Alternative for Germany has joined France’s National Rally and Reform U.K. in becoming the most popular party in its country, according to polls.
A poll Tuesday showed Alternative for Germany — which is under surveillance by the country’s intelligence services over suspected extremism — is now the most favored by voters. The survey by broadcaster RTL put the AfD at 26%, ahead of the ruling Christian Democrats at 24%.
This is a high watermark for the European far right, a once fringe movement whose virulently anti-immigration, anti-Islam and culture-war politics were shunned by the mainstream just a decade ago.
Today, these parties have developed deep ties with President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, who openly cite nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as inspirations on policy and tactics.
Maybe if the left wing party that got in for the first time in 15 years actually behaved remotely like they should, this would not be happening in the UK
All Kier Starmer has managed to accomplish is vindicating the idiots that say “both sides are the same” and fuelling Reform’s populism.
His government’s current policy focus areas make Tony fucking Blair look like a socialist by comparison—and he earned the fucking red-tie Tory assessment of his policies.
vindicating the idiots that say “both sides are the same”
When a “left wing” party is still far right, the people who complain have a point. Yes, there is a difference between extreme right and far right, but in the absence of any meaningful leftist options, people will gravitate toward those they hope will implement actual change, even if the change is worse than every other alternative. This most often tends to be those who want to pull the world even further to the right.
Yeah. I naively thought that finally there might be some change now the fucking Tories have imploded, but no.
What a monumental turdpile.
Same thing is happening in Australia. It’s controlled opposition. The real leftists have been progressively out-capitaled from the center-left parties. Now their majority are corporate whore “centrist” neoliberals that continue to screw the workers, just slower than the center-right party, which is now a borderline fascist party.
I’m still waiting for people to realise that we live in corporate dictatorships with the illusion of democracy; you can vote for whoever you want, but the oligarch-financed candidates are statistically guaranteed to win a majority 90+% of the time, coz capitalism. The major difference is how much lube they apply before they fuck you.
I’m still waiting for people to realise that we live in corporate dictatorships with the illusion of democracy; you can vote for whoever you want, but the oligarch-financed candidates are statistically guaranteed to win a majority 90+% of the time, coz capitalism.
People having this realization and solidarity amongst the common folk are the only way to we have a hope of fighting this pile of shit back.
It’s still nowhere near a guarantee of a win, and it’s made monumentally more difficult by the oligarchs plotting to divide us up (using the politicians and social media platforms they own) but it’s the only chance we have.
Spot on
Labour has been a joke of a party for the past 3 decades. The only reason they are in power right now is that the Tories actually managed to completely destroy the UK. Labour and the Tories are going to go the way of the Whigs the nezt election and will be replaced by Reform UK and Corbyn’s new leftist party.
All these leftists become conservatives when their wealth is threatened.
Who the fuck looks at the US right now and thinks “I want that?”
Fascists
This is EXACTLY what leftists have been trying to warn liberals about. People everywhere are struggling under late stage capitalism. Centrists liberal parties like Labour, CDU/PSD, Renaissance, and PO are telling everyone that everything is great and the ship will right out soon. Meanwhile far right parties acknowledge that everything is fucked and they promise to punish “those responsibile” for it (they of course are referring to social minorities instead of the wealthy capitalists that are plundering our societies.
The current status quo parties if Europe either need to pivot their platforms to radical change and clamping down on the capital class whome literally everyone hates or they are simply paving the way for fascist takeovers.
If that were true then wouldn’t leftists be winning in the polls? Why would Late Stage suffering cause a shift to the right? Makes no sense.
You anti-liberal crowd seem like precisely the reason this kind of thing is happening. You’re like a pipeline for people to go from socialists to Trump supporters and anarchists.
Maybe you should look at how governments have reacted to right wing movements vs left wing movements over the past century and you’ll answer your own question. The US wasn’t paying communists to terrorize fascist groups in Italy and Greece, nor were they suddenly forgiving if war crimes to incorporate communist leaders into their societies.
There was a just a news story posted this week about the German court ruling that a communist book club could legally be disbanded amd broken up by the state, yet that same government does nothing to Stop AFD
Angry people
More like idiots
Idiots are allowed to be angry.
Idiotic angry people.
Vladimir Putin.
Man it’s the 1920s all over again!
This is so depressing. I remember 10 years ago seeing how the world was changing, I was full of hope for the future, we were slowly becoming more socially accepting of minorities and it seemed to be slightly getting better. Now the progress didn’t stop, it fucking reversed and shit is so much worse than it was. This makes me really sad.
The people pretending they cared about the gays and the minorities ignored people’s basic human needs.
That’s how we got here.
Who got all the new wealth from increased productivity post 1980? The gays and minorities?
The billionaires who are scapegoating gays and minorities just like they almost always do.
I don’t think they’re saying helping gays and minorities was the problem. I think probably more that rich and powerful for a while learned they could get votes while enacting predatory economic policies by marketing social issues where the government doesn’t actually do a ton there but put minority groups into marketing campaigns for what public programs there are out there and advertise non-governmental things minorities can seek. So minorities and LGBQT were really good marketing for politicians and the rich while they were pushing privatization, lower taxes, austerity, higher surveillance/police state, etc
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We are speedrunning robber-barrons through WW-II in one shot this time. What a ride. Can I get off, please?
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“My wage-slaves are getting a bit too comfortable. Here’s a bunch of money. Go fuck with them.”
- Sociopathic Oligarchs
Now the progress didn’t stop, it fucking reversed
It didn’t reverse itself. Huge amounts of effort and organization went into that reversal.
That’s why it’s a called a “reaction”
Are people not paying attention to how destructive these parties are to democracy?
Nope and by design from the media to keep them distracted from it. Get people riled up about trans people in toilets and asylum seekers in small boats rather than the rich destroying the planet and causing horrendous inequality in basic living.
Tyrants are also usually to blame for the asylum seekers in small boats. The irony knifes me. They’re often seeking asylum because they’re fleeing a tyrant, and the response of the countries they try to find safe harbor in is to turn themselves into the very type of tyranny they were fleeing.
People want change, they promise change, no matter how bad of a change. That, coupled with a massive propaganda network made up of a few billionaires, and there you have it.
No, they promise the world and then shit in your mouth. These people are being duped.
They definitely are, “strangely enough”, it follows trends of cost cutting measures on education that have been happening in the last few decades.
People are getting shit on ny the current parties as well. Prisoners don’t riot because they think they will get out of jail, they riot to get even with their keeps that have been fucking them over. All the status quo parties in Europe/the West are responsible for the current mess we are in and people know it.
That’s the whole point. Look to the now infamous Jubilee video of the man proudly claiming that he is indeed a fascist and he wants an authoritarian ethnostate.
Most people are essentially animals. 50% of the population doesn’t have an inner monologue.
idk, this doesn’t mean they are more subtle to propaganda. There is currently no scientific evidence, that this would indicate that people are not able to self reflect or other things. Not having an inner monologue means that these people are using different techniques to accomplish these tasks. The reality is more complex than that.
I wonder, how can people look at what Trump/MAGA has done to the US and think to themselves “I want THAT for my country”.
I feel that in 50 years from now there will be documentaries about how the Russians won over Europe and the US by influencing voters and just straight up frauding right wing parties into the government.
I refuse to believe that many people are this stupid/brainwashed to fall for literal 1930’s Nazi propaganda.
Your comment presupposes that there will be some kind of back to normal in 50 years, which is unfortunately not going to be the case. Climate change accelerates, economic and political crisisl follows, and these kinds of populist movements are going to thrive in that kind of environment.
Climate change will not have stopped in 50 years, on the contrary.
IF there will be a free enough country to make this documentary
The documentary might be in Russian. Even Hitler had planned a museum to feature all the people he had exterminated; once you’ve won and everybody is dead, there’s no reason to hide it any more. Another example would be our (the United States) fascination with native american culture, now that it’s far too late to reverse that particular genocide.
But they do, even if Russia can flood the information space and all that. I have no doubts there.
Still, a lot of stupid people need to believe this crap.
I go about my day not believing that crap but others are seemingly open to this.
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People are fed up with being broke and not able to afford the same things that they or their parents could afford even 20 years ago. Populists do not have to offer policies they can or event intend to implement so they can promise any old shit to the gullible who want change. Wrap that in a reassuring racist package: immigration is out of control, send back the small boats, etc. so that it doesn’t smell like communism (not that communism cant be racist) that people confuse even moderate socialist policies for due to decades of western propaganda.
Couple this with the Overton window being moved ever towards the right due to left and center left parties being captured by neoliberals who seek funding and patronage from the Rich, plus decades of the press putting pressure on any left wing policies by enforcing a double standard of left wing policies required to fully document how they will work and be funded, while right wing fantasy policies are waved through without any scrutiny from the majority of press.
Then the right deliberately break any essential service, under fund it and spend it elsewhere, making it time consuming and expensive to fix, leading them to point at their opponents being ineffective, and the press refuse to hold the right to account over this.
This has reduced any coupling between those left of the far right and the general population in terms of policies meeting the requirement. You can start to see why they are gaining ground.
This could help give some explanation of the election of Trump/MAGA, but 8 months into that election everyone outside can see that they just made all the problems worse. And when this rise was noted last year, I wouldn’t have asked that question because the people don’t have something to give an an honest response of what would really happen if such groups were elected to power (which these exact same problems happened the last time Trump was elected, but it’s happened now twice in a row with a safety bumper between these elections which would help dismiss any claim of it was a fluke/bad timing). Which comes back to my question, how can you look at Trump/MAGA and say “I want THAT for my country?”
We aren’t dealing with hypotheticals anymore, we are already seeing cause and effects.
They don’t. But the wealthy, the corporations, etc, they do.
They do, the majority of voters are fucking illiterate idiots. It’s not always an evil plot by big business, reality is usually far more depressing
I think it’s both. With enough illiteracy, enough misinformation and corrupt media, enough evil corporations, and potential election interference, and there you go - far right movements driven by lack and entitilement and hate and greed. Malignent leadership manipulating others and the system to get what they want. Combine it with cost increases because of evil corporations and their clutch on politics and climate change inaction, and resulting cost increase on foods and other products due to major climate events and instability, and that’s where we’re at. It sucks because with all of our knowledge, our technology, perhaps things could’ve been way better. But malignant greedy leadership and the worst traits of humanity have given us this outcome.
Racism and other kinds of bigotry mostly.
They don’t,this shit reeks of right propaganda
Maybe ask a Trump supporter?
Billionaires are people, too. Sorta.
Hey UK, they’re all being funded by Russia, just like to dipshits who told you brexit was a good idea. Don’t fall for it again
Narrator: They were going to fall for it again
King Farage pledged the UK’s loyalty to the Russian Empire.
UK has been on a dark path for a while now, Kier Starmer has done a great job of pushing the population down that dark path. When people say both sides are the same, Kier has made sure that everyone feels as though that is true.
WTF is happening in the world rn? Why are all the right wingers taking control? I thought it was just the US going through a crazy-stupid phase
Billionaires learned how to use the world wide web as an AI powered disinformation network
perfectly written.
Social media. Muskrat, Zucc, Thiel, etc. are high on the fumes of the AI hype, and want that sweet AI money, from the surveillance state using AI.
Well right now in the UK we voted for the supposed
left, centre,centre right wing party (The UK has the same 2 party issue as the US more or less) and they reacted by being even more right wing than the right wing we just got rid who recently also just imploded their popularity and now we’re stuck with the far right party next election because UK politics is such a caste based exclusive club that no one on the left or even real centre has enough political or monetary capital to form an opposition.and want that sweet AI money
actually i think rich people don’t really personally profit from extra money. They have already more money than they could ever spend to fulfill personal wishes. in that sense, the money is not “sweet”.
the reason they’re hoarding so extreme levels of wealth is because they believe in “greatness”, in being a part of something greater and bringing the world progress, one way or another. that’s why “techno-optimism” is such a common theme among them. “mars settlement” might go in a similar direction, though that one has more reasons (jobs programs, mostly). it’s more for a desire for greatness (you could call it imperialism, but without the bloodshed) more than a desire for money, i think.
the reason they’re hoarding so extreme levels of wealth is because they believe in “greatness”
They only believe in the “greatness” of themselves. Which is expressed monitarily.
Their entire self worth is based on the size of their bank accounts, on what they “could do” with their money.
Instead of, you know, what they’re actually doing with their money: nothing.
They hoard it to feel special. They could literally give away billions to the right places to fix shit immediately and still be billionaires. But they don’t.
Despite that very literally leading to them being worshipped. Which would be more greatness for them then they have now. And more greatness for the world. And it ain’t happening.
Because. They’re all convinced they’re the smartest people ever, and not big idiots that never learned the basic social benefits of sharing.
“Greatness” isn’t found on top of a pile of money. It’s found at the bottom once it’s been spent. That’s how people and the economy actually benefit from it. By the velocity in which it changes hands. Which so far, is near 0% for these billionaires seeking “greatness.”
It’s embarissing, if anything, to see them so incapable of achieving their goals of greatness simply because they’re too insecure about having anyone else that isn’t them spend their money. Especially when it comes to actually using it to benefiting the world instead of their egos.
It’s more that they use the accumulated wealth as a leaderboard score to show off to other rich people.
But the reality is that economic power is power, and a healthy society must limit the amount of power any individual can accrue.
I think you’ll get a lot of different answers depending on who you ask, and i think liberalism and allowing other people their own opinion / interpretation of things is important. Yet here’s my take:
- There was a gross mis-interpretation of reality around the 2000s when people believed that we could lay down all violence and gross behavior and enter a “perfect, soft world” which was understood as an absence of sexism and nationalism, mostly. However, these are instincts so deeply rooted in people that you can’t just “get them out” in any way, even if you try to create a social movement around “calling out” men who show sexist behavior. What happens instead is that these suppressed groups seek their own expression, and you end up with far-right populism.
I don’t want to love on this planet anymore
I like the idea of an AI apocalypse
You’re confused because you’re existing in a censorship bubble.
it’s not just censorship. people have fundamentally different instincts, and that leads them to see different behavior as “normal” or acceptable.
We can either blame the western political system for it or some other agents interested in making it fail…
Asimov’s second foundation spoilers
spoiler
As with the second foundation, it was strange to see psicohistory predicting so precisely the future, here it is very strange to see all western democracies fail at the same time
Idk man, while it’s possible that this is russian influence, I think it’s beating around the bush and facing the fact that people are capable of being terrible all on their own* (talking about the manipulative people in politics, not the gullible citizens)
Russia and china are only using failures in western policies against us. They don’t create them. It’s up to our nations to resolve those tension spots so they cannot be used against us.
The Russian argument is understandable because it’s what our governments point to as the origin of their failures. It allows them to keep pointing at that “outside interference”, invest in surveillance while not investing in what the subjects used by the interference reveal about the real wants of the population are.
Russia certainly is no friend of democracy and hatred towards the Putin regime is healthy but to fight it does take more than just saying a third of your citizenship is dumb and brainwashed, you have to remedy what they use against us.
This is true. But at the same time, a THIRD of our population ACTUALLY IS dumb and brainwashed. How the fuck do you fix that?
That’s true as far as it goes, but breaking the chain of Russian (and other hostile nation) influence on our politics is still the most direct way of dealng with the fascist problem. They’re puppets and we must cut the strings.
The Foundation has been out for 75 years. I think we’re past the time limit needed for spoilers
Imo we are never past the spoilers… someone may be doing its first steps into it and deserves to have the full experience.
I think this is the beginning of Foundation’s Edge, tho. Second Foundation book deals with the First Foundation looking for the planet where that homes the Second and revolves around Arkady Darell
So glad the liberals, both in government and voters, that always lead us to fascism are so invested in shit like “respectability politics”, politics “being boring” and being on their supposed intellectual high horse because “emotions are bad, you should never raise your voice when people are starving and being genocided, you’re just the same as the far right.” But then while saying this just doing mostly what the far right want, pretending it’s somehow their idea. It’s really working so well to stop them.
But then the liberals would happily throw us into fascism if it meant there was an “I told you so” they could somehow twist out of it to say to the left
It seems that democracy is beyond saving in the age of social media and all the misinformation that circulates there. I mean, you can’t be that incredibly stupid if you live even halfway in reality.
You only have to look at the US to see very clearly how corrupt the goddamn neo-Nazis are and that the promises they make to their ignorant voters are nothing but lies. It’s more than obvious that the US fascists are pursuing policies that are by no means in the interests of the people, but rather the work of a criminal syndicate, which is what they truly are. There is no difference between these barbarians and those in Europe – they are all agents of the power hungry billionaires and do nothing but pursue their interests, which is of course at the expense of the citizens.
Anyone who still doesn’t understand this is living entirely in the imaginary parallel world that the Nazis have built together with their financial backers.
Since this obviously affects so many people and these people cannot be convinced with rational arguments, it is probably hopeless.
Democracy has always been the beard for Fascism since the creation of the US. It was a good lie to sell the people while the wealthy did whatever the fuck they want. Once you come to realize this everything makes sense and falls into place.
That may be true for the US, but we’re talking about Europe here, where many countries have a welfare state, workers’ rights exist, and education is handled very differently. That’s precisely why I find it even more incomprehensible how people can be so incredibly stupid and vote for Nazis who are not only inhuman racists, but also want to create US-style conditions in Europe.
If Europe is such a great representation of idealism why are they marching lockstep to the right?
The truth is the wealthy, because of concentration of capital, have a disproportionate amount of representation. The wealth gap continues to get worse in all of Europe. This is not a coincidence!
The US doesn’t need to impose their shitty conditions on Europe because they are doing it to themselves. It is a race to the bottom and the wealthy are laughing the whole way.
What else can I say? Every thinking person is aware of the problem, but you’re not going to achieve anything with your propaganda slogans – on the contrary, you’re scaring off people who basically agree with you.
The truth is fucking terrifying and you have a lot of propaganda running around in your head like everyone, including me. This propaganda creates cognitive dissonance.
Every thinking person is not aware of this or even close. I studied communications with an emphasis on propaganda and persuasion. I learned a lot of disturbing things about humanity.
While we may agree on a few points I highly doubt you believe what I do. Perhaps you are right though, stranger things have happened.
Social media. They are disproportionately pushing right wing media. That’s it.
The actual Nazis didn’t really drop in popularity much, or rather their policies didn’t, even after those very policies resulted in much of the continent being burned down. People literally looked around at the rubble and hoped that fascists would fix things. In Italy, they stayed in power ffs.
You need strong constitutions to protect from this shit, because people will vote for their own death when they are scared.
You need strong constitutions to protect from this shit, because people will vote for their own death when they are scared.
Constitutions without a mechanism of enforcement are just a piece of paper. Much of what is occurring in the United States right now is absurdly unconstitutional, but it doesn’t matter because the institutions – that are full of living, breathing humans – all ignore it.
Please. Europe is a dozen times less stable than the US. You guys can’t stop from blowing each other up every 30 years.
If you add the words “liberal, capitalist” in front of democracy, I agree with you. But I believe that democracy as a whole is a worthy ideal worth striving towards, in all areas of public life.
Democracy is on it’s way out. Humanity is completely fucked on every fucking angle possible.
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Most importantly, they paint the liberals as the left option to pretend that left does not work.
We’re all in hell.
Nah, the human species is finally being honest. This is what we are. We are shit.
We have and can be better. There is no excuse.
No, we can’t. It’s time we accept the truth. Humans are, at their core, evil, hateful, selfish creatures.
Idk I don’t think it’s so black and white - that’s a cognitive distortion. There are good/better people who work hard to help people. Or people who are kind and uplifting to others around them even if it’s not their job. What we’re seeing now is malignant greedy people taking advantage of multiple collapses: our governments, the sixth extinction, climate change, etc.
I’ve spent time thinking and learning about the worst parts of humans, and I’m no expert, but the good, the bad, the ugly, and all the shades of gray inbetween, are all things that humans have used to survive. Just some people, whether by nurture or nature or culture, skew to the worser traits and some to the better traits. I guess I’m telling you all of this because there are good people who aren’t evil at their core, there are good people who make life worth living and that should give you hope and maybe something to hang onto during these awful times.
What we’re seeing now is malignant greedy people taking advantage of multiple collapses: our governments, the sixth extinction, climate change, etc
And literally nobody is stopping them. Why is that? It’s because every human is a malignant greedy person.
I’ll leave the optimism to others. I’ve officially seen enough. We are beyond redemption.
So why are you commenting? Why not fuck off to your cave of misery?
I have, but you goddam humans have infested the entire planet.
I’m sorry that this is how you feel. There are good people fighting fascism right now. All is not lost yet.
Well, maybe both of you are right, actually. We all suck so much and have been putting off a lot of responsibility for such a long time, and now it’s coming back to roost. Kinda nuts to think about, that it works that way.
The US is a huge cautionary tale that other countries would do well to heed. I see “Why don’t the Americans do something??” all the time, but meanwhile, your country is creeping towards the same conclusion. “We’ll do something to stop it if it gets too bad!” Yeah, that’s what we said while the far-right continued to gather support.
I thought Nazism, Hitler and WWII was the cautionary tale? I wasn’t present at the time, but i heard that Bad Things happened.
I also thought that after WWII, systems were put in place to ensure that it would not happen again. Where are these systems and why aren’t they working?
Right after WW2 pretty much every European country that still had colonial holdings in the Americas, Africa, and Asia went straight back to ruling them with a iron fist. Wars swept across the world outside of Europe and the Anglosphere. Wars of independence.
To that point I don’t think there were truly any safeguards put in place for minorities. Really it was just ban Nazi imagery and formation of European trade zones that would progressively include more governance cooperation eventually forming the EU.
The safeguards in place were done to prevent EU member states from waring with each other, not safeguards for minorities or anyone outside of EU member states. Solution for Jewish people wasn’t to make the EU safer for Jewish people, it was to take land elsewhere and make Israel. Anyone outside of EU member states including colonial holdings were fair game for mass destruction. A lot is made about the civil rights era in the US, European countries had there own versions of that too. The lesson of WW2 was that war sucks, wars should be fought on other continents, move the Jews to Israel. Modern civil rights in European countries had to be fought for as well post-WW2 but I think it was easier there because the minority groups were much smaller in number compared to the US so there was less racist blowback against social safety nets that non-whites could benefit from. Minorities were politically irrelevant until the past couple decades once the children grew up and population sizes grew and they started making it into significant political offices and corporate leadership positions. Now racists started feeling insecure a lot more regularly against the growing number of successful and visible minorities. People that were certain they weren’t racist are finding themselves racist as minority populations are now in their surroundings rather than just a passing mention
Right after WW2 pretty much every European country that still had colonial holdings in the Americas, Africa, and Asia went straight back to ruling them with a iron fist.
Colonialism largely collapsed after WW2, with the unwinding of the British Empire (what’s left largely consists of Gibraltar and the Falklands) and the end of French dominance in Algeria and Vietnam. It was US policy after WW2 to support decolonization.
Imperialism remained, but more as an arms-length interference in the politics of former colonies (especially by the French in Africa).
because the minority groups were much smaller in number compared to the US
Like the Catalans, Basques and Galicians in Spain, who together comprise 13 million of Spain’s 48.7 million population? The same could be said of groups in a number of other European countries.
Minorities were politically irrelevant until the past couple decades
I think you’re specifically referring to immigrant-descended minorities. They’re not the only ethnic minority groups within a country-- almost all countries have long-term ethnic minority groups as well as descendants of relatively recent arrivals.
Colorism and religion. Like Jews being made to wear an armband for easy identification. Black people in Europe are easily identified. East and southeast Asians are easily identified visually. The darker skinned middle eastern peoples are easy to identify visually as non-European.
Every country has historic minorities but it’s more recent that migration across huge distances became common so that adjacent skin tones and visually identifiable features from far away became common in huge numbers.
In Australia, pretty much all the mostly genocided countries, there were programs to breed the savage out of natives. That being taking children mostly young girls and raising them to be married off to white men and after enough generations of this, they would visually look European and would graduate to being a white person.
Europeans in discrimination discourse seem to acknowledge far less easy visual markers for discrimination than the mostly European descendant inhabited former colonies where multiculturalism would be just as much colorism as regional differences in tradition old and new. Like in the US, Canada, etc significant migrations of people from the former states of Yugoslavia. Their children joined the default American or Canadian identifier in those countries because they’re visually European descendant and no longer have the accent. But even with an accent because they come from the adjacent culture that dominates in the US and they fit the color, they face less default discrimination than minorities with easily distinguishable visual differences. They can’t easily be identified as outsiders until they speak but if they can nail a close enough to a common domestic regional accent, then they can be treated like a native better than the people with native American, African, Asian characteristics
You have natives, native Hispanic, black, Asians that have been in those countries for decades to long before Europeans arrived but are identified with a qualifier. Native American, African American, Asian American, Latin American.
Like I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Europeans call China diverse because Han Chinese is distinct from Manchu which is distinct from Korean which is distinct from Dai. Uyghurs look distinct enough that white people see them as distinct from Chinese but I have not seen that same for Hui people or all the other distinct Muslim minority groups in China.
The same with India. Colorism and religious and ethnic visual markers that vary significantly in visual identification that cause groupings and discrimination in local communities to federal governance. These two are geographically large with huge population countries.
In the same way Germany and Spain have distinct historic minority groups, so do Japan and Vietnam before getting to immigration to those countries from like India let alone the large ethnic Chinese populations in those countries but I’m certain almost everyone in Europe and America would look at them as monoethnic. People out here generally don’t look at a Chinatown in Thailand like they do a Chinatown in the UK and Thailand and China are right next to each other but historically have vastly different languages, different religions (I’m including the difference of folk religions and school of buddhism and the resultant syncretism). I never hear these countries spoken up for their experience in handling minority groups and multiculturalism because they have historic, tracing back centuries to over a thousand years, old minority groups that aren’t easily visually identifiable. It’s different than modern migration minority groups. An Indian minority in Vietnam is far different than one of the common historic minorities of Vietnam that trace damn near the whole minority groups existance to modern day Vietnam
So minority groups like Basque and Catalans will experience minority life far differently than people from Africa and Asia. Just subsetting to Muslims, Muslims from northern Africa and the Middle East can expect different treatment from people they’ve never met based on skin color and Muslims can expect different treatment if they look Malaysian, Indonesian, Hui, etc because in Europe and the anglosphere, Muslims aren’t expected to look like southeast asians or chinese
I thought Nazism, Hitler and WWII was the cautionary tale?
It was. We fucked up. Badly. Now we’re another cautionary tale.
This is bewildering. As an American citizen who has no idea how the actual fuck we wound up with another Trump presidency, all I have to say is, if you live in any other country and think the answer is to import this bullshit into your own country, I have no sympathy for you.
Social media plays a big role in this. People have been inoculated with a state of mind that allows this kind of ideas to succeed.
It’s not as simple as “Europeans are also voting for Trump-like parties”. You have multi-party system in Europe and the far-right parties are mostly anti establishment movements. People are mad at lack of action from the governments when it comes to housing, climate, crime, immigration and social services issues. They are tired of both left and right wing parties so they voting for the alternatives now. It’s not exactly some anti-intellectual, extreme conservative, anti-democratic movements like MAGA. Yes, it’s still bad but most people support EU and democracy. While MAGA is a purely fascist movement trying to regain their dominant position over the minorities in EU it’s more about frustration with the ruling class.
As an American, thank you for explaining this. It’s still not great because it echoes what happened here. We are also stuck in a duopoly that was slowly being cranked to the right over decades. A lot of people were initially drawn to Trump because of his ideas of “draining the swamp” and sounding anti-establishment. I think the duopoly and the sense of anti-establishment under a capitalist economy (that turned into hypercapitalism) is where fascism really dug it’s claws in and when things really started to accelerate. I have hope that this will result in something better after whatever happens happens, but I’m deeply worried about my family, my friends, my self with whatever comes next. I don’t want people to die and suffer but that’s already happening and has been happening. I feel powerless and it’s awful.
Everyone everywhere is worried now. I really hope EU as a whole will survive and guard basic human rights (at least internally) but who knows?
I’m not sure how corrupt the politicians are in your country, but they are here. We’ve had laws repealed one by one so politicians can get bought off like by oil companies, health insurance, war profiteers, housing investment companies (renting out homes to people instead of people owning), etc. That seems to be a major issue for us in why no progress was made in terms of climate change and other issues too. Although our democrats made progress on social issues, which honestly democrats won’t lose much with some policies and laws for some social progress, they’re still protecting corporate interests because they want their slice. I’m not sure if there’s a good future for us or not, but I’ve been reading that getting involved in one’s community and grassroots helps. Best of luck to you and yours from across the pond.
As an American citizen who has no idea how the actual fuck we wound up with another Trump presidency,
I can help you, here.
We skipped the primary and coronated Liz Cheney as our party leader.
election was rigged like 3 times, plus Dems wont do anything, they are afraid of being labed the riggers by the conservative. at least the old guard is very complicit with the gop(they benefit from his tax cuts, and many are Dinos themselves)
That’s the thing. We have a foresight Americans don’t necessarily have and we’re still making a mess. It’s an even more damming reflection of our society.
Nah, fuck that. I plan to blow my head off anyway. Might as well stick an axe in some nazi as well.
Schizo rant about media manipulation
We are isolated from the right wing side of it here but propaganda is dominating most media. Its really sophisticated and resourced by different states and groups.
On mainstream platforms open Nazi imagery and ideas go viral in hyper specific pockets. Its targeted at groups they think will be suspectable then those groups adopt it, wash it and then spread it. At this point its several stages in and most of the work is done by actual people for free.
They compile emotional imagery, videos and stories and blast them in the face of average people and it baits them hook line and sinker. If you can show a 35 year old white women clips of vicious attacks on women from refugees of the course of the year she will internalise it and become radical. These dont have to be recent she just needs to see them regularly. Strip context, make up different narratives for the same clip it doesnt matter.
With the lovely invention of social media and targeted advertising you can get your message put in front of these average people. People dont choose what they see, they just view what comes across their feed.
If you want to get a glimpse of the hellscape in which our adversaries are conditioned, I would urge you to peruse the MSN start page in Edge.
I’m forced to use Edge at my job. It’s honestly not bad. It even has a built in PDF editor!
However, every time my eyes glance at that start screen, my blood pressure skyrockets. It’s all blatant propaganda.
The best/worst part? THERE ARE COMMENTS…
The scary part starts when you think about how much lurkers are using this MSN start page and just watch these 3 comments there. I think of all these boomers.
I checked it out. Ahh these people are lost souls.
This – people determine themselves by consuming media. If you consume media with algorithms, then you are determining yourself even more, because you are not in charge of what you are consuming next. It doesn’t matter what you will publish against this, because the algorithms decide if your peaceful living is more “viewable” than the right wing propaganda.
The dangerous blend of political funding, ideological media, and the power held by those who design and control algorithmic behavior – combined with insights from modern psychology – is part of what’s driving us toward the dystopian future we’re now living in.
the most sublte forms are copaganda, and military propaganda, to assure people that is right to support these people. is it a coincidence that these genre popped in the MSMs around the time of trumps 1st term, not really.
the news are blatantly bias because trumpers actually own these networks. as soon as you hear people quoting fox, or another MSN, they consume that garbage daily.
It’s easy to blame Russia and China, but it’s not really that. It’s clear that this is a symptom that something is wrong, and that is stagnating or worsening living conditions, unhappiness with how society operates and people hearing that turn to reaction.
Left doesn’t have an answer given how marginalized they are, all you get are center-lib parties that pretend everything is okay or that focus on liberal middle class issues. It’s no surprise
The problem is simply humanity. At any given moment in time, there are a lot of these ugly, angry, nasty, unhappy people, and they want control of everything so they can take their anger out on those they hate. This is a natural human archetype. They are with us now, and they have ALWAYS been with us. The are the MAGAs and the European far right, they are the warlords that run various small nations, they are the Vikings, the Huns, the Mongols, the Romans, etc.
It was the Nazis in the 20th century, it’s the MAGAs in the 21st. It’s not that MAGA is copying the Nazis, they are both the same sort of people following the agenda that those people always follow - just generally making life miserable for as many innocent people as possible.
The archetype includes being arrogant and demanding, but that doesn’t mean we have to allow it. Most of the time, a strong moral leader can keep the assholes at bay, but every now and then, someone drops the ball, and they gain power, and start fucking with the world. The 21st century Dems dropped the ball badly, over and over, and did nothing to prepare for the MAGA onslaught.
Even after decades of the worst possible election behavior, the Dems instantaneously defended MAGA, and declared the 2024 election “fair & square,” before even waiting to see if there had been any review of the election at all. These people are treasonous criminals who will do literally anything. This election was the ONLY thing keeping him from getting a life sentence, how could anyone believe that this is the first election that he didn’t cheat on?
We aren’t going to defeat these people by appealing to their better nature, they have none. It’s who they are, and who these people have always been. We tend to forget from generation to generation that we have to hold the line against the worst people in the world, because they are out there, and they are ALWAYS planning to take control. It’s important to remember that, and fight them every single step of the way. We can’t accept any excuses like we have to let them do it because we don’t really know that the outcome will be bad until we do it. Yes we do, because we’ve let these people have their way over and over, and they ALWAYS kick us in the nuts.
We need to stop trying to kick the football that our enemy is holding.
Depends on, the outer rings often have better nature that is being slowly eroded by hate fed from the inner rings.
They get these people by trying to appeal to things liberals at least seem to glimpse over, then they give you scapegoats instead of real solutions. Then slowly they feed you even more “problems” that don’t affect you, with scapegoats to get rid off, often with a web of conspiracies tying it all together.
I was a Fidesz voter in 2010. They told me the previous government were radical communists, who will kick me out of college, then force my disabled ass to work in underpaid factory jobs, with mandatory overtimes that may not get paid for a while. I saw a lot of my girl classmates getting groomed as teens, and thanks to the fucked up laws of Hungary, it was all legal. I got targets to hate for it; feminists, who forced these girls to “marry rich guys ASAP”; and LGBTQ+ people as MSZP did not raise the AoC to match it to homosexual relationships, but lowered it for everyone.
Then after 2010, my face got eaten by the leopards. On the day Fidesz added a “close in age” exception to our fucked up AoC laws to allow 17 year olds to prey on 12 year olds, I was so angry I couldn’t sleep. I also was a young atheist who just didn’t believe in a “Stalinist form of persecution of religion” (of which I got a horribly distorted description), but after how strongly religion got pushed by Fidesz, I started to gravitate towards stronger forms of secularism. And lastly the widely criticized implementation of mandatory internships only got solved for those in vocational education, meaning as a college student I would have had to paid a used car’s price to a HR personnel to hire me, especially due to my autism, which at leas in one place thought was actually “intellectual disability, like in Forrest Gump”.
So interesting to read a perspective from another country dealing with much of the same issues.
The feeling of not being able to sleep, of impotent outrage? Yeah, that’s how I felt when he started that family separation policy, and they started stealing children from their parents. It was the most egregious thing they’d done to that point, and it was beyond belief that this was happening in my country. There was nothing I could do except call and email my elected representatives, most of whom agreed with it.
I FEEL your frustration.
Congratulations, you’ve written probably the most hitlerite comment I’ve seen on Lemmy so far, and I’m genuinely concerned.
Instead of investigating what makes people act this way in terms of material conditions, incentives and values that are promoted, maybe the way power is organized and how it leads to inevitable opportunism or this being an inevitability of a class dictatorship that we have now, you instead go for the “undesirables” angle.
People didn’t vote for the candidate you wanted because they were irredeemably evil. What do we do, kill all MAGA voters now for having the wrong human archetype? Prohibit them from voting? That only seems the natural conclusion from everything you wrote.
Yep, your kind of thinking is the problem. No sense of history, or the people who have consistently rampaged through it. People have been people for as long as there have been people, and we’ve ALL seen the variations between humans. To PRETEND that somehow everybody is born exactly the same is contrary to everybody’s experience, especially anyone who had siblings raised in the same situations.
Some people are born with wiring to be decent people, and some people are just born to be evil. There are videos of Stephen “Pee Wee Himmler” Miller in high school arrogantly defending highly racist concepts, illustrating that this psychopath has been a bad seed his entire life.
It’s time to stop pretending these are normal people for whom we have a normal philosophical disagreement. By definition, MAGA supports a POLICY of treason, pedophilia, rape, racism, intolerance, corruption, slavery, hate, and more, and they aren’t novel. People with these same sorts of philosophical leanings have emerged over and over throughout history. Pointing that out, and telling people like you that it is your responsibility to hold the line against that sort of oppression, is not “hitlerite,” it’s patriotic. If you can’t see that, you’re either MAGA, or one of those weak, spineless Democrats who allowed all this to happen with your political weeniness.
“Pee Wee Himmler”
Fuckin’ lmao. Absolutely cannot explain to my coworker why I’m laughing in my office.
Happy to provide the giggles. I have declared it public domain, so feel free to steal it and use it as much as possible.
RFK, Jr is Great Value Mengele.
It’s not that MAGA is copying the Nazis
Oh, they very much are, though.
The problem is simply humanity
No, the problem is a set of very specific political conditions that derive from geopolitical power struggles.
We need to stop trying to kick the football that our enemy is holding.
If you’re implying that we should kick the enemy instead, I agree.
Our specific political issues aren’t really causing this. These people have ALWAYS been with us, throughout human history. Sometimes we have rulers strong enough to resist them, sometimes we don’t, but the problem with evil humanity is that they are infinitely patient, and they never give up. So if this generation manages to resist them, they’ll make what progress they can, and wait for the next generation. That’s what they’ve been doing since Reagan and Rush took over the American political scene in the 80s, and have been mucking it up ever since, until they finally saw their chance, and grabbed it.
My point is that no matter what the political situation is, good or bad, these people are always waiting in the shadows, organizing, planning, and getting into position. We can never forget who they really are, and what they really want, so that when they emerge, we can tell them that we know they are liars, and shove them back into their hole. Evil people don’t deserve the privilege of walking among us with their hate on full demonstration mode.
It’s clear that this is a symptom that something is wrong
The “something” that’s wrong has been wrong for multiple generations, but it has only flared up now, when Russia and China started interfering. Surely that’s a coincidence.
