A friend of mine who’s a higher up at an investment bank — the same guy who told me in 2006 that there would eventually be a huge real estate crash and that it would destroy Bear Stearns first, then Lehmann Brothers — started texting me from Europe yesterday about how frightening the economic situation is over there. He says he thinks austerity will hurt Europe even more than people think, partly because the system there has more trouble adjusting to sudden government changes than our system does. As things get bad, he expects to see more and more immigrant-bashing (some of you don’t like it when I say this, and I know it’s a generalization, but Europeans as a group are much more xenophobic than Americans), with Eastern European/Baltic immigrants in western Europe getting sent home, which makes things worse, especially for Eastern European/Baltic countries. He thinks that in some places, the Strapping Young Bucks may turn on their Galtian overlords in a serious way, and that the best thing might be for some low-level Baader-Meinhoff-type activity to scare the Galtians straight before things get too dire.
He’s not optimistic about the US economy, either, but doesn’t think it’s in anywhere near as much as trouble.
celticragonchick
I’ll say it again: If we are going to be stuck with the screwed up dystopic Blade Runner future, then I want to at least have the flying police cars and punk rock fashion to go with it.
celticragonchick
I’ll say it again: If we are going to be stuck with the screwed up dystopic Blade Runner future, then I want to at least have the flying police cars and punk rock fashion to go with it.
DFS
Also pet robot owls. I want a pet robot owl.
scav
There’s certainly a more active and recent history of mass action and demonstrations in Europe than this side. EDL and non-friends out in the streets as we type, no? (haven’t checked for updates recently, it’s one of my random lent days where I go on as low a news diet as I can manage
Hunter Gathers
I find that very, very hard to believe.
befuggled
@celticragonchick: And again, and again…
(Not that I don’t agree.)
RoonieRoo
Well that is certainly depressing.
scav
@Hunter Gathers: Lots more nearby xenos to phobe about if nothing else.
CT Voter
At least there’s that.
And power is slowly returning to Connecticut after that bitch Irene.
Alex S.
I’d say that Americans are less xenophobic because hispanics are ‘at least’ christians. But since the ‘islamic threat’ entered US politics it’s not that different from Europe anymore. I think that the Tea Party is the american version of the european right-wing populists. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Europe, I really have no idea. Something big eventually has to happen, a complete political union, death of the Euro, greek bankrupcy and expulsion from the EU or financial collapse.
drkrick
@Hunter Gathers:Why? The US has a long history of immigration, and of a lot of successful assimilation of many groups, although there are exceptions. Europe has none of that. In many countries, there’s not even a legal process for immigrants to become citizens – if they want to stay, it will be as permanent guests with no right to stay that the natives are obliged to respect. As appalling as some of the things we see in the US are, Europe is much, much less inclined to accept outsiders. The blood and soil thing is much deeper and more real there.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@scav: For a cheery look at “The Revolution” in Europe check out “The War is Over” from 1966.
Frankensteinbeck
@Hunter Gathers:
I used to work with a lot of immigrants. Now, this was pre 9-11, but they told me flat out that they’d been all over the place before they settled in the US, and they faced less racism here. And this was Kentucky.
EDIT – The point here isn’t ‘America isn’t racist’, it’s ‘You wouldn’t BELIEVE how racist humans are, and how bad it is in a lot of other parts of the world.’
evap
I have lived in Europe for a year twice (Germany and Spain) and spend time in Ireland every summer, and it has been my experience that Europeans are more xenophobic than Americans, on the whole. I think this mostly comes from the fact that the populations are much more homogeneous than ours and that immigration is relatively new. Slavery was evil, but our culture is so much richer than it might be because of African influence — music, food, etc. There’s nothing like that in Europe.
Anonymous At Work
It’s not the prettiest thing in the world but fear of “underclass” backlash has been the best way to keep capitalists in line. Fear of Marxists, USSR, and unions, et alia played a large role in the widely-shared prosperity in the 50s and 60s. That same fear played a large role in the initial tacit and later explicit support of the Civil Rights movement as well.
It isn’t pretty nor what you want, but the lack of fear by capitalists is causing problems, as long as the political process is unable or unwilling to step up.
bleh
I agree on most points. The underlying financial situation there is worse than here, and the US is further along in reckoning with it. The fiscal position of European governments is also more difficult, because of the generally larger and more expensive social services, and political adjustment there will for the same reason be more difficult. And while I don’t know that Europeans are “much more” xenophobic than Americans, they certainly aren’t any less so; most European countries have larger, more overt, and more popular anti-immigrant political movements, and there is no “melting pot” myth comparable to the US one.
Where they may have an advantage is in the existence of a defined and accepted patrician class, which — IF it is properly motivated and organized — can lead the people rather than be led by them. The question is, will their overlords step up to the responsibilities of that leadership role, or will they — as many of their American counterparts seem to be doing — just grab as much loot as they can and join the stampede for the exits. If that happens, it WILL be ugly, quite possibly uglier than here.
Davis X. Machina
In America, you can always get one half of the working class to shoot the other half. In Europe it’s the other way round.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Frankensteinbeck: Try Japan some time.
Eric
@Hunter Gathers: I found that hard to believe as well, until I moved to the Netherlands 6 months ago. Dutch people say things (and mean them) about other races, especially immigrant groups, that would make the staunchest America Firster blush from embarrassment. And it’s just about everyone: from warehouse workers to CFO’s I’ve met.
And Holland prides itself on tolerance and openness.
DFS
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Yeh. Had a friend of mine, a black woman, who lived and worked in Tokyo for most of the past decade. She told stories about petty harassment from the cops that were so appalling you could hardly believe it.
eemom
@Anonymous At Work:
who cares if it’s pretty? I would love….delight…..thrill to break out the guillotines and USE them.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@DFS: They don’t even consider other Asian’s human.
Frankensteinbeck
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Japan was on my mind. ALL of Asia. And where we’ve had race riots, Africa has had inter-tribal genocide.
I’m going to stop before I depress myself. The point is, as much as the US has problems with racism (and other horrible cultural flaws) don’t assume we’re special and everyone else has gotten over this stuff already.
Sam Simple
I wonder when people will realize the capitalism has failed and is in the final stages of collapse. Marx was right. It eventually eats itself. Socialism is the only sustainable form of governance – where everyone sacrifices. In a world of scarcity, no one should be able to accrue vast resources at the expense of everyone else. We are seeing where that leads…….
scav
Also, xenophobia isn’t necessarily only racism and what with the former empires, things get even more complexicated. In addition to the whole Islam, long-distance immigration thing, you’ve got things equivalent to TX-CA rivalry only backed up with actual national borders and a few historic wars with pointy things.
S. cerevisiae
@celticragonchick: I wish it would be as cool as Blade Runner. No, we are all headed for the Soylent factory because that movie is becoming more prescient all the time.
FlipYrWhig
@Anonymous At Work:
Definitely. The near-consensus of quasi-liberalism during the Cold War era had a lot to do with keeping actual lefty insurrection at bay here at home _and_ with putting on a brave face to the world about how The American Way was better, freer, and more fulfilling than the stolid regimentation behind the Iron Curtain. When communism failed, American elites rather rapidly lost the desire they once had to show off their backing of widespread prosperity, and the generation that followed them is dominated by greedheads, graspers, and good-for-nothings. Time was, American capitalists were loath to live up to their fat-cat stereotype. No longer.
Big Baby DougJ
@Hunter Gathers:
Talk to any Indian person who’s lived here and there. Talk to any Persian person who has lived here and there.
I had a conversation about this with a Persian friend of mine whose reaction was “seriously, you’re actually *asking* if Parisians treat me worse than people in Atlanta do.”
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@eemom: Ah, the Widow of St Pierre!
Hoodie
Which is why it’s a crying shame that we’ve got so many people buying into a Republican myth of American decline.
eemom
@evap:
I have tried many times — never to any avail — to explain this to my mother when she passionately insists that there was NO such thing as racism in her native Greece, where less than 2% of the population are something other than white Orthodox Christians.
The Dangerman
…and the U.S. didn’t really pull out of the Great Depression until WWII (for those keeping score, the largest Government Stimulus program ever).
Villago Delenda Est
There is no Bismarck around to wisely concede that in order for society to continue, there must be some changes that the Galtian overlords may not like, but those changes are preferable to tumbrel rides for Galitan overlords.
Big Baby DougJ
@DFS:
And it would be even worse if she were Korean.
wenchacha
This is just downright fucking depressing. And I’m not sure that any
will solve a damn thing except to create a shit-ton more fascists, and then some more terrorists, then a few more fascists, etc., etc., etc.
To paraphrase Neil Young, “Why do we keep fuckin’ up?”
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Frankensteinbeck: It’s the fucking human condition.
Avi
@drkrick: The soil of Europe is literally soaked with blood spilt only recently due to xenophobia. True, USA did not have to deal with the Christian/Muslim divide but it had to deal with the Christian/Jewish divide and the Christian/Christian sectarian divide, all of which filled European rivers with blood many times over. This is simple, recent history. Things may look bleak when you look sideways in the USA, but all you have to do is look at recent European history and they look much better
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Yeah, the British sank him in 1940.
RossInDetroit
A friend of mine who is black traveled to France recently. I asked him if he encountered bias because of his race. He said “they don’t have to look down on you because you’re black. They’re already looking down on you because you’re not French.”
Maybe Nationalism is a better term than xenophobia.
wrb
@FlipYrWhig:
Absolutely. I can’t imagine America before the fall of the wall tolerating the waty the Tea Party has humiliated the nation in front of the world.
PurpleGirl
@Hunter Gathers: Why?
My paternal grandmother came to the US from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For years I heard all her stories about why Hungarians were worthless, Czechs (Bohunks) were worthless, everyone was worthless except for Austrians and the French from 200 years earlier (her family fled to Austria during the Revolution). The Russians were terrible and all the Slavs. Heard this for years. She had opinions on European politics — she came here in 1910. But she knew what she knew.
scav
@Big Baby DougJ: Parisians are not the best example: they’re notoriously rude (they’ve applied for a trademark) while Atlantans have that easy, immediate and often superficial Southern Charm(tm). If I had to choose a friend though, I think I’d go with the Parisian so long as were using the French definition of friend and not the American. French friendships take time to mature (let alone be acknowledged as a possibility) but they’re pretty solid after that.
Omnes Omnibus
@RossInDetroit:
The two can go hand in hand.
Big Baby DougJ
@scav:
She lived in Paris for six years and spoke fluent French.
Xenos
@eemom: I spent last Christmas in a rural part of the Peloponnesos. The Ethnic homogeneity is really remarkable. Then one thinks back to the number of Jewish and Turkish civilians murdered in the course of the revolution and it clear – what you see is the result of a successful ethnic cleansing and genocide nearly 200 years ago.
And then the quaint little towns don’t seem so cute any more.
scav
@Big Baby DougJ: French helps, it’s not a universal key. I’m not saying they’re easy or for everyone, but they’re not fucking monsters.
Big Baby DougJ
@scav:
I love French people, I have lots of French friends. They all tell me that French culture is very xenophobic.
Linda Featheringill
Just how bad is the economic picture in Europe? Is the Union going to collapse? Will separate areas start lobbing harmful objects at each other?
Omnes Omnibus
@scav: Who said the French were monsters? Aside from the English?
Alex S.
@RossInDetroit:
Agreed. Also, until recently there wasn’t really the american nation to speak of. There were WASPs, the Irish, Germans, Italians, Scandinavians etc… Only since people of a different skin color entered the political landscape did these national differentiations disappear.
MikeBoyScout
@ DougJ,
This post is awfully similar to a Mustache Of Understanding column regaling the wisdom of Taxi Cab drivers.
MikeJ
@scav:
Not my experience in Paris at all, but I’m a white guy. I think a lot of the rep for rudeness comes from people who have never been to a big city before. I don’t find NYers to be rude, nor do I find Parisians to be so. Parisians do tend towards xenophobia though.
MattF
There’s no doubt that Europeans are xenophobes– the English are probably the most tolerant, and they’re not tolerant at all by American standards. And Europeans are paragons of tolerance compared to Asians.
Villago Delenda Est
@MikeBoyScout:
Yeah, but it’s much more likely that DougJ actually has a friend who’s high up in the investment banker food chain that it is likely that Friedman actually understood what the cabbie was saying…or that the cabbie actually existed in the first place.
scav
@Big Baby DougJ: Did I say they weren’t xenophobic? I just pointed out that Parisians aren’t the best example because they draw the boundaries of xenos at la periferique and they’re not too sure about the people on the interior either. Although, from personal experience, the Bordelais have the Parisians beat hands-down in terms of snubbing those from outside the banlieues.
srv
I’m getting pissed that Australia, Europe and (apparently to some extent) Canada, are becoming infested with wingnut thinking. What’s the point of moving to Canada if they’re nuts too?
As for xenophobia, probably half of the longer conversations I had in Switzerland last year included the local bringing up how ‘infested’ Switzerland was. The Irish didn’t seem to mind all the Poles, but that was back during tiger times. Given the Irish don’t actually stay/work in their country, I’m not sure what they could complain about, the countryside was emptier than Montana.
Villago Delenda Est
@MattF:
Koreans are particularly bad. They tolerate the white GI, but the black GI? Nope.
Oh, and don’t get me started on how they feel about Japanese, and with good reason, and it’s mutual.
On the other hand, the Thais seem to be quite tolerant in many ways, but that’s based on my very brief personal experience with them, much shorter than being stationed in Korea for a year.
Jeff
@Hunter Gathers: believe it.
Europeans like to put on a veneer of civility and sophistication, and laugh at us rubes, but they are only one bad recession away from Sarajevo 2011
Cain
@scav:
Other parts of France seem to not like Parisians either for typically the same reason. Kind of like me complaining about New York City.
That said, I was treated well in Paris. I had no problem, and if you even try to attempt to speak in French that’s all they care about.
Best time I ever had was in Ireland, and those guys are totally awesome. I lived there for three month, and it was the best in my life.
PurpleGirl
My Norwegian pen pal (back in the 1970s) talked about how they told Swedish jokes…
ETA: And mainland Italians (especially from the north) dislike Sicilians.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jeff:
Every country is three missed meals away from revolution.
RossInDetroit
I live in a fairly culturally diverse area. My city is 98% white and 40% Jewish. Across the road it’s 50% white (predominantly Orthodox) and 50% AA. a quarter mile away is a strip of shops with all Arabic signs for the Middle Eastern community centered there.
I think here the secret to there being basically zero ethnic friction is everyone has elbow room and their own community. In a big city with a truly heterogeneous population there can be much more direct mixing and conflict.
scav
@PurpleGirl: Ah, now this is fun. The Swiss tell Austrian jokes, and the French I was with tended to tell Belgian jokes (when I was in the northern end). Be fun to come up with a whole map of these: would work for US states too.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Big Baby DougJ:
But what do they mean by xenophobic? France was home to an awful lot of people with Polish, Russian, Spanish, Italian and Magyar surnames before WWII. Sarkozy ain’t exactly a Gallic name, ya know?
Roger Moore
@Hunter Gathers:
I don’t see why. The Holocaust happened in Europe within living memory, and the Yugoslav Civil War was hardly an example of “Love thy Neighbor”. Take a long look at how the EU is treating potential Turkish membership and tell me that Europe doesn’t have a serious problem with xenophobia.
PurpleGirl
DougJ — Re austerity. Is your friend prepared to say that austerity makes the problems worse? Does he support austerity programs here?
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Villago Delenda Est: The clubs in Yangicol that catered to the brothers were much more fun than the honky joints. Of course you had to go with a brother to get in and if they told you to cuttachogi you damd sure did. There was an enclave in Saigon where a bunch of brothers who went over the hill stayed, I always wondered what happened to them when we split?
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): I found out after watching “La guerre est finie” that Yves Montand was Italian!
Omnes Omnibus
@MikeJ: I have always found Parisians, outside of the most touristy of places, to reasonably friendly, in a more reserved and formal way than Americans generally are. Of course, I also am a white guy who speaks French (and at one time spoke it quite well). It is the Belgians who I have found to be the most like the stereotype of the French.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@RossInDetroit:
Then there are all of those people with roots in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. They’re the people that I’ve always found most foreign up here in the urban Rustbelt.
scav
@Omnes Omnibus: There’s the whole seasonal thing too. February is great: by August, I was avoiding people that spoke English.
Roger Moore
@eemom:
Ask her how her neighborhood would have reacted if a Turkish had tried to move in.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
As was the little Corsican who had founded the French Empire.
Oh, I left out Irish and Scots. Marshal MacMahon, first president of the Third Republic ring a bell?
maye
I’ve made a dozen trips to europe in the last 5 years, and each trip I have a conversation with a local (cab driver, hotelier, etc.) who complains about immigration. Same conversation in Greece, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland. . .
Tyro
@eemom: That’s kind of amusing because I would have assumed that Greeks would have been the first to admit their own cultural chauvinism about their own province or village.
It’s not accident that not only is everyone in the country Orthodox Christian (a result of the Greco-Turkish population exchange in 1922), but that everyone in the country speaks the exact same dialect of Greek.
Though they can console themselves knowing that they’re more tolerant than the neighboring Turks.
But you know, European countries get a pass on their xenophobia as far as I’m concerned. They were formed as nation-states. They spent generations trying to forge a singular, unified national identity out of a bunch of different provinces and tribes, sometimes speaking mutually unintelligible languages. They have a history of going to war against their neighbors, and their immigrants were supposed to be temporary for the purpose of rebuilding after WWII. They simply haven’t had the several generations of experience to deal with it. The chickens are coming home to roost on this matter, but I don’t think they ever thought about how they were supposed to deal with large immigrant communities in the first place.
Linda Featheringill
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I’m an urbanized hillbilly and I want to tell you that it requires a BIG adjustment on the part of the refugee.
Northern cities do have some advantages, though. People tend to let you be who you are, even if that is a bit different.
Bruce S
“Is austerity killing Europe’s recovery?”
Krugman: “Toldja!”
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Tyro:
Not all of them. The French granted French citizenship to any of their colonials who wanted it. The colonials had, after all, served and died for France in both world wars.
eemom
@Roger Moore:
don’t think she’d count that as racism; Turks aren’t even considered human.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Linda Featheringill:
I’m mostly- mostly- kidding, Linda.
I, the descendent of a man who fought in the Michigan 17th Volunteer Infantry Regiment (the Stonewall Regiment) and lost his brother in the Civil War, still find it fucked up that we have a suburban neighborhood tucked hard into the southwest side of Grand Rapids that’s named for Robert E. Lee. Their high school’s mascot is, of course, the Rebel.
Bruce S
To link the “austerity” fallacy to earlier discussion of the politics of the ozone regs fall-back, Krugman has an interesting blogpost arguing that it’s not just bad environmental policy, but lousy economic policy in these times, more likely to cost potential jobs than save existing jobs:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/fatal-distraction/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto
fhtagn
@Tyro:
Actually, they don’t speak exactly the same dialect of Greek. The Greek of the islands is not the same as the Greek of Attiki, for example. Nor is there an undebated “standard” Greek. There are long-running disputes about demotiki vs katharevousa that have fairly serious political overtones.
Irony Abounds
The depressing thing is that the economic crunch in Europe only exacerbates the problems with getting the US economy moving into any meaningful progress. Consequently, the GOP is much likelier to gets its nominee elected (and complete control of Congress) and we’ll get the twofer of horrible economic policy combined with 18th century social policies.
Don K
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
And in my experience they have very finely tuned senses for telling Japanese from, e.g., Chinese and Koreans.
Regarding Europeans, the older brother of my college roommate, who has curly hair and somewhat swarthy skin, spent a year in Switzerland. At one point he had a run-in with a local, who started yelling at him in German. When he yelled back something like, “Hey, fuck you!”, the local became apologetic and said, “You’re American? Oh sorry, I thought you were Italian.”
Not saying Americans aren’t racist and xenophobic at times, just that these traits seem to be part of the human condition.
Roger Moore
@eemom:
Yeah, I guess it’s kind of hard to convince a fish to notice the water.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
It’s not just the white folks, or the Asians, or the Africans, for that matter. Spend some time on the rez. Nobody hates Navajos more than Hopis, and vice versa. It’s a human thing.
RossInDetroit
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
A lot of the AA in Detroit are from or closely descended from southern states. To the point that phone conversations can be challenging if the speaker grew up in Arkansas or Miss. Thank FSM for TXT. Again.
RossInDetroit
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
Not discounting actual grounds for grievances between the groups, but maybe there’s a cultural equivalent to the Uncanny Valley going on. Someone very different from you is easy to accept because they’re not challenging. But someone who’s like you except for one important thing can be an intolerable weirdo.
Gex
I don’t know how anything like that would happen here. When I check the temp around me, I notice that 20-30 year old white dudes are firmly with the Galtians.
Tony J
@Omnes Omnibus:
We don’t think they’re monsters. Shifty, hypocritical, razor-adverse, perma-smoking cheats who have raised lying and being snooty to a fine art, yes, but they’re not monsters.
OTOH, I lived (and actually worked) in France for a year, and have been back quite a few times. Never had a problem with attitude, even in Paris, and the only things I can say in French are “Please”, “Thank You”, and “I’m sorry. I don’t speak French because I’m very, very English, so require your patient assistance.” For some reason that goes over very well.
That said, when we were there our friends came almost exclusively from the immigrant community. Senegalese, Ethiopian and North African. Friendly isn’t the word, we were embraced.
Big Baby DougJ
@PurpleGirl:
No, he thinks austerity is crazy here. There, he thinks it will hurt, but he’s not sure what they should do, exactly, except let the Greeks and Irish default.
Norwonk
OK, let’s get a grip here. Tell your friend that the Baader-Meinhoff-type activity was not pleasant, and that no one should wish for its return.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@RossInDetroit:
Heehee….
The father of one of my best friends from middle and high schools was a black man from Delta country in Mississippi. I could barely make out a word he said.
But the bone I have to pick with Southern immigrants isn’t with African-Americans, but the white people who brought their racism up here with them. Michigan was chock full of abolitionists in the Antebellum, and we sent a higher percentage of men to put down the Rebellion than any other state. Naming anything up here after Robert E. Lee should be illegal.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tony J:
My error. Whatever could I have been thinking? Sorry.
Omnes Omnibus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Needed fixin’.
Also, on the topic of the French, I just went and got food from my nearby French cafe/boulangerie. Bread, croissants, brioches, as well as a raspberry and a cherry/almond tarte… Yum. I will note that the staff is made up predominantly of young women who appear to have been chosen for their personal attractiveness and ability to speak French.
PurpleGirl
@Big Baby DougJ: Thank you for the answer. I hope people listen to him.
Chris
Haven’t read the comments yet, but I’m just going to say this:
It would do the opposite. All the Baader-Meinhoff shit will accomplish is to drive more people to the right and give the Galtians another stick with which to beat back reform, and another brush with which to tar the left.
There’s a reason the original Baader-Meinhoff jackasses never accomplished anything, here OR in Europe.
And I’ll get on board and say the immigrant-bashing is an enormous problem in Europe, and likely to get more so if the economy gets worse. Which is worse – I really can’t say from personal experience. But what I’ve heard from ethnic Middle Easterners who go through France (my other country) is less than complimentary.
Scamp Dog
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: Time to bring up the old Tom Lehrer tune, National Brotherhood Week.
tomvox1
Well, at least we can trust big time rating agencies like S&P to give us correct and unbiased analysis of each country’s economic outlook because their calls are based on sound fiscal metrics. Oh, wait…
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
I sometimes almost wish we’d had some of that at the end of the Bush administration. Wouldn’t want it here now — the media would blame it on the strawman of weak Democratic leadership, like they did when the dirty fucking hippies and anarchists rebelled at the end of Johnson’s administration, instead of the real culprit, GOP greed and sadism.
But, yes, there are times when I think Our American Galtians will never take any steps to ameliorate the sufferings of the bottom 95% until people rise up against them and make them share the pain, fear and despair engendered by right-wing, conservative, Republican policies.
.
catclub
@Norwonk: “OK, let’s get a grip here. Tell your friend that the Baader-Meinhoff-type activity was not pleasant, and that no one should wish for its return.”
At first glance many here speak approvingly of the Baader-Meinhof approach (eg. guillotines and tumbrels always bring a cheer). But on second look, the backlash would be orders of magnitude more nasty than in the 70’s. The tools
that the Arab states have been trying out were built here.
I think those re-education camps that the wingers are fearful of (projection anyone) would come.
Somebody above said that the tit-for-tat would make a LOT of fascists.
Chris
@Alex S.:
Yes.
Remember Charles Johnson of “Little Green Footballs” fame having a road-to-Damascus moment when he realized the “anti-jihadist” movement was putting him in bed with overtly fascist parties in Europe – and when he pointed that out, his base just showered him with accusations of liberal RINO treason. Yeah, they’re the same people.
The only difference is that in Europe, mainstream right and far right are still two different and opposing things, whereas here, they’ve been melded together for thirty or forty years at least. Krugman had an interesting comment on it back in 2002 comparing French and American politics – http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/23/opinion/the-angry-people.html.
catclub
@Omnes Omnibus: “cherry/almond tarte… Yum”
Your inner lecher is showing. From one who recognized it.
JGabriel
@catclub:
Don’t we already have a lot of fascists? Those Tea Partiers are fluffy socia1ist bunnies.
.
Dennis SGMM
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
In late ’71 the State Department concluded that we could win the hearts and minds of far flung villagers in the southern part of the Mekong Delta by delivering pairs of Hampshire sows and boars to them. The Brown Water Navy was chosen for the task and I’ll leave the hilarity of loading a recalcitrant, fully-grown porker into a nineteen foot fiberglass boat to your fervid imagination. It occurred to me then that pigs are way more intelligent than they’re given credit for. They knew instinctively that cruising the Mekong Delta in a moving target was bad idea.
On one of the missions we went way, way, into Heart of Darkness territory. We’d traveled so far that we had to tie up overnight while they organized a supply drop for us. Met a brother, Army draftee, in that ‘ville who did not want to go back to the US under any circumstances. I hope that he is, like me, white-haired and in the bosom of his family.
Chris
@srv:
Everybody’s nuts.
I’d say in general, that America’s somewhat better from a civil rights/racial tolerance point of view, but Europe’s better from an economic-and-social-justice point of view. Both these things may be changing, I’m not sure.
Jager
@scav:
What’s a Kentucky virgin? A girl who can out run her brothers!
How do you make a Nebraska farmer go broke? Weld his mailbox shut.
What’s the difference between a Wisconsin farmer and a pidgeon? A pidgeon can put a deposit on a new John Deere.
How does a Montana rancher get two government checks a month? He marries an Indian.
We got em here!
JGabriel
@Chris: Whoa, nice Krugman link:
Krugman was describing both the Gore loss, and the Jospin loss. But it’s amazing how identical the rhetoric is to how Obama is described and treated in the media
.
Chris
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Yeah, but all these guys are white. In a globalized world where The Face Of The Enemy is Arab, African or Indian, white-people-differences fade away. (Kind of like here).
Hence why Angela Merkel can make an oblivious, idiotic statement like “multiculturalism has failed in Europe,” never mind that Britain is four different countries tied together and Switzerland actually speaks four languages. Multiculturalism among white people is different.
Although, not everyone feels that way: the French fascist leader, Le Pen, liked to make fun of Sarkozy by asking “Would I vote for him? For President of what? I don’t vote in Hungary.”
Tony J
@Omnes Omnibus:
No problem. Glad I could clear that misconception up for you.
Mnemosyne
From what I’ve heard, the difference between Europe and the US is that they tend not to be as specifically race-based as we are and are more nationality-based. So a black American can go to Europe and be treated pretty well because, as far as the Europeans are concerned, they’re Americans and their race is secondary. But a Francophone immigrant from, say, Senegal will be treated much differently because they’re African.
Here in the good ol’ US, our xenophobia is race-based thanks to our historically race-based slavery system, so a black person from England or Jamaica will get treated just as crappily as a native-born African-American citizen. Yay us!
JGabriel
Chris:
It’s not much different here in the US. Without black and brown people, whose skin color marks them as easy targets to xenophobes, the bigots would target Irish and Italians, Catholics and Jews, anyone who spoke a different language.
We know that’s true, because our history tells us we’ve already done it. Bigots everywhere always find some group less pure than them to target.
.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Are you sure it isn’t Belgian?
Chris
@S. cerevisiae:
How about Firefly?
I always thought Firefly was in the same kind of universe as cyberpunk movies like Blade Runner. It’s just that cyberpunk is that world from the POV of the urban lower class, while Firefly gives the POV of a group of nomads who mostly stick to the “rural” part of the ‘Verse.
“Dystopian, unequal, ultra-corporatized future as seen by regular working folk” being the common thread.
Villago Delenda Est
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
My first experience in the deep South and their accents was with the black staff at the motel I was staying at when I first arrived in Augusta, GA, after being commissioned and assigned to the Signal Corps, and their school, at nearby Fort Gordon.
To the ears of a kid who grew up in Oregon, they were not speaking English as I knew it. The accent made communication from them to me very difficult. They had no problem with my accent, as the PNW English is pretty close to the “standard” midwestern accent that all teebee types tend to use. As Linda Ellerbee (from Texas, like Dan Rather) once pointed out, you don’t want to sound like you’re from anywhere when you’re on the teebee. One of the local anchors on an Augusta station’s newscast once, on the air, lost her well cultivated Iowa/Nebraska flat midwestern facade and when into the Southern Belle mode for a few sentences before she caught herself. :)
Omnes Omnibus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Yeah, the couple who own it are from Rouen.
ETA: I liked Bruges and Waterloo was interesting.
Chris
@JGabriel:
Good point.
I think one of the big reasons the far right is still on the fringes in Europe is because they haven’t been able to update their prejudices. In France, Le Pen denied the Holocaust and accused Jacques Chirac of being controlled by international Jewish bankers. Not the sort of shit you want to be saying in a country where “patriotism” is synonymous with “World War Two.”
His fucking bitch of a daughter (pardon my French) (and that pun), on the other hand, has supposedly been trying to mainstream the FN – trying to move away from the jackass skinheads and towards the more “respectable” soccer moms who’re just, y’know, good honest hard working folk terrified of those scary darkie muggers. (Trading her father’s George Wallace routine for the more ambiguous and infinitely more effective Richard Nixon one, as it were).
JGabriel
Chris:
I think another factor is the parliamentarian system. Fringe parties have a realistic chance of electing some representation, though seldom a majority, to the government — and, consequently, bigots are more likely to seek representation through them, rather than the major parties.
Fringe xenophobic parties have far less chance of successfully pursuing power in the US, so right-wing xenophobes seek power within one of the major parties — the GOP today, the Democrats in the 19th C. Such conservatives have historically had to share power with other factions — Democrats and Republicans both had liberal and conservative wings in the past — but that’s no longer true today. The past 20-30 years of conservative purity purging, and mainstream propagandizing through their own Fox News media outlet, have left the GOP a party that combines the worst of right-wing xenophobia, authoritarianism, and corporatism under one umbrella — essentially mainstreaming fascism.
That’s one of several factors that make today’s Republican party so potentially and terrifyingly dangerous.
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Corpsicle
“There are only two things I hate: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch”
Chris
@JGabriel:
Their short-sighted loss.
The teabaggers have far, far more power as an integral part of the Republican Party than any of the far right parties in Europe ever will. And as you said, it’s terrifying.
Villago Delenda Est
@JGabriel:
Depends on how the Parliamentary system is structured; Israel has this bizarre situation where incredibly radical microparties have huge influence on the inevitable coalition governments. In Germany, there’s a 5% popular vote threshold to actually hold seats in the Bundestag, which means that the serious nutcases don’t have the popular support to actually be in the Bundestag. It was a big deal when the Greens finally broke 5%.
JGabriel
Chris:
Of course. I don’t mean to give the impression that parliamentary systems are an ideal panacea. Just because fringe parties seldom take control of a parliamentary government doesn’t mean they never do.
It seems unlikely, for instance, that a genocidal Hitler could come to power under the US system. Though today’s GOP looks capable of nominating some lesser version, say an ideologue willing to build the concentration camps but who thinks firing up the ovens might lose him votes.
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Woodrowfan
Wasn’t there a Monty Python skit about a contest to come up with the best insult for the Belgians as well as other prejudices?
why yes, there was!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19fcN3VaXs4
Samara Morgan
this is empirically false. in America one of the two major parties is wholly white conservative christian nativists.
Villago Delenda Est
@JGabriel:
Well, Hitler had considerable popular support, far more than any of his wannabe successors in modern Germany have. One of the burdens fascists must bear is that the German version of fascism seriously damaged the brand, what with all those crimes against humanity and whatnot.
So a Parliamentary system has its advantages and drawbacks, just as our locked in stone version of the 18th Century British Constitution does.
Villago Delenda Est
@Samara Morgan:
Not true. There are a few chickens who, inexplicably, align themselves with Colonel Sanders.
fhtagn
I would like to see some evidence that le tout Europe has any mainstream news channel that is quite as systematically and virulently xenophobic as FOX. I’d also like to see some evidence that le tout Europe manages anything quite as stupid as the recent anti-immigrant stunts in Arizona and Georgia, to name only two.
JGabriel
@Samara Morgan:
See my comment @ 118. That may simply be an artifact of the US two-party system vs. the various European parliamentary systems.
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scav
@fhtagn: if you’re looking for evidence of le tout Europe doing anything as a le tout, you’re missing the point slightly, but here’s a stupid immigrant / marriage law I remember from DK (granted, for 2002, but I doubt the moods gotten better as economic troubles got worse) and The Daily Mail is, if I can believe stereotypes from UK comedians, rather solidly anti foreigner and it’s the 2nd largest in the UK. Probably not in the FOX league though, they’re special.
Svensker
@Scamp Dog:
And then, there’s always this
There’s hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain….
Some things don’t change.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Villago Delenda Est:
There are a lot of telemarketing firms here in MI because our accents are so neutral. In the Lower Peninsula, anyway.
Funny thing is that I’ve always been really good at hearing through accents. I think part of the problem I had with my friend’s dad is that he was always drinking Johnnie Walker Red when I saw him.
fhtagn
@scav:
No, actually. The person who is missing the point is the one who put up an amazingly over-generalized post about “Europeans” versus “Americans”. I realize that this sort of fashionably ignorant xenophobia gets clicks and page views, but it is remarkably offensive to anyone who knows the diversity of Europe.
“Europeans as a group”: utter pig-shit.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’d love to see Bruges, but Waterloo…? I’m a big fan of battlefields, but the King of the Netherlands completely screwed up the topography there by building that huge memorial mound a few years after the battle. Or so I’ve read from multiple sources.
JGabriel
@fhtagn:
Well, it’s not too long ago that Yugoslavia was torn apart in a bitter war between Croatians, Bosniaks, and Serbians, who all speak the same fucking language, are identical genetically, and have intermarried for centuries.
Or that the French were forced into a presidential run-off where the two options were right and far-right, Chirac and LePen.
Or that the mainstream Austrian conservative party willingly chose to form a government with the Nazi-apologist Jorg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party, instead of with the Social Democrats they’d previously governed with and who had a far larger share of the vote.
So there’s three examples, in three different European countries, from the past two decades, right there.
.
Barry
(f*cking whatever the blogging software is, that won’t let me cancel a comment)
scav
@fhtagn: But, then, it could be equally pig shit to discuss Americans as a fucking generality rather than Texans, Californians, Vermonters et al. What makes the US such a monolithic unity for that matter? Abstact borders? There’s geographic variation here and we can pursue this question of scale and group behavior all the way down to individuals if it makes you happy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): The interesting thing for me at Waterloo was that, while standing the mound, you can still see La Haie Sainte (the farm is still there) and site where Hougoumont was. The mound itself is a bit silly, but it does create high ground.
Binky the consumer bear
@Roger Moore: Might be mixing up racism and xenophobia there. There are distinctions with differences there; just perhaps only insofar as it becomes “I’m not shooting you because you are brown/black, I’m shooting you because you are Turkish/African/target du jour.”
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, but at the expense of the integrity of other parts of the field. Imagine digging out chunks of Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg in order to build a huge fucking mound on the field across which Pickett sent his soldiers! Bah, I sez! Humbug!
Omnes Omnibus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Well, they also did it so long ago that it is part of the landscape now. Plus, the nifty rampant lion on top is facing France with “defiance”-a bloody lot of good that did in 1914.
Chris
@JGabriel:
Vote for a crook, not a fascist!
(Actual rallying cry of the Chirac voters, or should I say, the anti-Le Pen voters who handed him that crushing victory. Also my personal policy in considering Democrat/Republican politics)
zadura
The check on American xenophobia is that the U.S. is stolen property. Our problems have more to do with not understanding the limits of the abundance of the next frontier.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Who’d have known that after a few centuries of mostly belligerence with France and alliances with Prussia that everything would flip a century later?
Omnes Omnibus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): If they had thought ahead, they could have built in the capacity to rotate the lion.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, we’re talking about the Dutch here, not the Swiss.
Elie
@MikeJ:
My hubby who is white, and I had a wonderful time in Paris. Fabulous. Parisians were helpful and we felt we fit right in. This was during the years that W was in the White House too. Loved it. Found the city of Paris to be quite diverse. Also.
JenJen
Not much to say except I’m worried, too.
And only because they were mentioned, “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex” is a really, really good film.
Chris
@JenJen:
Haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve been watching “Carlos,” which someone else recommended in the last Netflix thread. Really good miniseries so far (2 episodes in, 1 to go). Whenever they finally get around to Osama Bin Laden, I’d love to see the same people filming that.
Elie
My hubby and I loved Paris and found it diverse and the Parisians friendly. We felt like we fit right in and this was during the W years.
As for human nature, you need not look further than our cousins the Chimps. We are territorial, intelligent and therefore quite dangerous. We cleave to our various tribes/bands. As everyone knows by now, Chimps frequently launch assaults on each others’ bands and murder some or all of the individuals. Some chimps are outright murderers of babies and youngsters. We share 98% of their DNA and don’t seem to have improved our behavior with the 2% we don’t match.
Remember, we are still evolving but the nature of biological life is competitve and territorial.. at least on this planet. We have to work at being peaceful and getting along and its a pretty thin veneer laid upon the neural/cerebral/psychological wiring for centuries of the territorial ape swinging a stick.
Samara Morgan
@JGabriel: does Norway have a parlimentary government?
Anders Breivik is a white christian nativist. Just like the teabaggers.
AA+ Bonds
From what little I know from my friends in the national banks there (middle-rung as they are) I concur wholeheartedly with your friend’s assessment.
I always try to bring discussion of Europe here and I hope that you’ll have more posts about it. European national economies are extremely important for America’s well-being and austerity may absolutely tear apart the body politic in Western Europe.
Then again, I’m trusting the word of bureaucrats. Bureaucrats! People who actually work to help the state function!
AA+ Bonds
@Elie:
An oft-overlooked fact during Bush’s presidency is that according to 2005 polls, among the British who disapproved of America, a greater percentage indicated that what they didn’t like was America itself than among the French.
France’s America-disapproving population indicated instead that it was George W. Bush’s administration that pissed them off. Pretty interesting when you consider which European country went to war in Iraq. Many French apparently felt there was something extraordinary and negative about the Bush administration compared to their point of view on America.
The anti-American sentiment in France, especially liberal urban France, is pretty overblown.
AA+ Bonds
@Samara Morgan:
It’s pretty wild how a mass murderer offered up his manifesto, and it was a bunch of Mark Steyn columns and lifts from his book that melded seamlessly into Fjordman posts about white Teutonic knights, and not even American “liberals” tend to talk about the obvious threat of how we tolerate discourse like this in prim elderly publications like the Atlantic Monthly beyond the purely legal freedom of speech.
Mnemosyne
@fhtagn:
So France’s ridiculous anti-head scarf law doesn’t count because Switzerland, Germany and Italy didn’t follow suit?
I’m pretty sure that the various US states are more similar to one another culturally than the various members of the European Union are.
Omnes Omnibus
@AA+ Bonds: I have talked to a number of French people who see a bond between the two countries. In their view, their philosophy led to our revolution, our revolution led to theirs, etc…. I have not really found much true anti-American feeling there. Anecdata, of course.
JGabriel
Samara Morgan:
I’d have to look it up (which you could have done, you know), but I think Norway has a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary legislature.
Looking it up now … and Wikipedia tells me I’m right.
Samara Morgan:
Yes. Breivik was also a member of the fringe, right-wing, anti-immigrant Progress Party, which lines up with my analysis above:
That Breivik went beyond that doesn’t invalidate the assertion. He tried the fringe parties first, but they simply weren’t extreme enough for the virulence of his hatred.
In fact, it kind of affirms the idea that the Tea Party is analogous to Europe’s right-wing fringe parties, but, unlike them, working within the apparatus of a major, ostensibly mainstream, US political party — which is partly what I was arguing in that comment.
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Marginalized for stating documented facts
@celticragonchick:
You’re in a desert, walking along, when you look down and you see a tortoise, celticdragonchick. It’s crawling toward you. You know what a turtle is? Same thing. So you reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back, celticdragonchick. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.
AA+ Bonds
@JGabriel:
It means the Republicans are the same as Breivik’s former party: they’re breeding Breiviks. And I’m wondering if Democrats are going to wait around for their kids to get shot.
Barry
“Hence why Angela Merkel can make an oblivious, idiotic statement like “multiculturalism has failed in Europe,” never mind that Britain is four different countries tied together and Switzerland actually speaks four languages. Multiculturalism among white people is different.”
The more likely thing is that she’s a simple lying neo-liberal politician, the type who’ll declare liberal ideas dead, while keeping zombie right-wing ideals around.
Gretchen
I think our immigrant groups have tried to keep themselves “pure”, but the kids won’t cooperate. My Irish peasant grandparents looked down on one of the brothers who married “Achill Irish”, from an island even poorer than the mainland. My parents would have been ok with me marrying Achill, but were set on me marrying a “nice Irish boy” (albeit one who didn’t drink – good luck with that, Mom!). When I married a half-Italian, my dad pretended to be unable to pronounce his name until after we were married and I told him he sounded silly being unable to say his own daughter’s name. My mongrel kids have no idea or particular interest in the national origins of their friend’s familie.
And Indian woman was lamenting to me yesterday that her niece was marrying an Indian, but he’s not a Brahmin. Not our kind/caste, my dear. The Thai, Vietnamese and Phillipino immigrants I know all have tight communities of their own group, but their kids are all marrying out.
Silver
Keep in mind, in Germany, their idea of multiculturalism is, “We invite the filthy Turks to work here for 30 years, and then they all pack up and go home when the get old and we replace them with new filthy Turks.”
And yeah, Dutch people can be racist. How do you think a guy like Geert Wilders walks around without people spitting on him all day?
Lesley
Western capitalists thought they could outsource it all, deregulate it all and create a globalized third world of passive low-earning wage slaves. They didn’t count on so much resistance from their own citizens. I have never been this angry and militant in my life. Randian Corporations can suck it. I want them heavily taxed. I want them heavily regulated. I want the worst offenders put out of business.
Gretchen
But Lesley, they seem to be getting away with it. See all the Republican state legislatures that are making if far harder to vote for people who will likely oppose them, like minorities and young people. Is it already too late?
Chris
@Gretchen:
Paul Krugman mentioned somewhere in Conscience of a Liberal that as time went by and the liberal population grew, the risk of there being endemic, large-scale voter fraud to maintain Republican domination couldn’t be neglected.
He just didn’t picture them openly calling for the abolition of universal suffrage, with their entire base cheering along with it.
El Cid
Few people who mention anything about “Baader-Meinhof” and politics know much more than the name “Baader-Meinhof” and “Brigades”.
Kathleen
@Svensker: Ah, Svensker! You beat me to the punch. I was thinking about that song while reading the very intersting and enlightening comments today. Enjoyed the clip and the comments.
Original Lee
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Amen.