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(1) Making America complicit in ethnic cleansing is a moral stain on us forever, occurring in the 21st century where every nation should know better — this is not the mid 20th or 19th century; as Trump’s continual 1.7 million remark tells us, there are 500,000 dead in Gaza, and if America goes in these bodies will be placed on us and not Israel — the history books will surely be written so that we the ones who did it; (2) Hamas is still in operation, so American blood and resources will be spent on Israel again; (3) if you think Western culture bears the blood guilt of WWII, consider how Arab people will look at us for the next few hundred years — meanwhile, Jews being responsible for displacing* Palestinians would at once delete the holocaust from our whole collective storehouse of political metaphors, as it almost has now for the Left; (4) it’s naive to think America will ever “own” it, we will be responsible for trillions in rebuilding it for Israeli settlers, and then a president will come along whose donors / influences push him to give it away to Israel.
What? There are not 500.000 dead in Gaza. You should never take the numbers Trump throws out as serious. This should be obvious by now.
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Was the expulsion of the Volga and Prussian Germans from their lands a moral stain on Americans forever?
"Oh, it was different" - no, it wasn't. It was exactly the same case. No one can argue with the results. And the Germans don't have a violent blood feud with America in the present day. Ethnic cleansing is a tool in the toolkit. And it works.
Are you referring to the post-WWII expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia?
There's no such place as Czechoslovakia.
If you're going to be pedantic, I would point out that there absolutely was a place called Czechoslovakia when Germans were expelled from it.
There was a nation of Czechoslovakia, which had existed for about twenty years at the time.
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I'll be damned if I'm going to stop calling it that after I finally learned how to spell it.
And I told them "we promise we're not Chechnya" was a lousy tourism board slogan...
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Yeah, that too. (My examples would be more on the Soviets.)
The overall point is that the architects of the post-war order did this: to question the righteousness of this cracks the very basis of our political morality. There's really no reason why, after expelling Germans for the holocaust, we can't expel the Palestinians.
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Don’t call it that then. We should revive the moral distinction between moving a people under duress, which is a respectable policy of empire, and murdering them.
Ethnic cleansing is offering a people a choice between a suitcase and a coffin. Genocide is when the suitcase is taken of the table.
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Yes, it is a moral stain on Americans forever.
No, it's really not. Nobody cares about it. That's the point.
I understand that you want people to care, because then you can continue to use the cudgel of ethnic cleansing against people, but the plain truth is nobody actually cares, it's all just special pleading.
Average person has consumed endless hours of one sided propaganda on the subject of WW2 and has likely never heard a detailed account of how Germans were treated immediately after the war. You might as well claim that since North Koreans think that expropriating the bourgeoisie was righteous therefore it was.
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How about the rapid emigration of European-descended South Africans and Zimbabweans since the 1980s? That one feels somewhat more complicated, but still fits the definition provided.
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How about if we make "ethnic cleansing" great again? If it's clear two peoples cannot live in close proximity without trying to kill one another, what else are you going to do? Genocide, relocation of one or the other (I think "ethnic cleansing" is a misnomer here; there's already an ethnically cleansed area -- namely Gaza. That wasn't sufficient), or constant strife seem like the only possibilities.
Worrying about the moral stain future progressives will impute will paralyze you.
"Let the retards fight" sounds like a far superior option.
Fair enough, but Trump is definitely leaning into American hegemony here, and while moving the Palestinians to Somewherelsabad might be bad for the US, I don't think it's some sort of moral horror given the current situation.
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The plan to "Let them fight" keeps getting abandoned by demanding Israel stop fighting as soon as they get too close to winning
Sure, though it also gets abandoned by all the monetary and military support, and the "greatest ally" talk.
If the region got Under the Dome'd and external support no longer existed, Israel would not only still win, but they'd win even more than otherwise.
Good for them. I don't see a reason for anyone else to get blood on their hands in their name, though.
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The most valuable support Israel gets is in the form of being allowed to buy US weapons. This could be counted as a form of military support, as not all nations get this privilege, but this isn't coming at US expense (quite the opposite). The US could stop providing monetary aid and Israel would still be the dominant military power in the region by some distance as long as the US didn't embargo them.
I think they've moderated that to "greatest ally in the ME"? That's the only version I see.
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This is a small point in your broader post, but it is an important one. Things like this make journalism and media untrusted and untrustworthy, and it has been getting worse over the past ~10 years.
(I think this was intended for a comment above mine by the way)
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If tomorrow, say, Sweden decided to deport its Somali population, would you consider that a permanent stain upon it as a nation, an affront to civilization?
If Finland deported the Sami, yes. Or if Denmark deported the Greenlandic indigenous. For Swedes, it depends on if they are citizens. If they are not, then it’s a policy choice to deport. If they are citizens, it is better to encourage them leave through (1) monetary enticement and (2) permitting Swedes full freedom of choice in businesses and institutions to exclude them if so desired and (3) enhancing native birth rates (which Israel is doing right now in Israel proper, and I don’t criticize this). It would be honorable for Israel to open up a pathway for Gazans to expatriate, and to pay them an honorable amount for loss of land both now and during the Nakba. How about $1,000,000 each? But would I want America to forcefully deport Native Americans to Mexico, where they are more similar to the indigenous by blood? No, that’s crazy. Not even America at her worst thought they should do that. The amount of land given to the indigenous is about 10 Israels worth in square miles.
What if they simply stripped them of citizenship first? States can act. They can just do things. Citizenship is made up, it's a piece of paper, especially for Africans in Sweden.
This is definitely true, but are you really expecting good results from collapsing the whole house of polite fictions that keep us in the Rules-Based International Liberal Order regime?
The Rules-Based International Liberal Order, to the extent that it exists, would not collapse if a state decided to strip citizenship from its members.
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This isn't going to make people go back to Somalia.
Either you break the citizenship contract (or admit some citizens are more equal than others) or they're staying.
I’m not so pessimistic. I think Somalians would enjoy living like kings in Somalia, it would just require a “safe zone” in the country that makes migration attractive. Such a safe zone could conceivably be procured through diplomatic means and pressure campaigns on the Somalian government.
I don't think they could pay enough to get all the groups like Somalis out, and many of them won't want to leave regardless. At the very least, you will have to do the mean things that offering money is supposed to avoid first. And the consequences of that sort of thing is unclear.
I came from a safe poor country. We didn't live like kings but we were relatively well-off (middle class) by national standards. We still left.
Because if someone has a condition you can't get an MRI. You can't send your kids to a university worthy of the name (if you send them to the West as a non-citizen they'll squeeze you since it's the easiest way to raise tuition*, so there goes a chunk of that money). You can't always avoid the graft and corruption. You can't always avoid the shitty roads in the rainy season. You're constantly being taxed in a variety of ways: you have to organize your own electricity and water , have to dodge shitty cops, have to worry about family members on a small salary. There are very few good jobs and the economy is going nowhere.
And everyone knows that the West is better and no guarantee that you'll be first man in the village, for as long as European power maintains it, (and I'm being charitable in assuming that this is a thing that can be casually done and that Europeans have the will for pseudo-colonialism; the fact that you think it would be easy and would be done merely through diplomacy doesn't augur well) will be as good. It's inherently unstable and not a particularly bright future.
This shit might work on the Polish but I don't think there's any point in pretending there'll be anything genteel about ethnically cleansing people back to certain nations.
* At least in Canada. Much easier to raise fees on foreign students.
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That looks like an order of magnitude greater than most estimates. Where are you getting that number from?
2.3 million before the war, 100,000 known to have left. Trump on more than one occasion now has repeated that there are 1.7 million in Gaza. This means his advisors have told him this number. (Former real estate tycoon, he knows how to remember numbers briefed on, probably his deepest skill).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
Now the old are dying naturally and less are born than before, but from what I can tell there are still births and Gaza’s population pyramid probably means that the births and deaths are approximately equalized.
Bold move to assume all unaccounted for are dead. There's "known to have left" (100k), there's "known to have died" (around 50k in this case apparently), and the rest are "fate unknown" who can be in either group. And that's assuming the initial numbers (2.3M and 1.7M) are correct and comparable in the first place.
Trump was given the number 1.7 million presumably when he asked his intelligence advisor — conferred with all of the intel of the American Empire — how many people would need to be relocated from Gaza. The advisor gave him the number of living people in Gaza, not caring about “unaccounted for” or anything besides being alive. I think this number is accurate, because he has said it on different occasions now and because it’s the exact thing his brain is trained to remember. (He literally encodes it in his memory as a real estate project, you can tell by how he speaks about it, this is his savant-level skill and it’s a simple number to remember.) Determining how many Gazans are alive is a trivial task for the America intel community — use drones and satellites and movement tracking. They’ve wrangled them through corridors, they look at aid dispersal, the population isn’t exactly in hiding.
It’s the Lancet... we can assume it is trustworthy on this number.
You mean he asked the guys who are about to get Tulsi Gabbard for a boss after putting her on shitlist? And whom Trump generally disrespects? I can only imagine how eager they are to work full throttle for the occasion.
If I were Trump, I would be asking people from my shadow cabinet, or whatever passes for one. But those people do not wield the full intel power of the US right now, and haven't for at least four years.
In an active warzone? With your upper estimate of roughly 1-in-5 dead?! Yes the civilians wll be hiding.
Lancet means civilian medics, which in Gaza means palestinian authorities, directly or indirectly. See recent discussion about UNRWA. Trump's data, wherever it came from, it's not from the palestinians almost for sure. You risk getting large error, possibly large than the effect you'll looking from, just because it's not the same source. Palestinians, I would guess, have incentives to over-count. External observation, which you assume Trump relies on, will likely undercount.
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God, I absolutely hate attempts to subsume so many different things under "ethnic cleansing" or genocide.
Gaza is a smoldering ruin. The US gov is, as far as I can tell, not indicating a desire to send its remaining denizens to a gas chamber. It seems they're being relocated, presumably with enormous amounts of US aid and direct support, with US forces probably being more palatable to the locals than Israelis would be, the place is being rebuilt from the ground up, at which point I presume return tickets might be booked.
If this is "ethnic cleansing" in a manner that deserves to be condemned, so am I when I do a bad job with my laundry.
"presume" and "might" are pretty big problems, setting aside the rest of the sentence. Trump's statement was characteristically vague and disjointed, but the return of Palestinians seemed like an afterthought and there was no mention of who would have sovereignty of the territory. I'm not going to accuse Trump of calling for ethnic cleansing based on the implication of ethnic cleansing... but the proposal has a discomforting "because of the implications" vibe, if you know that reference.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethnic-cleansing
attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups
the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous
The Likud party platform calls for the Jewish state’s control over Gaza. Le Monde’s editorial board calls it ethnic cleansing. From the BBC:
Ethnic cleansing is a term developed in the 80s, so it is obviously not defined by events before that. The assertion that Trump is rebuilding if for Gazans to return is… more than fanciful. If Jewish Israelis want to ethnically cleanse Gazans, they should do it themselves — with their own blood, money, and reputation.
Ethnic cleansing is good, actually. You want your places clean, after all.
Multiethnic countries don't work, or don't work for long.
The two countries that will be carrying out the ethnic cleansing have been multiethnic since their inception, though largely of one faith.
America has not been multi-ethnic since its inception.
I think we may be using different definitions. Was pre-1990 South Africa multiethnic under your framework?
But if for some reason the United States doesn't count as a long-term stable multiethnic country, Israel certainly does, as do Brazil, Singapore, Malaysia and Chile.
Singapore isn't even as old as my parents, and neither is Malaysia, and neither is Israel. None of them have survived a single human lifetime.
Chile and Brazil are at least old enough to even bother looking at, but at inception they were not multi-ethnic, either. Chile and Brazil were founded, much like the USA, as former colonies, and made up primarily of people from those home nations.
As nation states are a relatively new phenomenon, I'm afraid most examples wouldn't be able to meet your stringent demands for longevity.
So maybe we should take a wider view. How long did the incredibly multiethnic Roman, Persian, and Ottoman empires last?
Btw, was pre-1990 South Africa a multiethnic country under your definition?
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Enslaved Africans (and indentured servants from, among other places, Ireland) have been here since before the arrival of the Puritans in New England, and only about a decade after the establishment of Jamestown. Even if you exclude the Amerindians (which, fair enough, so do I) it’s simply a fact that a substantial portion of non-Anglo-Saxon people have always been a sizable part of the populace of this country, even if they were not integrated into the political fabric of society.
It's not like I'm ignorant of that fact. I excluded them, just as you did the Indians.
The country itself was very clear that they were excluded, too, when it was founded.
There were non-Anglo ethnicities included in the founding, such as the Dutch. America has been multi-ethnic on the national level for a very long time.
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The key difference is that unlike the Indians — who lived in geographically-distinct territory and with whom colonists were in near-constant explicit military conflict and treaty negotiations — the Africans and indentured Irish lived side-by-side with Americans, interacting daily with them and participating in cultural exchange. (This is especially true of free blacks, who were a non-negligible part of the population of northern states from pretty early on. I don’t think it’s a situation remotely comparable to the Indians.
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I don't think I'd go that far, but the Israel-Palestine issue is at the point that it's probably a good thing if "Ethnic cleansing" stops being a thought terminating cliche. By moving this possibility into the Overton window (still the extreme part of it), Palestinians might start having to reckon with the real possibility that continually starting pointless wars might soon get them punished in a way they seem to care about.
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I am well aware of what the term means, even though those who care to define it can't find mutual agreement.
I think it's absolute bullshit as a concept in general, the arson, murder and jaywalking charges of international law.
I oppose your use of it to describe what, until proven otherwise, is a humanitarian intervention that will likely keep two inimicable foes from tearing out each other's throats, and with the US footing the bill for the repair work instead of confiscating the $3.50 left in Gazan accounts.
We might disagree, but I expect even you think that US peacekeepers would be a preferable alternative in the eyes of the locals, and with a better track record of not doing {all alleged Israeli war crimes}.
It would be funny if this were the first step in a rehabilitation of "population transfers".
Sadly, the attempts to equate two different crimes of differing severity led to the hyperbolic accusations of one and with it the discreditation of the other.
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