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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel.

Has any ethnic group gotten blanket asylum in the West? There has been a slow shift away from permissive asylum policies (see the entire cats thing): nobody is letting in "the other" wholesale (Rwanda? South Sudan? Yazidis?) with maybe a few limited exceptions like Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion or Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. That's putting a heavy assumption that those Jews won't be treated as "the other" there (for which there are plenty of pre-WWII examples), and even then I don't think that supposedly-favored groups like white Zimbabweans (whose population there is down at least 80% since the country became independent in 1980) have ever been recognized as categorical refugees.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

The basic model these people have of the world is that "the West", as colonisers/imperialists, have forfeited for all time the right to any ethnic criteria for who lives in their countries, while "Indigenous peoples" (basically everyone else) have always lived peacefully and harmoniously in the same spot and so have a fundamentally legitimate claim of ownership of their land.