Thanks for this. Very interesting. It reinforces my belief that the 'populist tide' rhetoric in Europe is overblown. Nominally right-wing governments across the continent, including recently elected ones including parties with very strong rhetoric on immigration, have yet to make any dent in either illegal or legal numbers. And I don't think they will. The demographic imbalance (surging populations in the developing world, shrinking ones in Europe), plus the short-term economic incentives, plus ponzi-scheme welfare states, plus huge pressure from the judicial/academic/NGO complex, mean that any halt to the flows will be temporary.
I must admit, the bit about feeling sorry for the woman who organised the anti-Ukrainian protest that nobody came to made me laugh. And the picture of her was even funnier/sadder. Imagine not only organising such a non-event but going ahead and talking into a microphone to an empty square! And then you see the individual in her coat, her shoes with her well-groomed ponytail. She schleppt that damn loud speaker all that way. Then ultimately the disappointment and embarrassment at being the only person there. Her cause might well have been uncharitable but even my hard heart goes out to her. Had she been a middle-aged man though I suspect I would have felt different.
Ed, please can you help? I read (possibly in your substack) about a Dutch academic who drew distinctions between truth and knowledge, wisdom and folly etc. during the 1990’s. His point being that before mass education the number of know it all types were limited.... truth exists in the abstract but here on earth we (should) make do. Any idea?
Ok this is extreme nitpicking on my part but there's a handful of Nazi war criminals who are still with us, believe it or not. They just convicted Irmgard Furchner a year ago in what will probably be the last trial. And there are like three others that are unfit to stand trial, can't be extradited, etc.
Plus there are tons of non-criminal Nazis (deemed functionaries rather than crossing the line into war criminals by the German gvt) who are still alive.
Anyway, my big problem with multiculturalism is that it's a tedious monoculture that is exactly the same wherever it arises, and anything locally distinct and interesting gets replaced by not just multiculturalism but people talking about multiculturalism. And of course this leads to what "Lomez" has eloquently termed "ghey race communism" whereby for example in a TV program about say British history, instead of talking about interesting things that actually happened in British history, blasts you with insomnia-curing propagandistic crapola about how medieval England was full of sub-Saharan Africans because someone is described as "swarthy" in some old manuscript. And metropolitan liberals look at the imperial metropole, AKA the USA, and decide to import the spiritual experience of America's black liberation theology to whereover they live so they can experience it themselves, using the Africans that have been imported for labor purposes as vessels for it. Psychopathically ambitious members of the latter demo rise to the occasion, penning books about their own "oppression" in their new countries that leads to their endless feting by the libs. And the metropolitan libs aren't satisfied with having it in their urban centers; they look at localities where it hasn't spread, deem this unacceptable, and work to push it on the hapless locals. Just one giant tedious inescapable blob of American-ness.
Everything is going to be like this for the rest of our lives.
Thanks Ed, this makes a lot of sense. Those Nazi reparation claims could well just be posturing, if you're arguing about whether or not Germany is responsible for what the Nazis did, then Germany is on the back foot when it comes to talking about immigration and liberalisation.
All the ‘far-right extremists 50 and 60 years ago along with Enoch Powell were entirely correct. They were of course dismissed by the liberal-left and ‘responsible conservatives’ at the time. Anyone with brains and common sense can’t look at London today and not understand these deeply maligned figures from our not so distant past were absolutely spot-on about the problem and what would likely transpire unless something were done to halt and reverse it.
An unsolvable problem a bit like “The Sorcerers Apprentice” or the cat lady down the street. Leftists have been sold the idea they can help everyone to a good life. Businessman have convinced us we need eternal growth for which we need cheap workers. Like the cat lady we will soon be overrun with more mouths than we can feed or house. Combine that with people who don’t want the freedom (religious or speech or…) that comes with their new location to the people already living there who now cannot find jobs that pay for the high cost of living in a socialized civilization and you get conflict.
Leftists are not remotely interested in everyone having a good life because they are not, in my limited experience, at least, especially generous people.
They are also shortsighted here because the future they are ushering in will obviously destroy their world view first
Worth noting that Germany's inexplicably large 'central Asian' population is primarily ethnic Germans who claimed citizenship after the fall of the USSR.
Their reporting rules don't note ethnicity, and classifies someone as of foreign extraction if they have a parent who either migrated to Germany or was born with a foreign passport.
Accounting for these German 'foreigners' reveals Germany to be a much more homogenous country than a quick glance at the stats suggests.
Using the same definition, around 4/10 babies born in England are of foreign extraction (and their parents aren't returning Brits).
I'm not sure that sort of language is helpful to be honest, and certainly alienates most people (including me).
I don't view it as the death of a race, it just means people's lives getting less happy and peaceful. States with ethnic super-majorities have huge advantages over others.
The British authorities right now, in London and the FA, can't even bring themselves to make simple gestures of humanity to Israeli victims of terrorism because of a genuine fear of violence by 'communities', as they put it. I wrote in a previous post how this is not a problem in Hungary, and the reason why is considered too distasteful for people to say.
The Great Replacement which is dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theory’ or ‘far-right trope’ is a glaring reality we can readily observe in real time. We can see the monumental demographic changes and unwelcome and dangerous environments these changes create for European and derived peoples. It’s time to call a spade and a spade here. Demography is always destiny.
And halting and reversing immigration. We also need to make Remigration a thing. Radical demographic change usually is ‘a zero-sum game’ for the group being replaced and displaced. It isn’t rocket science, as they’d say in America.
Yet that is exactly what is occurring. Greater numbers of alien peoples means less Europeans. Several regimes such as the ones in Germany, Sweden, and Ireland, seem hell-bent on outright replacing their native populations with foreign immigrants. I’d say sticking one’s head in the sand to be a good system liberal or ‘responsible conservative’ (useless people who ‘conserve’ nothing) is far worse than being condemned by globalists, leftists, or do-nothing ‘center-rightists’ as ‘hateful and paranoid.’
I don’t know about ‘killing us all’ though we all know certain groups commit disproportionate amounts of violent crime, especially rape/sexual assault, robbery, and murder. Denial of these obvious realities is pretty silly. If tens of millions of non-European migrants gate-crashing Europe and fundamentally altering traditional demography and culture, and rendering sections of cities throughout Britain and Western/Northern Europe almost unrecognizable compared to a generation or two ago doesn’t qualify as ‘replacement,’ I don’t know what does. Political and economic systems come and go but if you replace a population of a given society you change its character or nature entirely and in many cases, beyond recognition.
You conveniently ignore triumphal crowing in mainstream media over changing demographics while at the same time maligning those aware or actively resisting it politically and culturally as examples of ‘hatred and paranoia. Our ruling elites and their media are experts in gaslighting techniques.
Lots of great detail which I'm just going to ignore with this:
And upstream of all of it
Liberalising sexual relations (aka self gratification) leads to men failing to commit which leads to low birth rates which leads to unhappy women (and unhappy men) which leads to wokeism (as cope) which leads to increasingly open borders which become increasingly necessary because there are insufficient young to support the old and take the culture and country forward.
It feels as if American progressive values are on an inexorable march through the West and perhaps Asia one day.
What it is about progressive beliefs that is so seductive to traditional societies is beyond me, but my guess is a necessary precondition was the decline of Christian belief and discrediting of the Catholic Church.
At this point they are not really values at all but rather ways in which a dominant but largely pointless bureaucratic structure can remain empowered by making everything complicated and arcane so it must be administered by them as experts. It is also in decline already (I think) and as standards of living drop (being something to which the bureaucracy has no answer) the pressure on it will mount but probably not before huge damage is wrought
Demography may well be destiny, and immigration certainly does beget more immigration - but western governments need to make successful integration the foremost goal, rather than so called ‘vibrant’ multiculturalism. People will still come, politicians of all colours will still enable this, but good integration could head much of the downside off at the pass. Otherwise all western societies will end up considerably more ‘vibrant’ than is comfortable or even tolerable.
A good piece, although I would say that nowhere the Polish attitude of “not concerning themselves with making friends” is more evident than in its mishandling of relations with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union (no, it is not all Putin’s fault, although he played his sinister part). And just in case: the “weight of history” argument does not seem all that convincing to me considering that Moscow and Budapest have good relations despite things like, say, the Russian intervention during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-1849, not to mention the Soviet period. It’s ultimately about the unwillingness of elites on both sides of the Russian-Polish border here and now.
He was hugely feted in the west, and even came to stay in England but had to move because house prices were too high!
I wrote a while back about tsarist Russia's tolerant and benign rule of Finland and the German Balts compared to its attitude to Poland after 1863, although I now write so much I've forgotten where.
True about the Russian-Polish history being especially bitter, although the UK and the Republic of Ireland manage to keep things civil and peaceful despite the sordid history (obviously, it’s more complicated, but I would say that the level of vitriol is much lower than in the Russo-Polish relations, although you are welcome to prove me wrong). Past exerts a powerful gravitational pull but it’s up to us to decide how we deal with it.
As an aside, one of my favorite missed opportunities is when we almost had a Polish czar near the end of the Time of Troubles. I think this could have led to something close to an English-style limited monarchy in Russia and also made things better for Poland in the long run. But, alas, the stupidity of Sigismund III robbed us of this chance.
the analogy with England-Ireland is a good one imo. Irish people are *very* hostile to Russia right now, and part of it is obviously projection. It's why I don't doubt the Ukrainian war has some support in Russia, Crimea being their Six Counties so to speak.
Well, my rule of thumb is that 10-15% of people are for the war and 10-15% are against it, everyone else is kind of in-between. I think in general people want this to be over regardless of their attitude toward Ukraine.
Great to see Tusk and the Polish opposition win the election. Let’s just hope Orban will be out in the next few years. If you have any doubts as to whether he is a bad egg, check out the photos of him shaking hands with Putin on Tuesday this week in Beijing.
Thanks for this. Very interesting. It reinforces my belief that the 'populist tide' rhetoric in Europe is overblown. Nominally right-wing governments across the continent, including recently elected ones including parties with very strong rhetoric on immigration, have yet to make any dent in either illegal or legal numbers. And I don't think they will. The demographic imbalance (surging populations in the developing world, shrinking ones in Europe), plus the short-term economic incentives, plus ponzi-scheme welfare states, plus huge pressure from the judicial/academic/NGO complex, mean that any halt to the flows will be temporary.
I must admit, the bit about feeling sorry for the woman who organised the anti-Ukrainian protest that nobody came to made me laugh. And the picture of her was even funnier/sadder. Imagine not only organising such a non-event but going ahead and talking into a microphone to an empty square! And then you see the individual in her coat, her shoes with her well-groomed ponytail. She schleppt that damn loud speaker all that way. Then ultimately the disappointment and embarrassment at being the only person there. Her cause might well have been uncharitable but even my hard heart goes out to her. Had she been a middle-aged man though I suspect I would have felt different.
Ed, please can you help? I read (possibly in your substack) about a Dutch academic who drew distinctions between truth and knowledge, wisdom and folly etc. during the 1990’s. His point being that before mass education the number of know it all types were limited.... truth exists in the abstract but here on earth we (should) make do. Any idea?
I can't remember. I can tweet it asking people if you like?
Yes please, thanks
"no one alive had any hand in"
Ok this is extreme nitpicking on my part but there's a handful of Nazi war criminals who are still with us, believe it or not. They just convicted Irmgard Furchner a year ago in what will probably be the last trial. And there are like three others that are unfit to stand trial, can't be extradited, etc.
Plus there are tons of non-criminal Nazis (deemed functionaries rather than crossing the line into war criminals by the German gvt) who are still alive.
Anyway, my big problem with multiculturalism is that it's a tedious monoculture that is exactly the same wherever it arises, and anything locally distinct and interesting gets replaced by not just multiculturalism but people talking about multiculturalism. And of course this leads to what "Lomez" has eloquently termed "ghey race communism" whereby for example in a TV program about say British history, instead of talking about interesting things that actually happened in British history, blasts you with insomnia-curing propagandistic crapola about how medieval England was full of sub-Saharan Africans because someone is described as "swarthy" in some old manuscript. And metropolitan liberals look at the imperial metropole, AKA the USA, and decide to import the spiritual experience of America's black liberation theology to whereover they live so they can experience it themselves, using the Africans that have been imported for labor purposes as vessels for it. Psychopathically ambitious members of the latter demo rise to the occasion, penning books about their own "oppression" in their new countries that leads to their endless feting by the libs. And the metropolitan libs aren't satisfied with having it in their urban centers; they look at localities where it hasn't spread, deem this unacceptable, and work to push it on the hapless locals. Just one giant tedious inescapable blob of American-ness.
Everything is going to be like this for the rest of our lives.
<flees to Japan>
A huge issue, as you say, is that it can’t be allowed to develop organically for fear of all hell breaking loose. A miserable state of affairs really.
Thanks Ed, this makes a lot of sense. Those Nazi reparation claims could well just be posturing, if you're arguing about whether or not Germany is responsible for what the Nazis did, then Germany is on the back foot when it comes to talking about immigration and liberalisation.
Yeah I take it as a bargaining chip, although apparently some take it seriously.
All the ‘far-right extremists 50 and 60 years ago along with Enoch Powell were entirely correct. They were of course dismissed by the liberal-left and ‘responsible conservatives’ at the time. Anyone with brains and common sense can’t look at London today and not understand these deeply maligned figures from our not so distant past were absolutely spot-on about the problem and what would likely transpire unless something were done to halt and reverse it.
An unsolvable problem a bit like “The Sorcerers Apprentice” or the cat lady down the street. Leftists have been sold the idea they can help everyone to a good life. Businessman have convinced us we need eternal growth for which we need cheap workers. Like the cat lady we will soon be overrun with more mouths than we can feed or house. Combine that with people who don’t want the freedom (religious or speech or…) that comes with their new location to the people already living there who now cannot find jobs that pay for the high cost of living in a socialized civilization and you get conflict.
Leftists are not remotely interested in everyone having a good life because they are not, in my limited experience, at least, especially generous people.
They are also shortsighted here because the future they are ushering in will obviously destroy their world view first
Worth noting that Germany's inexplicably large 'central Asian' population is primarily ethnic Germans who claimed citizenship after the fall of the USSR.
Their reporting rules don't note ethnicity, and classifies someone as of foreign extraction if they have a parent who either migrated to Germany or was born with a foreign passport.
Accounting for these German 'foreigners' reveals Germany to be a much more homogenous country than a quick glance at the stats suggests.
Using the same definition, around 4/10 babies born in England are of foreign extraction (and their parents aren't returning Brits).
https://www.dw.com/en/russia-hopes-to-lure-back-ethnic-germans/a-2772792
This will truly be the death of the white race if not halted and reversed.
I'm not sure that sort of language is helpful to be honest, and certainly alienates most people (including me).
I don't view it as the death of a race, it just means people's lives getting less happy and peaceful. States with ethnic super-majorities have huge advantages over others.
The British authorities right now, in London and the FA, can't even bring themselves to make simple gestures of humanity to Israeli victims of terrorism because of a genuine fear of violence by 'communities', as they put it. I wrote in a previous post how this is not a problem in Hungary, and the reason why is considered too distasteful for people to say.
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/where-are-jews-safest-in-europe
The Great Replacement which is dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theory’ or ‘far-right trope’ is a glaring reality we can readily observe in real time. We can see the monumental demographic changes and unwelcome and dangerous environments these changes create for European and derived peoples. It’s time to call a spade and a spade here. Demography is always destiny.
An overly zero sum vision is never worth saving. And Europe’s demographic issues largely start and stop with its exponentially declining birth rate
And halting and reversing immigration. We also need to make Remigration a thing. Radical demographic change usually is ‘a zero-sum game’ for the group being replaced and displaced. It isn’t rocket science, as they’d say in America.
Yes, there is a lot of immigration into Europe, but there is no conspiracy to ‘replace’ the white race in Europe.
Come on - ‘replace’!
This is a weasel word as bad as the woke left saying ‘assigning’ gender at birth, or biological sex being a ‘spectrum’.
So yes, the great replacement theory is a paranoid, hateful conspiracy theory.
Yet that is exactly what is occurring. Greater numbers of alien peoples means less Europeans. Several regimes such as the ones in Germany, Sweden, and Ireland, seem hell-bent on outright replacing their native populations with foreign immigrants. I’d say sticking one’s head in the sand to be a good system liberal or ‘responsible conservative’ (useless people who ‘conserve’ nothing) is far worse than being condemned by globalists, leftists, or do-nothing ‘center-rightists’ as ‘hateful and paranoid.’
What, they are going to kill us off and replace us? Nonsense.
I don’t know about ‘killing us all’ though we all know certain groups commit disproportionate amounts of violent crime, especially rape/sexual assault, robbery, and murder. Denial of these obvious realities is pretty silly. If tens of millions of non-European migrants gate-crashing Europe and fundamentally altering traditional demography and culture, and rendering sections of cities throughout Britain and Western/Northern Europe almost unrecognizable compared to a generation or two ago doesn’t qualify as ‘replacement,’ I don’t know what does. Political and economic systems come and go but if you replace a population of a given society you change its character or nature entirely and in many cases, beyond recognition.
You conveniently ignore triumphal crowing in mainstream media over changing demographics while at the same time maligning those aware or actively resisting it politically and culturally as examples of ‘hatred and paranoia. Our ruling elites and their media are experts in gaslighting techniques.
Lots of great detail which I'm just going to ignore with this:
And upstream of all of it
Liberalising sexual relations (aka self gratification) leads to men failing to commit which leads to low birth rates which leads to unhappy women (and unhappy men) which leads to wokeism (as cope) which leads to increasingly open borders which become increasingly necessary because there are insufficient young to support the old and take the culture and country forward.
A great piece, Ed to help put the upcoming Polish elections in context.
thank you, Melissa!
It feels as if American progressive values are on an inexorable march through the West and perhaps Asia one day.
What it is about progressive beliefs that is so seductive to traditional societies is beyond me, but my guess is a necessary precondition was the decline of Christian belief and discrediting of the Catholic Church.
At this point they are not really values at all but rather ways in which a dominant but largely pointless bureaucratic structure can remain empowered by making everything complicated and arcane so it must be administered by them as experts. It is also in decline already (I think) and as standards of living drop (being something to which the bureaucracy has no answer) the pressure on it will mount but probably not before huge damage is wrought
Demography may well be destiny, and immigration certainly does beget more immigration - but western governments need to make successful integration the foremost goal, rather than so called ‘vibrant’ multiculturalism. People will still come, politicians of all colours will still enable this, but good integration could head much of the downside off at the pass. Otherwise all western societies will end up considerably more ‘vibrant’ than is comfortable or even tolerable.
You can’t ‘integrate’ what can’t be integrated to begin with. Remigration in stages is a far better solution for all concerned.
A good piece, although I would say that nowhere the Polish attitude of “not concerning themselves with making friends” is more evident than in its mishandling of relations with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union (no, it is not all Putin’s fault, although he played his sinister part). And just in case: the “weight of history” argument does not seem all that convincing to me considering that Moscow and Budapest have good relations despite things like, say, the Russian intervention during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-1849, not to mention the Soviet period. It’s ultimately about the unwillingness of elites on both sides of the Russian-Polish border here and now.
If someone is interested there is a good Carnegie article about how this divide could be potentially overcome https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/85115
Russia's history with Poland is far more bitter than with Hungary though?
There seemed quite interesting parallels between Zelensky and Lajos Kossuth when I read that Habsburg book recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lajos_Kossuth
He was hugely feted in the west, and even came to stay in England but had to move because house prices were too high!
I wrote a while back about tsarist Russia's tolerant and benign rule of Finland and the German Balts compared to its attitude to Poland after 1863, although I now write so much I've forgotten where.
True about the Russian-Polish history being especially bitter, although the UK and the Republic of Ireland manage to keep things civil and peaceful despite the sordid history (obviously, it’s more complicated, but I would say that the level of vitriol is much lower than in the Russo-Polish relations, although you are welcome to prove me wrong). Past exerts a powerful gravitational pull but it’s up to us to decide how we deal with it.
As an aside, one of my favorite missed opportunities is when we almost had a Polish czar near the end of the Time of Troubles. I think this could have led to something close to an English-style limited monarchy in Russia and also made things better for Poland in the long run. But, alas, the stupidity of Sigismund III robbed us of this chance.
the analogy with England-Ireland is a good one imo. Irish people are *very* hostile to Russia right now, and part of it is obviously projection. It's why I don't doubt the Ukrainian war has some support in Russia, Crimea being their Six Counties so to speak.
Well, my rule of thumb is that 10-15% of people are for the war and 10-15% are against it, everyone else is kind of in-between. I think in general people want this to be over regardless of their attitude toward Ukraine.
Great to see Tusk and the Polish opposition win the election. Let’s just hope Orban will be out in the next few years. If you have any doubts as to whether he is a bad egg, check out the photos of him shaking hands with Putin on Tuesday this week in Beijing.
Having an event you might wish to participate in