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Post by Dan Dare on May 23, 2023 9:31:14 GMT
Attentive readers may have noticed my usage of the term ‘It’s Hitler’s Revenge’ from time to time in response to questions such as: To what extent do the dramatic post-war demographic changes which really got underway in the late 40s/early 50s, as well as the attendant multiculturalism and the contemporary human-rights culture, owe their genesis to the Holocaust? One school of thought prefers to place the “blame” - although I’m uncertain whether its adherents actually see these developments in general as being blameworthy, or even undesirable, in any real sense - on a natural evolution of the social and economic liberalism that supposedly, was a characteristic feature of western society even well before Dolfy got his DAP member’s badge. I have several points of issue with this argument, but perhaps those will come out later if the discussion develops. In the meantime, it seems to me that the major problem with this hypothesis is that an evolutionary theory of liberalism struggles to explain the dramatic transformation in the attitudes of the managerial elites in western countries towards universal human rights and by extension immigration between say, 1935, and 1955. Something happened during this period that caused the old, traditional attitudes about the superiority of western culture and its endemic racialism to be swept away in a revolutionary fashion. I wonder what that might have been? Clearly the experiences of the US and Europe as source and destination countries for migrants, not to mention the other white settler countries, are very different and should not be underestimated or wished away. There are even significant differences within Europe itself. West Germany and Britain, for example, both started to import people of differing ethnicity during the 1950s in large numbers, but for very different reasons. The booming German economy led to a requirement for additional labour, especially once migration from its eastern neighbour had been effectively halted by the events of 1961. Contrary to popular wisdom, Britain had no such need for imported labour from the Empire during the 1950s; its requirements were being amply met by an annual influx of workers from Ireland and, during the late 40s at least, by Eastern European ex-soldiers and displaced persons. In Britain’s case, however, immigration from the ‘New Commonwealth’ was a post-imperial legacy, a historical accident, in the face of whch successive Labour and Conservative governments were paralysed into inaction. We might ask why that was the case, and an answer will no doubt emerge if this discussion develops along the lines that I expect. If we are interested in establishing a connection between the Third Reich and present-day multiculturalism, what better place to begin than in Germany itself. The refugee influx from former German territory in the East aside (it had largely subsided once the Wall was in place), post-war migration into West Germany began in the 1950s with Gastarbeiter from countries in the Mediterranean. Later on, as the economies of the source countries began to recover in the early-mid 60s, the net had to be cast wider, resulting in substantial number of migrants from North Africa and, above all, Turkey. From the beginning it was understood that labour migration would be a temporary phenomenon and that migrants would return home when no longer required. Some did, but the great majority didn’t. Even after the Gastarbeiter scheme was terminated in 1973 the numbers of migrants from, particularly, Turkey continued to increase. By that time a recession had shaken the economy, the oil shocks, inflation, high unemployment and so on. So why didn’t the Germans just send them all home? The government of the day certainly expected and wanted that to happen and the public just assumed it would. But it didn’t, so why not? In a nutshell, the elected Federal government was trumped by an activist judiciary which skillfully used the provisions of the Constitution bequeathed to the Federal Republic by the Western Allies, and which was constructed to specifically preclude the emergence of another totalitarian regime. In effect, the ‘human rights’ provisions of the Constitution were deployed to prevent the repatriation of unwanted Gastarbeiter as well as to extend to those already resident full(er) civil rights including, crucially for future migration patterns, the right to permanent residence, family reunion and formation.
The following is extracted from a 1998 article by Christian Joppke, entitled Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration, published in World Politics, Vol. 50 No. 2, outlines the unfurling of events in Germany.
So here we have a direct and causal link between the reaction to the excesses of the Third Reich and the contemporary multiculturalism that plagues/enriches* us. I’m sure we can uncover many other such linkages as we go through this. * delete as appropriate |
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Post by Orac on May 23, 2023 10:08:24 GMT
The shift pointed to here seems to be moving from a system in which the elected government has the largest portion of discretion, to one in which the elected government has practically none at all and the judiciary is free (essentially) to rule regardless of the elected government.
It looks like this process was masked to some extent in Germany by a denazification project (ie Germany didn't start with a democracy), but in the UK, it's unclear what excuse or cover is used. It just seemed to happen because our political class weren't bothered by it.
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Post by Dan Dare on May 23, 2023 11:27:34 GMT
In the UK I'd suggest the process began because of complacency and post-imperial delusion on the part of post-war Labour and Conservative government, who had the opportunity to stop it but didn't. Then by the early sixties it was institutionalised as a consequence of the Faustian bargain between Labour and Conservatives to remove race and immigration from party politics.
But this was all was preceded by a step-change in elite attitudes between the late thirties and the late forties precipitated I would claim by reaction to the racial policies of the Third Reich.
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Post by Dan Dare on May 24, 2023 7:42:05 GMT
This is the first forum I have ever been on where threads about Hitler are less popular than threads about quantum computing or China.
Very odd.
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Post by Orac on May 24, 2023 8:55:27 GMT
In the UK I'd suggest the process began because of complacency and post-imperial delusion on the part of post-war Labour and Conservative government, who had the opportunity to stop it but didn't. Then by the early sixties it was institutionalised as a consequence of the Faustian bargain between Labour and Conservatives to remove race and immigration from party politics. But this was all was preceded by a step-change in elite attitudes between the late thirties and the late forties precipitated I would claim by reaction to the racial policies of the Third Reich. Substantial democracy was packed away as being to risky. The notion makes sense. Of course everything is a trade off and the democratic risk you avoid on the swings becomes some unpleasant certainty appearing on the autocratic roundabouts. The folding away of the ability to sack the government creates a giant opportunity for bad faith actors to take that control. Ironically, trying to avoid Nazism is quite likely to mean that a similarly odious destination is a near certainty. I could wax philosophical about risk being an unavoidable part of reality for hours - but i wont bore you lol |
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Post by Dan Dare on May 24, 2023 9:36:04 GMT
Continuing on with the general theme, the following is an extract from a review in The Occidental Quarterly of Kevin Macdonald’s book, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization.
The particular aspect of MacDonald’s work that is discussed here is the unprecedented manner in which people of European descent are not merely passively acquiescing in, but in many cases actively encouraging, their own demographic eclipse in the countries that their ancestors created. Starting with the United States, where the European-descended population will collapse from 90% in 1950 to less than 50% by 2050, that is in a period of less than four generations, by the late 21C Canada and Australasia, as well as a number of the ancient nation-states of Western Europe – the UK in particular - will all, should present trends continue, become places where the founding population is merely one ethnic minority amongst many.
Such a scenario is historically unprecedented. Even Rome, before the Fall, did not experience an ethnic transformation on this scale. Never before has any nation experienced such demographic change unaccompanied by violent invasion; the question for our time is: why is it happening? Why are we unable to resist it? Why have we given up?
Here then is the review:
I offer my own answer to the question, next.
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Post by Dan Dare on May 24, 2023 9:39:38 GMT
The shift pointed to here seems to be moving from a system in which the elected government has the largest portion of discretion, to one in which the elected government has practically none at all and the judiciary is free (essentially) to rule regardless of the elected government. It looks like this process was masked to some extent in Germany by a denazification project (ie Germany didn't start with a democracy), but in the UK, it's unclear what excuse or cover is used. It just seemed to happen because our political class weren't bothered by it. I'll be touching on this later when the subject of the 'post-war liberal idiom' as promoted by the hegemonic United States comes up. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Jun 10, 2023 9:57:43 GMT
Finally got round to adding the coda:
It’s Hitler’s Revenge
My own theory as to why the western liberal democracies are not simply acquiescing in, but actively promoting, a demographic transformation unprecedented since the fall of Rome, borrows in large part from the work of Christian Joppke, a German sociologist who studied under Jürgen Habermas at the University of Frankfurt. It may appear odd that I should give much of the credit for explaining what is going on to someone of such impeccable liberal pedigree, but there we are, credit where it's due.
The two works that I found particularly persuasive and most helpful in understanding the theoretical background to current events were Joppke’s paper Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration, which appeared in the journal World Politics in 1998, and his more recent book Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State.
With that preamble, Joppke offers the following rationale for why liberal states accept unwanted immigration, which all of them do despite what appears to be restrictionist policies and anti-immigration political rhetoric. He makes the rather obvious, but usually forgotten , point that only liberal states are plagued (his word) by unwanted immigration, and that : “… some states, such as the immigrant-receiving states of the oil-producing Middle East, are very efficient at keeping out, or sending back, unwanted immigrants.” We might also note that, in addition, the Asian tiger economies as well as Japan and China have been equally successful in that regard. Joppke, then, proposes the following:
• Western liberal states have implemented self-imposed limits on their own sovereignty, including the capacity to properly control immigration. Joppke notes that ”… The capacity of states to control immigration has not diminished but increased--as every person landing at Schiphol or Sydney airports without a valid entry visa would painfully notice. But for domestic reasons, liberal states are kept from putting this capacity to use.”
• Since WW II in Europe, and since the mid-60s to mid-70s in the white settler countries, liberal states have collectively abandoned the practice of selecting immigrants based on ethnicity in favour of ‘source country universalism’. As Joppke puts it: ”… the universalistic idiom of liberalism prohibits the political elites in liberal states from addressing the ethnic or racial composition of migrant streams.”
• Although, as Joppke states, ”… Under the hegemony of the United States, liberalism has become the dominant Western idiom in the postwar period, indicating a respect for universal human rights and the rule of law,…” it is clear that expression of that idiom has been different in Europe versus the white settler countries, not only in form but also in time. Even within Europe we must distinguish between ‘post-colonial’ immigration (eg Britain, France) and ‘labour-force’ migration (Gastarbeiter in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Benelux).
Joppke puts great emphasis on the internal constraints that liberal states have placed upon themselves, and why these have arisen. He points to a combination of activist judiciaries, client politics (a euphemism for ethnic rent-seeking), and economic imperatives resulting from globalisation as the predominant driving mechanisms.
He downplays the importance of globally-imposed versus locally-imposed constraints, and this is where I feel his analysis is lacking. It does not explain the step-function change in the attitude of the political elites across the West towards migration and citizenship that occurred in to the immediate post-war period. Prior to WW II every western state had an immigration policy that would, were a nationalist faction like the RN, the AfD, Vlaams Belang or the FPÖ to propose such a policy today, be universally condemned as xenophobic and fascist.
Joppke discusses the international human-rights regime which sprang up in the late 1940s, but does not offer any insight into why that should have come into place practically overnight in historical terms, and at that particular moment in time. He does lightly touch on the reason in his concluding remarks, noting that ”… nationalist semantics were delegitimized because of their racist aberrations under Nazism.”
That, in my view, is the missing link in Joppke’s argument.
The reason why liberal states accept unwanted immigration, and the reason why the present-day demographic transformation is occurring, is a direct consequence of, and a reaction to, the racial policies of the Third Reich.
We could, in fact, characterise the entire process as being ‘Hitler’s Revenge’.
Somewhere, up above or down below, depending on your individual Weltanschauung, der Chef is surveying all these goings-on and declaiming bitterly “Bloody fools! I told them what would happen if we let them win. Now look what’s happening. Serves them bloody-well right!”
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Post by sheepy on Jun 10, 2023 17:48:33 GMT
In the UK I'd suggest the process began because of complacency and post-imperial delusion on the part of post-war Labour and Conservative government, who had the opportunity to stop it but didn't. Then by the early sixties it was institutionalised as a consequence of the Faustian bargain between Labour and Conservatives to remove race and immigration from party politics. But this was all was preceded by a step-change in elite attitudes between the late thirties and the late forties precipitated I would claim by reaction to the racial policies of the Third Reich. Substantial democracy was packed away as being to risky. The notion makes sense. Of course everything is a trade off and the democratic risk you avoid on the swings becomes some unpleasant certainty appearing on the autocratic roundabouts. The folding away of the ability to sack the government creates a giant opportunity for bad faith actors to take that control. Ironically, trying to avoid Nazism is quite likely to mean that a similarly odious destination is a near certainty. I could wax philosophical about risk being an unavoidable part of reality for hours - but i wont bore you lol Dan puts this up on every forum he has been on, unless Hitler foresaw socialist central turning fascist which he didn't it might have been. |
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Post by sheepy on Jun 10, 2023 18:11:56 GMT
On the other hand, Winston Churchill did and they hate him for it.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 17, 2023 15:44:04 GMT
This is the first forum I have ever been on where threads about Hitler are less popular than threads about quantum computing or China. Very odd. I know a lot about the Third Reich, having studied it for most of my life. Any causal link between it and the growth of liberalism is reactive rather than pro-active. By that I mean most western powers were so horrified by what the Third Reich had done, that there tended to be a reaction against what it stood for. Racism did not suddenly disappear in the west - far from it - but it was no longer considered mainstream in the intellectual world and it was increasingly felt that racist thinking - far from being justified by invoking ethnic, cultural, intellectual, or racial superiority - was actually a sign of moral and intellectual primitiveness. Racial assumptions - taken for granted throughout the west before the war - were notably on the defensive after it and have been ever since. And this primarily because Nazi Germany showed us all where such thinking could potentially lead. There thus came into existence throughout the west in the immediate postwar period a desire to enshrine human rights in law everywhere so that such horrors could never happen in the west again. It was not entirely successful - the events in the former Yugoslavia in the 90s demonstrate that. But it is in response to the demonstrated evils of Nazi Germany that a raft of human rights legislation came into existence in the decades that followed. And governments no longer wishing to abide by some of these today are falling foul of the courts. If they wish to do certain things they might need to unpick some of the human rights legislation. But they need to be careful and bear in mind why such legislation was brought into existence in the first place. The courts after all cannot overrule governments accept in terms of forcing them to adhere to the laws which earlier governments placed on the statute books. Governments cannot simply defy laws. If they don't want to abide by them they need to repeal or amend them by act of parliament. That is what the rule of law entails To call this reaction "Hitler's revenge" is utterly misguided though. Because it tends to suggest conscious action to create the situation by Hitler which of course is nonsense. What happened in the west after the war was not something set in train by Hitler as an act of revenge, but something done by the western world of its own free will after his demise as a reaction against the horrors he perpetrated, and in an attempt to ensure they could never be repeated. So to call that Hitler's revenge is an intellectual sleight of hand because it attempts to prejudge it as another evil intrinsic to the Third Reich rather than a highly moral reaction against it. If you can link human rights laws to the Third Reich it makes it easier to attack it, but such a direct linkage in terms of conscious endeavour on Hitler's part simply does not exist. To argue otherwise is to posit the notion that Hitler was a champion of human rights which is clearly untrue. It is thus the framing of the question as "Hitler's revenge" that probably deters many from engaging with the topic. |
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Post by walterpaisley on Jun 17, 2023 16:00:16 GMT
Dan puts this up on every forum he has been on.. He does. Finds a way of proclaiming "See? Hitler had the right idea after all!" Backs it up with lengthy quotes from anti semitic publications ("Occidental Quarterly", et al). Definitely NOT a nazi. At all... |
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Post by The Squeezed Middle on Jun 17, 2023 16:03:16 GMT
In the UK I'd suggest the process began because of complacency and post-imperial delusion on the part of post-war Labour and Conservative government, who had the opportunity to stop it but didn't. Then by the early sixties it was institutionalised as a consequence of the Faustian bargain between Labour and Conservatives to remove race and immigration from party politics. But this was all was preceded by a step-change in elite attitudes between the late thirties and the late forties precipitated I would claim by reaction to the racial policies of the Third Reich. Substantial democracy was packed away as being to risky. The notion makes sense. Of course everything is a trade off and the democratic risk you avoid on the swings becomes some unpleasant certainty appearing on the autocratic roundabouts. The folding away of the ability to sack the government creates a giant opportunity for bad faith actors to take that control. Ironically, trying to avoid Nazism is quite likely to mean that a similarly odious destination is a near certainty. I could wax philosophical about risk being an unavoidable part of reality for hours - but i wont bore you lol I think that we absolutely are marching blindly towards a fascist dictatorship. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Jun 17, 2023 16:03:24 GMT
On reflection, Hitlers Schadenfreude might have been a better choice given the widespread lack of appreciation for irony these days.
To characterise what I actually wrote as a 'conscious endeavour on Hitler's part' is beyond parody even for a card-carrying liberal leftie.
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Post by The Squeezed Middle on Jun 17, 2023 16:04:04 GMT
Dan puts this up on every forum he has been on.. He does. Finds a way of proclaiming "See? Hitler had the right idea after all!" Backs it up with lengthy quotes from anti semitic publications ("Occidental Quarterly", et al). Definitely NOT a nazi. At all...
The irony!  |
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