Radio War Nerd EP #4 — Migration & Wars
Comments (12)
Actually social services in Germany are not as generous as an (Anglo) outsider might think. Germany's welfare system differs from Northern neighbors in that it's 1)tied to family formation more directly and 2) tied to the labor market (administered through the job), in the economics literature this is called "corporatist". In many ways it's more resistant to immigrants taking advantage of it than most people think. Norway, Sweeden et al are also less prone to immigrants taking advantage of the system than you would think, but for different reasons: those welfare systems are genuinely generous, but tied to citizenship more explicitly. It gets complicated but bottom line is that these states are definitely getting benefits (and that doesn't mean it's not getting any burdens but the things you said in the podcast are accurate). The problem is that Anglo American economies have barely any welfare state and what little we have is basically just a bare minimum incentive to stay in the labor market ie "social insurance" so we have a distorted view. The Euros economic problems in monetary and fiscal austerity have done MUCH more damage than all the immigrants combined, indeed the Euro now threatens ALL of the welfare state measures above.
I'm sorry, but you're really off when it comes to refugees in Germany. They aren't immigrating into the job market, they are immigrating into the welfare system. Nobody is using them as cheap labor that can be mistreated. That is not how stuff works in Germany. Even the shittiest jobs are well regulated by strict worker protection laws and refugees usually don't even get work permits, even if they want them, which virtually none do, because the kind of money they get through welfare and socalled "child money" (subsidies for every child equaling the standard amount of welfare, which means that a family with 3 or 4 children can get as much money for nothing as if both parents would be working full time. There is no incentive to work for those people.). Those socalled refugees (I think they lost that status somewhere along their journey through 3 or 4 safe countries.) won't contribute anything to the German economy. They estimate that about 1.5 million refugees will come to Germany alone within the next year or so and will cost the German tax payer 45 Billion Euros per year and that is only if the number of people coming from Afghanistan doesn't go up significantly. And that are the white washed, "careful" and optimistic official numbers. This is not sustainable. You can't compare that to Mexicans immigrating to the USA. In Germany you pay so much for an employee's insurance, health care and mandatory benefits that not even really wealthy people can really afford to hire maids and nannies and gardeners and all those jobs Mexicans tend to do in the USA. Even if the "refugees" would want to work and would get a work permit, nobody would be able to afford hiring them in those low qualification jobs. And as I said, they don't have any incentive to work anyways, until the welfare system collapses and when that happens all bets are off. I grew up and lived in Germany for most of my life and I am a cynical war nerd myself who looks at his fellow humans like a biologist who is studying a ape horde and even I have not the slightest idea what will happen then.
I agree that social services in Germany are much more generous. Then again, a lot of refugees in the US these days are Guatamalan and Honduran, coming from a much rougher world, compared to which the US probably does seem fairly cushy.
Thanks for the shoutout! I'm fine with you using my name. People already know I'm into unusual things!
In regards to your last show, I think you guys may have given Hoxja a bit of a bum rap. I mean the guy boosted the country out of grinding poverty, wasn't afraid to stand up to the Soviets when he thought they'd gone too far, ended the terror of blood feuds in Albania, provided everyone with free education and healthcare...not too shabby. Plus, I think the mistake those generals made wasn't so much criticizing the policy of the bunkers, but rather criticizing Hoxja, as the generator of the policy, in public. You'd have to kill them after that.
Perhaps they did give him a bum rap, but why keep the bunker program going? The argument provided in this episode is solid, keep the resources out of the peoples hands, and in the elites. Frighten the people with constant threat of war, and then provide a solution that will keep the elites in power and in control of the resources.
I hear alot of contempt for the Islamic State, which of course is understandable. But since I guess you have a strong enough stomach to stand their Mongol-style PR-campaign (though of course it's a different thing once the Mongols have cameras...) I assume that most of it is grounded in a sort of reaction to the most common media narrative? From what I'm seeing, they're impressively good at urban guerilla warfare; subterfuge, assassinations, information warfare and so on. This is the base of all their success; the footsoldiers and kamikazes only come in once they've established intelligence networks, planted sleeper cells, etc. They only fail in places where they lack these resources. They've managed to completely destroy the Sawha movement (and the powerful tribes behind it), they managed to very quickly establish control on a foreign battleground (Syria) and so on... Also - Mosul was the complete opposite of "blitzkrieg"! It was the result of a drawn-out urban guerilla campaign, made possible by the fact that IS has been the main "underground network" of that city for close to a decade (since 2005-2006). Remember the ISF operations in 2008? They failed. IS was always in Mosul - last June year was nothing but the very last step towards complete control. I'm not sure Mosul's fall should be entirely blamed on ISF incompetence. Mosul was a dangerous place for a decade - if anything, that is what broke the morale of its "defenders". And it was IS who made it a dangerous place. You know very well that the complicated tribal lands between Aleppo and Fallujah is a nightmare for any organization that aims at any sort of even semi-centralized control. And it's not like the locals accept IS just because they're Sunni - the powerful people in these areas care about family, not about sectarian super-categories. But that's "powerful" in the old sense. What IS has managed to do is awaken a new kind of power, by taping into the young blood of the region; angry, modern men with dreams of nationhood. And the way they've done this is a great story of 21st-century warfare; an actually brilliant combination of guerilla warfare against the old power structures and image-generating, "cool", media (they produce so much more than execution videos). Brilliantly executed, but far from as easy as it may sound. The actual guerilla part is hard in itself, but the real trick is being able to produce propaganda that attracts this unpredictable demographic, then make them stay together and - most importantly - loyal to the organization itself. For these are men who may have dreams of nationhood, but not much of any real experience of it. Just look at what happened to the Syrian Sunni revolution. This success has been achieved by an incredibly top-heavy propaganda machine. Incredibly, coming from a Sunni Arab revolutionary movement! There are no individual "katibas" with their own names, there is no more than one flag/symbol and all of the videos are released by a central authority after going through a seemingly meticolous editing process that puts them in line with a centrally defined aesthetic and ideology. They're getting their shit together - they know what matters - and it scares me alot. Short term, the Islamic State has no hope of surviving. But maybe before I die there will be second attempt at a Caliphate - built on lessons learned from the first. It's frigtening, the evolution the pan-Sunni extremists have made in the last 20 years.
you guys, would be super cool if I subscribe to this podcast on iTunes so that I can listen to it on the go
Gary has touched upon the weird hard on some leftist types seem to have for Sunni extremists. That Charlie Hebdo piece was great and I have always found it odd to hear the Left clamor about Palestine with such fervor all the while not hearing a peep about the Kurds, Hazara or Yezedi. I’ve met Leftists like that who damn near apologize for every act Sunni extremists make; they will mince words and try to connect every conflict in the Middle East with Palestine. I think it goes back to the 60s and 70s when the PLO buddied up and knocked boots with the cool kids from Europe’s boutique terrorist Leftist groups. What astounds me to this day is that both Left and Right winger seem to overlook the fact that both Iran and Saudi Arabia are regional hard powers and are responsible for a lot of the mess in Syria and the Middle East. The Saudis especially get overlooked.
What people in the US think of ISIS has little to nothing to do with the organization itself and everything to do with the mindset of people living here. It's about us, not them. Most people getting panicked about ISIS couldn't find Syria on a map or name a single leader (probably not even Assad). The news is kind of like porn, and citizens are fed a steady diet of smut about militant groups in the Middle East because it makes us feel like were are still a force for good in the world rather than a imperialist force driven primarily by rapacious greed. ISIS is just a big commercial that says "look at how barbaric Muslims are in the Middle East. They should be thanking us for demolishing Iraq to save them." This has little to do with reality, but that isn't the point. The leftists you speak of are trying to negate the propaganda image by saying ISIS and Salafist Islam in general aren't so bad. While good intentioned, they are dealing with the same propaganda. A negation of a false image will important all the misleading assumptions of that false image. It's like arguing about a weather forecast that says it's sunny outside in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Ames sounds like he's recording from the bottom of a well. Not that it will stop me from listening to and enjoying this.
Great discussion: most of the barrel bombs are coming from transports or helicopters. As your comments about the anti Shia tilt: Here is what I think will happen: Putin and Iran have temporarily buried the hatchet. And they are going to end up with a Shi'a belt from Bagdad to Lebanon, and a big enclave of Alawite along the coast. In short, to survive, Assad has given up independence, and sold out to Iran and Putin. And the Sunni of Syria and Iraq are toast. The Kurds have a chance to keep their border state between Greater Iran and Turkey. The Saudis are gone within 10 years- my estimate. Gulf states as well, simply too few effective internal armies to counter the exterior supported insurgencies. And Israel will have to deal with it.