Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and France’s Marine Le Pen headlined a rally in Madrid on Saturday by Europe’s biggest far-right bloc, buoyed by Donald Trump’s return to power and calling for “a 180-degree pivot”.
Patriots for Europe has realigned extreme-right forces in the European Union. It became the European Parliament’s third-largest force after Orban helped launch it last year to pull the bloc towards the far right.
“Yesterday we were the heretics. Today we are the mainstream… We are the future,” proclaimed Orban, sharing the stage with other leading extreme-right nationalists including Dutch anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and former Czech premier Andrej Babis.
I find it incredibly cringe anyway that all these parties just copy the same slogan. Some weird form of international nationalism, where they all just copy whatever the others are doing. It apparently works very well.
I guess in Western Europe it’s largely focused around anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiments, but with this movement being more and more international, I do notice an uptick in rhetoric concerning sexual minorities and women’s rights, with a lot of anti science and elitism/wokeism sprinkled in. It’s very scary. I’m happy that we don’t have a political system where the winner takes it all in my country, as it’s pretty bad already as it is right now.
That’s part of what’s so ridiculous though. Europe is basically a long history of wave after wave of immigration. So the “again” is when, the point when the Neanderthals colonized it?
So is the US, and it’s even more recent. Don’t seek logic in it.
I don’t know much about the history of anti-Semitism in Europe (so anyone feel free to correct me or add more info), but what I’ve been thinking is that the cause/origin of anti-Semitism is no different from the anti-immigrant panic from today. They both come down to people from a “foreign” or at least different culture coming into a society and getting jobs or opening business. It just so happens that now those foreign people are more diverse, whereas before (centuries ago in Europe) they were mostly Jewish.
This tells me we have learned nothing from our past except for the most surface level details. We learned that anti-Semitism is bad and beat people over the head with it, but we never properly addressed the roots of it, and so now the same thing is repeating but for different groups of people. It’s the same sort of thing as when it is said that “people nowadays are more open minded”, when the reality is simply that they were taught to be okay (or not) with certain things; but the bigoted though process has not really gone away.
Yeah, mixing with those filthy homo sapiens was a bad idea…