The thing that bugs me about all these "If Europe, Then USA" articles is that they assume as their gospel truth that the starting conditions in Europe are exactly the same as the starting conditions in the USA and that both the New World and the Old World are monolithic, unchanging happy democracies going back to when we were pilgrims and knights respectively which was at some point so distant in the past that it just doesn't matter.
Look. Poland wasn't even a country except from 1918-1939 and 1989-now. It's been a baltic enclave of sophisticated culture and thinking, sure, but it's also been an uneducated hinterland with nobody to look out for it. When Italians adopted Tuscan as their national language in 1861, only 2.5% of the populace could speak it. Germany ceased to be "large chunks of Prussia" ten years after the American Civil War. There are ethnic and religious conflicts pock-marking European history going back to before the Greeks and Armenians battled over turf in 300 BC.
By contrast, America is pretty much "white people vs. everyone else" and even the white people haven't been here that long. It is a nation of immigrants and those immigrants have come in waves (by choice or by force) from four different continents. You can want your eggs and your potatoes not to touch on your plate, but not if you're eating a scramble.
American "ethic cleansing" looks like Trayvon Martin and Kaepernick on a Nike campaign. European "ethnic cleansing" looks like mass graves. It's shit like this:
- Captain Alfred Dreyfus was an Alsatian, spoke with a German accent, and was a Jew—and therefore, in the eyes of some, not a real Frenchman. As it would turn out, he was also innocent. But French army investigators created fake evidence and gave false testimony; as a result, Dreyfus was court-martialed, found guilty, and sent into solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.
And the Dreyfus Affair was incredibly important to the history of the Israel and European ethnocentrism but the modern American parallel is Trump Vs. Curiel.
Look. Europeans are racists, too. The preponderance of evidence and examples illustrates that Europeans are hella more racist and reactionary than Americans. And I recognize what an unpopular opinion that is to hold, considering we're the ones shooting black people in their apartments and locking up brown babies in cages but the fundamental difference is the Americans saying "Yeah! More brown babies in cages!" are now, have been and shall continue to be the lunatic fringe.
I think we're doing a lot worse this year than we did a couple years ago. I agree with the alarmists as far as that goes - we've become more polarized, we've become more ready to fight, and the nazi scumbags are emboldened. But this whole zero-to-Hitler thing doesn't help anything. We need to focus on the problem we have rather than the problem we learned about in high school history class. If you're primed to look out for ICE smashing windows in the ghetto you ignore shit like passports being stripped off Latinos born along the border.
- We need to focus on the problem we have rather than the problem we learned about in high school history class.
This right here. So many racists today think racism is expressed the same way it was in the sixties. So if they aren't yelling racial epithets at people in protests they aren't racist. Yadda yadda yadda, Stormfront memes an orange shit gibbon into the White House in part by playing on racial tension
I'm frankly somewhat convinced we're going to see multiple authoritarian dictatorships in Europe in the coming decades. Poland and Hungary are already fairly far down that path, Germany has AfD gaining popularity, hard-right parties are gaining popularity in all the Nordics, and similar stuff's happening down South as well.
Here in Finland our nationalist right-wing party just had an internal schism due to the original leadership not being racist enough, we spawned the whole Soldiers of Odin shit, national socialist "resistance movements" are gaining popularity and so on.