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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   35152 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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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