Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

increasing appeal of fascism/nationalism as the air and the oceans coincidentally warm is a dumb fad, germany. don't fall for it!

A friend pointed out that this is not really a remarkable victory, it's about average (a little low in fact) for the far-right across Europe. Which isn't good, of course, and there's a frisson from it being Germany, but it's not the end of the world.

"It is, frankly, hard to imagine better headwinds for an anti-Muslim, anti-immigration political party than Germany this election. IMAGINE the media and political response in the UK if Theresa May had opened the borders! (To avoid ambiguity, I think Merkel was basically right to do this and May's response to the humanitarian crisis has been outrageous.) Is the AfD's 13% really a seismic shock? And since they've tacked hard to the right to get it - to the point where their leader just walked out because the party's too extreme for her now - can they do any better?"

After underwhelming results for the far right in various European countries when everyone was expecting the Trump/Brexit trend to continue, this does feel more like the tail end of a trend, but that might be dangerously misplaced optimism on my part.

i am ok w/ ppl being terrified about 1 in 8 german voters thinking the nazi thing was good actually and they should do that again. i mean the only hope we have is that ppl remember that kind of shit and are horrified by it. would hope to rely on germans of everyone taking the lead in that particular discipline.

Sitting in a country where the far right scored 12% as early as 2001, it's hard to feel it's that seismic. But it's bad that they over performed polls, for the reason Daniel points out.

Sitting in a country where the far right scored 12% as early as 2001, it's hard to feel it's that seismic

to point this out for literally the 45th billionth time since you started posting here, maybe you're not that worried about it because you're a white person in a land of white people and the threat isn't directly against you

Donald Trumpth billionth time

he has even taken over the number system, we're dooooooooomed, he is the gray goo we were warned about

karl malone otm x a billion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHG0ezLiVGc

I never said I wasn't worried, but I don't think any of my immigrant friends are surprised at the far right doing 13% in Germany.

i am not surprised the giant vampire squid has a role in all this . . . but a lesbian???

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4917706/Lesbian-mother-two-set-Angela-Merkel.html

That shouldn't surprise anybody since at least Pim Fortuyn. But I guess I'm saying that because I'm white too.

so what's to keep afd from facing the same fate as the DRP or the FAP?

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/how-a-splintering-of-the-national-front-could-end-up-rebranding-it/540567/?utm_source=atltw

Whenever I see "AfD", I first think "Appetite for Destruction", which I guess is actually apt, but the reality is still doubly disappointing.

Btw, the SNL sketch is funny but not really reflective of my experience.

i am ok w/ ppl being terrified about 1 in 8 german voters thinking the nazi thing was good actually and they should do that again. i mean the only hope we have is that ppl remember that kind of shit and are horrified by it. would hope to rely on germans of everyone taking the lead in that particular discipline.

― Roberto Spiralli, Dienstag, 26. September 2017

To be fair, people who actually remember the Nazis didn't vote AfD. Less than 7% of people over 70 did.

Sadly, Germany's baby boomers' attitude towards fascism boils down to "we can't possibly be like Nazis coz we're not wearing swastikas"

the npr piece on the election interviewed one guy (so small sample size) who of course started off why he voted for AfD with 'I'm not a racist, I'm not a Nazi, BUT...'

Hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness are as popular here as anywhere.

Rewatching "The Nazis:A Warning from History" the last few weeks has confirmed in the belief that if you choose to affiliate with this shit you deserve to be forcibly reputed

Repudiated, sorry

Germany's favorite brand of history doc is the kind where you get shown the usual prominent Nazis over and over again, with menacing background music and a solemn commentary about what they just did or what they are about to do. Doesn't really get you to contemplate the causes and workings of authorianism.

That '97 Nazi doc by the BBC is very good, but it just just didn't include the caveat that there is a risk that they might end up disseminating hate-speak and providing propaganda for far right regimes themselves, during the next right wing cycle. #trenchant warning!

Rewatching "The Nazis:A Warning from History" the last few weeks has confirmed in the belief that if you choose to affiliate with this shit you deserve to be forcibly reputed

― be the cringe you want to see in the world (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, September 26, 2017 10:36 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I watched this too over the summer, and was startled to learn that the dude who discovered after the fact that his dad was a Nazi, ended up going neo-Nazi himself iirc

Before watching the Ilse Totzke segment from "The Nazis" I had no idea that the Gestapo went after random unpopular people as well. I'm sure AfD voters could get behind that: snitch on the neighborhood weirdos, have them shipped off to forced labor camps, no real harm done and everyone lives happily ever after.

Suffice to say that no Gestapo snitch was ever called out on German TV like that old lady on "The Nazis."

oh aye, plenty of SS/Gestapo officers got plum government jobs in the post war FRG as well, never mind the snitches. It is very good is that bit though. Gotcha vindictive + evil snitch! I also watched Orphuls The Memory Of Justice recently. Excellent that was.

I'm just reading an incredibly depressing book called Savage Continent about all the post-war pogroms, genocides and ethnic cleansing, revenge killings throughout Europe after Fascism was defeated forever.

there's a particularly brutal Robert Kaplan book called Balkan Ghosts that I couldn't get through, similar topics but focus is just on the Balkans in the 90's

It's unfortunately kind of inevitable that you can't hold fascism at bay forever based solely on historical memory -- historical memory dies out by its nature.

I never realised that Jews were still getting persecuted and murdered in Poland after the war. I knew that much of the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe was encouraged by Stalin. Not that Tito needed any encouragement to wipe out the Ustashas, or other score settling where the oppressed became oppressors. But a lot of this stuff was happening shortly before the end of the Nazi regime or 18 months after even. It is a far cry from the victory parades and camps getting liberated and this "will never happen again" spiel.

reading Enemies, tim weiner's history of the FBI. the number and extent of semi-official "patriotic" vigilante snitch societies in America in the first half of C20, encouraged by the justice department, is breathtaking

watching something about the Pacific War last night and I hadn't previously realised how openly the US had committed war crimes for which there were no post-war consequences

what's a little firebombing of civilians between friends

guys openly talking about shooting captured Japanese soldiers because they were taking no prisoners

it's not a war crime if your side wins iirc

(marine a to thread)

of course bitter twisted misguided kneejerk bleeding heart me knew this, I was just surprised it was so openly conceded

State of this little twerp...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41627586

Mistah Kurz, I hope he soon dead

Fortunately extreme right stagnated, and social democrats did well. (looking for silver linings here tbh)

Never change, Austria. Oh right, you weren't planning to.

(xp) Yes, but Little Lord Fauntlereich wants to get in bed with them.

Like fuck the extreme right stagnated -- Austria's "middle right" is Orban City. Also, the Greens have split in half, and the old party may not make it into Parliament -- the old white guy (who was kicked out for spurious reasons) went on a "foreigners are in fact shit, but we have to deal with them humanely" campaign and will be in. Which would leave Austria with exactly 0 parties not willing to describe immigration itself as a problem in the Austrian Parliament. Xenophobia isn't a left-right thing in Austria.

Years of hating Football and hating Lads vindicated

https://www.facebook.com/VICE/videos/1854923958154978/?hc_ref=ARSetkcjlQu1EAz2JHuUSDR-8LXsVhB0ohEM79HCA8-iVUlWkvvqnwU-ze0s9h4HwsI

#notalllads

Are the Football Lads Alliance the next right-wing street movement or the "backbone of this country" simply standing up to terrorism?

gosh i wonder

ffs I'm off to join ISIS.

http://tass.com/defense/959862

donald trump colluding with vladimir putin to steal the 2016 US presidential sure is drifty and grifty, sure as a snowless kilimanjaro rises like an empress above the serengheti