Orange Devil posted:

hjbo

Lawman 0 posted:

https://twitter.com/PopulismUpdates/status/1362135453902639104

Lawman 0 posted:

https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1362116353772187652
uhhhhhhhh

quote:

‘For the first time in centuries,’ he writes, ‘Europeans are living in a world they did not, for the most part, shape.’ More alarmingly, the responsibility for shaping the world is now passing from the US itself; and fear and anxiety (‘white man, what now?’), though never explicitly acknowledged, darken every page of Caldwell’s book as it tries, like other jeremiads about ‘America alone’, to boost morale by conjuring up worthy new racial and civilisational enemies.

A more thoughtful conservative than Caldwell could have examined valuably how neo-liberal capitalism, while enriching Europe’s transnational elites, has frayed the continent’s old cultures and solidarities. In Europe, as in India and China, globalisation has provoked great anxieties about inequality and unemployment, fuelling new xenophobic nationalisms and backlashes against ethnic and religious minorities. The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger that ‘minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties.’

This at least partly explains why a few hundred women in headscarves incited such fierce passions in a nation state whose geopolitical and cultural insignificance in recent years has only been partly obscured by its hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy. In The Politics of the Veil, the distinguished scholar of gender studies Joan Wallach Scott explains how the banning of a small piece of cloth that covers the head and neck affirmed an ‘imagined France’, one that was ‘secular, individualist and culturally homogeneous’ and ‘whose reality was secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation’. Scott demonstrates that French Muslim girls, who were directly affected by the law on the foulard, were ‘strikingly absent from the debates’ in France, which were dominated by intellectuals and politicians frantically defining the dangerous ‘other’ (typically by describing the veil as, in Jacques Attali’s words, a ‘successor to the Berlin wall’).

The veil has now been turned into, Scott writes, a highly charged ‘sign of the irreducible difference between Islam and France’. Elsewhere, too, politicians and journalists – self-proclaimed ‘liberals’ as well as unabashed rightwingers – rhetorically ask whether ‘Islam’, which allegedly enforces a harsh divine law on all Muslims, is compatible with ‘European’ values of reason and tolerance, which are supposedly derived from the Enlightenment (or Christianity, as Sarkozy blurted out in 2007, in a revealing breach of republican protocol).

In actuality, the everyday choices of most Muslims in Europe are dictated more by their experience of globalised economies and cultures than by their readings in the Qur’an or sharia. Along with their Hindu and Sikh peers, many Muslims in Europe suffer from the usual pathologies of traditional rural communities transitioning to urban secular cultures: the encounter with social and economic individualism inevitably provokes a crisis of control in nuclear families, as well as such ills as forced marriage, the poor treatment of women and militant sectarianism. However, in practice, millions of Muslims, many of them with bitter experiences of authoritarian states, coexist frictionlessly and gratefully with regimes committed to democracy, freedom of religion and equality before the law.

For many of these Muslim aspirants for full and equal citizenship, the urgent questions are whether the old-style liberalism of many European nation states, which has traditionally assumed cultural homogeneity, can accommodate minority identity, and whether majority communities in Europe can tolerate expressions of cultural and religious distinctiveness. A part of the secular intellectual priesthood, which cannot survive without its theological opposition between the Enlightenment and Islam, thinks not. In 2004, France’s ban on the wearing of headscarves in public schools bluntly clarified that Muslims will have to renounce all signs of their religion in order to become fully French.

This expectation of identity suicide has a rather grim history in enlightened Europe. Voltaire burnished his credentials as a defender of reason and civility with attacks on ‘ignorant’ and ‘barbarous’ Jews who, as slaves to their scripture, were, ‘all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts’. (The Nazis put together a sizeable anthology of Voltaire’s rants against Jews.) Accused of mistreating their women and proliferating with devious rapidity, and goaded to abandon their religious and cultural baggage, many Jews in the nineteenth century paid an even higher cost of ‘integration’ than that confronting Muslims today in France.

As it turned out, those Jews who suppressed the Torah and Talmud and underwent drastic embourgeoisement became even more vulnerable to malign prejudice in post-Enlightenment Europe’s secular nation states. The persecution of Alfred Dreyfus in France convinced Theodore Herzl, the creator of modern Zionism, that ‘the Jew who tries to adapt himself to his environment, to speak its languages, to think its thoughts’ would remain a potentially treacherous ‘alien’ in the secular West. Reporting in the 1920s on Jewish communities exposed to a particularly vicious recrudescence of anti-Semitism, the novelist Joseph Roth denounced assimilation as a dangerous illusion, blaming its failure on the ‘habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average western European’.

Roth, who trusted Europe’s old ‘fear of God’ more than its ‘so-called modern humanism’, bluntly questioned the ‘civilising missions’ of European empires in Asia and Africa in a preface he wrote to his book in 1937: ‘What is it’, he asked, ‘that allows European states to go spreading civilisation and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?’ Joan Wallach Scott’s account of France’s colonial history reveals that violent prejudice against religious and racial ‘others’ was also an intrinsic part of spreading European civilisation and ethics abroad. The veil, fixed in the nineteenth century by the French as a symbol of Islam’s primitive backwardness, was used to justify the brutal pacification of North African Muslims and to exclude them from full citizenship. Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood, the editors of Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, write: ‘How Muslims are perceived today is connected to how they have been perceived and treated by European empires and their racial hierarchies.’

Meanwhile, as colonialist stereotypes again proliferate, second- and third-generation Muslim women creatively use their head coverings in their own passage to modernity. In Another Cosmopolitanism, the political philosopher Seyla Benhabib describes the bold actions of three French girls who in 1989 consciously risked expulsion by wearing headscarves to school:

They used the symbol of the home to gain entry into the public sphere by retaining the modesty required of Islam in covering their heads; yet at the same time, they left the home to become public actors in a civil public space in which they defied the state.

Liberal spaces within Europe have brought many more Muslim women out of their old confinements. Benhabib asserts that these women, who ‘struggle at first to retain their traditional and given identities against the pressures of the state’, then go on to engage and contest their Islamic traditions. As Europe’s own passage from tradition showed, this necessary reconfiguration is not the work of a day. It requires the practices and institutions of European citizenship to grow more rather than less flexible.

In historic terms, Muslims are a recent presence in Europe, especially when compared to the minorities in different parts of the continent – Jewish, Italian, Portuguese and black – who were once feared to be unassimilable. Their initial position as barely tolerated ‘temporary workers’ was never likely to create the conditions for quick integration. Muslims from a young, globalised and highly political generation are now poised to enter the public spheres open to them, or to embrace extremism, or, like many of their parents, to retreat into passive resentment. But these choices in turn depend on how quickly and readily their ‘hosts’ – ordinary Europeans as well as their governments – will make them feel at home. Strident invocations of the Enlightenment or some other historically and eternally fixed essence of Europe seem increasingly symptoms of intellectual lag and cultural defensiveness. Multi-ethnic Europe is an immutable fact, and needs, appropriately, a more inclusive, open-ended identity, one derived more from its pluralistic and relatively peaceful present, and supranational future, than from its brutishly nationalist and imperialist past. Writing in 1937 about the minority then most despised in Europe, Joseph Roth predicted that ‘Jews will only attain complete equality, and the dignity of external freedom, once their “host nations” have attained their own inner freedom, as well as the dignity conferred by sympathy for the plight of others’. This proved to be too much to ask of Europe in 1937. But the moral challenge has not gone away – civilisation remains an ideal rather than an irreversible achievement – and the dangers of leaving it unmet are incalculable.

Office Pig posted:

god i hate europe

quote:

In historic terms, Muslims are a recent presence in Europe,

Grape posted:

Ummmmm

Electronico6 posted:

Thankfully some Europeans are very aware of the long historical presence of Muslims in Europe!

https://twitter.com/alexandreafonso/status/1361950213934616579?s=20

Grape posted:

The real truth is that as in most cases when the article says "Europe" it means "Western Europe". So we don't have to worry about Tatars of any kind, Bosnia, Albania, European Turks, Muslim Greeks etc.

double nine posted:

lmao. Free market innovation

https://twitter.com/fernandezamster/status/1364673332851965965

mrfart posted:

i say swears online posted:

qu'est-ce que c'est, une prison pour fourmis???

An insane mind posted:

Welp, voting in the Netherlands tomorrow and all polls are predicting a surge rightward and a shrinking of the left. I know, who trust polls in 2021 but I'm more then ready to believe in the shittiness of my countrymen.

We've had a rightwing Gov for 10 years, by all metrics they've done nothing but gently caress up and people are going to reward them with more power.

The Puppet Master posted:

it is pretty lol. rutte will win again all by promising that he will do more racism and the he has done such a good job with cv19 lol

it is cool that there is a new and explicitly anti capitalist party that might win 1 seat

An insane mind posted:

Oh you mean Bij1? If so yeah, I'm going to make drat sure they get their seat.

JordanKai posted:

The pragmatist in me wants to vote GroenLinks or SP simply in the hopes of slightly increasing the size of the largest left-ish parties in the second chamber. However, I've never been comfortable with GroenLinks' elitist air and I'm furious with SP for cutting ROOD loose and for clinging to the Marijnissen family.

I'm still not 100% sure, but I think I'll be voting for BIJ1 tomorrow. I think getting Sylvanna Simons into the second chamber and letting her go off for four years would do a lot of good for the national discourse. More so than one more GroenLinks or SP member, at least.

JordanKai posted:

The pragmatist in me wants to vote GroenLinks or SP simply in the hopes of slightly increasing the size of the largest left-ish parties in the second chamber. However, I've never been comfortable with GroenLinks' elitist air and I'm furious with SP for cutting ROOD loose and for clinging to the Marijnissen family.

I'm still not 100% sure, but I think I'll be voting for BIJ1 tomorrow. I think getting Sylvanna Simons into the second chamber and letting her go off for four years would do a lot of good for the national discourse. More so than one more GroenLinks or SP member, at least.

An insane mind posted:

I just hope we can have a leftist block stopping the most heinous things Rutte and his friends in the far right want to do...

spankmeister posted:

Both of you should just vote Bij1. The established left wing parties have demonstrated time and time again to be conservative (SP on immigration, EU, etc), or selling their soul in the name of "pragmatism" i.e supporting neolib bullshit (GL and PvdA both).

This country needs a real left wing voice and even if it's only one seat, being able to bring up votes and to steer the debates a little bit more to the left is absolutely crucial, imo.