Today Elon Musk tweeted out ‘demographics is destiny’. This, of course, was the mantra of the Alt Right in its 1.0 version between 2014 and 2017. To be clear, Musk does not mean it in the Alt Right sense, he means it in the sense of total population. He believes that population needs to keep growing; I think he’s wrong. The Alt Right 1.0, and many people who remain from that milieu, believe that racial percentages will dictate the fates of their nations. For example, that because the white population is below birth replacement and immigrant populations are above birth replacement, the destiny of their nations is something like white genocide unless something is done. Again, I believe they are wrong, at least in this sense. This will likely be a shock to most readers, who I imagine believe that ‘demographics are destiny’ in either the Musk version or in the Alt Right version, or both. Musk’s argument is about population growth as opposed to depopulation; this will have to wait for another article because here I wish to explain why I disagree with the Alt Right 1.0 thesis.
The Nazis were actually a lot more popular among German ethnic minorities abroad than they ever were in Germany proper. The highest vote share the Nazis achieved inside Germany was 37%. In the last free election of the Weimar Republic, that Nazi vote share was already falling. But Germans abroad, in the Sudetenland and Danzig, regularly voted over 85% Nazi in local elections. It was partly because of the Nazi weaponisation of ethnic minorities that, at Potsdam in 1945, the Allies agreed to expel all 12.5 million Germans living east of the Reich, and to make the nations of Eastern Europe as ethnically homogenous as possible. That’s right. In 1945, operating in near mode, the victors of WW2 decided that the best defence against any future Nazi revival was ethnic homogeneity.
“When push comes to shove, every migrant has some idea of where they would go should the shit hit the fan: back to their homelands. The notion that peoples who self-identify as Indian could never go back to India, for example, is nonsensical. They can and would and will when the time comes.”
I have doubts about this. Everyone of these groups have a interest in keeping their plunder and would probably fight for it against an initial wave of pushback, like they did to powel.
The issue here is mixed race peoples. Thus, genetic dilution into the English from non-European groups. Where do they go?
Also, British whites are projected to be 1/3 by the end of the century. Whereas the examples you explained were peoples who had majority ethnic states which they could return too.
This reminds me of a magnificent passage from Zhuangzi—
"The people have their constant inborn nature. To weave for their clothing, to till for their food - this is the Virtue they share. They are one in it and not partisan, and it is called the Emancipation of Heaven. Therefore in a time of Perfect Virtue the gait of men is slow and ambling; their gaze is steady and mild. In such an age mountains have no paths or trails, lakes no boats or bridges. The ten thousand things live species by species, one group settled close to another. Birds and beasts form their flocks and herds, grass and trees grow to fullest height. So it happens that you can tie a cord to the birds and beasts and lead them about, or bend down the limb and peer into the nest of the crow and the magpie. In this age of Perfect Virtue men live the same as birds and beasts, group themselves side by side with the ten thousand things. Who then knows anything about "gentleman" or "petty man"? Dull and un unwitting, men have no wisdom; thus their Virtue does not depart from them. Dull and unwitting, they have no desire; this is called uncarved simplicity. In uncarved simplicity the people attain their true nature."
The reason that the multiethnic utopia doesn't work is that, quite simply, people don't want it. The vast majority of people have neither the care nor the energy required to overcome the ethnic divide. It's a case of trying to compel nature to be "more perfect" than it wants to be. At the end of the day people, as Zhuangzi describes, settle down into their own pastures.
"1.3 million Germans back to Germany from Poland" probably means from within the pre-WW2 borders of Poland and doesn't include Silesia and East Prussia.
I can’t immediately think of one book to recommend. I’ve been reading about the lands between Germany and Russia for some time. I’ll have a think…
A lot of “antifascists” like Gary Lineker are so determined to retcon 2023 onto the past, they wind up having some really odd ideas about history. They seem to think the Nazis came to power in 1933 because large numbers of Jews, Slavs and Roma were immigrating into Germany in small boats and there was some kind of anti-migrant backlash against their arrival. In reality, Jews had been living in Germany since at least the middle ages; they weren’t recent arrivals. Hitler played into and amped up a historic anti-Jewish sentiment which was already hundreds of years old, exemplified by Martin Luther’s “On The Jews And Their Lies”, written in 1543. But mass immigration into Germany really wasn’t a hot issue in 1933.
What Hitler did a lot was to use the existence of German ethnic minorities elsewhere, such as in Czechoslovakia and Danzig/Gdansk, to justify invading those countries. Try to imagine Erdogan invading Germany in order to protect the Turkish minority there. That’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s far better than Lineker’s.
Once the Nazis conquered Poland, they actively encouraged Germans from the east to immigrate and settle there en masse, evicting Poles at gunpoint from their ancestral farms to make way for the migrants. I don’t know how Gary Lineker would fit that fact into his narrative. Would he view the benighted Poles as racist if they objected to such German immigration? I hope not.
Slightly outside the timeframe you mentioned but in 1922 Greece and Turkey exchanged 1.2 million Christians living in Turkey for 400 thousand Muslims living in Greece.
People who live in egypt currently are not egyptians by blood, rather they are arabs. Same goes for the people who live in current turkey (they are not greek, rather turkish/arabic). When it comes to the ancient world, then we can state the conquest of gaul by ceasar as a demographic shift, where ceasar killed around 2 million gauls, and later once the province was roman it became majority roman (after-conquest settlements). when it comes to the modern times we can describe the situation in america, where white men has replaced a indian men, or in australia (aborigines replaced by a foreigners).
The Soviet Union forced the Poles to migrate westward, giving up much of their ancestral land in modern day Belarus and Ukraine. Germans were forced out of lands that were ancestral enough to be a casus belli in 1939. The newly Polish land in Silesia, areas that had been cultural Venn diagrams, had entire histories invented to provide justification for this forced mass migration. Gregor Thum's book "Uprooted" is an excellent source on this topic.
Poland's national/ethnic homogeneity isn't necessarily a natural one--that is, if you take their empire building into account. Life in prewar Poland was certainly multiethnic in urban centers, and had been so for centuries. Sure, it wasn't always peaceful, but self-segregation and freedom of association went a long way. David Frick's book on the topic, "Kith, Kin, and Strangers" certainly has a lot of meaty food for thought on the topic. It was actually really formative for me in understanding how ethnicities naturally behave in multiethnic urban settings. Note that I'm not defending modern day urban hellholes.
What would be done with all the multiethnic people who identify strongly with the nation of their birth? People who don't physically resemble the rest of their community? As "white-adjacent" mixed men, you and I share a phenotype. I imagine it would be different for myself in America, but what about for you? Will you choose to move to Iran if people don't take you for part of their nation in Wales? To clarify, is your piece specifically about unassimilated foreigners, as opposed to second or third generation children of those foreigners?
Finally, yes. The migrant issue is minor. Once the empire collapses and the west descends into chaos with plummeting living standards, an end to welfare and the cities truly become slums (ie, within the next 5 years), the migrants will migrate.
If they are to be drafted to march into a land war in Russia, they will migrate even faster.
Because none of them feel any love for their current homelands. They came for the money, and once the money is gone they will leave, in millions.
Which will help cushion the blow for the indigenous pops, as the new, much more narrow demographics will push up wages, collapse the cost of housing and open up resources for a future comeback built upon production and not a late imperial consumer economy.
One of the most encouraging things I've read for years. I honestly don't care if I'm poorer, I just want the foreigners out of Britain. They can squawk about how they're British all day long but we all know it's a lie. The sad thing is the terrible cost of those movements: Partition wasn't pretty. That being said I don't care about the cost as long as they bear it and not us.
"The thesis of my book, The Populist Delusion (2022, buy it now, etc), is that the organised minority are the decisive factor in any society."
The minority are the decisive factor, but what is the choice they decide between? If the majority becomes a group with distinctly different values from you, then all the options they give you to decide between may be completely alien to your values. It is fine to say that, if you find yourself in the minority, you will be able to make yourself the decisive wedge between the competing ideas debated among the majority. But if the two ideas being debated are whether infidels should have their hand cut off or their tongue cut out, your wedge victory is pretty meaningless.
I guess the hope is that, when the group with alien values becomes the majority, they will be infected with the same meaninglessness that liberalism and democracy long ago inflicted on your own group when you were the majority. They will now find themselves intellectually handcuffed into giving you the same tools to tear them down that you once handed them to tear you down with.
I think you might be missing a deeper point. If Japan were to become 40% Somali, would it remain Japanese? Would it feel like home for the Japanese people? Would they trust one another? Would representative politics remain meaningful? Perhaps demography is secondary to power politics, but in a Ciceronian view of the republic, the common interest, it's paramount. It determines that ties that bound us together and allow us to function as a nation.
The Nazis were actually a lot more popular among German ethnic minorities abroad than they ever were in Germany proper. The highest vote share the Nazis achieved inside Germany was 37%. In the last free election of the Weimar Republic, that Nazi vote share was already falling. But Germans abroad, in the Sudetenland and Danzig, regularly voted over 85% Nazi in local elections. It was partly because of the Nazi weaponisation of ethnic minorities that, at Potsdam in 1945, the Allies agreed to expel all 12.5 million Germans living east of the Reich, and to make the nations of Eastern Europe as ethnically homogenous as possible. That’s right. In 1945, operating in near mode, the victors of WW2 decided that the best defence against any future Nazi revival was ethnic homogeneity.
I felt more English living abroad.
The act of migration has an impact on the mind.
You yearn for home.
I would be interested in your perspective on this desire for home which all migrants feel.
“When push comes to shove, every migrant has some idea of where they would go should the shit hit the fan: back to their homelands. The notion that peoples who self-identify as Indian could never go back to India, for example, is nonsensical. They can and would and will when the time comes.”
I have doubts about this. Everyone of these groups have a interest in keeping their plunder and would probably fight for it against an initial wave of pushback, like they did to powel.
The issue here is mixed race peoples. Thus, genetic dilution into the English from non-European groups. Where do they go?
Also, British whites are projected to be 1/3 by the end of the century. Whereas the examples you explained were peoples who had majority ethnic states which they could return too.
This reminds me of a magnificent passage from Zhuangzi—
"The people have their constant inborn nature. To weave for their clothing, to till for their food - this is the Virtue they share. They are one in it and not partisan, and it is called the Emancipation of Heaven. Therefore in a time of Perfect Virtue the gait of men is slow and ambling; their gaze is steady and mild. In such an age mountains have no paths or trails, lakes no boats or bridges. The ten thousand things live species by species, one group settled close to another. Birds and beasts form their flocks and herds, grass and trees grow to fullest height. So it happens that you can tie a cord to the birds and beasts and lead them about, or bend down the limb and peer into the nest of the crow and the magpie. In this age of Perfect Virtue men live the same as birds and beasts, group themselves side by side with the ten thousand things. Who then knows anything about "gentleman" or "petty man"? Dull and un unwitting, men have no wisdom; thus their Virtue does not depart from them. Dull and unwitting, they have no desire; this is called uncarved simplicity. In uncarved simplicity the people attain their true nature."
The reason that the multiethnic utopia doesn't work is that, quite simply, people don't want it. The vast majority of people have neither the care nor the energy required to overcome the ethnic divide. It's a case of trying to compel nature to be "more perfect" than it wants to be. At the end of the day people, as Zhuangzi describes, settle down into their own pastures.
"1.3 million Germans back to Germany from Poland" probably means from within the pre-WW2 borders of Poland and doesn't include Silesia and East Prussia.
I can’t immediately think of one book to recommend. I’ve been reading about the lands between Germany and Russia for some time. I’ll have a think…
A lot of “antifascists” like Gary Lineker are so determined to retcon 2023 onto the past, they wind up having some really odd ideas about history. They seem to think the Nazis came to power in 1933 because large numbers of Jews, Slavs and Roma were immigrating into Germany in small boats and there was some kind of anti-migrant backlash against their arrival. In reality, Jews had been living in Germany since at least the middle ages; they weren’t recent arrivals. Hitler played into and amped up a historic anti-Jewish sentiment which was already hundreds of years old, exemplified by Martin Luther’s “On The Jews And Their Lies”, written in 1543. But mass immigration into Germany really wasn’t a hot issue in 1933.
What Hitler did a lot was to use the existence of German ethnic minorities elsewhere, such as in Czechoslovakia and Danzig/Gdansk, to justify invading those countries. Try to imagine Erdogan invading Germany in order to protect the Turkish minority there. That’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s far better than Lineker’s.
Once the Nazis conquered Poland, they actively encouraged Germans from the east to immigrate and settle there en masse, evicting Poles at gunpoint from their ancestral farms to make way for the migrants. I don’t know how Gary Lineker would fit that fact into his narrative. Would he view the benighted Poles as racist if they objected to such German immigration? I hope not.
Slightly outside the timeframe you mentioned but in 1922 Greece and Turkey exchanged 1.2 million Christians living in Turkey for 400 thousand Muslims living in Greece.
People who live in egypt currently are not egyptians by blood, rather they are arabs. Same goes for the people who live in current turkey (they are not greek, rather turkish/arabic). When it comes to the ancient world, then we can state the conquest of gaul by ceasar as a demographic shift, where ceasar killed around 2 million gauls, and later once the province was roman it became majority roman (after-conquest settlements). when it comes to the modern times we can describe the situation in america, where white men has replaced a indian men, or in australia (aborigines replaced by a foreigners).
Very interesting piece!
The Soviet Union forced the Poles to migrate westward, giving up much of their ancestral land in modern day Belarus and Ukraine. Germans were forced out of lands that were ancestral enough to be a casus belli in 1939. The newly Polish land in Silesia, areas that had been cultural Venn diagrams, had entire histories invented to provide justification for this forced mass migration. Gregor Thum's book "Uprooted" is an excellent source on this topic.
Poland's national/ethnic homogeneity isn't necessarily a natural one--that is, if you take their empire building into account. Life in prewar Poland was certainly multiethnic in urban centers, and had been so for centuries. Sure, it wasn't always peaceful, but self-segregation and freedom of association went a long way. David Frick's book on the topic, "Kith, Kin, and Strangers" certainly has a lot of meaty food for thought on the topic. It was actually really formative for me in understanding how ethnicities naturally behave in multiethnic urban settings. Note that I'm not defending modern day urban hellholes.
What would be done with all the multiethnic people who identify strongly with the nation of their birth? People who don't physically resemble the rest of their community? As "white-adjacent" mixed men, you and I share a phenotype. I imagine it would be different for myself in America, but what about for you? Will you choose to move to Iran if people don't take you for part of their nation in Wales? To clarify, is your piece specifically about unassimilated foreigners, as opposed to second or third generation children of those foreigners?
Finally, yes. The migrant issue is minor. Once the empire collapses and the west descends into chaos with plummeting living standards, an end to welfare and the cities truly become slums (ie, within the next 5 years), the migrants will migrate.
If they are to be drafted to march into a land war in Russia, they will migrate even faster.
Because none of them feel any love for their current homelands. They came for the money, and once the money is gone they will leave, in millions.
Which will help cushion the blow for the indigenous pops, as the new, much more narrow demographics will push up wages, collapse the cost of housing and open up resources for a future comeback built upon production and not a late imperial consumer economy.
I rarely agree with Elon which I consider a good rocketman but pathetic cuckservatard, but in this aspect, he is correct. Reproduce or perish.
Competent Elites!
One of the most encouraging things I've read for years. I honestly don't care if I'm poorer, I just want the foreigners out of Britain. They can squawk about how they're British all day long but we all know it's a lie. The sad thing is the terrible cost of those movements: Partition wasn't pretty. That being said I don't care about the cost as long as they bear it and not us.
"The thesis of my book, The Populist Delusion (2022, buy it now, etc), is that the organised minority are the decisive factor in any society."
The minority are the decisive factor, but what is the choice they decide between? If the majority becomes a group with distinctly different values from you, then all the options they give you to decide between may be completely alien to your values. It is fine to say that, if you find yourself in the minority, you will be able to make yourself the decisive wedge between the competing ideas debated among the majority. But if the two ideas being debated are whether infidels should have their hand cut off or their tongue cut out, your wedge victory is pretty meaningless.
I guess the hope is that, when the group with alien values becomes the majority, they will be infected with the same meaninglessness that liberalism and democracy long ago inflicted on your own group when you were the majority. They will now find themselves intellectually handcuffed into giving you the same tools to tear them down that you once handed them to tear you down with.
I think you might be missing a deeper point. If Japan were to become 40% Somali, would it remain Japanese? Would it feel like home for the Japanese people? Would they trust one another? Would representative politics remain meaningful? Perhaps demography is secondary to power politics, but in a Ciceronian view of the republic, the common interest, it's paramount. It determines that ties that bound us together and allow us to function as a nation.