@kevcvs57 said
No threat to Europe in general but if you live in the balkans they are ‘those’ neighbours you don’t want to mess with and pray they don’t mess with you.
I don’t know if it’s a Slavic thing but like the Russians they are born with a sense of entitlement / ownership regarding their neighbourhood.
It was a joke. They started the first world war (well, triggered it, to be honest).
However, back on topic: yes. There is a move to the right. And it is worrying.
Political parties and movements which were extremely fringe in the 1980’s have become far more popular in the last 2 decades.
And funnily enough, it’s the mainstream right-wing political parties who are to blame.
Let me attempt to explain (although I’m typing this on my phone, and it’s basically a tale which would take pages to do proper justice to).
Since the late 70’s there’s been a political drive to cut back on a lot of the checks and balances which smoothed out the hard edges of life. Think unions, workers rights, etc.
But also social things like community work, community centres, inter-cultural work, etc.
Mainstream capitalist parties were the driving force behind it: business above workers rights, community work programmes don’t make financiably measurable goals, etc.
So, from the capitalist perspective a lot of good things, which worked well on the ground level, were cut back or scrapped, because they either cost money (and the goals couldn’t be quantified) or cost business money.
What happened on the ground is that adults became less mingled (so withdrew more into their own groups) and children, besides withdrawing into their own groups, were given less oppertunities to expand themselves.
Think: less knitting classes for mums on an international basis, so the mums were connecting with eath other.
Think: poor white youths were no longer in music workshops with social workers bringing politics and poverty into perspective.
Think: young muslim men being urged to participate in funny art projects which broadened their view on society.
Etc.
With less worker’s rights, narrower experiences in life and no social workers helping to broaden view points and add perspective, the various groups get sucked into their own litte groups and group-think.
The world’s become smaller. A lot more people from a lot more places are living everywhere. The cost of living keeps rising, housing is expensive, etc. And a lot of peope have less perspective on a good future than a generation ago.
In muslim communities, the girls are getting ever better educated than the boys. This is creating friction there.
In poorer white communities, the groups revolve around football and the likes, with an always large fascist presence.
People generally don’t like poverty. Oh sure, they want to own a car, an own house, good clothes, etc. (all great promotional ideas from the capitalist political parties), but when reality becomes that the kids have to stay home until they’re 30, that care for the elderly has to be done at home and that there’s nowhere affordable for psychiatric relatives to go… that becomes problematic.
When you get to financial crisis’ and loads of people are losing their jobs (like around 2008 - 12) and there’s little well paid work to be found… people start voting more left-wing again.
So, the right-wing capitalist political parties, to remain in control, get into bed with the growing extreme right (morally right-wing) political parties. This keeps the right in power and justifies the existence of the far right.
The far right growing, because of the afore mentioned motion of poor white kids having little option of belonging anywhere except around football groups and the like.
So, because of capitalism’s ideals, you see the baseline of poverty moving lower and the glue (social and community work) which held inter-culturalism together being scrapped, leading to more poverty, far right movements (even within muslim communities… but there it’s called conservativism) and the right banding together in ever extremer variations.
And to make it all that more sharper: when I was at college in 1991, some of our teachers explained this all to us before it even happened. Because it all had happened before (different times, different groups) and there were reseach papers to back it all up.
The complete dynamics of what I’ve written above was known by the political parties, from the late 80’s onwards.
So they acted in full knowledge of what their decision’s would lead to.
Europe increasingly right wing
16 Sep '22 13:242 edits
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