Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

the US has been finding judicial grounds for it for a long time, it just isn't codified*

* or codified anymore, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it used to be / is still on the books somewhere

Thanks for your response but I'd like to hear some more about the nitty gritty. Do you have squads going in these "ghettos"? Has a judge sentenced someone from one of those areas already, double the normal sentence? How does this *work*? It all sounds terrifying, but with the conservatives at the wheel here, no doubt it will happen.

And of course the EU court of human rights is toothless, but hey, you can't expect them to jump at every xenophobic instance any of the 27 member states has and act upon it within months. This is on the member states, not the HR court.

@Katherine, it not being codified or written into law is even scarier. But I can't say I'm surprised. Sorry to say but I've stopped questioning if the US has judicial grounds for anything when it allows cops to kill black people as a pastime. There's no codifying that.

It's very new and I don't think it has had consequences in court. It's part of a larger law, which also means that kids from the areas are being forced into kindergarten from age 1, public benefits are lower for inhabitants in these areas (they're already lower for immigrants, so that will only hurt Danish citizens). Lots of stuff like that.

Part of the law also says that the police are allowed to focus especially on these areas. There's been some kind of 'stop and frisk' going on for a while. It's not entirely like in the US since they don't carry weapons and the police squads don't rely on fines, but it's definitely inspired by it.

I'm obviously biased, being from Portugal and having Brazilian friends and so on, but this Bolsonaro guy feels like a special brand of hateful garbage even amongst our current crop of fascists.

Everything about him is in Portuguese.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-45579635

Racist, sexist, homophobic and bigoted in every other way you could think of, but also openly praises the military dictatorship era and advocates for torture. Has given props to a judge responsible for torturing Dilma Roussoff when she was fighting against said dictatorship and told a female political opponent "I wouldn't rape you because you're not good enough".

He is leading the polls to become Brazil's next president.

Yesssss I have a houseguest right now who heads up an LGBTQ advocacy org in Brazil and she told us some of that last night. He's apparently advocating for civil war that would kill tens of thousands of Brazilians as the preferred way forward.

Correction: Her current job is not in LGBTQ advocacy but her previous ones were, but she's still in policy/advocacy and Bolsonaro is still hateful garbage who might get elected.

I think Haddad should still win a run-off but, post Dilma/Lula, there isn’t necessarily a long-term correlation between being elected and running the country if you are on the left.

Especially since Bolsonaro, taking yet another leaf from the Trump playbook, has made it clear that if he loses the run-off it's because of voter fraud.

I was talking with my Brazilian friends abt Bolsonaro yesterday and while he def seems a very special breed of misogynist asshole, they did not find it very realistic that he could lead a military coup since his connections with the military are not good

but I guess "fascist" means populist conservative or smth these days

LBI and Frederik you can read the draft bill about "zones of increased penalization" here: https://www.ft.dk/samling/20171/almdel/REU/bilag/382/1928101/index.htm

It google translates quite well https://translate.google.pt/translate?hl=en&sl=da&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.dk%2Fsamling%2F20171%2Falmdel%2FREU%2Fbilag%2F382%2F1928101%2Findex.htm

It will most likely be put forward Tuesday when parliament opens, then goes through 3 treatments and will most likely be accepted without changes since there is a wide majority behind it

The change in the law will authorize the chief of police to instate a temporary zone of increased penalization in an area that experiences a sudden increase in violent crime leading if he/she believes such a zone would have a preventive effect on the crime. It's not about where the person is from or where he/she lives but where the crime is committed.

I was talking with my Brazilian friends abt Bolsonaro yesterday and while he def seems a very special breed of misogynist asshole, they did not find it very realistic that he could lead a military coup since his connections with the military are not good

but I guess "fascist" means populist conservative or smth these days

Went to an anti-Bolsonaro rally yesterday and what I heard from Brazilian people there reminds me of what I heard from French ppl at the last election about Le Pen: they don't actually think he'll get elected, what worries them is how far he's gotten.

He may not be in a good relationship with the military right now, but he's openly nostalgic about the military junta that ruled Brazil in the past, I don't think fascist is a misnomer here.

Yeah, he does flirt pretty hard with authoritarianism

I was surprised to find that he has support from upper middle class voters as well, one of my friends' dad is a doctor and will (to the endless frustration of my friend) probably to vote for the guy o_O

I guess the #elenao campaign and the fact that he's gotten so far (and could win) is symptomatic of the poor alternatives...

so is he the favorite to win now

I would say yeah. His opponent is handicapped by popular disillusion towards the party he hails from (how merited is a matter up for debate).

A backlash:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/merkels-bavarian-allies-tried-to-pander-to-the-far-right-now-theyre-paying-the-price/2018/10/12/cc1df1aa-c71d-11e8-9c0f-2ffaf6d422aa_story.html?__twitter_impression=true&noredirect=on&utm_term=.42a5fd445d28

The CSU was always "the party the nazis fled to after WWII" to my parents.

Polish president and PM set to join fascist march in Warsaw

Cool cool cool.

so the nazis' levelling of poland during wwii was just... the wrong type of fascism?

This is a better write-up of the situation:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/09/fears-of-violence-as-polish-state-intervenes-in-nationalist-march

It’s a mess and not as straightforward as the Freedom article presents it.

The original neo-Nazi March was banned by the Mayor of Warsaw and the government came in to replace it with a, supposedly more inclusive, alternative along the same route. The ban was overturned and the original march is back on - suggesting they might have two separately organised marches on the same day. It looks like the government has tried to negotiate with the Nazis to combine the marches but drop the Fascist trappings but it’s not clear whether that has been successful or how the two matches will engage each other. It is not simply a case of the PM marching in the explicitly Fascist one.

There is a big crossover between the far-right and the PiS vote but the march is also internationally embarrassing enough for them to want to squash it.

thanks!

I think the PM, Duda, did join in 2015 or 2016 tbf.

The march has become more explicitly Fascist over time as it has attracted more white nationalists from elsewhere. It was last year that it really came to the attention of the international press.

This was a good overview from last year btw.

https://newsocialist.org.uk/poland-2/#

Spain far-right Vox party gains foothold in Andalusia election
Electoral earthquake in Andalusia

Ultimately, those who believe in democracy and popular sovereignty should aim at tearing the EU down — not at reforming it. https://t.co/MyJShItO06

— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) May 26, 2019

i don't know enough about the EU not to be forced to listen when people who live in it tell me it simply can't be made into the cuddly democratic socialist international of my dreams; it certainly does seem to have been constructed by and for technocratic executives, and i certainly think a "parliament" without the power to make law is farcical. i also think that local struggles are vital and primary. but this kind of thing--

The absence of a European demos with its integral class divisions prevents the existence of “normal” politics in the EU. There are no social cleavages applying uniformly across EU member states that could be organically reflected in political contestation within EU institutions. … No class or other social divisions in Europe take a homogeneous ‘European’ form, for there are no occupational, organizational, habitual, cultural, and historical norms able to create such an overarching social integration. Actual class divisions in Europe always take a national form, as do the party politics that correspond to these divisions. In Marxist terms there is neither a European capitalist class nor a European working class.

--does strike me as weird to the point of alarming for any kind of marxist to say. surely a key feature of marxist class categories is that they cut across national and geographical divisions the same way they do across divisions of race or gender. of course such divisions exist and must be recognized for a functioning democracy to be installed but "there are no social cleavages applying uniformly across EU member states"? there are no rich and poor? no owners and workers? certainly european capitalists do not behave as if their interests are unbridgeably cleaved from one another's-- nor from the interests of american or russian or chinese capitalists-- not even when they think and say otherwise. how can workers hope to oppose them if they behave as such themselves?

even in the fascist utopia of permanently warring genocidal tribes it is the owners and managers in each state who harvest the wealth from conflict, and the workers who together do the building and the dying. of course the official view in such states is that class is only a division of labor and the entire society is uniformly strengthened by war and isolation, and i know the linked argument is not that local workers and local owners are distinct organs in a harmonious body-- yet to claim that it is class conflict within the nation alone that produces politics and history nevertheless seems a kind of corporatism. a closed machine that works by friction is still a closed machine.

maybe i am strawmanning? maybe this is just a "don't get obsessed with the EU parliamentary elections" article? i guess the point is supposed to be that global class conflict somehow emerges naturally (fractally?) from various local class conflicts in which various national demoi are directly engaged? but expecting that process just to hum victoriously along in the absence of supernational institutions-- especially when global capital makes full use of such institutions itself-- seems a little naive here in the 21c. how can any heir to a political tradition shot thru from birth with references to global brotherhood and global struggle turn around and claim not only that there is no world proletariat but that there is no meaningfully united proletariat even within a podunk provincial subcontinent like europe? at least when stalin floated this stuff he was in charge of the biggest country in the world. and look what happened to it!

anyway tl;dr this is why you posted it in this thread obv. just wanted to be clear that for me it is not "giving up on the eu" per se that scans as right-wing: only cryptonationalism.

The Jacobin is shit, but the left has been anti-EU for ages. The story there is that they've stopped recently. In Denmark, the left anti-EU party lost their seat for the first time in forty years, while a moderately more pro-EU party took one instead.

--does strike me as weird to the point of alarming for any kind of marxist to say. surely a key feature of marxist class categories is that they cut across national and geographical divisions the same way they do across divisions of race or gender. of course such divisions exist and must be recognized for a functioning democracy to be installed but "there are no social cleavages applying uniformly across EU member states"?

I haven't read the piece (and no time rn) but this is otm to the extent that Left wing groups across Europe do reach across to other similarly red European parties. I think its in the "organically reflected" where the work is happening in that sentence that I can't quite parse but I suspect that a lot of what is local is very easily lost, which leads to huge disparities in voter turnout across European countries. If there is 20% turnout in one country how does politics really happen for that place as reflected in Europe?

More widely, whatever happens to this specific European project its clear that the challenges facing us - a lot of it driven by climate change but not always - will need to be tackled in an organised way across borders. Otherwise there is potential for destructive war and conflict, all too awful to contemplare. Ultimately the borders will need to be beyond Europe, and that is a left project.

hello?

hi

Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone at home?

I'm here. In a corner. Belgium has voted far right last sunday. :-(

Italian police arrest a bunch of people, including former Customs officer and a Forza Nuova activist, with a cache of weapons including machine guns, grenades and a working surface to air missile.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48987723

It's part of an investigation into Italians who may have fought in Ukrainian paramilitary groups.

The broader risk is that more of the right-wing dopes from across Europe who went to join Azov, etc, took similar 'souvenirs' with them.

Thats triggered my memory regarding something about Brazilians(?) that fought in Ukraine. Think it was Brazilians but can't remember the story

Yes, there was recruitment from the Brazilian far-right, but lots of Scandinavians, French, Germans, etc as well.

despite the Italian police statement saying they fought against pro-Russian separatists the BBC initially reported it as them fighting for pro-Russian militants. It might have just been a mistake, but a tinfoil hat type on my twitter line is calling it as dezinformatsiya!

You did have oddballs on both sides but if they're packing Nazi insignia it's a fair bet they were Azov or aligned.

Politico seems to have been the original source of error. The wording they used - "participated in the Russian-backed insurgency" - might be a case of their house style guide mandating "Russian-backed insurgency" instead of "war" - but it's absolutely misleading in this context.

I trawled a few Italian newspapers for more info on this and none of them mention which side the suspects fought for. So unless English-language media outlets know something their Italian colleagues don't, this does seem to be a case of leaping to conclusions.

https://www.thenationalherald.com/253767/setting-golden-dawn-having-trouble-paying-rent/

ATHENS – Bounced out of the Greek Parliament in July 7 snap elections after falling out of favor with voters, the accused neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, with all its 15 lawmakers on trial on charges of running a criminal gang, can’t afford the rent on its headquarters.

Unfortunately most of their voters have been lured back to the right-wing party they were originally supporters of - now in power.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-how-ultranationalists-infiltrated-greece-s-new-ruling-party-1.7485494

guys

A “woman-first feminist social network” launched on the Gab Social open source code today, becoming the 2nd largest Gab Social server instantly.

Tell me again how Gab is for the “far-right” only.

This is the future: decentralized, open source, unstoppable, for everyone. pic.twitter.com/TkmFhRayZA

— Gab.com (@getongab) August 12, 2019

can you give some more context there? is this a rightward drift, or?

Spinsterf

tldr: "gab" is a right/alt-right social media network. they have now launched a women's version (?) AND THEY HAVE CALLED IT "SPINSTER"

a TERF version, aiui

there's still maybe a right-wing drift in the west but i feel like even more of a characterization of politics in the west atm is a total inability to accomplish anything or lead in any kind of meaningful way. the US is terribly dysfunctional in this regard and you might say it's specific to our system but the UK seems no better (assuming this election returns another Tory gov that'll be what- 3 in a row elected without a clear path to enacting Brexit?), and Israel is heading into its third election. the right-wing autocrat-leaning leaders are real but they aren't really good at doing shit it seems like. maybe this is the truth about politics in our age - not a drift to the right or left but just drifting?