Two thousand years ago, Germania was a tinderbox full of competing warlords and clans. Today, in times of borderless mass migration, new “tribes” are fighting for identity and belonging.
Even small towns in the dread fascist East Germany have a few such signs, and even rainbow flags and and placards "gegen Abschiebung" (against deportation) -- not surprisingly in and around the schools, where the field is otherwise uncontested. If one were so inclined, one might be inclined to sniff a conspiracy of reeducation directed by the State. One might also wonder whether the recent election results in Saxony and Thuringia, and the coming election in Brandenburg, might serve as a counterweight to the inculcation of primary school children into the Rainbow Coalition...or an accelerant, similar to how the United States went mad during Trump's rule.
As you remark about the lack of official borders giving rise to spontaneous and ever-shifting ones, there is a contradiction in the heart of borderlessness which threatens to render the entire project moot; because borderlessness cannot very long be a one-way process (lest the borderless party be simply subsumed), it must needs take over a significant proportion of the world. And within a borderless project there can be no 'deportation' to argue against, but rather the relocation and resettlement from one arbitrary place within a borderless region to another.
We're seeing this now with Germany's promise (seen by Rainbow theocrats as a threat) to finally seriously enforce the Dublin Accords, which state that it's the responsibility of the first port of call for a prospective refugee to process an asylum application. One can only object to this if one acknowledges, if only in a subconscious and doublethink manner, that Germany's borders exist and are important (indeed, in some way, sacrosanct). It remains to be seen how the Rainbow theocrats ultimately resolve this contradiction.
You put in words, better than I could, what I might have meant by calling it a "paradoxical" pattern. The simpler expression really is "contradictory", in more ways than one.
I don't fully understand, however, what you mean by, "borderlessness cannot very long be a one-way process (lest the borderless party be simply subsumed), it must take over a significant proportion of the world."
Wouldn't borderlessness still initiate a one-way trek even if the target areas were constantly enlarged? Because almost nobody would ever return from the ever expanding destination areas, assuming they moved there from poorer or war-torn countries/areas.
This is one more unelaborated point I think about and keep meaning to elaborate on -- something that seems completely clear to me but which I can never seem to effectively express. Perhaps it is simply wrong; let me try to sketch it out a bit more and find out.
Firstly, we should clarify what exactly is under discussion. When I say "borderlessness", I mean the naive street-level ideology being peddled not only through graffiti and stickers by the romantically rebellious but also through posters set up by NGO propagandists with the tacit support of the government. (Only very occasionally, as in some murals in the East Side Gallery, do either of these rise to anything like art.) This ideology envisions the whole world without borders, which means the whole of the world subscribing to the ideology of borderlessness. This seems to me quite explicit as a premise, this aspiration for world domination -- no less explicit than the IWW's call for spontaneous global Communism.
The ideology's need to dominate the world is also implicit, as I briefly touched upon, because if the ideology remains contained, then the societies in which it operates will eventually be overrun and replaced by societies which do not subscribe to the ideology (but which are all too happy to take advantage of the one-way open door to seek better lives and greater fortunes for themselves). Thus borderlessness will inevitably take on an imperial character, as a sort of Darwinian adaptation for self-preservation -- not the preservation of individual societies or states within a borderless system, but the preservation of the ideology itself.
This imperial character will inevitably have consequences, concomitant ideas, and subordinate ideologies which the elites in all states under the ideology will shape and be shaped by. I cannot predict with any certainty the details of a successful ideological complex of borderlessness, but it strikes me as likely that the bureaucrats in charge of implementing the ideology into a system will one day understand that there is no such thing as "deportation" within such a system.
There is only, as I said, relocation within the system. So if the system extends to, say, Afghanistan, and the elites who run the system want to exploit the trillion-plus-dollar mineral wealth of Afghanistan, they will implement whichever incentive structures they see fit to make sure there are human beings mining in Afghanistan -- whether or not those people ever thought of themselves as "Afghanis", or indeed whether or not anyone outside of a few pointy-headed academics even remembers Peshawar or Kabul or Kandahar even existed.
Let's take the European Union as something of an illustrative counterexample, which is perhaps the most comprehensive and successful supranational project to render national borders effectively meaningless (at least from a resident's point of view). That is, the EU did not immediately collapse because it had a very clear vision for the theoretical geographical limits of the project and was quite effective at enforcing its external border for the first twenty-three years of its existence. (Indeed, despite a few waves of expansion, the EU has yet to reach its theoretical maximum, and is unlikely to do so if current developments proceed at their apparently-inevitable course.) The Four Freedoms did not lead to a massive influx of refugees from, say, the Balkans because the Balkan states were not considered for inclusion until they'd proven stable enough not to collapse and flood the rest of the EU with refugees.
But if the EU went insane tomorrow and admitted Afghanistan as a member, it is very likely that your instinct is correct -- the great majority of the Afghan population would uproot itself and come to Europe, and the state of Afghanistan would effectively collapse. Of course Germany, the probable destination of all of these newly-minted EU citizens, would also collapse in short order and thereby bring down the EU, and the continent of Europe would almost certainly devolve into another orgy of butchery and strife, as it has been wont to do for at least forty thousand years -- but I digress. We're in the thick of the thought experiment now, and the only way out is through.
Suppose the EU somehow survived that bout of madness, and Afghanistan denuded itself. Eventually, after some years or decades or perhaps even centuries, every Afghan who didn't like Afghanistan would leave, the country would stabilise, and the free-flowing capital of the EU would pour in to rebuild the war-torn areas. And along with this capital would come a panoply of Europeans, following the money and fleeing the instability and poverty brought about by the influx of Afghanis to where those Europeans used to live. And, though Germany and maybe France or Sweden would have been forever demographically changed and made much poorer on average, the whole system of the EU would then be enriched by the mineral wealth of Afghanistan.
The massive population exchanges in this scenario would not count as "deportations", and in the context of the EU would likely be implemented in ways we could recognise as democratic and capitalist, but there is nothing inherent in the ideology of borderlessness which requires either one. It could be that the elites of a borderless project move around populations by force on a scale that would have given Stalin pause -- and even these would not be "deportations", but rather population transfers within a system, justified in the system's own terms.
That is the vision which I see when I gaze upon a poster advocating borderlessness -- a cabal of elites shuffling millions, or billions, of people around for their own designs. I do not think this world is the one intended by the romantic rebels spraypainting their slogans or slapping their stickers, nor even of the stuffy cat-ladies staffing the NGOs which are laying the foundations of a borderless system, but I fear that the system would outgrow its architects and transform into something essentially antithetical to their designs.
All of that is awfully close to the "prison planet" espoused by such characters as Alex Jones, which likely means it's time for me to go to bed. Hopefully that made some kind of sense, or at least amused.
Even small towns in the dread fascist East Germany have a few such signs, and even rainbow flags and and placards "gegen Abschiebung" (against deportation) -- not surprisingly in and around the schools, where the field is otherwise uncontested. If one were so inclined, one might be inclined to sniff a conspiracy of reeducation directed by the State. One might also wonder whether the recent election results in Saxony and Thuringia, and the coming election in Brandenburg, might serve as a counterweight to the inculcation of primary school children into the Rainbow Coalition...or an accelerant, similar to how the United States went mad during Trump's rule.
As you remark about the lack of official borders giving rise to spontaneous and ever-shifting ones, there is a contradiction in the heart of borderlessness which threatens to render the entire project moot; because borderlessness cannot very long be a one-way process (lest the borderless party be simply subsumed), it must needs take over a significant proportion of the world. And within a borderless project there can be no 'deportation' to argue against, but rather the relocation and resettlement from one arbitrary place within a borderless region to another.
We're seeing this now with Germany's promise (seen by Rainbow theocrats as a threat) to finally seriously enforce the Dublin Accords, which state that it's the responsibility of the first port of call for a prospective refugee to process an asylum application. One can only object to this if one acknowledges, if only in a subconscious and doublethink manner, that Germany's borders exist and are important (indeed, in some way, sacrosanct). It remains to be seen how the Rainbow theocrats ultimately resolve this contradiction.
You put in words, better than I could, what I might have meant by calling it a "paradoxical" pattern. The simpler expression really is "contradictory", in more ways than one.
I don't fully understand, however, what you mean by, "borderlessness cannot very long be a one-way process (lest the borderless party be simply subsumed), it must take over a significant proportion of the world."
Wouldn't borderlessness still initiate a one-way trek even if the target areas were constantly enlarged? Because almost nobody would ever return from the ever expanding destination areas, assuming they moved there from poorer or war-torn countries/areas.
This is one more unelaborated point I think about and keep meaning to elaborate on -- something that seems completely clear to me but which I can never seem to effectively express. Perhaps it is simply wrong; let me try to sketch it out a bit more and find out.
Firstly, we should clarify what exactly is under discussion. When I say "borderlessness", I mean the naive street-level ideology being peddled not only through graffiti and stickers by the romantically rebellious but also through posters set up by NGO propagandists with the tacit support of the government. (Only very occasionally, as in some murals in the East Side Gallery, do either of these rise to anything like art.) This ideology envisions the whole world without borders, which means the whole of the world subscribing to the ideology of borderlessness. This seems to me quite explicit as a premise, this aspiration for world domination -- no less explicit than the IWW's call for spontaneous global Communism.
The ideology's need to dominate the world is also implicit, as I briefly touched upon, because if the ideology remains contained, then the societies in which it operates will eventually be overrun and replaced by societies which do not subscribe to the ideology (but which are all too happy to take advantage of the one-way open door to seek better lives and greater fortunes for themselves). Thus borderlessness will inevitably take on an imperial character, as a sort of Darwinian adaptation for self-preservation -- not the preservation of individual societies or states within a borderless system, but the preservation of the ideology itself.
This imperial character will inevitably have consequences, concomitant ideas, and subordinate ideologies which the elites in all states under the ideology will shape and be shaped by. I cannot predict with any certainty the details of a successful ideological complex of borderlessness, but it strikes me as likely that the bureaucrats in charge of implementing the ideology into a system will one day understand that there is no such thing as "deportation" within such a system.
There is only, as I said, relocation within the system. So if the system extends to, say, Afghanistan, and the elites who run the system want to exploit the trillion-plus-dollar mineral wealth of Afghanistan, they will implement whichever incentive structures they see fit to make sure there are human beings mining in Afghanistan -- whether or not those people ever thought of themselves as "Afghanis", or indeed whether or not anyone outside of a few pointy-headed academics even remembers Peshawar or Kabul or Kandahar even existed.
Let's take the European Union as something of an illustrative counterexample, which is perhaps the most comprehensive and successful supranational project to render national borders effectively meaningless (at least from a resident's point of view). That is, the EU did not immediately collapse because it had a very clear vision for the theoretical geographical limits of the project and was quite effective at enforcing its external border for the first twenty-three years of its existence. (Indeed, despite a few waves of expansion, the EU has yet to reach its theoretical maximum, and is unlikely to do so if current developments proceed at their apparently-inevitable course.) The Four Freedoms did not lead to a massive influx of refugees from, say, the Balkans because the Balkan states were not considered for inclusion until they'd proven stable enough not to collapse and flood the rest of the EU with refugees.
But if the EU went insane tomorrow and admitted Afghanistan as a member, it is very likely that your instinct is correct -- the great majority of the Afghan population would uproot itself and come to Europe, and the state of Afghanistan would effectively collapse. Of course Germany, the probable destination of all of these newly-minted EU citizens, would also collapse in short order and thereby bring down the EU, and the continent of Europe would almost certainly devolve into another orgy of butchery and strife, as it has been wont to do for at least forty thousand years -- but I digress. We're in the thick of the thought experiment now, and the only way out is through.
Suppose the EU somehow survived that bout of madness, and Afghanistan denuded itself. Eventually, after some years or decades or perhaps even centuries, every Afghan who didn't like Afghanistan would leave, the country would stabilise, and the free-flowing capital of the EU would pour in to rebuild the war-torn areas. And along with this capital would come a panoply of Europeans, following the money and fleeing the instability and poverty brought about by the influx of Afghanis to where those Europeans used to live. And, though Germany and maybe France or Sweden would have been forever demographically changed and made much poorer on average, the whole system of the EU would then be enriched by the mineral wealth of Afghanistan.
The massive population exchanges in this scenario would not count as "deportations", and in the context of the EU would likely be implemented in ways we could recognise as democratic and capitalist, but there is nothing inherent in the ideology of borderlessness which requires either one. It could be that the elites of a borderless project move around populations by force on a scale that would have given Stalin pause -- and even these would not be "deportations", but rather population transfers within a system, justified in the system's own terms.
That is the vision which I see when I gaze upon a poster advocating borderlessness -- a cabal of elites shuffling millions, or billions, of people around for their own designs. I do not think this world is the one intended by the romantic rebels spraypainting their slogans or slapping their stickers, nor even of the stuffy cat-ladies staffing the NGOs which are laying the foundations of a borderless system, but I fear that the system would outgrow its architects and transform into something essentially antithetical to their designs.
All of that is awfully close to the "prison planet" espoused by such characters as Alex Jones, which likely means it's time for me to go to bed. Hopefully that made some kind of sense, or at least amused.