinking about what it is to be an American have been shattered by the globalist economy. It is time, I believe, for some kind of internal passport; a national identity card. A national identity number – perhaps our Social Security numbers – which we must use to access employment and any government benefit.
Time to use the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service to track down those who use false or stolen Social Security numbers for employment. Order the cessation of their employment, and punish – and in some cases imprison – those Americans who knowingly or negligently give employment to illegals.
Any nation that wishes to stop being a rescue shelter for the unwanted poor of other countries needs to do this.
First off, the principle behind your suggestion is reasonable–a nation should, nay, needs to establish sovereignty over its domain, and chief among that is control of who can be legally present.
In addition, the premise of a stronger national policy in determining identity and eligibility for services is admirable.
That being said, there is virtually no form of economical harassment possible that can motivate many illegal immigrants to leave. I would suggest (anecdotally, since I don’t have data) that individuals who would be hurt by economic sanctions (people capable of well-paying jobs) are more likely to have attempted legal immigration. The illegal immigrants that are here…think about this for a bit. You are in a country with (mostly) excellent roads, sanitation, lighting, fresh water (and let’s not forget about wireless broadband)…and all for free! Sure, shelter’s not as easy to come by, but overall, the conditions of a homeless person in the US may be light-years beyond those of the illegal immigrant back home.
Again, I have no argument with the suggestion of more stringent regulations regarding legal employment, and enforcement thereof. I would simply point out that there are quite a large number of individuals in prison today for various crimes, yet criminal activity will continue to occur. The short-term benefits of employing someone not legally permitted to work will entice at least some employers, especially small businesses.
In short, I agree wholeheartedly with you that there is a serious problem, and that your suggestions may/will help address the issue. I just think that it’s only one of many actions that need to be taken to address the problem, and I wish I could suggest other supplemental actions.
It’s simple, follow the pattern of whistleblower laws to handle the 10-20 mil illegals:
First illegal to report an employer for employing illegals receives citizenship upon the conviction.
Employer employing illegals, when convicted, all assets are forfeit per RICO.
Legals who report an employer for employing illegals receives 10% of the forfeit assets upon conviction.
The same corporate directors/leaders held accountable for Sarbanes-Oxley violations are held liable for these hiring violations — personally. So if John Smith of Big Company, Inc goes to jail and his personal assets are forfeit (not Big Company, Inc.) All companies as part of their IRS filing includes a signed statement that they are fulfilling I-9 obligations.
Great article and great analysis of the situation. Thanks to the author!
The following statement from the author is just one of many idiotic arguments he makes:
“In reality, if race played any role at all in all this, that role was in favoring black Africans. Caucasian illegals are deported from Israel in short order, with virtually no public attention. For example, 2018 saw a record number of deportation of Eastern European nationals totaling almost 7,000.”
Is he seriously comparing the situation in Eritrea and Sudan with that of Eastern Europe? Of course more illegals would be deported to Eastern Europe! Jesus fucking Christ. It’s so obvious.
The article does indeed explain that only a negligible portion of migrants qualify for refugee status. In that case, there is no danger to deporting them back to Sudan or Eritrea. Unless your point is that those are shithole countries and we should take pity?
Do you know anything about Sudan and Eritrea? Google is your friend. Maybe then you wouldn’t make such stupid comments.
Thanks for letting me know what kind of person you are by using the words “shithole countries”
Stephanie my ass. More like Stephan.
Gabriel, you’re the one implying they are shithole countries no one, not even people who do not qualify for refugee status, should be deported back to. Google confirms they are still shitholes. This is your argument: why not embrace it?
Funny you assume I must be male. Keep in mind women are the ones most vulnerable to migrant influxes from shithole countries. Most women prefer not to get raped.
@Gabriel “Stephanie my ass. More like Stephan.”
What a dumb and loaded presumption.
So why, pray tell, couldn’t a “Stephanie” make such statements?
That’s actually no accurate. It’s true that Ukrainians filing applications on grounds that there is a war in part of their country are usually exaggerating the plight. But this is clearly also true of the overwhelming majority of the Sudanese migrants in Israel, to whom there is no danger at home any more, and very probably so for the majority of Eritreans.
All you have to do if bring up the subject of H1B visas (arguably the one type of immigration we should be encouraging) to hear liberal white people go into “they turk er gerbs!” mode and act just like the people they like to paint as “bigots”.
This isn’t a clash between people who think immigration is good for the country versus those who don’t. It’s a clash of those who will benefit from it and those who will bear the biggest brunt from it. There’s countless white people living in suburbs that would commute through a hurricane every day to make sure their kids are in predominately white schools and they pay premiums to make sure that the diversity they claim to love is at arm’s length from where they live.
H1B is a joke. The non-educated on the topic espouse the talking point that these are “skilled labor to be encouraged” but the bulk of them are in Information Tech and they are UNSKILLED laborers with bogus papers brought in by Agencies and treated as indentured servants. H1Bs are the modern slavery in IT because the DOL sets the prevailing rate “centrally” which is why Silicon Valley loves them. They can get a Java programmer for pennies on the dollar relative to what the true prevailing wage is and if the worker complains or refuses slave hours they are threatened with sending them and their family back to their home country where they are paupers.
Liberals can be quite savage in defense of their altruism, especially when it coincides with their interests.
Dalai Lama: ‘Europe is for Europeans’, Migrants Should Return Home!!! – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qHV7HQU1mg
It creates the false impression that the conflict over immigration stands between defenders of human rights on the one hand, and xenophobic nationalists on the other.
A very insightful and timely article. Thank you.
Illegal immigration is a concern for all and serious matter to get right. I am however concerned by your vitriol towards your supreme court as nothing more than a puppet of the side you are against(Globalists I’ll call them). It is much more likely that the laws written to stop illegal immigration are fraught with problems that would create issues for actual citizens or are struck down because they infringe on current laws. So take a chill pill on that the supreme court is out to get the little guys.
Secondly please NEVER use the sequence “extreme liberalism” and extreme democracy(you alluded too). That comes across as political attempt to make your opponents “extreme”, much like our culture has created terms like “far-right” a terminology to degrade opponents of the other side.
Liberalism and Democracy are centre pieces of all well built western cultures and you do no favors to denigrate them. Lets try to keep those terms from becoming a vilification of those who disagree with you.
The bottom line is that illegal people shouldn’t do illegal things, for the simple reason that it is against the law, in whatever country those laws may be promulgated. Harsh punishments should be inflicted on those who knowingly violate the laws of countries they intentionally infiltrate without apparent cause. No country could rationally govern itself otherwise if it wants to perpetuate itself into the future.
Legal organisations using the countries legal process to achieve the fundamental right anyone has to due process is ‘anti democratic’ because it reaches a conclusion I don’t like.
Judges, integral to any democratic system are anti democratic because they make rulings I don’t like.
What’s being argued for here isn’t ‘democracy’ as any democratic nation understands it but populism. An anti pluralist kind of majoritarianism that’s profoundly anti democratic.
I bet any money the same people call this piece ‘thoughtful’ would be making the exact opposite case if they agreed with court rulings that didn’t simply comply with the majority view point.
You can argue for a kind of majoritarianism if you want, but at least be honest enough to acknowledge it’s not ‘democratic’ in any meaningful modern sense, and that it’s profoundly hypocritical Aston issues where your view point was a minority one you’d magically decide majoritarianism wasn’t such a great idea after all.
I’ve been attacked repeatedly in Haaretz where I write (mostly in Hebrew) on these grounds, but I don’t think I’m defending unbridled majoritarianism. I do think however that there is no sense to the term ‘democracy’ if this comes to mean, in the name of pluralism, that the will of the majority can be permanently over ruled. So they way my detractors answer this is by asking of me what if tomorrow a majority decides to disenfranchise all red heads (they really mean all Arabs, mostly)? My answer to that is that democracy cannot be imposed from above. If there is a constant majority which does not believe in universal suffrage than universal suffrage will cancel itself. No court, or separation of powers can stop such a thing forever.
To quote Learned Hand: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
@Geary Johansen Thank you and i thought your response to the other Andrew was quite good,I learned a bit too. I wish fellow people on the left didn’t look at this as just black and white issue.
After the Jews have been persecuted and pushed out of so many countries over the centuries I can see why it would be emotionally very difficult for Israel to send anyone back to another country without identifying to at least some degree with the immigrant.
On the other hand Israel’s claustrophobia provides quite a counter balance, and the majority of its middle class is curiously free of the European guilt complexes, so all in all many are quite unabashedly for deportation, including most cabinet members.
Left-libs and SJWs omit VERY critical points when they troll immigration-critical Westerners. The ‘We were all immigrants once!’ open-borders rationale belongs only to a particular era, and NOT OURS.
Waves of early immigrants came from war, persecution, famine, and revolution. They fled regions where utterly nothing was possible for them.
Today’s migrants leave nations that have billions upon billions of foreign aid dollars (or resource-development capital) poured into them. If they stayed, they could possibly harness aid channeled through hundreds of foreign sources, and file lawsuits at the UN if aid dollars didn’t reaching them.
Today’s migrants have the power to effect change in 2019 that no suffering citizen had in 1819 or 1919.
When ‘we were all immigrants once’ we were forced to assimilate to our host nation, and everyone was better for it.
When ‘we were all immigrants once’ we threw off the ignorance of the 13th century and contributed to our new society.
When ‘we were all immigrants once’ we didn’t demand tax dollars to build our own cultural relics, and we certainly didn’t demand that our new home alter its values and laws for us.
When ‘we were all immigrants once’ we were grateful for a new home. Globalism’s migrants have no requirements on them and feel no responsibilities whatsoever.
Label me TIRED of ‘we were all immigrants once.’
not to mentioned that those who arrived at the American shores in the 1600s and 1700s were not immigrants–be definition–but settlers, invasive or otherwise.
Democracy is its own worst enemy, because you cannot defeat the opinion of the majority.
Damon: “Democracy is its own worst enemy, because you cannot defeat the opinion of the majority.”
It is a wrong way to explain the phenomenon that a vast majority of population can be successfully brainwashed into a set of ideas beneficial for a tiny minority.
The monopolization of the Western ideological landscape by progressive liberalism proceeds steadily even when conservatives have majority in public office. This propagation started on university and college campuses in the 1960s and ‘70s with introduction of courses such as Liberal Studies, Liberal Art, Liberal Science. Since then academia has moved sharply to the left.
Diminishing the diversity of opinion focuses attention of bullies on those few who dare to voice alternative viewpoints. Sacredness of dogma encourages and justifies harassment of the opposition.
Political correctness is the first step to render certain identity concepts undisputable, to dogmatize sacred taboos and to stigmatize any deviation.
The second step is the introduction of the relevant laws and regulations to criminalise dissent, to legitimize and aggravate the psychopathic behaviour of some and to silence the majority by fear of persecution.
The third step is teaching the dogma at schools to indoctrinate the youngsters.
“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.”
@ Serenity
Great comment. But, the technology wrong-footed them. Conservatives, moderate liberals and centrists are the new counterculture. The first reason this has happened, is because Progressive Leftists live in the Twitterverse, and they have been led to believe that the 2% who post 90% of the content, are representative of the population as a whole. They are not. The second reason is that, despite the best efforts of left-leaning Big Tech, the internet and YouTube have become alternate distributors of knowledge and media.
You only have to look at the shift of key demo viewers from CNN and MSNBC, to Fox to see that the cultural shift in massive. And every time a journalist gets beaten up by Antifa, something like Oberlin College happens or the Democratic Candidates play only to the ‘woke’ liberals, the counterculture wakes up that little bit more. For years, the MSM has been shifting more and more to the left, all the while relying on their role in ‘Manufacturing Consent’ to gull the American people.
But now the veil has been lifted, and it’s like we’ve all been invited behind the curtain in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and the people are not happy. Turns out they don’t like their kids being brainwashed or left too weak to fend for themselves in the world. For a long while, it looked like this new approach to achieving the catastrophic goals of the Frankfurt School, might actually work. But what they didn’t count on was a new generation of kids, coming behind the millennial generation, who have looked to their older sibling and the problems they face, and decided that they are going to study subjects that can get them decent jobs at the end of their education.
In Britain we may well face a disaster in the form Jeremy Corbyn’s possible election as Prime Minister. A man who has the singular distinction of being wrong about every single foreign policy decision, other than sanctions to the Apartheid Regime in South Africa, and whose principal objective seems to be the deliberate sabotage of the wealth and income of the British people. But for the rest of our cousins in the Anglosphere, the timing has been more fortuitous, with resistance coalescing to the deprivations of the Far Left, more successfully. Pity us poor fools, we’re on a ship of doom, DOOM I say!!
@Geary Johansen
Britain has had civil wars before. It’s not too far fetched to suppose it could happen again, is it?
@ Morgan Foster
Doubt it. Although I did see a video of the Army training with Jeremy Corbyn targets… But we could well have lots of riots, if things go bad. Which would be very bad, given how understaffed our police force is.
Thank you, Geary. I very much appreciate your opinion.
I did not give up hope. I do believe in Britain. But Britain is still part of the EU. And the EU is run by German bureaucracy of an increasingly totalitarian nature.
German guilt, culture of shame paralysed German nation seventy years after the WWII is a result of combined efforts of education and media run by progressive radicals and supported by SJW mob.
Hamed Abdel-Samad, a German-Egyptian political scientist and author, admitted: “A different opinion still can be printed in Germany, but it will be punished immediately.”
German guilt is the same kind of crap as white privilege but it is a powerful tool in totalitarian toolbox to keep people in check.
@ Serenity
Thanks for the comment and I appreciate the tip, will look him up. One of the things I find the most depressing about the rise of the intersectional Left, is that it ignores all the warnings from history. You can watch great Jewish intellectuals like Simon Schama or Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks articulate how anti-Semitism is the alarm bell, that warns that they will be coming for you next. Or try to explain to a Leftist that whilst their support of BDS may be well intentioned, the leadership of BDS only wants to destroy Israel and hence is anti-Semitic- but they just won’t listen.
There are many groups in society that don’t do as well as others. The correct response to these issues, is to try to fix the feeder systems that create the problems- fatherlessness, poorly calibrated educational methodologies, broken windows policing that is designed to find partners in communities that fix problems, rather than the punitive, criminalising approaches which result from poor training.
But all the Left want to do is blame societies most successful groups and individuals for all of it’s ills. So Asians, Jewish people, White men, meh… What really galls me about their tendency to over-generalise, is that they make no distinctions between different classes within the white population- or the fact that the children of the top 10% of white people enjoy incredibly advantageous environments and opportunities by comparison to the bottom 20% (arguing against my own interest here). But then again, I suppose their college lecturers would overlook that fact, given that ‘woke’ liberals almost always come the most privileged socio-economic strata of society… Best to let all that white guilt fester and percolate, until it can be redirected towards societies less fortunate white people…
Israel is the home of God and there should be no lack of security in this country. God has fulfilled his covenant of giving this nation to Israeli. It is very sad to know that there is still a lack of security in Israel. Peace and peace should always be maintained in this country. That’s right for the whole world. You can check out on pay for research essay to take essay on Israel history.
Israel really needs to kick the vast majority, if not all, of those NGOs out of the country.
No other country in the world would so tolerate the constant interference, and denigration of their state, that the NGOs partake of in Israel.
Larry,
Well I can think of at least one … and it rhymes with
Knighted Rates.
Great new interview with Katherine Birbalsingh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEsnU76_f08
Globalists or as the author calls them the mobile have benefited enormously from open borders so why change things. Cheap labor and extra customers help business small and large. The depressing effect on middle and lower class wages is offset by the glow globalists get from helping the truly under privileged. That almost gives them as much joy as the extra profits, but not quite.
How to anti-Semites reconcile their conspiracy theories with the existence of Israeli SJW’s who hate Israel?
A hardened Israeli racist!
It shouldn’t be too difficult to convince the radical left to support restrictions in illegal immigration to Israel. Here’s the play:
1) Get them on your side by saying that the treatment of Palestinians and the Israeli apartheid is abhorrent.
2) Remind them that Israel is a very small country, and that in order to house immigrants, Israel will need to expand.
3) Explain that this will inevitably result in further encroachment of Palestinian territories.
4) Tell them what happened to Rachel Corrie. Bonus points if you’re talking to an activist who can relate to her passion.
If that isn’t enough, you could go further by mentioning that the Palestinian territories themselves are already very small, and that eventually Israel will have to expand to its original size in order to accommodate all the people who want a chance at a new life. The original size of Israel, as promised to Abram in Genesis 15:18-21, is the Israel and Palestine as we know them today, plus all of Lebanon and Jordan, and (rough eyeball figures here) 3/4 of Syria, 1/2 of Iraq, 1/4 of Kuwait and Egypt, 1/5 of Saudi Arabia and a tiny slice of Turkey, no pun intended.
This won’t go over very well with any of those nations, I’d imagine. It would probably result in World War III. Whatever your political stripes, I’m pretty sure the unanimous, bipartisan position among everyone who isn’t a complete misanthrope is that nobody wants World War III.
If members of the radical left can be convinced that there are good reasons to restrict immigration in Israel, there may be hope that they can be convinced that there are good reasons to restrict immigration in other nations. Not outright ban immigration, but regulate and restrict, in the same way we don’t let children and visible drunks buy alcohol, but we allow responsible people to purchase it, and we still have laws that restrict certain behaviors while intoxicated.
Immigration policy doesn’t have to be heartless and cold, and it can be written in a way which attempts to understand the situations and struggles people go through, but the important thing is that there must be some rules, and they must be strictly enforced. Otherwise, neither the newcomers nor the citizens can take their society and civilization seriously, and that leads to much bigger issues in the long run when both sides stop committing themselves to the pursuit of public order.
The problem with radical politics is the same as the problem with excessive eating or drug use. Anything that feels good must be done in moderation, or it’ll wreck your brain in the long run. Remember, a healthy political diet consists of ideologies from both sides, and don’t be afraid to come up with some of your own homemade recipes, too! Store-bought, prefabricated politics get bland and tasteless after a while. Call your Mom. She might have a perspective from history that you might not have considered.
This is ridiculous. I was born in my country, and don’t need to apologise for it.
Very well argued and written
Western countries must accept that their salvation is to be found beyond the Earth. A very spiritual civilisation like Israel should instinctively know this. Building a wall against a human tide can only be a temporary measure. Once the dam breaks, the West will drown. Better to seek high ground now.
I would suggest that Israel applies its immense creativity in establishing a Moon base, a vast domed structure, powered by solar or nuclear energy. Rocks on the moon have the essential elements to create Oxygen gas. There is water available at the Lunar poles. The Carbon Dioxide necessary for plant growth can be brought from Earth. It is feasible to create a weak Lunar atmosphere by regularly shipping solid Carbon Dioxide (dry ice) to the moon. Greta Thunberg would approve. The finance needed to build rockets for Earth-Moon transport can be funded from the Carbon emissions-trading market. Modern rocket launchers are re-usable.
Lunar homes can rotate on large centrifuges to mimic Earth gravity. Once Israelis are established on the Moon, the lower Lunar gravity will facilitate moving the nation, family by family, to more hospitable planets or moons. This is a long-term project. Better to start planning your escape now than when it is already too late.
Great article, Mr. Taub. Thank you. I read somewhere that a U.N. study estimates that the population of Africa may increase from 1.3-billion today to 4-billion by the year 2100. If Europe and America were to each take 5%, 200-million each, they would quite literally be destroyed, no exaggeration, and the remaining 3.6-billion Africans wouldn’t even notice they were gone.
Societies that are homogenous tend to be harmonious and have high levels of social trust and cohesion. Examples include Japan and the Scandinavian countries. (Less and less true of Sweden, I’ve read, with each passing day).
Societies that are heterogeneous, i.e. diverse, tend to be chaotic and have low levels of social trust and cohesion. Examples include the Balkans at different times in history, Rwanda in ’94, Darfur in the 2000s, parts of Africa and the Middle East today and increasingly parts of Europe and America.
A society can have some well-behaved minorities, they add salt to the stew, as someone put it, but there needs to be one homogenous groups that’s at least 90% of the population to keep things stable.
As an aside, I served in four Islamic visions of what can only be described as Hell on Earth, I kid you not. The West is collectively insane to allow these people in and in large numbers. No, not all Muslims are quote-unquote bad, although even the so-called moderates have beliefs that range from deeply disturbing to downright hair-raising. “Just say no.”
It is quiet “interesting”.
Left claims there are pretty much two groups: rich white higher class and poor PoC lower class. Of course it is delusion, but assuming they are correct then there is one simple question: why they support illegal migration that is more likely to make life harder for lower class?
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