I think white supremacists lean really hard on the framing that they’re not destroying peaceful integrated multicultural societies, they’re just noticing that those never existed anyway or are about to collapse anyway.
And of course it’s a transparent lie. There are lots and lots of societies that have had successful peaceful integration. Racists and xenophobes are the force making integration difficult and dangerous and fragile; there’s not some other force that they are just innocently noticing. (Bad economic conditions and weak governments and violence all contribute to making racist and xenophobic movements more appealing. But it’s important to observe that the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ is still caused by the racists and xenophobes acting, it’s not something that happens separately from them.)
Y’all know I research the far-right, and whenever you start lurking around their trenches for very long you realize they have the idea that Europe is on the brink of war right now- that there’s violent racial tensions boiling just below the surface, that there are constant migrant attacks and that all it’s going to take is one major incident to spark a race war. That can be disproved from afar, of course, but actually having travelled (Western) Europe this past month, I’ve gotten the chance to see first hand that that’s just a total fabrication. Not to say that there aren’t racialized attacks in Europe, especially against immigrants and refugees, but it isn’t really reflected in the public atmosphere much at all. Hijabi women are just riding the metro to take their kids to school today, Muslim men are running a halal butchery, and black men are just out for a night with their friends. The integration seems pretty seamless on a surface level. Contra the culture clash narrative, this trip has pretty dramatically bolstered my belief in multiculturalism
I had the same experience! In particular, Berlin is safe at night, it was common to see hijab-wearing women out and about with non-hijab wearing friends and non-hijab wearing kids and teens, everyone was gearing up for Pride which they correctly anticipated would be supported and peaceful and prone to problems like ‘corporate cluelessness’ and ‘liberal infighting’ rather than ‘violent backlash’, there were people off all races and backgrounds working all kinds of jobs.
It’s funny because if you’d asked me ‘do you believe the alt-right narrative about western Europe I’d have said ‘of course not’ but I think on some level I was expecting it to be rooted in something – some social and commercial segregation of new immigrants, maybe, or hostility, or homelessness. Nope.
(The point is not that there is no discrimination or hardship or isolation or terror happening in Europe, obviously. The point is that there is a broad and peaceful public sphere where it’s not on the radar and where integrated people are living happy, integrated lives. I imagine white supremacists are inclined to downplay this because the call to expel them is much crueler when understood to mean ripping people out of happy lives in a welcoming multicultural country.)
Just reminded of this random (American) comment troll I dealt with a few years back on G+, who felt a need to chime in with some nonsequitur about how I need to go to Muslim-controlled Europe and see what life is like there.
Dude, I’ve been living right on the edge of one of those supposed European “No-Go Zones” for over a decade. Haven’t had any particularly unpleasant interactions with Scary Foreigners just going about their business. I really cannot say the same about xenophobes like him 😐
(I’m also way more concerned about living in a borough where UKIP was doing so well, beyond the personal level. But I don’t need to get started on that right now.)
This topic came up a while back, with some interesting discussion then–so, of course I can’t find a link just now. But, I really do find it disturbing how many of the far-right want to believe that the situation in Europe is somehow that terrible. Even if they’ve been encouraged to distrust established media reporting, it’s not exactly hard to check up on if they were not gaining more benefit from the bizarre fictional version(s).
You certainly do get enough homegrown bigots who are convinced they’re oppressed and under some kind of direct threat, just from seeing those Scary Foreigners going about their business while Offensively Foreign. Besides that being where their North American counterparts are getting first-hand accounts, I have to suspect that if they did climb on a plane? They might be likely to interpret what they’re seeing in similar ways, because that is what they want to see. That’s one of the most frustrating parts to me. How do you even counter that effectively? No clue.
While much of the West started paying serious attention to the refugee crisis in 2015, it’s been an ongoing issue for decades, with Europe becoming the place where people from across the Middle East and Northern Africa flee in the homes of finding sanctuary. The sheer volume of refugees has increased radically in the last year thanks to troubling and escalating political trends, but let’s not…
The issue here, though, isn’t that refugees are creating political pressure and pushing Europe to the right as people react to those who are seeking shelter. The problem is that right wing politicians who have been patiently lining up the dominos for decades are seeing an opening through xenophobia, especially Islamophobia, and they’re taking advantage of it to push their agendas…
Refugees never had a chance in Europe, and now, they’re becoming the sacrificial lambs of a right that isn’t just hoping to exclude refugees. It’s also hoping to roll back social policies ranging from open borders to healthcare to measures to improve diverse representations in government. And the same phenomenon is playing out in the United States, where many extremists are taking lessons from Europe’s playbook to slowly but steadily build a case against refugees, and to use it to take down other rights as well. We are living in an era where it is considered not just acceptable but necessary to discriminate against those most in need.
Today, it’s refugees being used as a fig leaf for promoting and successfully pushing through horrific social policies. And we should be rising in defense of refugees, because dehumanising people is wrong. But tomorrow, it’s going to be other vulnerable social groups as well — the same ones the right has been attacking all along, now made even easier to attack by the fact that attacks on refugees will strip social protections away.
So I heard you all wanted to live in the worst timeline.
That’s horriblarious.
So what I find particularly breathless about it is that this means that you have a substantial subset of the population who would think that NPR was agitating for revolution, that that was an outcome that wasn’t just feasible, but was viewed as a real immediate action. How hopeless is the idea of reaching a group of people who’s objective reality is so far out of touch that they can’t even see the absurdity or the impossibility of NPR demanding in flowery 18th century verse, for the deposing of the President?
This is simultaneously the funniest and most depressing news story of the week.
Not just money. I think it’s also much more about this psychology of threatened domination. People who believe it will harm their liberty for other people to have full citizenship and be able to work together to govern society. And that somehow that goes much deeper than money to me. It’s hard to find the right words for it, but it’s a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 