A few years ago, “Save The Children” released a well-produced video showing a “typical British child” being subjected to the sort of life-upending horrors that have befallen many Syrians. The purpose of this video was to gin up sympathy for the refugees and to gin up donations. The problem was… a lot of people could easily see some serious logic flaws with the video. While “what if” is a perfectly cromulent question to ask, as in “what if things in Britain were like they are in Syria,” the fact is that not only are things in Britain *not* like they are in Syria, people realize *why* Britain is not like Syria: they are utterly different cultures. It would be like a video set in Hungary going on about the heartbreak of seppuku. The only way to make this a realistic scenario for Britain would be to import Syrian-esque cultural fail into Britain. A silly notion, of course.
The video in question:
Except, of course, a whole lot of people are convinced that just such an importation is currently ongoing. The current wave of mass immigration from Syria and points south and east into Europe is fodder for the so-called “far right” (oddly, I never see such groups described as being devoted to small, constitutionally bound government, or free market capitalism). If you want the re-rise of nationalism in Europe or even outright fascism, dumping large numbers of unassimilatable immigrants into those lands against the wishes of the locals is exactly how you get nationalism or even outright fascism.
And what’s more: a lot of the propaganda used to try to make Europeans warm up to the refugees… is easily turned into propaganda for the *other* side. That very same “Save The Children” video was repurposed by a YouTube channel that seems to crank out a whole lot of “European nationalist” (read: exactly the sort of stuff that cause SJW’s to start screeching “racism”) videos. All they did was add some captions to the video, and they not only utterly changed the message, they made it make a whole lot more narrative sense.
The whole subject is one fraught with political difficulty. Like pretty much everything else in politics these days, there are the two extremes, and if anybody isn’t 100% on board with one view or another, they are immediately tossed under the bus as The other. It comes down to the Cucks vs. the Nazis, the people who want to enforce White Genocide and replace the Europeans vs the racists who want to exterminate the brown people. Feh. Basically not a good subject to bring up and express *any* sort of opinion on. That said: nations have the right to control their borders and maintain their cultures. Immigration is good, but waves of military-age males sweeping in in vast numbers… not so good.
And propaganda that is *easily* repurposed for the other side? That’s just dumb.
