Assuming that it will be just between these four, I think it’s going to go something like this:
Note that Sobchak and any [liberal candidate] can be substituted for Navalny. (Also TBH, I think Navalny has a chance of getting 10% – see below).
If other candidates (but not Navalny) run, for instance, Grigory Yavlinsky (Yabloko) and Boris Titov (recently nominated by the Party of Growth), then they will split that 7% between each other.
Here’s my logic.
Putin’s result in Presidential elections is usually the same as his approval rating in the Levada polls, which are currently at 80%.
Incidentally, in the very unlikely but not impossible event that Putin doesn’t run after all, but appoints someone like Alexey Dyumin, the successor will get around 60%-70% (Explanation: Medvedev’s result in 2008 was Putin’s approval rating minus 10% points, but he had been built up by Kremlin propaganda beforehand for several years; Putin’s own result in 2000 was approval rating minus 30% points, in the context of only a few months’ worth of “prep,” adversarial TV journalism, and no largescale electoral fraud. Logically, someone like Dyumin should perform somewhere in the middle of those two scenarios).
Zyuganov traditionally polls much better than Zhirinovsky. But that era has now come to an end.
Support for the Communists is in long-term secular decline, while the nationalists are on the ascent. Whereas 60+ year old Communist voters hugely outnumbered 18-24 year old LDPR voters in the 2016 Duma elections, by 22% to 10%, amongst LDPR voters the relationship is the complete inverse, with 60+ year old LDPR voters being outnumbered by 18-24 year old LDPR voters by 19% to 8%. Overall results for the two parties were within a hairsbreadth of each other.
One problem is that Zhirinovsky has a high anti-rating, and tends to underperform his party’s results relative to the Communists (this was especially notable in 2012, when he got almost thrice less than Zyuganov). On the other hand, back in September 2012, the percentage of voters willing to vote for Zhironovsky was 3% versus 6% for Zyuganov, whereas today it is the same 3% to Zyuganov’s much diminished 2%.
I am not going to belabor this point or do any deep analysis at the current stage. There’s still some months left to go and things can still change drastically.
Finally, the liberal candidate.
I have argued that Navalny could get as much as 10%, to the chagrin of hardcore Putinists.
Now Sobchak has a much higher antirating than Navalny, but as a household name, also more name recognizability, so I do not subscribe to the idea that she is totally hopeless and will get something like 1% or 2%. She has said some things that are very unpopular with ordinary people (Crimea is Ukrainian under international law; Russia is a nation of genetic refuse). But this is par for the course for Russian liberals, who do constitute a distinct voting bloc – after all, around 10% of Russians genuinely didn’t support the Crimean takeover – so this is hardly going to dent her numbers. There is even a small chance that making Sobchak say such stereotypically self-hating kreakl things was part of the Kremlin’s condition for allowing her to run (I don’t buy this conspiracy theory; I think she is just an idiot who is being incompetently advised by a britbong PR firm; but it doesn’t really matter).
Now according to the Levada poll (see above), only around 1% are willing to vote for Sobchak (subtracting unknowns/undecideds/etc). A FOM poll suggests that 5% might vote for her, but 87% will not.
The problem is that liberals are less likely to respond to polls, so pollsters tend to systemically underweigh them.
Example.
In the Moscow elections, the Levada poll was giving Navalny 8% to Sobyanin’s 78% amongst those who had “made their choice.”
The median prediction at my blog for Navalny was in the low 10%’s, with some of the most enthusiastic Putinists giving him just 5%-8%.
End result: Navalny – 27%.
However, this was very much in line with immediate pre-election secret polls that showed Navalny was at 23%.
Much the same logic should be applied to the [liberal candidate] (with downwards adjustment for Sobchak based on her lack of popularity!; so, instead of ~10% for Navalny, perhaps 5%-7%).
I acknowledge that these arguments will be controversial.
But here is a recent Telegram post by chief editor of Echo of Moscow Alexey Venediktov:
Translation:
Yes, Boris Titov is seriously being considered by the Presidential Administration as a “liberal candidate for President.” Especially considering that their polls show that she has already caught up with Zhirinovsky (7.5% are ready to vote for her, of those who already made up their minds). …
And wouldn’t you guess it, the next day Boris Titov indeed announced that he was running.
Boris Titov is an economically right-wing politician, businessman (he owns the famous Abrau-Durso champagne brand), and activist for entrepreneur rights. He is also not really an oppositionist, being on good terms with Putin and having once even served as a high functionary in United Russia. This would basically be a rerun of 2012, when Mikhail Prokhorov opposed Putin, except that Titov has even fewer oppositionist credentials.
Anyhow, the final decision is up to Putin. Having Titov run would make the election even more of a formality/farce (cross out as per your political sympathies) than it already is, though perhaps marginally safer than having Sobchak run – though the fact that some kremlins actually fear Sobchak of all people makes the whole affair even more surreal.
I think we can pretty much exclude Navalny being allowed to with at least 95% confidence.
On the other hand, with the reality of an 80% approval rating and total control of the administrative resource behind him, it’s not like allowing Sobchak, Titov, or both to run would make any substantive difference to Putin’s almost certainly overwhelming victory in the 2018 Presidential elections.
what exactly is the point of Putin ballot stuffing when he is going to get 70% of the vote anyway? What does he get out of that besides bad PR?
It’s just a way for the local officials to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime.
Nobody in Russia has ever been punished for ballot stuffing. On the other hand regional governors have been fired when United Russia underperformed at the polls.
Hmmm. Where did you get this from?
Was Steve faster than you? Or is it just fake news?
As Keverich says, it’s not something that Putin orders directly, just something he allows to happen (proof: There is a good correlation between levels of corruption and electoral fraud in Russian regions).
Why?
Yes, the downsides are real and obvious.
Upsides – Two scenarios. (1)Provides a safety margin in cases of close elections; (2) makes an otherwise solid win into an overwhelming win and demoralizes the opposition.
But also demoralizes people, so turnout starts to decline – “Putin can do fine without me anyway” (this is increasingly evident in Russia). Which in turn stokes a need for either more falsifications, or increasing electoral restrictions favoring the party of power. (Russia has taken the second route since 2012).
Various polls showing low 90%’s support for Crimea, + assuming some liberal undercounting as is typical of Russian pollsters.
Not fake news Kadyrov loves to outdo himself publicly proclaiming his loyalty but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Are you going to vote for Putin or not? Reading some of your stuff it is not clear if you support him or not, on the one hand you have him supporting immigration from the central stans, on the other hand can you really vote for a Soros approved candidate?
If I understand it correctly you are basing this assumption on pre-election polls from Moscow mayoral election. For me it doesn’t make a lot of sense. In Moscow the pollsters had a bad turnout model. This is not the same as saying, there are more pro-Western liberals in this country, than the pollsters let on. It’s just that in that particular election the liberals were more motivated to vote.
I don’t expect that the status of Crimea will ever be put to a vote, so the liberal turnout patterns are irrelevant as far as this question is concerned. Now, listen again to what you said:
There is no evidence to support this statement. Now, there were TONS of people, who didn’t care or felt ambivalent about the whole thing, but to actually object to the return of Crimea – we’re talking about 2% of Russian adults at most.
I don’t know, maybe Putin, maybe Zhirinovsky.
That was part of it but not entirely. Predicting <10% vs. actual result of 27% is a cardinal failure.
And Moscow elections after 2011 haven't been falsified at all!
This happens all the time in the US. Pollsters are not magicians: local, low-turnout contests are particularly hard to predict.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/mi/michigan_democratic_presidential_primary-5224.html
Navalny’s performance in Moscow election is a simply a case of his overzealous liberal base making an impact in a low-turnout election.
I find it hard to believe that 7% would vote for Sobchak. Also, ‘economically right wing’ seems a wrong description of Boris Titov. His Stolypin Club is more ‘left conservative’, proposing a combination of loose monetary policy and somewhat protectionist measures.
It will be pretty awesome if Zhirinovsky can secure 2nd place. I don’t really care what percentage of vote he gets, so long as he is above the communist.
I will be shocked if a liberal candidate can crack 5% (“liberal candidate” for me means someone, who publicly questions status of Crimea).
Thanks for the clarification, I haven’t studied Titov’s bio or views in any detail, assumed he’d be right-wing due to his pro-business activism will defer to you on this.
I also find it difficult to imagine someone like Sobchak would get 7%. Prominent Russian-American elections blogger Alexander Kireev believes she will get a Khakamada-like 3%-5%. We’ll see.
How would the process of returning Crimea to Ukraine look? Can liberals explain it? Would Russia shut down its Naval Headquarters, move a few hundred thousand people out, watch majority of the rest be treated punitively by Kiev? Pensions and salaries would go back down to Ukraine’s level (around 1/3 of Russia), no investment from Kiev, etc..
I can see how posing as a ‘principled’ liberal is tempting for many in Moscow. But if they question Crimea they should explain what to do about it. I am also curious to see how many votes will ‘return-Crimea’ liberals get in Crimea itself…
Questioning is always the easy part.
I suppose they never gave it a serious thought. They don’t care. Liberals in Russia have no concept of national interest. Many of them are ethnically Jewish (Sobchak is half-Jewish for example) and don’t identify with Russians as a group. Russia for them is simply a resource to be given away in exchange for acceptance in the West.
Funny thing is that these people make no attempt whatsoever to disguise their contempt for Russia and Russians, which is actually a good thing, because it means most voters can easily see liberals for what they are, and will never support liberal politicians.
There is a term for that kind of proposed trade…
I understand that many people supporting liberals in Russia have what one could call ‘cosmopolitan’ background. But the actual election results are much higher, e.g. Navalny’s 27% in Moscow, so there must be more to this…
I have seen in my neck of the woods people who will openly say ‘I prefer foreigners – Germans, EU, … – to come and take over because they are less corrupt and will pay me better, plus I just hate my brother-in-law getting rich, better a guy from London or Municg…‘ – is there a similar dynamic in Russia?
Navalny has said there should be a second referendum with international observers. My speculations on what will be the result of this:
Sobchak has merely said that the annexation of Crimea was a violation of international law (which is not even wrong, TBF) but has not said any more on the topic that I can recall. As such, her position is actually considerably less radical than Navalny’s.
Moreover, she was more supportive of Crimea in 2014 than 90% of the liberal kreakl class.
https://twitter.com/xenia_sobchak/status/441532962241511424
Putin will enter history as a “great” if he returns Crimea bloodlessly.
https://twitter.com/xenia_sobchak/status/447265830330716160
While all of my friends are against Crimea, I alone am proudly for it – it’s a wonderfully played geopolitical combination.
Sure, Sobchak is half-Jewish, and it is questionable to what extent she identifies with Russians, but Jews have no particular reason to like Ukraine over Russia, whereas Navalny is… yes, half-Ukrainian (or more).
Thanks, interesting background. Ukraine and the West would never agree to a second referendum – because it would validate Russia’s claim. So proposing it is an empty gesture.
I am always amused by how much empty posturing ‘liberals’ do. For people who historically came from the more-education-the-better part of the society, and also had in the past certain thoughtfulness and due diligence, modern liberals have become extremely sloppy and shallow.
That’s why liberals are increasingly frantic to maintain media monopoly – they don’t stand a chance in a full, open, non-mediated discussion. Their positions simply don’t add up…
It really is an outlier. To start, Navalny is not a real liberal, his base of supporters is liberal, but the man himself is a political opportunist more than anything else. At one point Navalny was associated with anti-immigration activists, some seriously right-wing people. Navalny did not campaign as a liberal in Moscow elections and was thus able to achieve some crossover appeal.
Since then Crimea has emerged as a powerful wedge issue, and it is causing Navalny a lot of trouble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn__bgeEaSA
I’m certain Navalny wouldn’t do so well, if he ran for mayor today.
Screwing with goyim is the reason why most Jews get involved in politics, and Jews in Russia support Ukraine for the same reasons, that Jews in US support Black Lives Matter.
LOL! You obviously don’t know any American Jews. American Jews breath this stuff. Their love for Black Lives Matter is 100% genuine.
Read guys like Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, Paul Waldman and Mathew Yglesias. They are true believers.
Russian Jews are completely different than US Jews. Anatoly will back me up on this.
No, it isn’t. American Jews don’t really care about “social justice” or blacks. And their brethren in Israel absolutely DETEST niggers.
Rather, Jews do these things in order to demoralise, emasculate and otherwise bring down the dominant ethnic group (Russians in Russia, WASPs in US).
Rock the boat, upset the established power structure, and hope that Jewry can gain a little more power in the ensuing chaos – that was the basic idea behind Jewish involvement in “civil rights movement” and this is how diapora Jews traditionally operate. Read Culture of Critique, prof. Macdonald explains Jewish behavior in terms of evolutionary biology. 🙂
It’s too late to lament Putin’s popularity in Russia. The situation was very different in 2012-13, when 55% or 60% at most supported him, with his approval actually declining year-on-year. By organizing and executing a coup in Ukraine, as well as encouraging shrill anti-Russian hysterics in the Baltics, Poland, and some more reputable European countries, the US unwittingly drove up his approval to unbeatable 75-80%, while making sure that so-called “liberal” politicians in Russia commit electoral suicide by taking the side of Ukrainian Nazis and openly receiving funding and marching orders from the US Embassy. Further anti-Russian hysteria, including totally crazy claims that Russian interference flipped the US elections, would only solidify his support and ensure that his successor would be even more openly anti-Western. However, sanity appears to have abandoned the elites in the US and its vassals. Current US policies towards Russia are suicidal. As the saying goes, when God wants to punish someone, he takes his mind away.
One Michael E Jones talks of the Jewish-Negro alliance (Catholicism, Jones’ brand or otherwise, is not my cup of tea and I find they had their own globalist “NWO” going on, but still.)
I think American Jews used to really care about Blacks, some under great personal sacrifice such as Andrew Goodman.
How much of it was genuine concern, wanting to stick it to Whitey or believing one’s own (blank slate) BS too much? Probably a bit of everything.
Btw my impression is the Jewish American lurve for Blaxx isn’t reciprocated, like, at all.
Putin had the ‘right’ figure in 2012 with 63% of the vote … the right amount for a ‘decisive but democratic’ victory, whereas percentages in the 50s or 70s can seem ‘rigged’ and artificial, so I suspect it will be 62-65% again in Russia for the good ‘optics’
Regarding international law re Crimea, Russia is arguably in the right, given the UN Charter on ‘self-determination’, which Nato & the EU applied ruthlessly in the corrupt Kosovo situation. Secession for a ‘people’ is arguably in legal terms, a human right per the UN charter, and Russia would be at fault for Chechnya, not Crimea.
And I still recall how Putin invited the Donbass Russians to hold their own referenda after the Odessa massacre … and then left Donbass partly-supported, half-abandoned, and thousands of Russians are dead … I still don’t see what would have been ‘worse’ for Russia if Putin had moved in & partitioned Ukraine, all the sanctions etc rot would have been about the same
(I don’t buy the ‘that would have been Armageddon’ claims expressed by Shoigu and so many others, I think Putin gives backhand services to Nato by keeping the various fires burning in so many places)
Btw, the Catalonia independence momentum is quite fizzling given the unworthy, cucked performance of their ‘leaders’ … will be on hold at least until after the euro currency collapses in next year’s banking – financial crisis, probably right after China’s bad debts go supernova
On the censorship front, Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer has just lost his most recent hosting in Hong Kong, but as usual is accessible via the Tor Onion link
https://dstormer6em3i4km.onion.link/
not all Jewish influence was bad. Jews did a lot against authoritarianism.
he microcomputer revolution was enabled (apart from the hardware becoming affordable) not least by the 60’s left-wing counterculture and it’s pretty POZZed ideas of empowerment and whatnot. this at a time when in Russia you couldn’t legally own a typewriter.
Of course, today, authoritarianism comes not just from the state but also the private sector and, as the nation states become weaker and ever more entangled with private interests, we’re sliding further and further back into feudalism.
Well said, Beckow.
An American here, but here’s a huge question that is fair to pose to people wanting Russia to surrender Crimea: are you then fine with US (or “NATO”) land and naval military bases in Crimea, and US warships daily challenging and shadowing Russian and other countries’ ships in the Black Sea? Because that is obviously what we should expect to come next.
A related question: won’t surrendering Crimea embolden the US and its allies to demand more concessions by Russia, including perhaps territorial ones? Would you also be willing to give up the Kaliningrad enclave if the West “demands” it? What else would you be willing to give away?
Blacks HATE (goyish) white liberals more than they hate Trump supporters. Basically the more a group likes blacks, the more hostile blacks are to them.
Without any hyperbole, this is the most wrong thing ever said. My mom volunteers to help black children and literally started crying at a film about how bad black schools were. My brother is a BLM activist. This is totally normal for American Jews. Secular American Jews worship blacks. American Jewish guys are even notorious for pursuing black women which is certainly not the norm among non-black men in general*.
American Jews are Ashkenazi, Israeli Jews are majority Mizrahi. Of course Mizrahi Jews are anti black, nobody is saying otherwise. Secular Ashkenazic Israeli Jews don’t worship blacks but they don’t hate them either.
I don’t have a problem with Macdonald, but his thesis is just flat out wrong. And I say this as somebody who believes that non Jews should do everything they can to keep Jews out of their countries.
*Yeah I know, I know, Anatoly. Well remember it has been speculated by some that Anatoly has some Jewish ancestry himself which would certainly explain his inclinations.
One could be idealistic about blacks in the 60’s, now there’s no excuse after Blacks have basically proven to be unreformable. Uplifting blacks is so irrational I totally get it people think Joos must be doing it for MacDonaldian reasons.
still, let’s not forget Blacks are just one item in a list that starts with “workers and peasants”, then blacks, then women and now it’s “immigrants.”
There’s indeed something about Joos that makes them ally with the world’s “injured and humiliated” and some of that is prolly even genuine.
Eh…aren’t BLM activists on your list of groups you’d like to remove?
Can’t your brother get a hobby or lobby for some other group more deserving of sympathy? Like Indians in the Amazon or those pygmies who get eaten in the Congo?
If Kasparov had been allowed to run in the earlier elections, how much of the vote could he have gotten? How much would he get now?
Wasn’t election fraud at closer to 5% (or rather 5-10%) even back in 2012, according to you anyway? Or alteast in the last year’s Duma elections? Didn’t you also say that the fraud had decreased modestly?
Also, maybe Putin doesn’t have that much power over it, i.e. he/UR doesn’t simply let it happen. Well, I guess that is wishful thinking from by part… But yeah, it’s irrelevant either way, because his popularity really is at 80%…
Of course it would. The basic dynamic is that Western elites hate Russia (most of them) and would prefer to get Russian resources in their own hands. They will deny it, of course they would, but the intense dislike is both observable and also makes sense: resources and the need for ‘white’ Christian villains.
When someone hates you, any accommodation or being ‘reasonable’ backfires. They will take it as weakness, grab any benefits, and escalate. The point is that by acting meekly Russia would actually dramatically worsen its strategic position.
The fundamental core issue in Ukraine-Crimea is that Nato attempted to grab the Sebastopol Naval base and push Russia out of Crimea. Russia acted first and prevented it. All else, Maidan, ‘corruption’, EU association, even Nazis, was just noise to cover up what was going on. It took real gall to go after Russia in Crimea, and it took some guts for Russia to prevent it. Both the gall and the guts came from the highest levels – Obama, Merkel, Putin – and they all knew what they were doing and acted consciously. Think about how we will live with the consequences of this for generations.
(Oh, the irony of the Obama Nobel Peace Prize…)
How long has it been since Zhirinovsky was serious about getting elected though really, indeed if he ever was? He’s a clearly an intelligent man, and is capable of being civil when he wants to be (see his speeches in Turkish), it seems he’s always gotten more a kick out of trollworthy statements and pranks than running for President.
What Russia expert historians (like Robert Service and Steve Kotkin I think) wrote about him a decade ago was that he was groomed by the KGB to make nationalist noises and be a kind of loyal opposition, but he perhaps liked the role more than his masters would have liked and at least to some extent went native.
He’s far more extreme(ly anti-Russian) than even Navalny, but he is also a very good orator and accomplished in his own right.
Still, there are any number of statements he’s made that would sink him even amongst liberals.
I suspect his support would be capped at melanf’s 2-3% who are truly hardcore opposed to Crimea.
Well, I was using ballpark figures here, no point in being more precise since we don’t even know who’ll be running, etc.
From memory, the best estimates of fraud for the following elections were: 2011 – 8%-10%; 2012 – ~5%; 2016 – ~7%.
I expected fraud to further decrease in 2016 relative to 2012 – there are good arguments against electoral fraud even for outright dictators, which Putin ofc isn’t – but that didn’t pan out.
Why didn’t you tell me that you’re one of (((them)))?
Macdonald says it is common for Jews to engage in self-deception: they think of themselves as more moral, noble and more selfless creatures than they really are. The Jews, despite their high verbal intelligence, have a very limited capacity for introspection, unable or unwilling to aknowledge their flaws.
It’s not like it was a deeply held secret…
I had assumed that you knew but now that I think about it, I’m not surprised that you didn’t as I have never before mentioned that I was Jewish or ever even commented on matters related to Jews or Israel.
I thought it was settled after SiP was banished.
And what would be the difference between a NATO base in Sevastopol and Odessa?
This “noise” is what could have pushed Russia out of Crimea if nothing dramatic had been done.
The former would also mean no major Russian base at the Black Sea.
Folks, that naval base in Sevastopol is mostly symbolically important, and it’s not the reason Crimea was annexed. The truth is Putin realised he fucked up, and needed to distract the Russian public before they started asking questions about how he lost the Ukraine.
In other words, it was a move born out of panic: Putin suddenly grasped that with the loss of Ukraine his own political survival was on the line.
By 2014 Russia already started constructing a new major naval base in Novorossiysk. Black Sea fleet was making preparations to leave Sevastopol.
The difference between symbolic and strategic in security terms is not that big. Pushing Russian Navy out of Sebastopol would be both. I don’t think Putin would survive as president with Nato ships moving to Sebastopol. Obama, Merkel and Co. knew it – that’s why they went for it. It was gutsy.
If there was no Crimea, by now we would be discussing Maidan II in Belarus, Moscow, etc… Russians got caught asleep. They didn’t anticipate how decisive and ruthless the smiling Westerners could be. Come on, shooting at your own demonstrators? This was all-in, high-risk operation.
Nato could be in Odessa and in Sebastopol. They could also be in Batumi, Constance, Varna, etc… So what? Losing Sebastopol with all the existing facilities and history would had been an order of magnitude worse for Russia.
Instead we have a stalemate. Locals win in stalemates. Losing Crimea was psychologically devastating for Kiev and the West, as it would had been for Russia. Unless Kiev has the balls to escalate (and probably lose more), the situation will eventually revert to ‘normal’ with Russia keeping what they have and normal links restored.
Someone rightly said that militarily Ukraine without Crimea is like a purebred stallion without balls. That’s why NATO is so hysterical years later. Obviously, NATO is just a fig leaf for the US military: Europe does not have an armed force useful for combat with any serious enemy. Even the Turkish army, significantly weakened by Erdogan purges, can annihilate all European armies combined. So, if someone contemplates a war with Russia, Germany or France would be no more help than Lichtenstein or Andorra.
The naval base in Sevastopol, despite its special place in Russian history and psyche, has largely symbolic value. But the peninsula itself, due to its size and location, controls the entire Black sea. With the weapons already deployed there Russia can destroy all NATO ports on the Black sea and make Bosporus much wider than it is in one salvo.
The great majority of Crimean population pushed for the secession from Ukraine since 1991. Russia turned a blind eye, and I suspect it would have kept doing so if it weren’t for the coup in 2014 that overthrew a legitimately elected president using Nazi storm troopers in Kiev with full support of the “democratic” West. Still, the Crimean operation was executed too well to be spur-of-the-moment thing. Even though Putin could safely count on full support of the overwhelming majority of Crimean population, the operation was inherently dangerous: even 1-2% of the population could easily throw a monkey wrench in the works. Yet everything was done almost flawlessly: all the key points were blocked by a small number of solders, frantic orders of warmongering Ukrainian “interim president” Turchynov to the Ukrainian troops were suppressed by Russian radio-electronic emitters, Ukrainian troops were offered a transition to the Russian army, which more than 80% immediately accepted, and the whole peninsula was taken over essentially without a single shot being fired. Even though the US and its newly installed Ukrainian puppets were caught with their pants down, one has to admit that someone had a good head for advance planning and at least a few weeks to prepare.
There is always Novorossiysk.
NATO was not main problem, Maidan was.
Regime change is greatest fear of Russian government and Maidan politicians like Yats were going to remove the Russian military from Crimea.
Being humiliated by a bunch of regime changers was a real threat to the Kremlin because it was strongly encourage the locals and discourage supporters and more importantly, the security forces.
I wouldn’t bet on it. By the way it’s a meaningless comparison. Turkey has no logistical capabilities to attack major European countries, because it’s far away from them and it’s difficult to move troops over such distances. I’d actually think it’d be easier for European countries to move up to Turkey’s borders and beyond, or to build up quickly such capabilities if needed, than the other way around. I’d also bet on European’s fighting abilities being a bit better, though I don’t think the difference is huge, Turks are also probably formidable as soldiers.
Perhaps. But Crimean Russian presence will mean that there’s always a Russian base on the southern flank of Ukraine. The Crimea is also close to the Romanian missile defense sites and the Balkan, an important naval/aerial base between Turkey and Ukraine, etc.
I’m not saying the whole of Ukraine wouldn’t be more important (but it’s important to note that it was at best neutral under Kuchma and Yanukovich and unfriendly neutral or outright hostile under Kravchuk and Yushchenko, so Putin didn’t “lose” it in the sense of ever having it in the first place), but the Crimea has its own importance.
Syria’s importance is that Russia demonstrated its military capabilities (helping weapons exports and also being taken more seriously by friend and foe alike), its willingness and ability to militarily back up an ally, which made it more valuable as an ally. It also makes it more difficult to threaten (even implicitly) Russia militarily, because now planners would have to deal with Russian presence in Syria, which is an extra headache. (I don’t think anyone want war with Russia, but as the late 90s showed, it’s difficult to stop American military adventurism if the only thing you can do is threatening with total nuclear war. It’s a bit like bike helmets and kids: kids will ride their bikes more dangerously if they have helmets. Similarly, neocons will push into Russia’s sphere of interest more cockily the more sure they are of their absolute military superiority. Shaking that belief is a good strategy to make them ride their bikes slower.)
That’s correct. Putin has a huge fear of getting overthrown. This fear is the real driving force behind his foregn and domestic policies. It compelled him to annex Crimea among other things.
This “ballot stuffing” is a western idiot myth. Unlike in the US and UK ,russian voting papers (note- they are not cards) usually including about 20+ names on the list( because Russian is an actual democracy)..so they are long sheets of paper that create the illusion of ballot stuffing , when people are recorded by Soros-funded cretin organisations at the voting booth. It’s long papers, normally done long papers put into the box at the same time as husband and wife.
So called “ballot stuffing” is almost universally done by women I should add…woman voting on behalf of their husbands who can’t be bothered to turn up.
That was also true pre-2014.
Novorossiysk was actually closer to Ukrainian Crimea than Sevastopol to the Ukrainian border.
Location was ultimately not as important as reassuring the Russian military that the Russian government won’t abandon them for the sake of “Western partners”*.
*Forcing the Russian military to leave Crimea in 2017 would have required Western support because the Maidanist interpretation of the extended lease and its legitimacy was not shared by Russia.
Garbage. Putin had actually brilliantly won Ukraine . Yanukovich and his team , saw sense and not only rejected the EU deal….but agreed the 5 billion loan from Russia. Polling for EU or EEU integration showed EEU ahead…even though most of the main Party of Regions politicians, all of the Ukrop media and groups (controlled by US) were heavily pushing the EU deal
Russia played the game fairly…and won fairly…..then the cheating by the west occured
I largely agree with you, but I also think a Soros-driven regime change in Russia wouldn’t be the best thing for the Russian population either.
It’d be nicer if Putin could think ahead more clearly and would spend money on R&D and would block Central Asian immigration and instead encourage white (or I guess especially easier to assimilate Belorussian and Ukrainian) immigration only and would think in terms of eugenics etc., but he’s still head and shoulders above most other white leaders.
Which is like to say that Smolensk is actually closer to the Belarusian border than Berlin is to West Germany. Even if true, what significance does that have? You cannot say it didn’t matter if Russian troops stood in Berlin or outside of Belarus.
Novorossiysk is not threatening the southern flank from behind the way Crimea does, not even close. You don’t have to be a strategic genius to understand that Crimea makes it way easier to cut off Ukraine from the sea, or that it’s closer to Romania, or that in case of war it’d actually be another front through which to break into Ukraine, etc. Maybe not an extremely large difference, but something.
So war or extreme hostility and a quasi territorial dispute with Ukraine was inevitable.
It also means Sevastopol is safer than Novorossiysk would be without taking over Crimea. Especially in case of Ukraine joining NATO it might have some importance. And of course taking Crimea makes it way more difficult for neocons to push through Ukrainian NATO membership. (Although popular opinion in Ukraine shifted for NATO membership, I hardly doubt eventual NATO membership couldn’t have been pushed through if there was a will on the part of NATO.)
Oh, that would be awesome, but the reason none of this is happening is because this regime is primarily concerned with its own self-preservation.
I don’t see a lot logic in comparing Putin with the likes of Macron and Merkel. Russia is not a Western country, never has been.
What about some Eastern Earopean leaders: Poland, Hungary, Baltic states? These guys seem to be woke on immigration question, and at the same time don’t seem to view their countries as their personal fiefdoms.
Poland is highly xenophobic, takes full advantage of EU membership, while rejecting its immigration policies, a less repressive society than Russia, and overall looks like a better run country. I’m a Russian nationalist, so it kinda pains to admit it, but I feel that having a Polish-style government would be an upgrade, compared to what we have now. 🙂
Orbán unfortunately does view Hungary as his personal fiefdom. His eldest daughter’s thirty-something husband got quite rich since he married his daughter. You guessed it: his firm mostly supplies the government and municipalities… (Almost all municipalities are controlled by Orbán’s party.) A close associate of his (a gas fitter who also became the mayor of Orbán’s village) became the fifth richest guy in Hungary since 2010 (again, a lot of government contracts), though he started out with only a few employees in 2010.
Orbán doesn’t spend much on education (making sure most teachers hate him and his ideology – this bodes ill for the younger generations) or healthcare, but spends lavishly on Hungarian football (soccer in American parlance), because that’s his hobby. Not with the greatest results.
Orbán is great as long as you don’t compare him to an ideal, but instead to a Macron or a Merkel. He’s not great if you think about how much could be done. I think he’s similar to Putin in that respect. I don’t know enough about Poland or Slovakia for comparison.
The Crimean operation started being seriously discussed around November 2013 according to Mikhail Zygar in All the Kremlin’s Men.
No orders to the Ukrainian troops in Crimea were given. According to meetings at the time, Turchynov wanted to fight for Crimea, but was overruled by Yatsenyuk and Timoshenko; they believed a large-scale invasion was possible if they gave Putin the pretext, and that Kiev would fall quickly.
I think (not knowledgeable enough to be certain) that Poland is better than Hungary. So is probably Slovakia, which is painful, because we never took Slovaks seriously.
Is Russia unprepared for this? Is it even possible? It never happened during Soviet times…
Well, it would be extraordinary stupid for Russia to keep its gold in the US. Because Americans can totally do this.
I keep hearing this complaint from Russian officials a lot: “Americans are treating us like they never treated USSR”. Duh, that’s because Russia is not USSR! Russian Federation has lower status in their eyes. We are considered a “rogue state” on par with Iran.
US arrested Iranian currency reserves in 1979, and to my knowledge, they are still holding them, or most of them. So they can totally do this to Russia, why not?
Is Zygar a reliable narrator? The dude is a “democratic journalist”, they have a tendency to make things up.
That’s one of the versions being circulated. When the blame game started in Kiev, Turchynov claimed that he gave an order to defend Crimea, but the communications with the Ukrainian troops in Crimea were jammed by Russians. He might have been lying, though. Considering that in Soviet times he rose to the secretary in the regional Young Communist league committee responsible for ideology, he must be an accomplished liar. The worst scum came from the Young Communist league in many post-Soviet countries: Turchynov in Ukraine, Chubais in Russia, Grybauskaite in Lithuania, etc.
That’s one way to describe it. But you can see Orban as a committed Hungarian patriot (‘nationalist’). He sees himself – and his family – as extended ‘Hungary’, his thoughts, plans, passions, and his imagined future is in Hungary. So he cares, he wants his wealth at home, his soccer to be better (yeah, I know, but that’s the way the ball rolled).
The only alternative is the comprador big-city elite that sees Hungary as an inconvenient stepping stone on their journeys of ‘self-realisation’. All East Central European states have the same dynamic. Elites in those countries yearn for something else, to be somewhere else, they don’t trust wealth at home. That’s why they are so easily f…ed with again and again. A few scholarships, meaningless NGO jobs, offers of a ‘visa-free’ access, or even kind words from a Western ‘journalist’ – it will start aspiring elitists on a rant about how it all sucks at home, how it is all ‘corrupt‘, how they want to be elsewhere, how it has always been like that, etc…
Given that those are really the only two alternatives, I prefer Orban with his greedy relatives and over-sized soccer stadiums. As more people get exposure to what the rest of the world is really like – and not their dreamed up versions – that might change.
Spending more on education just means that more people would get excellent, free education and immediately bail to clean labs or drive Uber in London. A better soccer team would do more for Hungary’s self-confidence. Western Europe is collapsing, the migrant deluge is too big, elites are in a civilisation-ending tail-spin – they don’t care any more, they want it all be gone. Over time the perceptions about Paris and Budapest will shift. Until then having Orban guarding the border is probably best one can hope for.
The former is not relevant, the latter is questionable (it is a bottleneck better suited for defense).
Why would you need an order? Military exists for no other reason except to ‘defend’. In Crimea they didn’t and that tells us that they didn’t see Russia as an ‘invader’. 80% switched sides and joined the Russian military.
Turchynov is a liar. But that is least of my issues with him. By the way, Khodorkovsky was also an enthusiastic Komsomol member.
I didn’t know about Khodorkovsky, but it makes sense – like I said, Komsomol gave us a lot of scum.
Why would it be so difficult for Turkey to move its troops into Austria, Germany, etc, assuming the USA is not willing to stop them?
The commenter is right that the military forces of those EU countries are pathetically small and ill-equipped relative to Turkey’s armed forces.
Finally, it’s not outlandish to predict that the “German” and “French” armed forces will have an increasing and eventually large percentage of Muslim soldiers in their ranks. It is by no means clear that Germany and France could count on the loyalty of those soldiers, especially in a war against a Muslim country. This would be particularly a danger as Turks join the “German” military, and Erdogan has been actively urging Turks in Germany NOT to assimilate.
Geography. They would have to go through some combination of Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Hungary…
At least one or two of those are capable of resisting.
I think a much more likely scenario are the two Islamic states created by Nato: Bosnia and Kosovo (w Albania). These are both Western creations to suppress local Christian majorities in the Balkans. They are very closely allied with Turkey and have wahabbi preachers paid for by Saudis. But they were literally created by using force (massive bombing) by Nato states.
Every one of those five countries, combined, could not long effectively resist the Turkish armed forces without major outside help.
Population of those five countries:
GREECE 10.8 million and declining
HUNGARY 9.7 million and declining
BULGARIA 7.0 million and declining
ROMANIA 19.6 million and declining by more than 50,000 every year
SERBIA 8.8 million and declining
Combined Total 55.9 million and declining by more than 150,000 every year
TURKEY’s population is 80.8 million and increasing by more than 70,000 per year
Moreover, the Turkish population of fighting-age men continues to grow, while the crucial population of non-Muslim fighting-age men continues to decline in all the countries you mentioned, as in every western and central European country as well.
For this and other reason, it is hard to overstate the weakness and vulnerability of all these European populations, both west and east, against the burgeoning Muslim powers nearby, such as Turkey and Iran.
P.S. But I thoroughly agree with you about the great evil that “our” government inflicted on the Christian people of Serbia for the benefit of the Kosovars. I would sooner disband NATO than see our young men and our tax dollars used for such murderous behavior against kindred peoples.
Iran isn’t really a threat to Europe imo, being Shia its influence in the wider Muslim world is limited anyway. I agree with you though that the potential threat by Turkey is probably underestimated (even if it lies more in support for Islamic subversion or possibly insurgency than in direct Ottoman-style invasion). Erdogan has made his hostile intentions towards Europe very clear, and a substantial part of Turks seems to agree with him.
Turks also have a history of invading Europe. The demographic picture isn’t pretty and the potential for Turkey to meddle (and I mean literally, not by posting on Pinterest) is quite substantial. If there are in the future conflicts between native population in Europe and the recent migrant communities, Turkey could use its power to intimidate EU.
But I don’t think moving across the Balkan countries would be easy – although I can see a renewed attempt to carve out larger pro-Turkish ministates, like Kosovo, Bosnia.
I agree that Iran is not a threat. They have no history of trying to expand towards Europe, they are isolated in the Moslem world, and they are not very good fighters (the civilisation is too old for self-sacrifice).
Iranian troops have not proved to be effective fighters. There was, however, an enormous death toll during the Iran-Iraq War, so they do sacrifice.
Turkey’s gross domestic product is about 1/3 of that of France and Iran’s is less than half that of Turkey. Turkey’s population and economy are not notably militarized; military spending accounts for < 2% of domestic product. The country is populous, with nearly 80 million people. However, metropolitan France has 68 million, the total fertility rates of the two countries are nearly identical, and Turkey has a restive and geographically concentrated Kurdish minority proportionately 3x the size of France's Muslim population. The last time they were able to conquer and hold European territory was in 1526. I think if they tried anything, they'd get their ass handed to them.
I don’t think any Turkish meddling would start with France. For geography reasons.
Well, no. Turkey occupied parts of Europe until 1912-13. Turkey also fought vicious (almost genocidial) wars against Bulgaria in 1880’s, against Greece, Romania, Serbia in early 20th century. This is a lot more recent. Even one doesn’t count the Bosnia-Kosovo wars in 1990’s – that were both heavily supported by Turkey. And of course Nato.
Well, yes (mostly). “Conquer and hold” isn’t the same thing as rearguard fighting as the Ottoman grip on Europe gradually diminished. That being said, there were periods of time when the Ottomans briefly expanded European territory after 1526. IIRC 1680 or so was their greatest extent.
Turkey still has a tiny bit of land in Europe.
As Art Deco stated, Turkey may have 80 million people but 20% of those are Kurds, who hate Turks, who have higher birth rates than Turks, and who are not bad fighters. Guess whom the Europeans can massively arm in case of a war with Turkey?
Turkish forces did not even dare to invade Rojava, a much less weaker entity on their southern border.
Balkans population would be uncooperative and Turkish logistics too strained to advance much.
Well, logistics alone would prevent them from reaching Austria at all.
The Turkish army is very large (with a lot of equipment like battle tanks and artillery pieces), but for example the Greek armed forces also field an incredibly large number of battle tanks, so I don’t think Turkey could just conquer Greece without suffering any casualties. If you add in the Bulgarian army (though most of their battle tanks obsolete, they are also in reserve), then even conquering just these two countries would seem rather difficult.
Yes, the German armed forces are small (but for example the German Air Force has roughly half as many jet fighters as Turkey, and I’d bet they would use them more competently), but for example the Germans have as many battle tanks (all the most modern Leopard 2 model) as the most modern Turkish tanks (also Leopard 2 model, but earlier versions, all bought used from the German Army, and upgraded afterwards), so probably they are not as small as simple raw numbers would indicate.
The original claim was that the Turks could simply conquer the whole of Europe. I think that’s quite an outlandish claim.
I think 1526 is too early a date. After 1526 they left Hungary, but started coming back with some regularity afterwards. They only occupied (there was no siege, the ethnically German city burghers opened the doors of the city for them) the capital city of Buda in 1541. Then they led a number of campaigns to secure the approaches to Buda, the biggest of which was in 1552 (ending in the unsuccessful siege of the castle of Eger). After that they could still conquer a few cities/castles (like Eger itself in I think 1596), especially if you count the castles they conquered from their vassal the principality of Transylvania (to punish it for disobedience), like Nagyvárad (Varat in Turkish, Oradea in Romanian). I would say that they could conquer until the mid-16th century (and perhaps a bit later), and hold unto those conquests until the late 17th century. Also, until the late 17th century they still posed a credible threat of conquest, even if by that time they fell behind the European powers in military equipment, doctrine, training, etc.
The collapse of their fighting power was so sudden because they didn’t train their troops much (though soldiers probably practiced their skills individually), instead their troops basically got all their experience and expertise during campaigns. After their best troops were annihilated in the 1680s, they could only replace the losses with inexperienced rookie soldiers, who kept being annihilated in subsequent battles, until in the 1690s European powers lost their interest and diverted resources elsewhere. Although they remained at least somewhat strong for over a century, they continued to decline relative to Europeans ever more, and had no hope of catching up due to entrenched interests blocking development (I think for example printing presses were prohibited because some powerful scribes’ guild had inordinate influence in the Sultan’s court, which led them being cut off from information, while the Janissaries blocked military reform).
How would NATO’s Article 5 function if one member country attacks another member country?
Apart from minor quibbles I can mostly agree with you on the main thrust of your comment: Orbán is way better than the alternatives. You also well recognize an important mechanism. I think Paul Krugman of all people wrote (during the Greek crisis) how the EU created a perverse incentive for European politicians. Before the EU, if a European prime minister in a democratic country failed to satisfy his electorate, he would have to retire early in disgrace after losing and election. Now by pushing through deeply unpopular policies, they can prove their “pro-European” credentials. The less popular the policies, the stronger the credentials: if you push down the throat of your electorate many deeply unpopular policies which are nevertheless popular with the Davos crowd (like cutting pushing through austerity while simultaneously cutting taxes on corporations, increasing immigration, accepting refugees, etc.), then the Davos crowd will know that you are their people: you don’t have divided or especially foreign loyalties (like loyalty to your electorate), instead you’re only loyal to the Davos crowd. So, as soon as you lose your elections (it’ll probably happen sooner rather than later), you’ll be given a gig at a supranational organization (usually the EU, but could be something else, like the IMF, or whatever), and you can of course move on to the private sector and make millions (like Tony Blair did), if you wish so. A person like Varoufakis (the leftist Greek finance minister who wanted to leave the Eurozone during the game of chicken with the Troika back in 2015) is so much hated by these people that his only chance is staying in Greece.
I think this applies to Orbán: he cannot really hope to get a job in Brussels (unless there’s an alt right revolution in Western Europe – I’m not holding my breath, but I think he’s playing on this chance), so he has to keep power in Hungary. I think this explains the corruption: he cannot promise his people many jobs in Brussels either, or jobs with multinational corporations (the previous prime minister, Bajnai, got a job in Paris as a director or something with a smaller multinational corporation called Meridiam Group), so he has to give them money. Which is why they are so corrupt. (Given that the socialists were also corrupt, it didn’t get much worse. And of course this “delayed payment” of a gig in Brussels or elsewhere is also a kind of corruption.)
So it’s all understandable, but corruption nevertheless it is.
True, but doesn’t contradict what I said “Well, yes (mostly). “Conquer and hold” isn’t the same thing as rearguard fighting as the Ottoman grip on Europe gradually diminished. That being said, there were periods of time when the Ottomans briefly expanded European territory after 1526. IIRC 1680 or so was their greatest extent..”
They didn’t conquer much in 1526, only defeated the Hungarian army. But then they left the country after looting a third of it, and only returned in 1529 (when they restored their vassal as a king of Hungary against the Habsburgs), in 1532 (an abortive attempt to lay siege to Vienna).
The actual conquest of Central Hungary took place 1541-52, in I think three or four campaigns (1541, 1543, 1552, and maybe another I forgot), so it’s not quite true that after 1526 there was no major conquest.
But I guess we’re now debating terminology, which is silly. There’s no disagreement regarding the facts.
But extremely well placed to launch Iskander-M and Iskander-K from there toward all Ukraine. It may be useful to target NATO missiles defenses on Romania also.
Uncooperative doesn’t matter much if the invading force is willing to slaughter millions of men, women, and children. The Turks will be willing, as they have shown in the past.
And yet again, the populations of the invaded countries will be far older than the Turkish population. We need to stop ignoring this.
How does a shrinking, timid, self hating country with an average age over forty resist a growing, confident, aggressive country such as Turkey with an average age of thirty? Sustained hand-to-hand combat between twenty- and thirty-year-olds and forty- or fifty-year-olds doesn’t usually work out well for the older group in the end. Especially in countries where the native population is almost completely disarmed.
The analysis is also still apparently focusing on the Kurdish fifth column in turkey, without focusing on the small but rapidly growing fifth column of Muslims in Europe, especially Turks in Germany and Austria. With Turks and other Muslims continuing to have far more children proportionally than Germans, Austrians, French, etc., the numbers get worse for white Europeans and better for the Turks every single year.
In twenty years, where will the young german, Austrian, and French men be to operate those tanks and other weapons that supposedly will hold off the Turks? They won’t be anywhere, because they are not being born.
If nonMuslim Europeans do not start having more children, and fast, tanks or other advanced weaponry won’t save them from the much younger and soon to be more numerous Turks.
The phrase is ‘conquer and hold’. Your anxiety is that Turkey will seize portions of Europe. The last time they did that was 500 years ago, when they annexed much of the Kingdom of Hungary. They laid siege to Vienna in 1683, but they failed and were not able to add territory. Their European possessions were whittled away over the succeeding 200-odd years, leaving them with part of Thrace.
In twenty years, where will the young german, Austrian, and French men be to operate those tanks and other weapons that supposedly will hold off the Turks? They won’t be anywhere, because they are not being born.
Again, France, Britain, and Ireland have only mild fertility problems, if that. Fertility recoveries have precedent. Both France and Russia have experienced them.
Also, the highly fertile portions of the Near East, Central Asia, and North Africa have not been the major source countries for Muslim immigration to (non-Russian) Europe. Turkey and the Maghreb states have fertility rates near replacement level.
You seem to be equating today’s Europeans with the Europeans of yesteryear who bravely drove back the Turks. We know that that comparison is indefensible.
Who will hand the Turks their asses exactly? I will reiterate, because this is conveniently glossed over: nonMuslim Europeans DO … NOT … HAVE … CHILDREN. There will be inadequate numbers of youngish nonMuslim men (even counting up to age forty) to fight in the armed forces, to operate those superior tanks, or to fight in the streets.
Just ten years from now, there will very likely be another five million Muslims in Germany, and another several million fewer nonMuslims.
Already, official german federal government statistics from September 2016 show that THIRTY-THREE percent of people living in Germany under age eighteen are of “migrant background”, which is nearly equivalent to non-white Muslim.
Under age five, THIRTY-SIX percent of people living in Germany in September 2016 were of migrant background, I.e. almost all Nonwhite and Muslim.
Just in the last year, those percentages have surely moved slightly higher already.
Again, who will operate those tanks and other superior weaponry of the “German” armed forces against a Turkish invasion 20 years from now? A lot of Muslims, that’s who. Do we really see the suicidal brainwashed Germans and French barring Muslims from the armed forces, as they should, let alone deporting them?
Back then, Europeans had children and believed in their people’s right to live and thrive and maintain their own culture in their own lands.
Today, Europeans do not have children, and most of them do not believe in themselves and their culture.
Germany now is already noticeably different than it was even five years ago. I speak and read german reasonably well, our kids are learning german from an early age, and we speak with Germans who are in Germany and in the USA every single week. We have come to doubt whether Germany will be a sufficiently safe and civilized place for our kids, especially our daughters, to be HS exchange students or to attend university.
No, it is not. There are, for example, 2-3 million Poles.
If things go the way they are going now, Europe is toast. But it’s slower than alarmists like you posit. Actually it’d be better if it was faster, but instead so far we’ve been boiled like the proverbial frog.
PS One real possibility that none of has mentioned yet: nonMuslim europeans may begin fleeing their countries en masses as Muslims grow in numbers, confidence, and belligerence in Germany, France, England, Austria, Sweden, and Italy.
As an aging and terrified white nonMuslim population is subjected to ever increasing daily violence, intimidation, and sharia, many of them may flee abroad. While i would be glad to have them come ere to the USA, such flight would further tilt the political and physical balance of power in favor of Muslims in the countries they are leaving.
The physical and political tipping point in these countries is probably coming sooner than people in Europe, and on these comment boards, seem to think. I will NOT be happy to be vindicated on these dire predictions, but the evidence is ample.
This also explains why Putin enriches his cronies.
Doing it legally (like Singapore with its extremely high salaries for top public servants) is electorally unfeasible. Otherwise, they will enrich themselves one way or the other, and the guy who pays the piper gets to call the tune.
German women are afraid to walk by themselves or even in small groups, Islam is being taught favorably to impressionable young german and austrian students in government schools, and more than 36% of Germany’s residents age five and under have a quote migrant background, according to the PC pussies in Germany’s federal statistics office. Are they referring to Poles? Please.
Go to Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, and Vienna and see if there are masses of Poles, or masses of Arab and African and Turkish Muslims.
Yeah, I’m an alarmist.
We personally know a man whose son was attacked and viciously beaten by a group of Arab men while walking home from a party in their hometown in Germany less than a year ago. He no longer lets his daughter go out without a sizable group and would like his son to follow the same precaution. They are considering applying to immigrate to the USA or Canada because they see zero demographic or government help on the horizon at all.
You have a strange and pie-in-the-sky conception of “mild” fertility problems. Such a “mild” fertility differential leads merely to subjugation, death, and expulsion for nonMuslims in time.
The white nonMuslim population of France is declining every year. Same for England. Same for Germany. Same for Italy. Same for Sweden.
Walking on the streets there shows that amply.
Visiting elementary schools there makes the point in a starker way.
The total Fertility rate of about 2.0 for France and Ireland is NOT the total fertility rate for white nonMuslims in those countries. Particularly true in France. If Muslims have even 2.2 kids on average per woman and nonMuslims have 1.8 – which is charitable – a Muslim takeover is all but inevitable. Every year the gap between the number of Muslims and nonMuslims shrinks in every one of the countries mentioned, Ireland to a much lesser degree.
Have you ever read Article V? Here is its full text:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.
It’s a joke, and not even a particularly clever one. It says that if one NATO country were attacked, another would help it with “the actions it deems necessary”. In plain English, if the other country feels like sending pampers to the victim of aggression, it would be perfectly within its rights under NATO treaty. It is clear that little fish, like the Baltics or Poland, would be defended exactly like Britain and France defended Poland in 1939 (remember “phony war”?). Only countries with outsized ego damaged by a severe inferiority complex can take Article V seriously. Basically, the only security guarantee any NATO country incapable of defending itself has is the fact that nobody wants it.
For what for? Weak Putin is not willing to wage open war.
Can do the same with sub-based missiles.
Britain, France, and Ireland reproduce at or near replacement rates. They’re not in danger of subjugation for fertility deficits. Save your hysterics for Japan and Korea, who do have a severe and persistent problem.
See Angus Maddison’s historical estimates of domestic product per capita in Turkey vis a vis a set of 12 west European countries. Over the period since 1820, Maddison found they’d had periods where their relative position improved and where it decayed. Net improvement in relative position since 1870 has been nil. The country has been militarily inglorious for over 300 years, is no more demographically dynamic than is France, and has intramural communal discontents far more severe than any European country this side of Bosnia. Turkey isn’t worth your anxiety. Egypt and the Levantine Arab states couldn’t conquer Israel.
A good point. The situation will not stay static and it is very likely that native European populations will at some point start massively moving – that has already happened in most large cities like London, Brussels, Berlin. It is happening more slowly in Vienna where migrants are taking over area after area.
The question is where will they go. There are still large areas in the countryside that have not been impacted, but peoples’ ability to make a living there is limited. Majority of modern jobs are in urban centers: government, universities, medical care, airports, service, retail, banks – these are more likely to go to migrants than to locals because migrants have started to physically dominate urban centers in Western Europe.
In the last few years, 200 Dutch farmer families moved to rural Slovakia (not the nicest parts with empty land). There are French girls cutting hair in Bratislava salons, there are 10,000 British living in Prague, there is a slow, quiet migration from the West. When you talk to them they say they like the ‘quiet, safety, family atmosphere’. They are (mostly) too PC-brainwashed to say that they are driven by fear of migrant take-overs in their home countries. They are surprisingly scared of expressing any controversial views –
talk about ‘totalitarian’ propaganda. Some even chide the locals for their ‘nationalism’. But actions speak louder than words. They are voting with their feet.
Not like Obama or Trump were keen on waging one either. Heck, I’m not keen on an all-out war between NATO and Russia.
As I explained above, that’s just similar to how children ride their bikes with or without helmets: without helmet, more carefully. With helmet, more carelessly.
But then the sub-based missiles could be used for something else. That’s an additional variable for NATO military planners. It makes their position less certain.
You are switching the subject. Turkey won’t be able to conquer Europe by military force, not today, not in a hundred years time. (They wouldn’t be able to conquer the Arab world if they tried to.) This was what we were talking about.
The demographic tipping point or the collapse could come any time (will come probably slowly, then all of a sudden), but it’s mostly unrelated to the topic of Turkish military conquest, which is what we were talking about.
How is fewer people a problem? Japan and NK are already horrendously overpopulated. I’m not trying single you out but natalism really pisses me off. The world needs fewer people, not more and not even the same. Let’s aim for 1 billion people by 2500.
Euro alert! In America children do not wear helmets. They would rather walk then wear a helmet. Only a total loser wears a helmet while riding a bike (although it is considered acceptable for an adult to do so).
That’s true. Such fertility differences are quite substantial on longer timescales, like over half a century. But they cause collapse only very slowly (and then all of a sudden, but that’s later).
“Overpopulation” is not a coherent concept outside of agricultural societies with static production technology. These countries are crowded, but you can make adjustments for that. The problem right now is that they are facing a situation where 1 person will have four elderly grandparents to look after.
The first part of your comment answered Art Deco, not me, while the second part is irrelevant, it was just an easy to understand example I gave.
Japan has a higher fertility rate than Germany I think. You are exaggerating the problem.
I agree with you that it’s outlandish to imagine conquest by the Turkish army of European territory, but judging form media reports Germany’s armed forces are in a disturbingly desolate state, e.g. supposedly at times there are only about a dozen (!) operational fighters. Number of tanks is now in the low hundreds iirc, and part of the existing vehicles are cannibalized for spare parts. It’s very different even from the 1980s when the two German states maintained massive armies which probably were reasonably competent.
EDIT: Interesting article about Germany’s military:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/germanys-military-dying-13748
My claim of only a dozen operational fighters may have been somewhat exaggerated (or maybe not?), but the reality is depressing enough.
Turkey is not Arab. They put up a decent fight against the Russians at various points in the 19th century and beat the British handily several times during the Great War.
That’s possible. Anyway, as I wrote, logistics alone makes it impossible for the Turks to progress beyond the Balkan peninsula. And of their immediate neighbors, the Greeks will be a formidable opponent with difficult terrain.
In one of Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld’s books (I think it was The Culture of War) he wrote I think a full chapter on the Bundeswehr. He wrote that this institution only had a future as an effective fighting force if it was willing to embrace its past, meaning its predecessors like the Wehrmacht, Reichswehr, and the Prussian army. But, as he wrote, it was actually more and more repudiating it, renaming units and barracks named after (decidedly non-Nazi) Wehrmacht soldiers, eventually bringing the WW1 and earlier army, and even the pre-unification Prussian army under suspicion. The only German military tradition they were willing to embrace was the 1944 plot on Hitler’s life, but even that was distorted, since they wouldn’t talk about the plotters’ battlefield heroism, only their heroism in trying to murder and replace their own commander-in-chief. However commendable that was, that’s not something to motivate a young soldier to give his life on the battlefield for the Fatherland. Only examples of past battlefield heroism can do that, while the example of soldiers who wanted to murder their own commander-in-chief in wartime to stop the war they were fighting will do actually quite the opposite: it tells you that maybe the war you are fighting currently is one where you ought to surrender instead of fighting it…
As van Creveld wrote, however commendable it is that Germany is willing to tackle its horrible past, it’s got to the point where it’s inimical to keeping an effective and combat capable armed force, and the German democracy will eventually prove unable to defend itself. In other words, self-loathing is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. (That his parents were holocaust survivors makes it probably easier for him to write about it than for some German hick like the AfD guy.)
Martin van Creveld is also a staunch anti-feminist who hates the very existence of female soldiers. I don’t think he’d say anything nice about the fact that the German minister of defense is a woman.
She’s also stunningly incompetent, like most of the top-level female politicians in Germany (admittedly the men aren’t great either).
And yes, there was something of a witch hunt recently regarding supposed far right tendencies in the Bundeswehr, and a consequent push for severing any links to the Wehrmacht past, e.g. even renaming a barracks named after that guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Lent
who merely fought against allied bombers and doesn’t seem to have been much of a Nazi himself. For a time they also removed a picture of Helmut Schmidt in Wehrmacht uniform from the Bundeswehr academy named after him.
Personally I think the Wehrmacht can’t really be a positive example given the regime it served and its involvement in major atrocities, but this definitely goes too far even for me.
Even worse however is the shabby treatment of present-day German soldiers by Germany’s decadent political and media class, e.g. sending them to a shithole like Afghanistan, claiming for years it’s a humanitarian mission, not a combat mission, not giving them adequate equipment and political support (and having dozens of them die for nothing), not honouring the fallen etc., with the leftie scum of course denouncing them as war criminals or claiming they’re all crypto-Nazis. Disgusting what this country has become.
Don’t let them vote.
Agree with Beckow/reiner/German_reader.
I did a quantitative assessment of national military power in 2016.
Each of the big three European military powers (France, the UK, and Germany – its problems regardless) likely has around 1.5x the military power of Turkey. Just Greece + Serbia + Bulgaria have around half of Turkey’s.
They need to be citizens. That requires a passing knowledge of the local archaic language – it will have to wait for their kids… (we got the bastards cornered :))
It doesn’t. They’re not too different right now (1.45 v. 1.50). Both slipped below replacement level ca. 1973 and there has been no sustained improvement since. Worse are Macao (1.28), South Korea (1.24), Singapore (1.24), Hong Kong (1.20), and Taiwan (1.12).
They won Gallipoli.
See the work of the historical demographer Justin McCarthy. The effect of the 1st World War on the Ottoman Empire generated excess deaths in seven digits (the 600,000 dead among the Armenian minority less than half the total number of excess deaths). And, of course, they lost their Levantine, Mesopotamian, Hijazi, and Yemeni provinces, as well as seeing the formal end of Ottoman suzerainty in Egypt, &c. They did manage to avoid losing the Agean coast (which success turned out to be too bad for the Greeks living there, who were sent packing). Pretty much a disaster. Since that time, their military has been preoccupied with holding the Kurdish provinces.
You ignore that the birth rate in Japan is all Japanese, whereas in Germany it includes groups with higher birth rates than ethnic Germans (which is a recipe for grave societal tensions in any case). Japan has problems, but I suspect it will do much better in coming decades than many European countries.
Don’t forget Kut al-Imara, several other battles iirc. Of course they lost and WWI was a disaster for them, no one is doubting that. However except for the Kurds (a hell of an exception) it did give them a racially pure Anatolia.
This is very well known in Poland btw. Poles claim to have a better military than the Germans do now, and continue building it up. Essentially, effective NATO militaries are USA, UK, France, Turkey with Poland catching up to that category.
May well be. But Poles have more to defend in a sense since at least genuine patriotism is still seen as legitimate there. Given how Germany’s political class is actively working against German interests I don’t even see why anyone would want to join the German army nowadays, except to get free weapons training, all the more so since the groups it disproportionally draws recruits from (East Germans, ethnic Germans – who are often quite Russified tbh – from the former Soviet Union) are vilified and ridiculed by the media and political establishment.
Fair point.
A quick perusal of Wikipedia suggests the Luftwaffe has twice as many modern fighters as the Polish Air Force. They also have comparable numbers of modern MBT’s (excluding Poland’s Soviet-era T-72 stock, which isn’t worth much and most of which is soon going to be retired anyway); moreover, the German Leopards are later versions than Poland’s.
I am sure the situation in the Bundeswehr isn’t optimal, but on the other hand, we have to adjust for the fact that concepts such as “preparedness” and “operational state” are going to differ between Germany and Poland (and for that matter, most other countries).
Ultimately, Germany spends 4x as much on the military as Poland and has one of the world’s most complex industrial bases. Very skeptical that Poland can best it if they decide to “duke it out” for some reason.
You can’t make up your own facts. White europeans in Europe do NOT reproduce at replacement levels. The nonwhites, including Muslims, in Europe, DO reproduce at replacement levels or above.
This leads inexorably to a society comprised more and more of nonwhites and Muslims, and less comprised of whites and nonMuslims.
Save your wishful thinking for some alternate reality where white Europeans have children, common sense, courage, and an actual willingness to perpetuate their own families.
Let’s argue about this again in a year, then two years, then three years. Population trends are proving what I’m saying every month and every year, without fail.
Just in the few years since I started reading and commented it on this site, the white nonMuslim population of Germany, France, England, Sweden, and Italy has fallen, and the Muslim and nonwhite populations of every one of those countries has risen steadily. Tell me that that is not accurate.
Of course Germany’s industrial and technical base is much more significant and in another league. Supposedly, however, much of Germany’s military is out of commission (something like a dozen usable planes at the moment). If for some reason Poland wanted to do a lightning strike into Germany today, it might get very far.
Article from August 2014 but things haven’t improved dramatically:
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundeswehr-unter-von-der-leyen-marode-ausruestung-bei-luftwaffe-a-987940.html
Of the 67 CH-53 transport helicopters operating in Afghanistan, among others, only seven can take off.
Also with the helicopters of the type NH90 there are failures: Just five out of 33 should be ready for use.
-Out of 56 Transall C-160 airliners that are currently delivering relief supplies to northern Iraq, for example, only 21 are fully airworthy.
2015:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/19/germanys-army-is-so-under-equipped-that-it-used-broomsticks-instead-of-machine-guns/?utm_term=.2a00ee840024
“On Tuesday, German broadcaster ARD revealed that German soldiers tried to hide the lack of arms by replacing heavy machine guns with broomsticks during a NATO exercise last year. After painting the wooden sticks black, the German soldiers swiftly attached them to the top of armored vehicles, according to a confidential army report which was leaked to ARD.”
Only around 20% of Germans under the age of 20 are of non European origin.
Also, the TFR of ethnic Turks is around 1.8 to 1.9, basically the same as ethnic French or British. Many regions with ethnic Turkish populations are going to enter natural population decline over the next 20 years.
The only think keeping Turkish TFR high is the Kurdish regions in the east. The demographic challenge that the Kurdish minority poses to the Turkish state far exceeds that which Muslims pose to Western European states, Kurds are 18% of the population and have a TFR of 3, ethnic Turks only have a TFR of around 1.8 to 1.9, on current trends Kurds will be a majority by the second half of this century and Turkey will break up.
Turkey’s long term outlook is quite grim owing to the population explosion which is occurring in the Kurdish regions and the low, basically European level of fertility which ethnic Turks have.
Still far too high given that Germany didn’t even have much of a colonial history overseas.
A few years ago I actually would have agreed though that Germany’s situation isn’t that bad (at least relative to France or Britain). Fertility of Turks in Germany is somewhat higher than that of ethnic Germans, but not that much higher, and in any case not all Turks are of the demented Islamist Erdogan-worshipping kind (groups like the Alevis actually pretty much seem to hate him and what his movement stands for). 3-4 million Turks in Germany, not ideal, but something we could live with. For all their flaws even Sunni Turks aren’t as extreme as other Muslim groups (e.g. Pakistanis in Britain).
But the last few years have changed everything due to the invasion enabled by our traitor government. If that process isn’t stopped and at least a large part of the 1,5 million invaders repatriated, it will end in a catastrophe.
EDIT: Agree though about Turkey’s prospects, but that’s what the Turks get for holding on to those backwards Kurdish regions. Should have let them go long ago and built a wall to keep Kurds out.
The nonwhites, including Muslims, in Europe, DO reproduce at replacement levels or above
They’re a single digit-minority (about 5% of the total).
Having more fighting-age Muslim men in the country each year, and fewer fighting-age nonMuslim men in the country each year, for decades without exception, is VERY relevant to the country’s ability to defend itself against invasion or encroachment by a younger, more confident, by then more populous Muslim country nearby, such as turkey.
You guys keep reassuring yourselves about how turkey could “never” conquer Austria, Germany, etc., and we can revisit the debate each year and examine the new absolute and relative population and fertility numbers among Muslims in Austria & Germany etc, nonMuslims in Austria and Germany etc., and Turks in Turkey.
Yes, that sounds about right, Tor. But let’s think about when we should start, say, a fifty-year clock running on such a population-change differential becoming more drastic & catastrophic. Meaningful numbers of muslims have been in some of these conuntries for a little while, and the immigration and fertility differentials have favored both absolute and relative increase in the Muslim segment of those societies every single year.
Moreover, I’m not sure we are even fifty years away from a tipping point in Austria and especially Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and England anymore. I’m guessing we are not, sadly.
People often leave out the large numbers of additional muslims who will likely be settling in these once Western countries due to family-reunification immigration policies.
Add that to nonreunification Muslim immigration, persistent differential fertility rates between muslims and non muslims, and then flight out of the country by nonmuslims, and things may well be changing much more quickly SOON.
All four of these factors must be considered to get a true appreciation of how bleak things are in the medium term, not even long term anymore.
That’s why I’m even more pessimistic and “alarmist” than some here when it comes to guesstimating the tipping point in terms of ability to control and defend ones own people, territory, resources, culture, and way of life domestically and against outside military attack.
Also a tipping point in the white flight, or nonMuslim flight, out of northwestern, western and some of Central Europe progressing from a trickle to a flood.
An aged and further aging nonMuslim population that is declining in absolute numbers and declining rapidly relative to muslims, will be a ripe target for turkey in time. Not a century but a few decades, more likely.
Out of date, unduly optimistic, and wrong. France estimated nearly 9% Muslim, Sweden also approaching 9%, Belgium and Netherlands 7-8% and booming, Germany over six percent without counting the several hundred thousand new Muslim immigrants and Muslim net births/deaths in the past year or so.
Every single year now, there are tens of thousands fewer Germans and a quarter million or more additional muslims (75-80,000 net increase in muslims in Germany this year without counting immigration at all).
We will find similarly bleak numbers for France, England, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
The smaller countries in Europe, such as NL and Belgium and Sweden, will soon be 20% Muslim, the larger ones coming farther behind but inexorably and gathering steam.
France is the most Muslim country in the EU. It has a little over 6 million Muslims. The EU as a whole, population 510 million, was indeed about 5% Muslim.
Just today a massive Pew study about Islam in the EU came out:
http://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/
EU in 2016 was 4.9% Muslim. Maybe now it’s 5.3%, or something.
If we take the German Federal Office’s data for 2016:
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Bevoelkerung/MigrationIntegration/Migrationshintergrund2010220167004.pdf?__blob=publicationFile, the relevant numbers being on pages 63-67.
11% of Germans under the age of 5 were of Middle Eastern or African origin and another 5.5% were not identifiable, if we include them as being Middle Eastern refugees, you get a figure of around 16.6% of the population under 5 being African or Middle Eastern, with another few percent being Asian.
17% being European of other origins and only 63% being ethnic German, Germany will remain majority European for the foreseeable future but there is a real risk ethnic Germans could become a minority in their own country as other European migrants, Italians, Spaniards, Poles etc. flood in. I believe Frankfurt is already minority German.
I agree the refugees need to be repatriated, I think some figures in the CDU have proposed sending them back from the summer of 2018 onward.
With regard to Turkey, Turkey faces one of the most difficult situations of any nation, they have an ethnic minority which comprises nearly 20% of the population and has a TFR 60% higher then the main ethnic group, I think Turkey is in huge trouble going forward, if it collapses, Iran will emerge as the dominant hegemon the region, even more so then it is right now.
Frankly I do not understand Erdogan’s fears about a Kurdish state in Syria or Iraq, if I were Erdogan I would be more worried about the 15 million Kurds in Turkey that are set to double to 30 million by 2050.
The many Muslims in Germany might lead to an Islamic Federal Republic of Germany or something. It won’t lead to magically enabling Turkey to militarily conquer Europe.
You have already written dozens of comments without responding to my most important point: LOGISTICS. Turkey is unable to conquer Germany in the foreseeable future for the same reason it’s unable to conquer Saudi Arabia, even though Saudia Arabia has a 100% Muslim Arab tribal population where a lot of tribes just hate the ruling dynasty, and they are shitty soldiers anyway.
I think the tipping point will come sometime after 2040, though there’s no way of knowing when. I think it will come earlier than a Muslim majority. The earlier it comes, the more chances we have of fighting back. The slower the process, the more likely we will keep being the frog boiled alive.
People predicting Armageddon Tomorrow have been proven wrong for decades now, even though things did get generally shittier. My guess is they will just keep getting shittier for decades. But I’m also sure Armageddon will arrive one day, sooner or later. We just cannot know when.
It can be a positive example of an effective fighting force. It cannot be a positive example of what to do with the fighting force. As time passes, it will all matter less and less, just as nobody cares anymore about Uzbeks worshiping Tamerlane or Mongols worshiping Genghis. Even Russians’ occasional Stalin worship elicits less excitement than it would have done a few decades ago.
I actually talked to Germans about military history, and they seemed to be proud of the Wehrmacht’s feats, even while meticulously making sure to condemn every aspect of Nazism.
If Nazism was treated as just another tyrannical ideological regime causing endless suffering instead of the incarnation of demons from Hell, it’d also go away. (Same thing about slavery in the US etc. Though Nazism seems to be the ultima ratio in the US and elsewhere, too.) I don’t know if tackling the problem of Nazism in particular or anti-whitism in general or both would be the most effective approach. I do both.
They were financial traders. I’m not sure how typical they were in Germany.
Over a year ago, official statistics from federal gov of Germany reported that of people age five and under who live in Germany, THIRTY-SIX percent have a migrant background. Those aren’t Poles, primarily. They are Muslims from Turkish and Arab parents.
Wait for updated stats that account for the hundreds of thousands of additional Muslims admitted to Germany, or born in Germany, over the last year and a half. During that time, there has also been yet another net loss of tens of thousands of actual Germans.
In 12 years, then, easily MORE than thirty-six percent of Germany’s residents under age 18 will be non-European Muslims. Probably forty percent.
Why the interest of some here, especially Germans, in denying the overwhelming and consistent evidence of your people’s rapid replacement and easily predictable disappearance? The numbers are worse in Germany than the “stop being an alarmist” crowd seems to think. (It is almost too sad and maddeningly unnecessary to contemplate, but it’s happening right now and fast.
That doesn’t even account for the flight of Germans out of Germany, which will likely accelerate drastically.
The so-called german military will be heavily Muslim soon enough.
(They’re getting dire in the usa, too, though not with Muslims as the main problem, yet.)
Saw the same study. Look a thing le engages for Germany, France, Sweden, for example.
Moreover, when one excludes the eastern euro countries with almost no Muslims, the average for Western Europe is higher than that quote European average.
The figures also seem not to include illegal aliens, of whom there are many.
Five percent, bullshit.
Also, what is important in times of physical conflict, street fighting, civil war, rioting? How many seventy and eighty year olds you have on your side, or how many teens and twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings are on your side? The Muslims have an average age in every European country that is far lower than the nonmuslim average age.
Touching how everyone, including ‘figures in CDU’ agrees now. Maybe even Merkel says it now, if one could figure out what she mumbles about. Great timing. It is as if people who watched an ancient building being destroyed and burnt, denying that it was happening as it was happening, suddenly claim that it can be put together again. It cannot.
It is almost impossible to remove large numbers of people from a modern society given legal, societal, logistics and human behaviour constraints. We are not living in 1945. To collect and process for repatriation even 10,000 of the more cooperating migrants is an enormous task – and it can only be done if you pay them to go back. Then they come back. These are not stupid people and they have established footholds in large German cities. There is also the unbeatable ‘family’ exception – who will expel anyone who has small children especially if they are born in Germany? I think the migrants know how to do it, and Germany is paying them to do it.
The damage has been done. To undo it would require a massive political and legal shift. The numbers are also much larger than the official figures because hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, are in Germany illegally or are coming to join their families and friends.
When someone is breaking into your house the time to stop it is as it happens, or maybe shortly after. Waiting a few years after he gets settled in, brings family, becomes friendly with a few unhinged and helpful neighbours – that doesn’t work. CDU also knew all of this as it was happening – people in those positions are not stupid and this was not that hard to think through. So their belated wisdom is not worth a bucket of spit. Only very simple people – or German voters – fall for a scam this obvious. Now for the consequences.
Very unPC people in my experience. Can’t really succeed at this craft if you live in your own reality.
Fair enough. I suspect you’re right about the tipping point coming before muslims are a majority.
The tipping point could come when Muslims reach even twenty percent of the population, because they can cause enormous fear and nonstop assaults with that number. Especially given that Germans are so very much older than Muslims in Germany, so they won’t be able to resist physical attacks well in most cases, particularly as they have nearly no rights to carry and defend themselves with firearms.
Once the white and nonMuslim flight out of Germany begins in earnest, Muslims could go from twenty to sixty percent of the population in the same time it took them to reach twenty percent in the first place. That will make it even more frightening and dangerous for nonMuslims remaining in Germany, who will face an even stronger incentive to flee the country. Like Detroit or Baltimore writ large, but with a more focused and somewhat less stupid population of aggressors.
Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, and many german cities will be freefire zones against nonMuslims and whites. This is developing rapidly already. We have postponed our plan to do a family vacation in Germany, as have other fellow germanAmericans of our acquaintance, perhaps to be cancelled permanently. We are no longer going to encourage HS student exchange or German university to our young children. If we wanted our kids to be immersed in a halfMuslim cesspool, as german cities will easily be by that point, we could send them to an Arab country or to Nigeria.
That isn’t really correct, it includes a lot of Europeans as well, iirc the definition is just “at least one grandparent immigrated” (which means I have “migrant background” as well since my father’s an English immigrant). It includes millions of Poles, ex-Yugoslavs, people from the former Soviet Union etc.
However the situation is definitely bad and steadily getting worse, I agree with you about that.
Maybe Erdogan believes he can paper over Turkish-Kurdish differences by Islamism. He seems more of an Islamist to me than a Turkish nationalist anyway, a lot of Turks seem to be angry about his willingness to eventually grant Syrian refugees Turkish citizenship.
As for Germany, the CDU is a big part of the problem, as long as it doesn’t totally repudiate Merkel and her entourage. Personally I think it would be best if that party just died, they’re irredeemable at this point imo.
Well sure, I understand that, and in a more general way Nazi Germany was certainly capable of some very impressive feats (it did produce advanced rockets and jet fighters after all). It’s probably not a good idea though to deliberately cultivate admiration of the Wehrmacht, since I don’t think this will be positively viewed in other European countries and we need to get beyond the WW2 past.
I’m also not sure if such tradition is really necessary, I once read a media report (maybe biased, who knows) that claimed German soldiers who had been in Afghanistan felt the Wehrmacht wasn’t important for them anymore, they now had their own war, their own fallen comrades, their own enemy to hate (the vile Taliban). And Afghanistan is probably more relevant in many ways for what the Bundeswehr will have to deal with in future anyway.
Somehow this discussion of relative strengths of different armed forces veered in the wrong direction. Hardware does not win wars. It’s not even a decisive factor. Just consider: in Afghanistan, the US and NATO troops with infinitely superior hardware are afraid to stick their noses out of heavily fortified bases, whereas Taliban with Kalashnikovs and medieval mentality roam free and do whatever they want. Another example: Saudis with modern hardware supplied by the US and EU are losing in Yemen to Houthis with old hardware but superior will to fight. Wars are won and lost by people, not toys, however expensive and modern those toys might be. Europeans have no stomach for warfare, so they are the losers even before the hostilities start. Some Eastern Europeans might still be different until the Soviet legacy wears off, but even that was never tested experimentally.
Those constraints need to be removed. It’s not inhumane to expel people who forced their way into another country just a few years ago and have caused immense trouble. If some amount of violence is necessary, so be it.
Maybe, but the war in Afghanistan is a bad example. Can there really be any doubt that Western powers could “win” there if they just used terror tactics, up to a genocidal level with measures of collective punishment, e.g. if there’s a village that supports the Taliban you just burn it down, execute all the men of military age and leave the women and children to starve and die? Western powers of course aren’t capable of doing this today, and it would be disproportionate and unjustified in relation to Western interests in the country. But an existential fight over European territory would be different. There wouldn’t be any constraints on operations in such a case.
Yes, and that is a relatively slow and long process. For example the legal environment right now with endless EU laws and ‘international obligations’ and the ability to appeal any decision endlessly and simply stall needs to change. But the legal environment also includes the current judges – all it takes is to find one sympathetic judge and everything is put on hold.
I wish I could be more optimistic, but all current indicators point to the situation getting worse.
Yeah the Amerindians just had no will to fight against the invading Europeans. It’s ridiculous how historians think that the Europeans usage of guns and armor against Amerindians’ sticks and stones were decisive when it is obvious that the battles were won by the European’s superior will.
That would have been a nice excuse, but numerous bombings of wedding parties and hospitals by Western forces in Afghanistan show that there are no scruples on both sides. Also, let’s not forget history: Alexander the Great, British Empire, and the Soviet Union had exactly the same “success” in Afghanistan. What’s more, all of the above had had better hardware than the locals. Hegel was right: “What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
When there is will to fight on both sides, the numbers become decisive. BTW, Indians very quickly learned to use guns and horses.
Nowhere near the level of violence and deliberate terror necessary to crush such an insurgency. You’d need to be prepared to use methods like Nazi Germany, 1940s imperial Japan or Stalin’s Soviet Union (not the 1980s version) for that.
I mean, seriously, look up the case of corporal Blackman in the UK (jailed for executing a wounded Taliban commander)…that’s very far from any realistic appraisal of what would be necessary to win a war like this.
To win in Afghanistan an invader would have to go above and beyond the levels you mentioned. An invader would have to kill every Afghan and have an empty desert as his prize.
That seems exaggerated to me, difficult as the terrain undoubtedly is, it should still be possible to terrorize Afghans into submission. They’re not that special. It’s just that it isn’t worth the effort and that it would be morally dubious.
How come the Nazis couldn’t terrorize the Poles, Czechs or Belorussians into submission?
I think they did, to a different degree. When you try to ‘terrorize into submission’ at some point that triggers massive resistance. With not much to lose, a large percentage of men, and some women, start fighting back no matter what the odds.
If they had defeated the Soviet Union, they certainly would have, the idea that there still could have been any meaningful resistance after that in Eastern Europe is fantasy. The Nazis would just have exterminated any remaining pockets of resistance by destroying villages, deporting the civilian population to concentration camps etc. Azar Gat makes that argument in “War in human civilization” btw. Insurgencies only work against enemies that for ethical or political considerations can’t adopt the sort of brutal measures the Nazis used (or to a lesser degree plenty of other powers in history like the Assyrians, Romans, or Europeans during colonial times…even the British, at the time already rather humanitarian on the whole, broke the Boers by putting civilians in quite horrible internment camps where thousands died).
Not that I suggest Western powers should adopt the same methods in their wars. The lesson is clearly not to get involved in futile projects in places like Afghanistan in the first place since one can’t win there under present standards.
Not to mention that the Soviets actually did terrorize these peoples into submission, completing the uncompleted work of the Nazis.
The Poles were terrorized enough that after 1939 they didn’t engage in much meaningful resistance until the odds changed in their favor, like the Soviet troops were approaching. Even that proved heroic but futile in the end.
The Czechs didn’t resist at all, the Czech factories kept producing weapons and munitions for the Germans until, well, until early May 1945. That was the point when they rose up. Even that was almost crushed at record speed in the last days of the war, but some pro-German Russian collaborationist troops turned coats (again…) and held back the Germans until the Soviet troops arrived. It didn’t save those Russian collaborationists from the gulag (or execution in the case of the officers), but it did save a lot of Czech asses.
As to the Belorussians, they were also terrorized by the red partisans (some of them parachuted from the Soviet side of the front with weapons), demanding “no collaboration” with the Germans (meaning not even paying taxes the Germans imposed on the village), and the partisans had credibility because everyone knew the Germans were losing the war. Partisan activities greatly increased after Stalingrad, when many deserted from collaborationist militias to join the partisans in the hope of erasing the stains on their reputations. So the Belorussians were just between a rock and a hard place, either collaborate and face the wrath of Stalin later or resist and face the wrath of the Germans. This caused the huge death toll, but it would’ve been resolved after a hypothetical German victory.
The Greeks ruled Bactria for 300 years after Alexander, and the Greek Bactrian kingdom was known as one of the richest of the Orient. In my book, this counts as success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom
They were defeated not by native Bactrians, but by another invaders, the nomadic Yuezhi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuezhi
Which the vast majority were Belarusians (or Belarusian Jews). A guerrilla war against the Germans fought the Belarusians, not parachutists