Tag: Far Right

The decline of liberalism, the West…

I quite liked this post by Rafael Behr. I quite strongly recommend reading it for the beauty of the words, even if you don’t agree with their intent.

On liberalism’s fighting power:

Fascism, its deadliest enemy, wasn’t debated into submission or outrun in an economic race: it was beaten by military force in a fight to the death, started by the fascists.

On winning the cold war:

Western intellectuals and eastern dissidents pleaded for democracy on principle for years before brute economics settled the matter.

On the state of the world today:

The Freedom party[^1] was then beyond the pale. The pale has moved.

And how quickly we got here:

It took a generation to get from the idealism of tearing down the wall to the backlash and pulling up the Brexit drawbridge.

Face facts. The west that won the cold war no longer exists | Rafael Behr

Anti-immigration <==> Don’t know many immigrants

The National Front has, in recent years, become more popular in many rural areas and small towns like Wizernes, places that are often relatively homogeneous and have few immigrants.

– Will France Sound the Death Knell for Social Democracy?, January 26, 2017 at 10:59AM

It’s the same here in the UK – many of the places that voted most heavily for Brexit, and are most anti-immigrant, are also the ones with very few immigrants.

I’m guessing it’s easier to whip up a fear of the unknown – immigrants people in, say villages of NE England, have never met – than of the known – immigrants people in London meet, work and play with every day.

Further down, in the same article… Lecoustre is anti-immigration, NF supporter, while Sailliot is anti-NF, leftist union leader.

I asked Lecoustre if immigration had changed his life in any direct way. He thought for a moment. “No,” he said.

Sailliot interjected. This was the absurdity of it all, he said. There were hardly any migrants in the area, and yet somehow, immigration was everybody’s biggest problem. How could that be?