History will not stay quiet nor it is ending. Fukuyama was wrong. Native cultures continue to be affected by epidemies of barrennes and a strange lack of interest in the future. They will not be part of the future. Some parts of Europe are reporting that people is not reproducing, they are refusing to have children. Overrall fertility rate in Italy is about 1.3, and for some towns it is less than 1. The NYT has a long article on this. But barrennes is not an European racial feature, the same process is hitting Eastern Asia and even Southern Asia (Thailand).
The combination of what I call the barrenness epidemy and possibly some other factors is rapidly destabilizing nations and communities across the Middle East as well as everywhere. Lebanon was one of the first signs of the incoming storm when its Christian community was swept away by the demographic explosion that consumed the world of Islam a few decades ago. Lebanon had been carefully engineered to have an Europeanized Christian majority and a passive, rural Muslim minority. The structure worked for one hundred years, till the demographic balance shifted and the country collapsed. Yugoslavia was destroyed by differential fertility between the South Slav majority and Muslim minority in Bosnia Herczegovina. In Israel we have four different ethnic groups competing, although the balance is maintained thanks to the demographic transition of Israeli Arabs and the strenghtening of the ultra-religious Jews.
What about Italy? It will be taken over once again by the Barbarians? So it seems to me. Old people needs help, and help is cheaply available in Third World countries. They cannot renounce to foreign caregivers and street sweepers. Israel wanted to avoid the foreign temporary worker phenomenon, and it largely succeeded except in one sector: the Phillippine caregivers. Consequence: we have a fast growing Phillippine community in Israel, girls who give birth, girls and boys who marry locals, illegal children protected by humanitarian volunteer organizations, etc.
There are two alternatives: (1) general miscegenation, like in Brazil, (2) settling into castes, like India. All over the world I am seeing increasingly mixed societies, not societies structured in castes. But the tide may reverse itself. This struggle will go on till genetic engineering makes irrelevant the whole ethnic thingie. Then we will have some other thingie.
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The question is, are the immigrants soluble or insoluble into the larger society and does the result (whether it is solution (i.e. assimilation) or not) strengthen or weaken the host society? America experienced many waves of immigration, but the immigrants were racially and religiously compatible with the existing population, so even though there were some rough spots of anti-immigrant feeling, eventually the children and grandchildren of the immigrants were able to dissolve into the American mix.
Jewish intermarriage rate in the US is over 50% so in only a few generations all the pure blooded Jews will be gone except for the ultra-orthodox. But in so dissolving, they will have contributed their Ashkenazic genes and made Americans a little bit smarter. The same is not true of the millions of Latinos now arriving - they are lowering the mean. Also because of modern transportation and communications, they are not severing their ties with the home country as in the past, so they have mixed loyalty to the US and retain their native language more. And they are racially different than the majority, although their religion is compatible. While miscegenation does away with racial tensions once everyone is the same color, the end result is a society that is weakened by lower intelligence. I think that is it politically incorrect to talk about it, so no historian ever does, but one of the factors that must have lead to the decline of the Islamic culture, which went from an energetic intellectual period where algebra was developed, chemical distillation invented (al-kohl),etc. to a period of torpor that persists to this day was the Arab habit of marrying the local (African) women, thus producing offspring of lower intelligence who could reproduce the religious fanaticism OK (being a religious fanatic does not require a high IQ) but could not keep up the scientific developments. Brazil is not exactly famous for its intellectuals and Nobel prize winners either.
Europe has an even worse situation in that they are getting peoples (Pakistanis, Africans, etc. who are both racially and religiously different and not likely to assimilate (nor are these countries set up for assimilation - you are born an Italian or a German, you cannot "become" one - the Jews were in Poland for 1000 years and yet they never became "Polish" even if they had wanted to. And most of these countries were exporters of people for many centuries and as recently as the 1960s, so to turn to importer of people is a shock. I don't think the host societies will be able to withstand this shock - Holland will go from being an ultra-liberal society to a place where the women all dress with Islamic modesty and gays are stoned to death - this has already happened in places like Turkey and Egypt where the urban women dressed in "immodest" Western dresss starting after WWI but now they have gone backward due to demographics - in Turkey the rural areas experienced their demographic transition much later (or not yet) than Istanbul so the rural population with its rural customs overwhelmed the sophisticated Europeanized society.
The Jews of Eastern Europe (until Hitler brought the whole show to a halt) offered a different model of immigration without (complete) assimilation. The insoluble nature of the Jews certainly was not without its tensions but on the whole (outside of Russia, which did not know what to do with the Jews of the Pale that it inherited when Poland dissolved, and Ukraine with its history of lawlessness) there was long term co-existence in Poland and the Austro-Hungarian empire and the host societies were strengthened by the Jewish presence, even if they did not want to admit it - only now that the Jews are gone to they realize how much they lost.
Gypsies offer the opposite pole - as unassimilated as the Jews (though they did pick up Christianity at some point) it is hard to say what benefits they gave to Europe (aside from music).
(1) Islamic collapse had much to do with the Mongol invasion, which exterminated Central Asian and Middle East peoples. The current population of Iraq is descendent of recent nomad tribes. Iran is peopled mostly by turkmen.
(2)Holland does not appear to be turning into a Muslim society at all, but a mixed society like its Caribbean colonies (Aruba).
(3) Regarding the tziganers, allow me only comment that I dont like gipsy music.
1. Either way, replacement of existing culture by immigrants/invaders of lower technological level tends to lead to downfall of advanced societies - poetry, arts, advanced science, etc. are the first to go. You could imagine the "cultural scene" in Tel Aviv if G-d forbid it was ever ruled by Hamas.
2. Aruba is a whole different story - local filmmakers are not being stabbed by religious fanatics in Aruba. Muslims with their "conquest" model seems to be uniquely unsuited to existing as a minority in someone else's country since their religion commands them to conquer the infidels and force them to convert or at least live as inferiors and pay the jizya. The first generation at least comes to work but their children neither want to do back breaking labor like their peasant fathers nor do they have the skills needed to work in a modern economy. Their specialty is crime, prayer and living off of welfare benefits. Sort of like a much more violent version of Hasidim.:-)
3. Uh, oh, if you take away the music, there's not much nice to say about tziganers. Their skills in mending tin pots are no longer in demand.
Without thinking I can fully agree with number 3.
I have to think about Aruba but it is too late here.
Regarding the Gypsies (or to be politically correct, the Roma, the Jews of all people should be sympathetic and not automatically condemn a whole group as being worthless parasites prone to crime, but what if the whole group really are worthless parasites prone to crime?
There are no worthless human beings. Just for being in Auschwitz condemned to deasth like the Jews, and my mother confirmed that they were there in the next lager to hers, makes me feel sympathy for them. No tziganer ever took the bread from my mouth.
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