\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nthe argument that the arab world is falling apart because of its poorly drawn borders falls apart if you look at borders literally anywhere else on the planet. africa? completely arbitrary. south and southeast asia? drawn at the whims of the colonisers. fucking the united states of america? have you seen what we\u2019ve got going on?
\nif anything the\u00a0\u2018bad borders cause conflict\u2019 argument is just an argument for the legitimacy of ethnic cleansing. nowhere in the world, prior to the introduction of the nation-state, have people of different languages and cultures coexisted such that it would be possible to draw a clean line between them and post some guards on it. europe\u2019s borders are exactly as arbitrary as the borders of the colonial world, in some cases more so; the primary difference is that europeans enthusiastically permitted themselves to carry out mass deportations (western poland) or state repression of minorities (alsace-lorraine) without a great deal of moral compunctions or conqueror\u2019s guilt. the creation of america\u2019s arbitrary borders was concomitant with a long-term project of genocide, erasing from history the people whose very existence could render those borders moot. and even today europeans find themselves putting up barbed-wire fences and running sea patrols to maintain the fictive purity of the nation-state
\nborders are violence, they necessitate large-scale communal violence, but it has nothing to do with the notion of them being \u2018arbitrary\u2019 or \u2018poorly drawn\u2019. attributing this problem to the third world and not the first is a self-serving myopia
\nnow hold up just a second there preacher, how come you just drop \u201c(western poland)\u201d there as if it was self-explanatory? surely you must be referring to the mass resettlement of germans from what became western poland after ww2? or the resettlement of ukrainians from the kresy into that same terrirory? would you say either of these were motivated by\u00a0conqueror\u2019s guilt?
\nlike listen i don\u2019t even disagree with the overall point here, and it puts me in the unenviable position of having to defend post-ww2 resettlement projects (admittedly the cause of a great deal immediate suffering and motivated by stupid ideology about monoethnic states being more desirable and more stable), but really, really, what the fuck
\nwell i think you misread the post because i said there wasn\u2019t any\u00a0\u2018conqueror\u2019s guilt\u2019, that phrase here referring to the sense of feeling bad as a result of doing terrible and inhumane things to people
\nbut also,\u00a0yeah, defending massive ethnic cleansing projects is a totally fucking unenviable position. maybe you should consider not being there
\nwell, no, i don\u2019t feel too terribly bad about the however many hundred thousand ethnic germans forcibly resettled from liberated poland, and that after the bulk of them had already fled westward before the soviet advance, indiscriminately destroying property and infrastructure as they went. many \u2013 but not all of them \u2013 were occupiers, settlers, collaborators, NSDAP members.
\n(notice i am throwing you a bone by saying\u00a0\u201cnot all\u201d; i could fail to mention this and have the upper hand in this argument, because you clearly have no idea what you\u2019re talking about.)
\nany residual\u00a0\u201cconqueror\u2019s\u201d (fuck you) guilt i might feel for the handful of geniunely innocent ethnic germans who got caught up in the millstone of history is counterbalanced by several considerations: one, the reprisals against them would have been much worse had they been allowed to remain; two, and relatedly, the memory of hitler using false claims about the oppression of ethnic germans as a pretext to invade was still very fresh in everyone\u2019s minds, and three, i think in this case the victims of attempted genocide should have a little bit more to say and\u00a0\u201ci don\u2019t want to live next door to a german\u201d would have been, uh, a pretty common sentiment.
\nanyway if you\u2019re going to use the term \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d to refer to the (forcible, fairly indiscriminate, undemocratic and probably immoral \u2013 i am admitting all of those things) resettlement of people responsible for genocide, you have some considering of your own to do. i\u2019m going to stop trying to give you an education in what every child learns in elementary school here, because it\u2019s a waste of time, and clearly you don\u2019t care about the historical details as long as you get to sound woke and righteous. fuck along now.
\nliterally incredible
\n
watching left tumblr bounce against central/east european nationalisms is hilarious
reminds you how Great Patriotic War socialism was experienced as whatever central/east european nationalism and still running on fumes
reminds you how Jew-suppressing Aryan supremacy was experienced as whatever central/east european nationalisms
(reminds you there MUST be collaborationist narratives by which the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was experienced as whatever southeast asian nationalisms and it\u2019s kind of odd you\u2019ve never encountered one)
remember that girl like a year and a half ago that was all about antiquities and… Turkey, was it?