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.
Nationalistic Exceptionalism is a tool of the elites to manipulate the rest.
I’m from a country in Europe - Portugal - which had “colonies” in Africa and forced work camps for the locals there as little ago as the 60s - a form of Slavery - whilst the country was under a Fascist Dictatorship and most people in the “Fatherland” were themselves dirt poor to the point that the country actually got food help from other countries in Europe.
Most of the wealth from exploiting those other countries went to a handful of rich families (the so called “7 families”) tightly tied to the regime and their wilful minions, not the majority of the people in a country whose “way of life” was supposedly “propped on colonization”.
(I can’t quite see which part of the miserable life of my grandparents, on both sides poor countryside farmers with many often undernourish children who didn’t have shoes to walk to school even during Winter, was “propped on colonization”)
But, damn, the Fascist Dictator was really big on propaganda about the “Glory of Portugal” and the “Superiority of the Portuguese”.
Absolutelly, all this shit was whitewashed after the Revolution that overthrew the dictator, a few years after the revolutionaries confiscated, the wealth of those 7 Fascist families - which was indeed their loot from pillaging both the “colonies” and the “mainland” itself - was soon returned to them by the mainstream parties and a propagandistic slant on all that kept going on since (even more recently, when past pillaging is recognized, the claims from politicians of “national shame” are really all about difusing the blame of the choices of the elites onto the entire population of the nation and at times just meant to indirectly get money in the wallets of those very same politicians and their friends).
“Europe” (as in, its elites) did pillage all over the World the riches of others and still does if less so (nowadays mainly by helping foreign dictators stay in power, pillage the wealth of their countrymen and then share some of the loot with wealthy European interests) and all that shit has been whitewashed for the masses in various ways, but now just like in that shameful past there was and there is no meaningful trickle-down of the wealth the elites pillage.