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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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‘right to resist’ settler colonialism

I find it difficult to square such a blanket "right to resist" with moral demands that immigration be considered an unalloyed good. I personally don't have a strong opinion in either direction on the issue, but I worry if progressives can't define a coherent reason why violent opposition to [Jewish] refugees fleeing political violence and warfare in 1948 to the Promised Land is acceptable, but opposition to asylum seekers at fleeing political violence and warfare to the Economic Promised Land (America) is completely unjustifiable, then we'll end up with some worse-than-Trump rightist candidate running on a platform of "based 1948 Palestinian immigration policy: more machine guns at the Southern Border" that could be difficult to argue against. And while you can point to how the violence up to and after '48 has been, to a nontrivial extent, mutual, I'm sure populists can drum up enough examples of "immigrants driving up rent, leading to state-sanctioned violence in the form of evictions" or just "immigrant does violent crime" to sway more people than I'm comfortable with. If there is a blanket "right to resist", should that not apply to the Klan's Reconstruction-era actions against Carpetbaggers and Catholic immigrants?

It's not a good platform, and I don't endorse it, but there needs to be a more clear moral principle than "кто, кого?". I don't have a particular line in mind, and I do personally find examples in history where resistance seems justified (I can't really fault the Plains Indians for taking umbrage at westward settlements, or Ukraine's right to defend its internationally-recognized borders), and others where it's not (see the Klan example above), and quite a few more morally ambiguous examples: how many newly-independent nations have used their first autonomous actions to engage in ethnic cleansing their colonial powers were forestalling?

I'm quite willing to listen to other suggestions, but from where I sit, the clearest line seems to be to favor generic liberal pluralism and peaceful coexistence, which probably betrays my most common sentiment on the issue, with an acknowledgement that all states fall short of the platonic ideal there.

I find it difficult to square such a blanket "right to resist" with moral demands that immigration be considered an unalloyed good.

I’m a conservative and fundamentally don’t think that immigration is an unalloyed good.

Yes, anti-Catholic activists like Lewis Levin were completely correct that large scale Catholic immigration irreparably damaged America. Men like Philip Hart and Ted Kennedy are in substantial part responsible for a lot of the negative consequences mass immigration has had on the US. I don’t consider any of this a particular topic of dispute.