I'd say the bulk of the anti foreigner sentiment has to do with islam not with melanin.
Religion poses an existential threat to life on earth. Islam is especially toxic, but we don’t even have to single it out to deploy simple tests for citizenship. Free speech? Check. Democracy? Check. Women’s rights? Etc. Prove that you’re in favor of these things or fuck right off.
I'd say it has more to do with mismanagement of economies and how that impacted fertility, the consequences of which the population is facing right now rather than islam or melanin, pressed further by climate change, the Ukrainian invasion and covid.
It's just easier to say it's the migrants, rather than the mismanagement of economies to privilege the old and wealthy, all the while migrants are being exploited to support an economic status quo that is unsustainable, since young people are difficult to exploit even further, what with the supporting of an aging population and all. We structured an economy that expected an unending baby boom and since that's impossible, now we have social instability.
Why not both?
Low birth rates —> neoliberals need workers so they increase immigration —> influx of religious zealotry fuels cultural friction.
Only that isn't what happens. Radicalized Muslims are not moving to Europe, it is they or usually their children who join radicalized groups as a response to European bigotry.
Yeah, and what could be less European than Islam? I'm going to go ask my Albanian friends and see what they think about this because I'm sure they'll agree.
Yeah people like to ignore Albanians, and also forget that Turks could be argued to be culturally closer to Greeks than they are to Arabs. Albanians are also not really religiously Muslim, but rather culturally. Not so much because of enforced atheism under communist rule but because the whole experience left people with a sour taste for taking religious ideologies (too) seriously. There's some fun polls for Muslim countries which I can't find right now asking things such as "is there a god", "does heaven exist" etc. and it figures that Albania, alongside with Iran of all places, is one of the countries where people who call themselves Muslim aren't doctrinally Muslim because they don't accept the full set of core tenets but some eclectic mish-mash. To have a comparison: That's like Christians who believe in reincarnation.
The main issue I think is that there's no established European Islam: Albanians aside, which generally aren't even noticeable among the immigrant population in other European nations, Islam in Europe is dominated by non-European interpretations. Other states are sending Imams here which often have no idea about life in the countries they're preaching in, and that's before we get to Salafis, Iranian operatives, and like ilk, who are causing havoc deliberately. Suppose you're Indonesian and live in Hamburg and want to go to the Mosque, where do you go? To Turks? Arabs? Persians? Neither speak your language, neither are culturally or theologically anywhere close to what you're used to. A German mosque? You might not be fluent in the language (yet), it might not be anywhere close to what you're used to, but you're learning the language anyway and trying to integrate so yeah that's an obvious choice. The community is headed by a learned Imam who definitely knows better Arabic than you so it can't be all heresy. The alternative is some Salafist noticing you being lost and trying to radicalise you.
Germany had quite a long discussion about the whole topic, more than a decade at least, and by now there's the first Imams educated in Germany. I kinda doubt such a thing is easy or even possible in, say, France, which is way too secular for politics to even touch religion with a ten-foot pole (the Muslim communities wanting to build that Imam training centre got state aid to establish it), or on the other end of the spectrum the Nordic countries, which have a single instead of a multitude of state churches.
Also the Serbs were good in committing genocide in Bosnia to wipe out the Muslims from Europe!!!!!! We should have kept supporting them!!!!, like some politicians back then, alleged and some people now try to revise the history of the genocide...
Islamophobia is genocidal like Antisemitism and other bigoted ideologies.
It is crazy how now a lot of the same sentiments are nurtured and normalized now against Muslims, that grew into the Holocaust against Jews 80 years ago.
A very naive or horribly dishonest take.
There's plenty of racism in Europe that has nothing to do with Islam or Muslims.
Secularism as a European value already excludes anything Islam-related from the picture. As it should be, fuck Islam.
How convenient after 25 years of hate propaganda and radicalizing people through constant racist exclusion. People whose great grandparents and grandparents moved to countries like Germany or France in the 50s-70s are still considered "the Turks", "the North Africans", etc. Now add to that increased racism and systematic discrimination and accusation of being criminals, radicals, terrorists...
Also it doesn't matter if you have Turkish, Pakistani, Indian, Arab, Persian, Viet, Thai, Chinese or any other ancestry with "melanin". People are facing racism both directly or there is the trope of thinking them to be Muslims, based on their "melanin".
At the core remains a white supremacist idea, that is just expressed differently but remains to target everyone outside of it.
If the situation is anything like on this side of the Atlantic, the distinction in popular imagination is ever-fluid.
Seems bad, however: europenus
No shit. I see and hear so much pathetic racist bullshit in Europe I want to vomit more than I could possibly eat. Pathetic little racist shitstains thinking they are somehow superior to "brown people". /a "white" person with common sense and no inferiority complexes
Really? Literally noone I've talked to believe themselves to be superior, they instead usually talk about migrant crime, low migrant employment and "we don't have enough for ourselves". The first two are based on official, government provided statistics, the latter is based on feelings derived from our stagnating economy. People don't see any benefit from the european migrant crisis, only downsides.
I personally don't see/experience any of that either, but ask some "native brown" (adopted/2nd,3th generation fully integrated/...) whether they have the same experience and you'll likely get a different answer.
they instead usually talk about migrant crime, low migrant employment and “we don’t have enough for ourselves”.
This is exactly the kind of racist bullshit I am talking about. As if any of these had anything to do with where people come from, and not everything to do with how they are taken care of (or rather not), and how corporations fuck you over.
No population in this world has more or less assholes because of their color of skin, country or origin or religion. Talking about "migrant crime" as a problem, instead of seeing it as a consequence of giving people no chance to live a decent life, and working on the actual fucking problem, that's a deeply racist talking point.
The whole point of racism is to direct anger of the masses away from those assholes actually responsible for their misery - the megacorps, banks, rich people and establishment politicians - at a convenient out-group, so that the masses do not get any ideas that would indeed change something for the better. And people who think migrants or migration are/is the problem are lacking the education to see through this bullshit and gobble up the lies and end up serving as useful idiots to the powerful.
People who believe this bullshit and regurgitate racist talking points are one of the most powerful tools of the wealthy to prevent the sensible people from driving politics that would actually change things for the better.
Fuck racists, and eat the rich!
I'm in Portugal were the single biggest immigrant group by far are Brasilians and the biggest discrimination is against Brasilians, even though they generally look like the Portuguese and speak the same language (though have a different accent) and there are also immigrants from Africa who are much less likely to be looked down on.
The whole thing is far from just plain Racism and is more broader.
Keep in mind that there are real problems associated with immigration, mainly that at least at first they put downwards pressure on salaries because of increasing the Supply of workers (it takes a while for the increase in consumption from immigrants to feed through into a higher Demand for workers), lower levels of formal education (some societal problems that the increase in formal education in Portugal since the end of Fascism in 74 had naturally corrected - such as religiosity, conservatism and illiberalism - are being imported again with immigrants) and due to different cultural expectations and behaviours so if they're a large enough number and come from a heavilly nationalist country, that can be a problem (for example, over 60% of Brasilians resident in Portugal voted Bolsonaro, whose politics are far more Fascist than even the most Far-Right party in Portugal).
I think we need to separate Immigrants from Immigration: it's absolutelly possible to be against "inviting more people over" (Immigration) and still think that we should to treat those who came at our invitation (Immigrants) with the respect that guests deserve - there really is no inherent right for people outside to be invited in (though I would say those who can do have a duty of within their possibilities help those in so bad conditions they qualify as Refugees, who are but a tiny minority of Immigration).
And yeah, I absolutelly agree with you that the anti-immigrant demagogy is a play from the rich to deviate the rightous anger of the locals who feel their lives are getting worse away from those who are trully to blame for it (the rich and their very much local wilful servants in the major political parties) and towards the people who have the least power over here of all people (immigrants can't even vote). In some countries (such as the UK and US) you see the very same kind of group demonisation and scapegoating deployed against Immigrants also deployed against the Poor (anybody who lived in the UK should be abundately familiar with the "Lazy Poor" rethoric) which IMHO reinforces the point that this kind of demonising of the weakest in society is a propaganda technique rather than a natural phenomenon.
I would even go further and say that the conflation or anti-immigration with anti-immigrant is purposeful and leverages the liberalist takes that the "modern" Leftwing in Europe has copied from the Anglo-Saxons world to get them to end up taking pro-immigration postures thinking they're defending an oppressed group (immigrants) and that puts them against an ever increasing fraction of the population who do have fair concerns (though they too have been swindled into being anti-immigrant when the source of their problems is high rate of increase in people competing for the jobs, with lower average education levels and different cultural norms and even political preferences - i.e. the immigration)
I think the "thinking" Left needs to separate immigration (inviting people over), from immigrants (people who came because we invited them over in the past, so our guests) and refugees (people who we are helping or should help due to their dire need and we being able to help them) and treat those things differently since there is really only a moral and ethical duty for the last 2, not for the first one.
While I support a differentiated perspective like you demonstrate, I believe that maybe it can be summarized a little briefer:
The typical racist thought process goes: Oh - an immigrant did crime X. How dare "they" while guests. Immigrants (from X / of ethnicity X) are more likely to be criminals. Let's get rid of them.
Addressing those issues requires targeted solutions for complex problems. And some of those are very similar to the solutions required for children from families with a low social status: Sometimes, we have to sadly accept that adults beyond a certain stage of brain development are "beyond help" (sadly, that also means most racists have crossed a line that they can mentally not recover from), and focus on the children being given all chances to learn normal and unprejudiced social interactions. This being: give even the worst parents an incentive (typically that means money) to send their kids to public kindergardens / daycare from an early age. And provide enough spots for children / enough caretakers, and pay those caretakers a decent salary and ensure that they have a very good education.
Yes, that's very much my point of view, only much more succinctly and well put than I managed :)
Immigration is a numbers problem: it's the interplay of rate of arrival, rate of integration, how fast do the locals get used to immigrants and how wide are the educational and cultural differences between those already in a place and those arriving.
Immigration is also a racism problem because racism lowers the rate of "locals getting used to immigrants" and makes cultural differences seem worse than they actually are: for a racist there are no "low enough cultural differences" to make the targets of their racism feel like "one of us", as can be seen in the US with racism against Afro-Americans who are fellow citizens with a shared culture.
All those things benefit from more Education, both adult education for the immigrants to help with flattening the educational differences (which is a good idea overall, not just for immigrants), education for their children to help integration and education for the children of the racists to stop the racism from crossing to the next generation.
This is, however a far more pragmatic take than the extremes of "we should help everybody that needs help in the World by inviting them to move over whenever they feel like" on the side of the Liberals and of "foreigners are bandits and eat other people's pets" on the side of the Far-Right.
Do you have anything to verify your claim that the biggest discrimination in Portugal is against Brazilians?
I already know that your claim about anti-African discrimination in Portugal is untrue....
There are definitely Europeans who think they and their culture are superior.
Eastern and Central Europe didn’t join the EU because they loved the western liberal ideals so much. It was a way for them to get out of poverty and to stop any aspirations of Russia to march into their countries. And now their economies have grown the basic needs of the people are met and now they have time to think about the other things the EU brings and turns out many don’t like many of those things.
Yeah, Europe is about pure European whiteness. Just ask half the population of Iberia. Or most of the population of Hungary. Or pretty much anywhere previously ruled by the Ottomans.
"White" has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who's ever missed an easy shot whether there's a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.
Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren't enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don't have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.
Ask any black soccer player
Not the best example if you want to argue that it's not about skin color, tbh.
“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin.
Replace "White" with "Racism" and you're on the money.
Whiteness has always been more important in the US that in Europe. People here have always been surrounded by other "white" nationalities and cultures that they could still be racist against.
Of all the things people say about Roma, them not being classified as white is one I have never heard.
Many Spanish people face racist attacks in more pale countries like Germany, where they are considered to be part of the brown people.
Fascists and Racists are not know for differentiation.
Hehe peanness
As a European, this article confuses me.
An institution like the EU is always going to be vulnerable to bigots and idiots in large numbers. The EU is also often viewed as an impediment to big business. Their values are not the same and I'm glad about that.
It's truly a world-news sub, cuz I was like "du-uh, where's the news?" until it hit me.
Tell me more about "sentiment". It's not sentiment, it's white/european supremacism being executed full force in plain daylight.
Yep, this is my best guess for the EU, sadly. It will keep being democratic and united, but adopt a more East Asian-style attitude to the rest of the world in the process. Oh well, hopefully we can pick up the internationalist slack in Canada.
Meanwhile, the US is probably going to explode one way or the other.
Nationalism sucks no matter who does it. Address immigration problems using data and pragmatic policy. Don't address it by allowing bigotry to fester in your population based on lies.
Seriously. Why does every single Center->Left of center government not understand the alt-right playbook at this point? Stop trying to fight fire with water (good guy things) and start taking a page out of the Dark Brandon playbook.
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