Why I don't believe in blood and soil

It's not true

Everyone on Substack is writing about their kids, so I’ll take a shot. The most annoying thing about kids, apart from all the other things, is when they are arguing about who gets to play with some toy. You make them both calm down and explain to you the nature of their claim on the toy, repeatedly pausing to allow outbursts of dysregulated emotion, listen carefully to both sides, assessing argument and counter-argument with disinterested objectivity, and then, after 15 minutes of this nonsense, you make an arrangement that wraps all of the complicated data of ownership and usufruct into an artefact of such perfectly boundless justice that Solon would be like dang, you nailed it dog! And you walk off feeling like top Dad, as opposed to those not top Dads who just threw the toy in the bin and went to the pub or whatever, and five minutes later you come back and the toy is on the floor. The point here being that they never want the toy, they want what the other one has, and will bite any bite, scratch any scratch to get it. Take away the contest over ownership, and it’s just some dumb toy; there are a million of those.

And that’s Israel-Palestine.

I’ve posted enough about Israeli architecture that it feels cheap, tired and stale to keep doing it, but, whatever, content go brrr.

Look, you can make all the excuses you want, but the bottom line is that if you love a given land, you just don’t do this to it. Sure, money’s tight, babies keep getting born, all that. But if you care, you just don’t, and since Zionists do this everywhere we see they don’t care, and that’s case closed.

But what about the Palestinians? Maybe they care? ROFL. Sorry, ROFLMAO. I lived in East Jerusalem. Their houses are bit nicer than the Jewish ones, but they throw rubbish everywhere, they burn tires all the time for no discernible reason. ‘All the time’, is not an overstatement. Maybe you don’t know this video.

It isn’t just that both sides in practice act like they couldn’t care less about the land on any meaningful level, it’s that their willingness to fight and kill for it is so clearly positively correlated with such an attitude. Yes, you can point me to that guy on a Samarian hilltop who used to be a hippy and lives exclusively off raw milk and microgreens he grows on his living roof. In general, though, if you see rubbish everywhere, you know you are in a Right Wing area, the more rubbish the more Right Wing.

The very first act of the first ‘fully Right Wing government’, which, as promised, went on to solve Israel’s security problems, was to repeal a very small tax on disposable plastics. Plastic bowls are such a good indication of baboonism because they aren’t just bad in one way, they are bad in every way. Apart from the litter and pollution, they are ugly to look upon, disgusting to hold in your hand, and also bad for your health. They are cheap purely because the actual costs from production and disposal are defrayed via externalities placed on the public at large so that people can be lazy and coarse. It is the quintessence of every bad aspect of modernity rolled into one. Of course, Israel tops out the global rankings for disposable plastic use. Truly the nations are lit up.

The government couldn’t merely restrict itself to abolishing a small, borderline token, attempt to care for the Land of Israel, but instead marketed it as a moral crusade. Pernicious Zionist shmad merchant Yitzhak Pindrus accused ‘the Left’ of having treated his voters as animals for asking them to wash up a plate or pay to defray part of the costs of their not doing so. The order was made by Smotrich, a man whose dedication to the sanctity and purity of the Land of Israel famously knows no bounds.

Gador Nature Reserve

Since then, when it has not just been generally clowning around, or implementing racial quotas in the judiciary, the government has set itself the task of gutting Israel’s already third-world environmental regulations. Every so often over the past two years, someone will raise the issue of the physical destruction of most of Gaza being an issue for the Israeli environment, and rightoids loudly guffaw at such נפש יפה nonsense.

The goyim

OK, but maybe this is just an Israel-Palestinian thing. After all, I checked the internet, and Palestinians are Arabs from muh 22 countries who moved to Palestine in 1936 to pick Zionist oranges, and the Israelis are white supremacists from Warsaw and Brooklyn who came to promote European imperalism. It would stand to reason that neither of them really values the land all that much. However, I don’t think blood and soil is really true anywhere. Here are some British people:

Look how healthy they are, how in touch with nature, how effortlessly cool. But they are in Rhodesia. Rhodesia is about as not like Britain as it is possible to be, and it turns out that British people who left their native soil and went there did pretty well. Indeed, we have a lot of data on how Anglos do in a very wide variety of latitudes and longitudes, and they mostly do great. The least successful country populated by British people, though, is Britain, which everyone agrees sucks. You can plead selection effects here (though the selection effect for Australia was largely propensity to commit crimes), but that’s just a roundabout way of admitting that being on your native soil isn’t very important.

I will admit that there are groups of human beings for whom being on their own territory is genuinely crucial. Bushmen, Pygmies, and Aboriginals are adapted to a particular environmental niche, and if taken from it they just kind of wither. That’s why no matter how much diversity your country gets, you’re never going to get a !Kung community, which is a shame because having an exclamation mark in your name is based. But we all kind of understand that, in this respect, they are removed from our fellow man and something closer to animals. (If that comes across as dangerous rhetoric, applying the same standards to them as afforded to endangered species would actually be a massive step up).

However, even Bantus aren’t like that. Bantus are from the Nigeria-Cameroon borderlands, which look like this:

But now they are all over Africa, the lowlands, the highlands, the wetlands, the drylands, and they ain’t done. Do they thrive any more in the Bantu Cradle than any of the other places? Not so much that you would care to notice.

Summing up

If you are literate, you may have noticed I have made two basically unconnected points. The first is that those who most loudly exclaim that they have a special connection to a piece of land going back thousands of years, and sanctioned by divine command, in practice treat it like a public toilet. The second is that being in their native place doesn’t seem to have any real relationship at all to how well different ethno-cultural groups do. Humans create their environments.

The idea of a mystical connection between a people and their land has had varied historical uses, but people like it today because it seems to offer a nice and not genocidal solution to a pervasive problem. Take Denmark. Denmark is a nice place: it has pretty buildings, it’s tidy, it’s clean, things look in order. Then Somalians come: now it looks shabby, things are falling apart, there’s mess everywhere. The only decent response is to want the Somalians to stop coming, to go somewhere else. The obvious place for them to go is Somalia, so it’s fitting to say something like ‘Denmark is the home of Danes; Somalia is the home of Somalians. Each should be content to dwell among their own people, and thrive in their proper domain.¹

Come off it though. If Danes in Denmark are replaced by Somalians, then Denmark will get worse, if Somalians in Somalia were replaced by Danes then Somalia would get a lot better. There’d be teething problems; elements of the culture would have to adapt to the heat, and they’d need to figure out a culturally appropriate form of sunhat. But it would all be straightened out after a bit, and it would still be a massive improvement long before that. I’m down with the argument that cultural diversity is a good in itself to be preserved, and that would justify keeping some Somalians around like in the Truman Show, but you don’t need many for that. I don’t want to say how many because that sounds kind of incendiary, but not [googles it] 19 million [19 million!].

The obstacle to resettling Somalia with Danes is different: it would be be a mess; the Somalians would get wind; they’d freak out; it would be awful. The Danes would have to either become monsters or give up. There was a time when disease and path-dependent immune systems took most of the job out of human hands. Was that better? Seems pretty ghoulish to say so, but it’s a moot point anyway. The Danes are staying in Denmark, and so the Somalians have to stay in Somalia. You win some you lose some. Don’t put a gift horse in your mouth, or whatever pithy aphorism is appropriate here.

A place is something you can see