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The EU is dead | 33 comments (33 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: The EU is dead (4.00 / 3)
The EU succumbed to neoliberal brain rot, gambled in the Wall St. casino and is now waiting for the banking crisis to reveal how greedy, compromised and stupid our leaders in the EU really are.
(As if the Greek treatment were not enough to reveal the dark agenda behind the mask of noble goals.)
Arms sales, following US orders to sanction Iran and Russia, (yes sir, how high?), and dirty dealing with car companies and emissions tests, kow towing to mammoth lobbies.
Then the immigration issue...
The hypocrisy and general sliminess of Macron in this regard is remarkable.
Sarkozy was bad enough, Barroso a low point for the time, but the reason for the far-right swing in Europe was the gross mismanagement of the immigration 'business' and the people-trafficking interests, the mob, and the anodyne, complicit centre-left parties who lost touch with their bases and ignored the growing resentment, not for the immigrants themselves so much as the shoddy job of integration.
The NGO's do right of course to rescue people, but are the people who financially back the ONG's willing to take responsibility for what happens to them after rescue?
We smashed Lybia, now we pay.
Our corporations have been making banks off the backs of Africans for centuries, now comes the blowback.
Throwing money at Africa to try and redeem the plunder with money partly from the plunder is trying to push toothpaste back in the tube.
Racism is thriving, how can we educate bigots who want to hate someone they think is to blame for their plight, but instead of hating those responsible for this mess, they blame the victims!
It's laziness, too easy to kick those who are already down.
Maybe, just maybe, Europe can use this crisis to re-invent itself in a form closer to its noble aims.
It's the only hope, and hope is the last to go.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Mon Jul 2nd, 2018 at 07:20:28 PM EST
Re: The EU is dead (4.00 / 4)


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
by Cat on Mon Jul 2nd, 2018 at 10:06:14 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: The EU is dead (4.00 / 5)
Sarkozy was bad enough, Barroso a low point for the time, but the reason for the far-right swing in Europe was the gross mismanagement of the immigration 'business' and the people-trafficking interests, the mob, and the anodyne, complicit centre-left parties who lost touch with their bases and ignored the growing resentment, not for the immigrants themselves so much as the shoddy job of integration.
The NGO's do right of course to rescue people, but are the people who financially back the ONG's willing to take responsibility for what happens to them after rescue?

What are you talking about here?

Also, I'd contend that Europe's rightward drift has very little to do with the handling of refugees. We had a Mayoral election in Vienna at the height of the migration crisis (from the local perspective. Arguably the crisis for the refugees is now quite a bit worse). And for all practical purposes the influence was nil, the non cringing socialist Mayor was reelected with broadly the same majority as last time. And at that time  the main train station was bursting at the seams. Certainly nothing that came after affected so many people negatively like the delays for commuters and overcrowded trains.

However, after Cologne the whole media establishment jumped on the "rapefugee" train as if their lives depended on it. In my more paranoid moments, this looks a lot like a bit of social engineering.

by generic on Fri Jul 6th, 2018 at 12:42:05 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: The EU is dead (4.00 / 6)
It's the perception of immigration that matters. It can be sold as a threat to personal prosperity, and a national pollutant - a convenient scapegoat for real political problems which are invariably home grown.

Some of the most xenophobic immigrant-hating areas in the UK have very few immigrants. The idea of sharing space with foreigners bothers xenophobes far more than the reality.

I'm firmly convinced that most racists are pre-rational authoritarians. They operate on an animal level of naive herd loyalty where displays of strength and independence matter more than future outcomes, not on a rational level where an understanding of cause and effect makes it possible to predict consequences.

Most professional racists - mostly on the right, but occasionally on the left - know how to take advantage of this for career gain.

Of course there's a sense in which anti-authoritarians are also in the wrong. By failing to understand that not everyone makes rational decisions, they tend to frame arguments in ways that fail to connect with the much cruder framing used by the professional racists.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Fri Jul 6th, 2018 at 03:07:57 PM EST
[ Parent ]

The EU is dead | 33 comments (33 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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