I thought we should have a thread to track the rightward movement in Europe and which factions of the populations in European countries are at the forefront of these movements - I am curious if they are similar in political, economic and religious outlook as well as how these movements are being represented ie are they represented as secularism? liberalism? anti-immigration? anti-Muslim or anti-Jew? pro-Christian? pro-nationalistic? Pro-architectural continuity? Pro-exterior design of skyline? First of all, which countries in Europe are showing a definite rightward trend? And just so its not all one sided, what are the groups opposing this rightward trend?
France is becoming a little worrisome. In the UK, racists gain a bit of a protest vote, but they are not trusted.
I think- from your OP, that Europeians are pissed off about something they can't comprehend. That is a side-effect of doing well. We, on the other hand, are paranoid about having enough money to pay the bills. We don't have the luxory of being pissed off about something we can't describe.
Well, I think that what is happening there has more similarity than anything else to what happened to the two major parties in the US during the presidency of Taft. The political landscape has so dramatically changed that the political factions involved are rapidly going through a process of rearrangement, trying to come to terms with a new identity in an unfamiliar context. I think that it would be more useful to examine the details pertaining to the issues. Let's take France, for example. Very much like the American Northeast during the mid-to-late-20th Century, it was easy for French culture to nurse from the smug belief that they were more tolerant, more educated, and more worldly than certain other cultures. The concept of racial intolerance was a distant issue that happened in less civilized countries. However, the reason that the American Northeast has always been able to assume such a point of view is that their population of minority groups is ironically a lot smaller than in the American South. The American South took longer to reform old attitudes over race partially because--and this is highly ironic--they had to contend, in their day-to-day lives, with the descendants of former slaves. The tragedy here is that being subjugated for several centuries did not leave the American negro prepared to cope adequately with the challenges of succeeding in our economy. Therefore, they faced numerous adjustment problems. They were often impoverished. Their parents and grand-parents were often severely under-educated, partly due to many slave-holders systematically obstructing their ancestors from gaining any degree of education. As a result of the effects of their sad history, the American negro was often found to be a public nuisance in many parts of the American South. It was easy for people who were distant from the issue to preach about the value of tolerance because they were not directly entangled with the problem. They had the ability to look on the issue with a sense of perspective that would have been much more difficult to attain for someone who is deeply immersed in it. What the French are facing right now, then, is the fact that many of the Islamic and African immigrants in their country have come to escape poverty and other problems in their own culture. Unfortunately, they often have difficulty fitting in with the existing culture, and this leads to various problems. Also, many French people are fearful of Islamic culture imposing its ideology on their own country, so they feel a need to take measures to safeguard against this possibility. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and prevention needs to come from several directions. One thing that a country needs to do as a means of preventing racism and xenophobia from cropping up is to try to educate the population at large about the people who are coming into the country. If the public actually takes an intellectual interest in the culture being introduced, it makes transition easier for the incoming immigrants. An example of this I can point to is how Asian culture has been received in the US. I think it is no coincidence that immigrants from East Asia tend to adjust better to life in the US than people arriving from other culture. Rather than seeing Asia as an inferior, poor culture, we tend to look upon Asia as a mysterious continent with a fascinating history. We readily adopt fashions that are reminiscent of what we perceive as their culture. We also perceive Asia as having a type of intellectual vitality that we don't perceive the US as having. Well, as silly as it seems on the surface, I think that this kind of imitation facilitates a process of integration for the East Asian immigrant. Because people in the US look upon the Asian immigrant in high esteem, even if such high esteem is based on misperceptions and misguided stereotypes, it smooths the way for them to move forward with their new lives on US soil. Asian culture is obviously not a threat to US culture because, for example, a lot of the people out there talking about the virtues of Buddhism are practicing, church-going Christians. Although they may not necessarily believe in these arriving ideas, they feel that they can learn something from understanding these ideas. So how can we take this lesson and apply it in such a place as the U.K.? France? I think they could overcome their immigration issues by simply creating a caricature, in their media, of the Middle East as being a mysterious and beautiful place with an interesting history. If the Muslims found their ideas being well, even enthusiastically received by the established culture, it should make them more open to integration. I think that Sufism would actually be a fair candidate...it does have the benefit of being fairly interesting, and it appeals to thought processes that are already popular in Western literature and art. Although it would seem on the surface to lend to further confusion if there were a concentration on a selection such as Sufism, when perhaps the Muslims arriving in the UK who practice it may be a minority, I am thinking of it as a memetic diplomat for the larger body of ideas. Even if an immigrant from Saudi Arabia comes from an intensely anti-Sufist background, he or she would feel more confident in a business transaction or a job interview if the person at the other end harbored an unvoiced belief that he or she comes from a culture that is held in relatively high regard. THIS IS NOT JUST VALUABLE TO THE IMMIGRANT. If the immigrant finds him or herself doing well after moving into a new country, he or she would be more inclined to believe that the existing system of rule is effective, thereby reducing that person's liability to impose his or her own ideas upon it! Now, another approach would be to improve the procedure of naturalization. However, I am not very well rehearsed on the subject and cannot think of any examples off the top of my head. And yet another approach is to staunch the tide of incoming immigrants, such as by requiring candidates for citizenship to have some special skill that is not as common in the country they are trying to move to. I am not sure as to its merits, but I think this was an American policy for many decades. It would at the very least slow immigration down sufficiently to allow the people who are already in to be absorbed into the existing culture. The sticking point is that I see the "rightward shift" as stemming from causes we can understand, in the context of history, and do something about based on the lessons of history.
@Alien Cockroach Alien I don't think you can make a comparison between European nations which for a long time have been completely homogenous sharing the same cultural history and the United States that is a large immigration nation and much more capable of absorbing different groups of people. The demands within both are different in terms of what could be expected of immigrants entering the culture. In fact what the French are going through has been happening in much of Europe for a long time now without all of the press scrutiny. Belgium and Denmark for have long had problems with their middle-eastern immigrants way before 9/11 and it was mostly due to cultural differences. Europeans unlike Americans do have an idea of different cultures and their history, some are former traditional colonialists that have a penchant for travel. Algeria, Turkey and Tunisia for example are not a far away mysterious places to the French, they know it quite intimately. What they are reacting to is the tendency of certain groups to resist assimilation into THEIR culture as they rise in numbers and to accept THEIR values as inclusive citizens. The reason why you never hear complaints against Asians and to some extent black africans is their willingness to to adapt and assimilate. On the economic front its not just non-EU immigrants that is the problem but EU immigration. Go to Scotland, Ireland and the UK and you will find complaints that Poles and eastern european groups are taking their jobs and lowering wages, but that isn't as interesting to the press as focusing on the muslim question. What you are seeing now is this subject coming to a head but it was decades in the making. The pan-nationalist movements are inevitable in Europe. It comes out of the long held liberal failure to directly deal with the immigration issue. They treated immigration with a wide open arms policy and didn't have a comprehensive integration program and instead pandered to groups that came in and left their social welfare programs open to outside corruption. Discussing immigration for a long time was deemed taboo and people threw the word intolerance and racism whenever anyone tried to broach the subject (liberal silencing). So what you have now are fed up populations letting their votes speak for them by voting center or far right. Most of these people are not really racist, most of these people wouldn't endorse a center or far right ideology outside of their strong immigration policies. Its for this reason that most of these groups like Geert Wilders party for example are one topic parties. What you are seeing is a failure on the part of the liberal left, which through their neglect, paved the way for a unprecedented right wing swing. What many here don't seem to understand is that Sarkozy, Wilders, and even the right advantage in Sweden are all CENTER RIGHT movements, not the far right. The truth is that Europe cannot afford to culturally or economically take in a lot of indigent populations and they have an obligation to protect their societies. So although Sweden, to take one example, is incredibly liberal their population of 5 million has exploded to 9 million and 14% of that are immigrants (especially new immigrant refugees from Iraq), now they have had enough and are cracking down by returning many of the refugees they have given sanctuary to in their country. It may not look pretty to other countries around the world but no one is going to take care of their internal sovereign needs but the nations concerned. This idea that they can take in all or any foreign nationals without it also having a negative impact on their social welfare system and without it having a negative as well as positive impact on their inherent culture is simply magical thinking on the part of liberals. Here is an interesting detailed argument on the subject at hand: To claim the moral high ground is always very tempting but it does not provides a political strategy and it is unlikely to decrease the appeal of right-wing populist movements. In this respect the case of Austria is very instructive and it brings us important insights concerning the mistakes to be avoided. I believe that the European reactions to the formation of the coalition government between the ÖVP and the FPÖ represent the very example of the wrong strategy. We witnessed an explosion of moral indignation that led, under the instigation of France and Belgium – worried by the possibility of similar alliances at home– , to a series of bilateral measures against the new Austrian government. In the name of the defense of European values and the struggle against racism and xenophobia –of course always easier to denounce in others than to fight in your own country– the other fourteen European governments ostracized the new coalition before it had even made anything that could be deemed reprehensible. All the good democrats saw it as their duty to condemn the coming to power of a supposedly «Nazi» party and raised the alarm bell against a return of the «brown plague». Clearly the whole episode had negative consequences for the European Union. For instance, it antagonized small nations like the Danes who felt that such a treatment would not have been used in the case of a more important country. And, as the lack of European reaction to the much more dangerous coalition established by Silvio Berlusconi in Italy with the Lega Norte of Umberto Bossi and the Allianza Nationale of Gianfranco Fini testifies, they were right. Moreover, this strategy of moral denunciation did not have the expected effect in stopping the growth of right-wing populist parties. Witness the good results of the Progress Party in Norway in September 2000 (14.6%), the People’s Party in Denmark in November 2001 (12%), the Pim Fortuyn List in the Netherlands in May 2002 (26%), not to mention the 18% for Le Pen in the second round of the French presidential elections of May 5, 2002. "Right-wing populism does indeed represent a real challenge to the democratic values that are at the core of the political identity of Europe. This is why it is urgent to find an adequate way to address its growing attraction. But this requires understanding the causes of this success and envisaging a truly political answer to the problems that they raise. To begin with, it is necessary to acknowledge that for several decades important changes have taken place in European countries without real popular consultation about possible alternatives. It is therefore not surprising that a sense of frustration exists among all those who have not profited from them or who feel that those changes are jeopardizing their future prospects. As long as traditional parties refuse to engage with those issues, with the argument that this evolution is a necessary one and that there is no alternative to the neo-liberal model of globalization, it is likely that right-wing populist parties will continue to grow. And it is certainly not moral condemnation that will make them disappear. It might even have the contrary effect...without a profound change in the working of democratic politics the problems that have led to the emergence of right-wing populism will not disappear. If a serious attempt is not made to address the democratic deficit that characterizes the «post-political» age that neo-liberal hegemony has brought about, and to challenge the growing inequalities it has created, the diverse forms of resentment are bound to persist. http://www.cccb.org/rcs_gene/mouffe.pdf
Lucy, pardon me for being brief. I read your post with great interest. Although I am not as ready as you are to believe that there is something specially different about East Asian cultures, I am not ready to dismiss the idea either. Now, a sticking point from my post before was that perhaps the Europeans could find a way to resolve their problems by examining the historical background of other cultures that have had similar problems. Although there is an ocean of difference between the US and Europe, we have had both successes and failures insofar as integrating immigrant cultures. Many people do not understand, but the US is really a relatively diverse culture itself. Different places here have different histories.
You are probably right about the Polish. I think I heard that. But it isn't as sexy when it's white European blood, as much as it isn't nearly as arousing when someone OTHER than Ahmadinejad says something about 9/11. Deja vu! It's even worse when you have pictures of black presidents with antennae on their heads! Similar to the Tea Party, I will assume, and all the accusations of racism. And blaming them for some African-American woman getting fired by the White House. Funny how wanting to be able to control your own country's border becomes a race issue. Kinda like a black president with antennae on his head.
So nobody really addressed the issue of integration. Are you saying that the liberals in general supported having no plan at all for integration? It sounds to me like part of the problem was that, when someone did try to discuss the issue, it would turn into a screaming match between some swastika-tattooed skinhead and some dope who thinks that Islam is a fucking ethnicity. And the voice of reason was mistaken for either a trouble-maker or a panderer, and nobody really thought about the concept that he was telling people they were idiots because they actually were behaving like idiots. Eventually, the poor bastard got frustrated and found something creative to do until the whole thing blows over. Does this sound right? So perhaps someone should point out to the people who are doing this that they are part of the problem. Well, there is an old issue in the South. Nobody really had an issue with the colored people. The war, Reconstruction and the Panic had destroyed a lot of people's lives, though, and the colored people were the easiest puppy to kick over it. Nowadays, people fly the damned Confederate Navy Ensign to annoy the carpetbaggers, but they have largely buried their differences with the colored people. I think they succeeded in what they really endeavored to do. They endeavored to cause misery and frustration for people they felt to be morally wicked. Like most people who are sanctimonious and foolish, they are shocked and dismayed that someone is biting back. Similar to colored people in the South, during the late 19th Century through the mid-20th Century, it is not the fault of the immigrants. The immigrants simply don't know any way of life other than the one they left. They are just the easiest puppy to kick when you're having a bad day. The ones who pretend to be their friends are only really serious about guarding their excuse for ad hominem. In the US, we have had successes with the black people by listening to their music and reading their literature. Although this minority still struggles, relations have improved significantly. I think it benefits relations overall when the majority group takes an intellectual interest in their minorities. Now, do you think that there is a cause-effect relationship there as I do? Do you agree that the lesson could be applicable elsewhere? Just so that I am clear, I am aware that situations are different. What I suggest could be similar are the people. If a certain method has been seemingly effective under one set of circumstances, what we know is that the method should not necessarily be considered to be harmful. Other factors or simply serendipity could explain a great deal in the event of one isolated correlation. At the very least, it warrants discussion. If we find that it works in a handful of other cases, we should consider the idea to be worth investigation. Plausibility is a gray area.
Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia wanted to work with the Western Civilization to strengthen it as things are not looking good. For the first 1800 years AD, Asian GDP was at the top. Here is his quote: This type of stress will cause right wing to rise towards Confrontation....a human nature, western style.
If all liberals ever did was call bullshit on that kind of self-excusing, self-concealing garbage, they would be worth keeping around for that alone. The membership, heirs, and supporting culture of the KKK, by far the most significant terrorist organization ever to attack Americans, are still a dominant political force in the US. And their "differences" with "the colored people" (wow - 2010, this is) are only "buried" in the sense of concealed, deep in their characters and views of the world.
Ellison is a representative in the US Congress, and I apologize for the mistake Excuse me, but I am trying to explain a bit of history that you might not be familiar with. You would benefit from paying attention. You see, when I try to explain to a conservative-minded Westerner why terrorist organizations have been cropping up in the Middle East and culturally linked regions, I am at least met with interest. Most conservatives want to do the right thing, but a lot of them have been too busy with more pressing, personally important concerns to have time to pursue a more liberal education. They end up with a lot of holes in their knowledge base. One highly weird phenomenon that I have discovered in them, though, is that the majority of relatively successful conservatives will listen with interest if spoken to civilly. Look, the Klan's worst crimes happen to coincide with an economic depression during the late 1800s. Remember, the American South was still living under military occupation during this time period. The former Confederacy was not allowed to really run its own affairs until the presidency of Hayes. As dishonorable as it was for the Klan to attack freedmen during this time period, the black people became targets strictly because they were easier to attack than those who were really responsible for their unhappiness. The point is that there are many people in Europe turning against Muslims and other minorities, and there is a similar reason behind it. They feel economically insecure, and at the same time there are many who feel that the sanctity of their culture is under threat. http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/politics-parties.13e Europe is going through a period of great change, and it has a lot of people feeling anxious. It happens, but there is a lot that we can do about this sort of problem. We have a history that equips us for dealing with it. I am aware of the fact that the Reconstruction Era and current times in Europe are two different things. However, the US had both successes and failures during the Reconstruction Era, and they should be taken note of. Integrating the US under a truly united federal government was not something that happened overnight. Even before the Civil War, there was never really any sense that the US was one united country. One of the major factors in the economic crisis we suffered during the late 1800s was the sudden boom in the rail industry following the Civil War. Yes, it was the rail system that truly united the USA, but I am afraid that the country tried to consolidate itself too quickly into one entity. I don't know what is happening presently in the EU, but I honestly hope that the people in Brussels are keeping their eye on the historical record. There is precedent for what they are doing. Every case has its own nuances and details, but hammering several states into one united country is not something that happens overnight without serious, deeply unpleasant consequences. Italy wasn't always one country, you know: they had to go through a transitional period, too. Men like Niccolo Machiavelli invested their lives on creating the country that is now Italy. A lot of people don't understand Machiavelli, but he was really one of the founders of modern political science. Like many philosophers during the time period who were discussing economics and social sciences, he drew a lot of his ideas from the history of Rome written by Titus Livy. I highly recommend perusing his work. It is very interesting. You know, I would be met with a great deal of criticism if I were say the same sort of garbage about Germany in relation to what was going on in the early 20th Century, and that has been more recent. Most people acknowledge at this point that Germany has become one of the most open cultures in the world. The only reason that teachers aren't allowed to wear their headscarfs there is that there are still a lot of people in Germany, many of them with relatively liberal sentiments at heart, who don't understand how Muslim women tend to view the headscarf. Nah. 1) We have a black president now. Didn't you hear the news? And there isn't even anything really special about him. He's politically moderate, relatively competent, charming to most people and so forth, but he's hardly anything special. 2) Most of his detractors are motivated by Islamophobia. There are a lot of people out there who think he's a secret Muslim or some stupid shit like that. I'm afraid that the media hasn't been clear in differentiating the forms of Islam that breed terrorism from other forms of Islam. For example, when a Sufi cleric proposed building an Islamic center near the ruin of the World Trade Center, there was a big drama over it. Sufis are about as far removed from al qaeda as Barry Goldwater was from Jesse Helms. 3) Have I mentioned that we have a black president in our country? And one of our states has a Muslim representative in the US Congress, by the way. Seriously, how many Muslims does the UK have in Parliament? Last time I checked, the Muslims are a pretty large minority there, so it should follow that the Muslims should have many representatives in government. Right? http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/index/press.php?pr=202 4) Hey, France! In our country, women can wear whatever religious symbols they want! Yeah, we're pretty open-minded and enlightened here. You should learn to be all liberal and educated like us Americans. HAHAHA! Take that!
@Alien Cockroach Oh I'm not suggesting Asian cultures like the chinese, thais and vietnamese are different, I am suggesting that they assimilate differently into other cultures. My point is that Europe cannot learn from the US on how to absorb other cultures. The average European nation is small, they are mostly homogenized, they share a very deep tribal ties. The United States cannot claim any of the above. Also my point IS that there are diverse cultures in the US but no base culture. Also you assume that the problem of integration is based on resistance of the host culture and not that of the immigrants, something I would argue vigorously against. @Giambattista Europe does not and probably will not for a long time have a black president or prime minister as a national head though its possible on the level of the EU. No not similar to the Tea Party which not only a fiscal movement but has a whole lot of ideas of less government that is the opposite of the European ideal which has always favored large government. Again you make a mistake that thinking there is some linkage to what goes on in Europe and that there are similar events you can compare in the US. That's just simply americans thinking they share more with europe than they actually do. Something most Europeans are always shaking their heads over.
@Alien Cockroach Sorry I missed your long post. The issue of integration was never really addressed in terms of setting protocols in place to ensure immigrants are actually engaged in the society where they are living. European nations like Denmark for example are not 'multi-cultural' environments and its silly to think that a nation of 5 million would suddenly take to it without any issue. The multicultural US is something different entirely and you even have a base political system and constitution that supports such an environment, most nations in Europe never did. Nations like Denmark and Sweden for example never had a great many immigrants like the UK, France and Germany. They were super liberal nations with a stronger social welfare system than their neighbors and they had thought what they needed to do was offer the new immigrants all the advantages of citizenship and then align themselves to the special needs of the group. They weren't just being 'liberal' they were being generous with the idea that inclusiveness would settle all social problems, they didn't anticipate that the new group would choose not to want inclusiveness. It got to the point where a population of 5% was costing close to 40% of social welfare funds. They allowed for perks in transportation, housing and education to the point where they were paying for schools to be taught in Urdu and forcing ALL kindergarten's throughout the nation to serve 'halal' as was demanded by concerned immigrant parents (can you imagine this in a country famous for its pork?). They had never had any problems with their african immigrants but then began to find Somalian's bringing with them a crime wave they were not quite expecting. Before this they had that same problems with albanians and other Eastern european populations except they would generally commit crimes and then cross the border, whereas the somalians were living in their society. What they didn't expect was an uproar at a mostly muslim school that was being supported by Danish taxes when mother's began burning santa hats that were given to the children for xmas; evidently it was perceived as promoting christianity. Danes didn't require their new immigrants to respect the values and host culture, they instead pandered to the new group hoping that they would miraculously turn from a parallel society to an integrated on and it back-fired. They then had problems with honor killings and had to set up a program sending women to Sweden for protection with new identities, and ironically complaints from loud mouthed imams proclaiming Danish society too 'permissive' and 'areligious' which it is. These incidents of course do not represent all muslims or all immigrants but it was enough that Danes and Swedes have begun to be fed up with ALL immigrants which is where this always leads. If the Liberal Left had recognized that some measures needed to be enforced as they allowed for a surge in immigration then it would have saved the society a lot of problems and kept center-right groups from stealing the stage. By the time the death threats came against the cartoonists and imam's DEMANDING that Queen Marguerite apologize for the cartoons and placing their shoes on the Danish flag the national right had already begun to swell in their ranks. Is it any wonder? Immigration in a nation so small, remember the US is a huge land mass compared to these countries, needed management; a management that they have already begun to enforce, it is now much more difficult to become an immigrant with full rights and privileges, now there are integration requirements but now there are those who would like to call them 'racist' for doing such. Why shouldn't there be forced integration policies? Why not? What makes anyone think any nation can have a future without some degree of national unity and things that bind them to each other either through ideals, culture or identity? You asked: So nobody really addressed the issue of integration. Are you saying that the liberals in general supported having no plan at all for integration? It sounds to me like part of the problem was that, when someone did try to discuss the issue, it would turn into a screaming match between some swastika-tattooed skinhead and some dope who thinks that Islam is a fucking ethnicity. Rubbish. "Gordon Brown's election campaign was thrown into turmoil today after he was caught on mic calling a Labour supporter who had challenged him over the economy and immigration a "bigoted woman". Her question was where were all the immigrants flocking from. To be exact Duffy asked: "You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're … but all these eastern European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?" Are you suggesting that she represents a swastika-tattooed skinhead? See this is what the article I linked is exactly about. The tattooed swastika skinhead isn't represented in politics, they are not the middle-class, they are not the tax paying majority. So when you take that group of people and then label them as 'bigoted' or try and present their concerns as those of a 'tattooed swastika skinhead' then you find what you have now. A quiet rage that leads to center-right, not representatives of the extreme right, gaining votes because they are willing to do what the Liberal Left didn't do and that is limit immigration and force a certain commitment to the values and culture of the host society. I believe that if the liberal left and the center right allow for integration measures to take place then you will find a more cohesive society in the future where you can have a Danish-palestinian or a Danish-somalian and they will culturally have more in common than not, for decades this was true of their asian and african immigrants who are incredibly integrated. Now the challenge comes in forcing that on a group who would like the benefits of the host society but not become a part of it. This is possible in the US but not in a small homogenized place like Denmark or Sweden. If this continues then you will most definitely see a resurgence of very right wing racist nationalist movements and I would imagine that they will also have a strong anti-EU message. I have more to say about this but will have to return to it later.
Excuse me, but telling me that the racial bigots of the cultures that supported the KKK for more than a century, fought and spoke and voted for racial bigotry and white supremacy in every national political effort from the Civil War to Karl Rove's champions, suddenly have no issues with "colored people" now, is bullshit. The Klan was lynching black people and anyone associated with them all through the 1900s, had "issues" with black people all through the 1900s, and remains an especially significant, if shrinking, political force in region of the old Confederacy to this day. The economic roots are of course fascinating, but the legacy is virulent, ugly, violent, and damaging racial bigotry still with us today. The white people of the regions that produced the Klan voted against him in overwhelming numbers - despite the lack of another viable candidate. There isn't any "we" about it, in their case - and there was a whole lot of overt, flagrant racial bigotry involved in the opposition to him and the reaction to his Presidency since. You talk as if the Klan hangover and the racial bigotries that supported it were long gone, instead of present and significant political forces. The Nazis were not just forced to tone down their rhetoric and hide the brown shirts - they were defeated in war, shot and imprisoned and hanged, driven out of the country with the international forces of law and order on their heels, their pictures published in association with their crimes. The Klan just had to hang the sheets in the back of the closet, learn a few code words like "States rights" and "pointy headed liberals". Every Republican presidential candidate since Nixon - maybe even Goldwater, or trace to Hoover - has mastered the dog whistle phrases of their time, for rounding up the bigot vote. As Lee Atwater put it, in discussing Republican campaign strategy during the Reagan tenure, you can't say "nigger nigger nigger" any more. But that recent change (long after WWII) didn't kill off the people or the cultures you used to say "nigger nigger nigger" to. They're still there, and they certainly vote. Thread relevance? Europeans should be careful taking advice from the residents of a country still dealing with the hangover of industrial scale racial slavery, and failing pretty dramatically at dealing with its own immigrant problems. The US is a great source of lessons and tips, for the careful observer, and is to be respected for not crashing and burning over such matters long ago, but it is not particularly self aware of how it managed then, or what it's doing now.
My fucking god. It sounds like what would happen if the Christian fundamentalists got total, unchecked run of the US for a few decades, had everything they wanted, fucked the whole third of a continent up, and then moved to a country that hadn't fucked itself up, blaming everyone but themselves, and continued the same nonsense, creating the same hell. Locusts. Human locusts. Man, I didn't realize that the problem was that bad. Okay, so you say "why not?" To tell you the truth, I think that it would be more productive to point out concrete, real-world examples of integration working out to the common good. Concrete exemplification trumps bullshit every time. Look, I realize that you disagree with me when I suggest that the Europeans can learn from the US, but try to understand, we were not always just one country. Before the Civil War and the following Reconstruction Era, there was an idea that we were one country, but it wasn't taken very seriously. I don't really understand what stage Europe is at right now, but I see enough parallels from where I'm standing that I think that at least similar principles can be applied if understood correctly. What I am saying is that I think you are correct that a small European country cannot deal with such a rapid influx by itself. However, some discussion in Brussels could make it possible to emulate being a larger country than just France by itself or Denmark by itself. I think the EU should discuss a federalized immigration policy because it sounds like you have one monster of a problem on your hands. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/28/gordon-brown-gillian-duffy-transcript That would be silly. She strikes me as a frump who is trying to juggle being employed with raising two children. Poor Brown. Now, on the people immigrating from Eastern Europe, there was a period during US history in which there was a mass migration from the South to where the manufacturing jobs were, where the factories were. The North had to assimilate them. If I understand correctly, a lot of different approaches were taken to dealing with the issue. Some worked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)#Integration.2C_and_non-integration Now, my ex-lover down in Florida actually grew up in Queens, New York, and he went to an integrated school. New York City actually wouldn't allow segregation, by either chance or design. They actually had laws requiring black people moved up to the North to attend mostly white schools, and they had a lot of white youths going to schools that would otherwise have been dominated by black students. Do you think that these programs were successful, based on your observations of American history? A quiet rage that leads to center-right, not representatives of the extreme right, gaining votes because they are willing to do what the Liberal Left didn't do and that is limit immigration and force a certain commitment to the values and culture of the host society.[/quote]The "center-right" doesn't have any business trying to create laws designed to integrate people from divergent cultures because they have all the diplomacy and tact of a block of wood. They would fuck up a wet dream. Don't you people have a center-left? In our country, the center-left is the only reason we aren't blind fucking lesbians in a fish market. In the US, we had a lovely war over it. http://www.rockingham.k12.va.us/EMS/History_Pages/The_Battle_of_Antietam/antietam.html Thousands dead, in a matter of hours. Hours, man. Not days...hours. Unifying most of a continent is not easy. When something goes wrong, it's usually horrible. But it's also to a large extent unavoidable in modern times for borders to dissolve. Modern transportation and communication systems...our present-day economy...have thrown us together. It's integrate or die. Please do. This has been most enlightening. My thoughts right now are pretty much, I don't know what the Europeans could do about immigration from countries that practice fundamentalist forms of Islam. We barely keep our own fundies under control. The only thing I can think of to do would be to force their children to go through moral education, make sure they learn that moderate-to-liberal values are the accepted norm. No opt-outs. Look, Germany has had that kind of program going for years. Their students have to take classes more or less exactly like that. The reason I know this is that I have known a few young people from Germany, and I remember them speaking about it in tones of annoyance. Now, based on your observations, do you think that Germany's program has been successful in what they originally endeavored to accomplish with it? Did the programs by chance result in some other phenomenon? Your other immigration issues can be resolved simply through compulsory integration. It's not a big problem, and there's a lot of precedent for successfully dealing with it. Okay, so it is a big problem, but it has familiar aspects to it. Without some muscle in Brussels, though, you're going to have more problems than you otherwise would.
Nah, race relations in the South are pretty good for the most part. However, there are still some pockets of trouble. There are places in some of our cities where the same families have been living for almost two hundred years. Sadly, they still suffer from a lot of problems leftover from the time period when they were being murdered and persecuted. They suffer from problems with drug dependence and so on. In some of the better cities, we have tried applying the concept of "beat cops," where we have police officers circulating through the same neighborhood all the time and just trying to establish good relations with the people there. In some cities elsewhere, it has been a somewhat effective means of rehabilitating broken communities, and we are hoping that the same technique will help for us. There are also still some pockets of resistance to reconstruction. Even in fairly urban areas, you can find people who will pretty openly castigate Obama NOT because they have some ludicrous belief about his origins but because he is black. Integration has not been universally effective, but I think that we can learn something from trying to examine those problem areas. What are the causes behind these stubborn pockets of resistance? Fascinating and helpful. There is a lot that we can learn from our history. For example, you can point out how large economic bubbles have always led to catastrophe by comparing the Panic of 1873 to the recent crash in the housing market and the so-called "Dot-Com Bubble." You can also point out the so-called "Roaring Twenties," which preceded the Great Depression. Now, if you don't have any eyes for the past, there would be some facile logic in blaming the Democrats for our present economic problems. However, if you take it in context with previous periods of economic crisis, the real picture is more complex. For the most part, our regulatory procedures can staunch the growth of economic bubbles, but it's hard to sell the concept with some people because it looks on the surface like deliberately sabotaging economic growth. It looks crazy, but it's a necessary measure to prevent catastrophic consequences in the long-term. Unfortunately, we have to triage some less-than-certain spurts of economic growth to make room for more substantial markets to creep in. Now, why can't we examine the historical record here to try to figure out what causes people to turn so strongly against minority groups? Which is exactly the reason we should examine the historical record and try to figure out what led to this problem. We should also examine measures we tried to take to dig ourselves out of it. What worked, and what didn't? Where was reconstruction successful, and where did it fail? Xenophobia has always been a problem in some parts of the country. It has not always been related to skin color, but I am afraid that agricultural societies tend to have a very conformist worldview. I do not entirely understand why it works out this way, but it often does. Now, what can be done about it? What's wrong with McCain except his god-damned political angling of late? I didn't vote for him because I don't trust his party, but he was hardly an ogre. At the time. Oh, yes. Remember, I was there. Do you remember how some people up in Pennsylvania were openly taking bets on how long it would be before there was an assassination attempt against him? It was deplorable. That's because it is not a significant political force. There are still people like that out there, and guess what? McCain would be the President of the United States of America right now if they had not spoken up. I don't know about other parts of the South, but in North Carolina we got tired of the punks a long time ago. During the Reconstruction Era, the South was under military occupation for decades, and it wasn't until President Hayes that they could really go back to governing themselves according to their own laws. You don't study much history, do you? Iceaura, this smacks of a personal attack against me. If you would like to make some accusation against my character or motivations, you should say so to me in language that does not attempt to disguise itself as discussion. To me, such behavior makes you look very dishonorable and extremely cheap. I just gave you a lesson in American history that you would usually pay thousands to hear the half of. You owe it to me to express some gratitude for it rather than casting cheap insults and unjustifiable behind the mask of ostensible civility. Because, unlike you, I will tell you in clear, plain language if I think that you are an ungrateful degenerate. How dare you look over an honest attempt at an in-depth analysis of American history, and all you can say about it is "Well, I'm sure it's fascinating, but..." as if somehow it doesn't have any value in the perspective of the present? Try showing some gratitude. I am sorry that you can't see anything in what I say other than some weird attempt to defend the Ku Klux Klan, which is apparently what you think all this is, but I can't help it if you insist on being an ignorant clod. You are a waste of my time, you know that? I think you're a waste of person if you are such an ignorant wreck that, when someone tries to explain the Reconstruction Era to you and what went wrong during that time period, all you can do is search it for anything that might justify your dumbass preconceptions about the person who is attempting to do so. And, the more you try to hide your accusations and insults behind a mask of ostensible civility, the more certain I am that you are a dishonorable waste of air. Bullshit. Last time I checked, Hispanic immigrants are actually pretty well adjusted in spite of having significantly lower average incomes, and some states have actually been overwhelmingly successful at integrating not only the incoming immigrants but the society that they are entering into. The Spanish language is being taught at thousands of schools in the US, and it is a second-language for many Americans. In most places, it remains exactly that: the nation's second language. We have largely kept our existing culture intact. Also, the USA is a large and highly diverse country, and individual states have a higher level of autonomy than I think most people outside the US appreciate. Different states have taken different approaches to dealing with immigrants. Some approaches have succeeded, and others have failed. There is a lot that we can learn by trying to sort out what has worked from what has failed to work. The US has had large problems, also. During the great Irish immigration, the Irish ended up in highly segregated communities. These communities did not cooperate very well with law enforcement, largely because they felt that their relationship with the law was an antagonistic one. It took decades to try to repair this problem. Kennedy was opposed almost as much for being of Irish descent as for being Catholic, if I remember correctly. I'm not saying the US is unique in the respect of having a long history to draw from, though, but it is the history with which I am most familiar. My overarching point is that Europe is far from lacking in historical perspective for their current problems.
