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ara-la · 6 years

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A Specter is Haunting Europe

by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-LA/People Against Racist Terror

The spectre is unfortunately not communism but a resurgent, zombie neo-fascist racial nationalist populism. I visited Sweden, Poland and Germany this summer and became more aware of troubling developments in all three countries, indicative of the growth of far right forces, rooted in old fascist elements in northern and western as well as eastern Europe. You can come and learn more about anti-fascism in Europe from two German antifa visiting L.A. on September 27. Contact ARA-LA for details.

Anti-fascists in Stockholm told me that although their movement was still strong and there was substantial, broad opposition to open Nazis, the racist right had successfully moved away from demonstrative street actions and confrontations and into the electoral arena over several years. Shortly after my visit, the far right Sweden Democrats, with neo-Nazi roots, who have promised to freeze migration and want to take the nation out of the European Union, became the third largest party in the elections, with 17.6% of the vote (up about 5% but short of the 20% that had been predicted).

Although there was much greater diversity in Sweden, apparently comfortably, than I saw in a visit 8 years ago, the ruling center-left coalition, led by the Social Democrats, had paved the way for the election outcome through over a decade of neo-liberal privatization policies and recent efforts to embrace anti-immigrant sentiment. The Social Democrats came in first, but their coalition, including the Greens and the Left Party, barely led a mainstream center-right coalition, and the outcome of the deadlock is unclear. Jimmie Akesson, leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats (a misnomer) portrayed himself as a kingmaker. "We see that we are this election's winner, but now we enter a new mandate period and now we are going to get influence over Swedish politics for real." If the center-right is willing to accept their support to take over the government, Sweden will join the ranks of European countries where neo-nazi-based parties are now part of ruling coalitions.

In Austria (Hitler's birthplace, and once united with Nazi Germany in the Anschluss) the mainstream right's junior coalition partner, the Freedom Party once led by a former SS officer, now controls the defense, interior and foreign ministries. The Daily Beast reports that hackers discovered that the party’s chairman, Johann Gudenus, once had the Facebook password “heilheil”.

The neo-nazis have also taken aim at the intelligence services. A police unit headed by a Freedom Party member raided the homes of four staffers and an office of the domestic Austrian intelligence agency known as the BVT (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismus Bekämpfung, i.e., Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution and for Counterterrorism) in May of this year. The bureau had released, supposedly accidentally, an intelligence report on right-wing extremism.

Herbert Kickl, Austria's Minister of the Interior from the Freedom Party, claimed they were investigating "corruption" in the BVT based on documents that exposed sex parties among staffers. The material, attributed to a BVT employee, was noised around for a year until Kickl took over the interior ministry. Peter Gridling, head of the BVT for the last 10 years, was fired several days after the raids. According to the Daily Beast, he had been the object of a virulent campaign by the website unzensuriert.at (known as “the Austrian Breitbart”). The former editor in chief of unzensuriert.at is now Kickl’s communications director. Gridling has been reinstated, but Germany's intelligence agency has limited its sharing of information with the Austrians after it turned out that some of their material was seized in the raids.

Austria also hosts the largest regular gathering of neo-Nazis in Europe. On May 12, about 10,000 Croatians – including neo-Nazis and Catholic officials – gathered in a field in the southern Austrian town of Bleiburg to commemorate the defeat of the Ustaše army in May of 1945. The fascist movement which collaborated with the Nazi invasion, was responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma, Serbs and Muslims during World War II, many in the organization's Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia. It was the only concentration camp run without any German involvement. Thousands of Ustaše members were captured and killed by Allied forces in Bleiburg. According to VICE, the annual event mourning that fact is organized by the Croatian Catholic Church, which claims that the gathering is not political, but simply a Mass that aims to "remember the dead".

In Poland, where I visited with anti-fascists at a squat in Warsaw, I learned that the mainstreaming and embrace of open neo-Nazis has also taken place there. Whereas in earlier years, antifa had been able to forestall or disrupt neo-Nazi marches in the capital, beginning in 2015, the Nazi element had become part of a larger, nationalistic march on Nov. 11, Polish National Day (anniversary of the end of World War I when Poland again became independent). That year, several hundred neo-Nazis peeled off from the larger march and physically attacked one of the autonomous movement's squats in the city; although the squatters and supporters were able to fend off the attack, it was from a clearly defensive position.

In 2017, the 99th anniversary, 60,000 people including right-wingers from across Europe marched in Warsaw, in the "unofficial" celebration, many chanting "Sieg Heil" (Hail Victory, the chant of Hitler's Nazis) and carrying banners reading "Clean Blood" and "White Europe." Warsaw was by far the "whitest" and least diverse city I visited in Europe as compared to Gothenburg or Stockholm in Sweden, Frankfurt in Germany, or London. Vessel cancellations forced me to skip a visit to Bialystok, Poland, where my father grew up, but from what I was told, it is now a hot-bed of neo-Nazi activity, with swastika graffiti everywhere, and antifa forced to keep a low profile.

Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party [PiS] has taken a hard line against immigrants and refugees, and defended the racist and nationalistic Warsaw rally. Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the "power behind the throne" in Poland. With no official government or state position, he remains party leader and is considered the most powerful man in the country. The party has tightened its grip on the security services, the courts and the civil service, and the media, purging and replacing personnel at the public TV channel with party loyalists.

In Slovakia, the People's Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), led by Marian Kotleba, similarly moved from the fringes to winning seats in parliament. Kotleba used to wear a uniform modeled on the militia of Slovakia’s wartime Nazi puppet state. He rails against the Roma people (AKA "gypsies", also victims of genocide under Hitler) and is an admirer of Jozef Tiso, the Catholic priest and wartime leader who deported tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. In the post–World War II era, European politics have seen a long series of extremists, generally raging on the sidelines and creating a lot of noise while wielding limited power. His People’s Party-Our Slovakia got 23% of first-time voters in the last election, and took 14 seats in the 150-member parliament. Similar to Sweden, the left-wing populist Prime Minister Robert Fico had repeatedly vowed to protect Slovakia from an influx of Muslims, saying Slovakia would take in 200 Syrian refugees, but only if they were Christians. By legitimizing such anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim politics, he paved the way for the acceptability and electoral success of the openly racist far right.

But as Sweden shows, electoral success for the Nazi-rooted far right is not limited to former Warsaw Pact countries or former soviet republics like the Ukraine, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The Dutch PVV and Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France are now partnered with the neo-Nazi Austrian FPO in the European Parliament. Other allies include the Danish People’s Party (DPP) and Vlaams Belang (VB) in Belgium. Filip Dewinter, who is now the leader of Vlaams Belang, published a 70-point program in 1992 calling for the forcible deportation of all ‘immigrants’ -- up to the third generation born in Belgium -- back to their countries of "ethnic origin" — in practice, this would imply the repatriation of the majority of ethnic Belgians, whether or not they were Belgian citizens. Dewinter opposed efforts to integrate “non-European foreigners” into “Flanders and eventually all of Western Europe” as a dangerous plot to create “multi-racial utopias.”

According to an article on Medium, Belgian philosopher Etienne Vermeersch, professor emeritus at the University of Ghent, points out that Dewinter founded the NJSV (Nationalist Young Student Association) in 1980, with a flag bearing the traditional Nazi colors — black, white and red. Dewinter’s NJSV published Signal, a magazine which in several issues featured a sword with a ribbon, stating, “My honor is loyalty”, the original slogan of the Nazi SS.

Meanwhile, in Italy, two far-right parties formed the core of a new government earlier this year. The right-populist, anti-establishment Five Star Movement agreed to form a government with the Liga Nord (Northern League) after Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, which had been part of an electoral coalition led by the League, agreed to support the government in Parliament "from the outside" (without entering into the government itself or getting any cabinet posts). League leader Matteo Salvini took the post of Interior Minister, and in addition to blocking entry to refugees (he refused to let a vessel carrying several hundred migrants rescued at sea to dock in Italy), he has ordered a census of Roma, with the aim of deporting those who are not Italian citizens.

The other noteworthy lesson I learned while in Europe is the similarity of other struggles going on over housing and gentrification/displacement, in Stockholm and Frankfurt, although with less police violence than is the case in Los Angeles. But those cities, and according to reports from British antifa, London among others are seeing poor people and migrants driven out of areas by rising housing costs or new upscale and corporate construction projects. Comrades in Frankfurt were involved in a rent strike and in efforts to build a tenants' union; they were very interested in developments in Los Angeles along those lines.

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sanityinthesouth · 3 years

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Time to Eradicate the GOP for Good

What are we doing? We’re America. The strongest nation on the planet according to us.

Frankly, I used to believe it.

We’ve overcome some pretty tough challenges in our history. I know we’ve had our issues, I’m not here to debate those right now. I’m reflecting on our best moments when I was proud to be a citizen of this country. The 9-11 terrorist attacks come to mind instantly. This was my generations Pearl Harbor and as I watched the towers fall and the crashed flight in PA and our nations military and intelligence people flee the Pentagon my heart wept. But then I saw thousands of Americans rush to the scenes from around the country and my eyes filled with tears and my heart filled with pride. This was the best of America and it didn’t matter what political party anyone belonged to. We set that aside and we came together and we did what had to be done. Many of us did not vote for George Bush, but on that day, we all stood behind him as he spoke through the bullhorn to those First Responders standing on top of what was left of the World Trade Centers. We didn’t all agree with his politics, but we sure as hell agreed with his statement that day.

Whever we were, in the grocery store, at the gas station, or at work, we stopped and comforted each other because an attack on one of us was an attack on ALL of us. I believe that was the last time America would come together as a whole to lift each other and our country up.

Twenty years later and that America is unrecognizable. It no longer exists and I am mourning the loss. This time our enemy isn’t flying planes into our buildings, they are sitting in offices in our nations Capital. They are the very lawmakers elected to to protect and defend us from all enemies. Who knew that they would be the enemy we’d need protecting from?

There is no longer any question or any doubts that the party that calls itself Republican has become a lethal danger to our democracy and literally to the lives of our citizens. Even the ones who wholeheartedly support them. The party is infested with dishonesty, greed, lack of honor and dare I say it? Evil.

From local levels all the way up to the US Senate, we have Republican law makers who participated, enabled and most likely helped plan the January 6th insurrection. We have state representatives that are in office only to spread conspiracy theories harvested from the depths of the Internet sewers and pass the information onto gullible constituents as fact. These lawmakers KNOW what they’re doing and they know the people following and supporting them are easily exploitable. These lawmakers and their mouthpieces on Fox News and alt-right information websites are the enemy of America with the sole purposes of driving a wedge between us. They’ve succeeded and our country is more divided now than ever.

The sad part about this is, it isn’t a foreign enemy doing it to us, it’s our own people. People WE pay to serve the public interest. They’ve infiltrated the highest levels of government, our military ranks, our police force and our families. Especially our families. They’ve turned us against one another to the point of no return.

They’ve exploited and twisted our precious Constitution to serve their purpose with no resistance. They’ve stacked our courts full of extremists that in no way reflect the views or values of the majority of Americans. They’re attempting to force their extreme ideology on us while pretending to be putting “America First”. There is nothing American about what they’re doing. Not a thing. Republicans do not want to govern they want to rule!

WHY are we allowing a fringe, minority group of mentally ill people and seditious lawmakers destroy us from within? We’re living our lives in fear of people who are no longer in touch with reality. We’re giving safe quarter to people who have been brainwashed to believe a deadly pandemic is a hoax even after it’s claimed the lives of 600,000 (and counting) of our fellow countrymen. We’re doing nothing while they rip the masks off our faces, refuse to abide by simple safety procedures and are killing us and now our kids.

We’re allowing seditious politicians who have been proven cheaters and liars stay in the highest offices of power. People who are literally trying to overthrow the government and our Constitution of which they took an oath to uphold.

I’m realizing that all the talk about how tough we are as a country might just be bullshit becuase if a grifting, child raping, conman can get away with duping almost one-third of the American people by convincing them an insurrection to hang on to power is patriotic, we might not be as badass as we think we are.

We’re attempting to play fair and reason with these same people who will, in the blink of an eye, seize power and send us all back to Nazi Germany.

This is INSANITY. WHAT. THE. FUCK. ARE. WE. DOING?

Is anyone in charge? FBI? CIA? Justice Department? Anyone?

We’ve got MAGA, QANON, White Nationalist militias, white supremacist freaks attacking our Capital based on complete bullshit. They KNOW it’s bullshit. We’ve got fringe members of said groups making their own attempts or threatening to on a daily basis. We’ve got literally MILLIONS of families torn apart by goddamned QAnon conspiracy theories. We’ve got anti-vax, anti-mask wackos showing up at school board meetings acting like animals attacking our officials based on LIES and worst of all, we’ve got Unites States Republican governors perpetuating the lies driving these mentally ill people while their states run out of ICU beds and medical staff are at a breaking point.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING? WHO IS IN CHARGE HERE?

Fox “News” Channel is now responsible for an untold number of deaths. Nothing being done about it.

Republican QAnon representatives spewing outright lies about the virus, vaccinations, mask and their fake stolen election. Nothing being done about it.

Former president incites a literal insurrection to overthrow the US Government with the aide of US lawmakers because he lost a free and fair election. Nothing being done about it.

Groups of mentally ill people are infiltrating our every day lives and putting us in danger. We can’t even go into a grocery store or get on an airplane without violent confrontation by people operating on nothing but lies and misinformation. Nothing being done about it.

This isn’t freedom. This is fucking insanity.

As the nation spirals out of control, it seems like nothing is being done about it.

In an effort to show bi-partisanship the Democrats continue to try to work with a party they KNOW is no longer operating in the best interest of ANY American citizen. It’s time to stop. It’s time to throw off the gloves and fight this fight on the same level. Desperate times call for drastic actions.

The MAJORITY of Americans DEMAND action. We DEMAND accountability. If the current Democrats in office are incapable of finding a way to do that, then they need to be replaced with people who realize what’s at stake and realize that they are no longer working with an equal party. They are fighting an enemy of the state and politics be damned. TREAT them as such! Start putting these people in jail and holding them accountable.

We’re hearing the death rattle of American democracy, Democrats only have one shot at righting these wrongs. ONE SHOT. We the people need to force them to take it.

It’s time to raise OUR voices to drown out the insanity from the right wing crazies threatening to implode us from within. There are more of us than them. What are we waiting for?

It's time to eradicate the GOP for good. They are the enemy of America.

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evilelitest2 · 7 years

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100 Days of Trump, Day 38: Why Are You So Angry?

Welcome back to 100 Days of Trump, where I try to recommend 100 works to help us understand WTF happened in 2016, and it should be increasingly obvious that I don’t actually plan these things out in advance because today’s recommendation is actually a little bit behind all things considered. I was hoping to move past the psychological state and into the “The system itself which makes all of this possible” state, but I remembered this video series and I want to talk about it, so Innuendo Studios. Its a video game channel that mostly talks about Indie Games and while all of that stuff is very cool and I recommend you check it out, I want to focus on his six part series on Gamergate called “Why are you so angry?”

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Now I’ve said it before and I will say it again, to understand Trump you need to understand Gamergate and if it wasn’t for Gamergate, I honestly don’t think Trump would have gotten elected, within this bubble of internet gaming insanity we see the core of both Trump’s popularity, and the way he was able to win. And there is a lot to say about Gamergate, and a lot of it was covered in my earlier series talking about Assassins, or Taxi Driver, or The Wall, or Breaking Bad, or Pan’s Labyrinth, or, Protagonist, or Rope, and above all the Social Network, all talking about the misdirected rage and optimistic nihilism that characterizes the Gamergate and by extension Trumpkin crowd (and really they are the same people). So what does Innuendo Studios have to say which the earlier works don’t already say? Well, in his Why Are You So Angry series focuses on a specific sub set of the reactionary hate mob, not the guys who lead it, but the guys who serve as support for those who do, which he coins “Angry Jack”

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Now I think it is important to understand that this video series isn’t actually summing up the whole movement, and the Angry Jack is just one small part of a larger WTF puzzle, so don’t take this video series as rite and go “OH well, I understands Gamergate/Trump Perfectly” not all of his supporters are Angry Jacks and Angry Jack are just one part of a larger system. But when it comes to this particular subject, he is unto something. The Ian Danskin posits that a core point of these movements is less malice than a form of ethical laziness, that sloth is the core sin of a lot of these reactionaries. People like things to be simple and things to be self serving, its human, and when outside information challenges stuff, it is easier to double down than think critically. To use a non political example, people who don’t drink at parties, I don’t drink by choice and a friend of mine doesn’t drink because it makes her head hurt, and a third friend doesn’t drink hard Liquor. When ever we are at a party, despite having very different reasons for not drinking (and one of us actually liking alcohol) a lot of strangers will react really hostilely to any of use refusing a drink equally, and the ones who drink the most react the strongest. Because they are assuming judgement to what is actually just personal preference. I don’t drink because I dislike drinking, I don’t subscribe a moral value to it, but people who meet me seem to preemptively make me into some sort of prohibition era strawman, and it is doubly absurd for my friends whose choice comes from a place of ‘I don’t want head aches” and “I like this alcohol but not that alcohol”. Because the people who get so pissy are terrified of judging themselves, so they try to create environments where nobody might do so.

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Now this video series isn’t perfect, I do think his understanding of Christianity is ironically quite muddled and his belief of where this all stems from is frankly....dumb and juvenile, but look past that stuff and focus on his larger point, and you see why this is useful, a lot of this reactionary stuff is coming out of a sort of defense of one’s internal state of ignorance, that these people think they have found the loophole to living a morally good life without doing any work for it. Just don’t notice whenever bad things happens, look away and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. And the progressive movement is challenging that, it is effectively acknowledging problems that everybody knows exist. And in order to make everybody more comfortable with the situation, they lash out to create an environment where people don’t have to think about these complicated issues. Again, most people are lazy, cowardly, and stupid, and prefer it that way, anything that would make them not want to behave like that is legitimately scary if your goal in life is to be selfish and never have to be judged for it. Even for the less debased, there is the question of difficulty, and people want simple solutions to problems even if those don’t exist. I wish I lived in a world where parents didn’t sexually assault children, or if it happened it was done by creepy immediately evil people who I could call the police to instantly handle without any difficulties. But I don’t live in that world, I live in a world where it is extremely common and there aren’t obvious solutions. A lot of people prefer a fantasy of the first than the reality of the second. And this is why so many (but not all) reactionaries are weirdly positive towards the Civil Rights movements and the early feminist movements, because in their mind that was “When the bad thing ended”.

Small note, I don’t like how Ian uses the term sociopath, and I think it is very silly, but move on, focus on the larger point.

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And this is why we need to understand the relationship between Angry Jack and the more open and direct reactionaries, because if you have encountered these people online, you notice that unlike the most dire hard Alt Rightists, they don’t openly say the white nationalist/MRA/homophobic rhetoric, they insist it isn’t there. They tune Trump out when he says some things, and tune in for others, and when they interact with Neo Nazis, they pretend they can’t see the obvious racist elements because they don’t want to confront the reality that they are allied with them. A lot of these vocal harassers online are internally terrified of confronting who they are or what they have become, and if they were ever in a circumstance where they could calm the fuck down, would be horrified by the people they call their allies. But they don’t want to face that, so they ignore it. This is what Fox News and other groups like that do for these people, they give them an out. Remember after that refugee child drowned and everybody briefly pretended they gave a shit about refugees and the Right’s hypocrisy on the subject of human rights was coming to the forefront? And then Fox turned it into a Refugee vs. Vet, when both groups are fucked over by their very policies? It isn’t suppose to make any sense, its suppose to be a life raft for the people who don’t want to think hard about the fact they are abandoning children to die. Or how about when Milo got caught advocating for the sexual abuse of children, and the Right’s response was to bring up Roman Polanski as a “left wing child rapist”, nvm the fact that the left has been attacking Polanski for decades now particularly feminist circles. Its a way to not think about the type of people they are allied with, for the average supporter think about this as an “US vs. THEM” argument rather than “Holy fuck, the guy I listened to thinks children should be raped...maybe all of the other things people said of him might be equally true....maybe this whole being cruel for the sake of humor thing is bullshit maybe the other side has a legitimate....oh wait, if I condemn Milo then THEY WIN and fuck THOSE PEOPLE (jews)” So they march behind actual nazis, and as Hannah Arendt noted, once this all blows over, they will be out there saying they had nothing to do with it and that the Nazis tricked/forced them into participating in these crimes.

For the record, I would divide Gamergate into more than two groups, rather Nine see here for my thoughts.

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What separates the Angry Jack from the Nihilist MRA people we see in Assassins and Breaking Bad is that Angry Jack really needs to see itself as morally correct and most importantly, normal. They might use rebel rhetoric but they don’t see themselves that way, they identify themselves as just a dude, and really want to believe that feminism is nothing more than a few thousand rich college students or that the only white people who think racism is a problem are a couple dozen people who have been white guilt-ed into being puppets for the Black Panthers, they want to be the default, and are upset by the notion of having to accept a larger world. This is why the fact Clinton won the popular vote is so upsetting to these people, because they really want to believe that they are most of the country, that they are normal and are driving abnormal out of their larger political community, the alternative scares the shit out of them. And so much of this comes from my old enemy, simplistic easy morality, something which the left sadly has trouble with as well. Because the way we depict morality in so much of our fiction makes this mindset more powerful, it encourages the thought process that is so useful to the right. Because if our villains in works are nothing more than evil for its own sake, then we don’t have to think complexly about them, we don’t have to assume that their evil comes from a place and there are simple solutions to complicated problems. And the left should avoid this mentality as well.

Also how much of this battle is a fight for vindication, that these reactionaries are furious that society at large doesn’t respect them and doesn’t take their opinions seriously, and so they are screaming loud and more intensely out of the hope they will finally be recognized and respected for who they are...except that they aren’t because they are crazy. This is why Trump supporters are so angry at the media, because they won, they managed to get the most powerful job in the world, and yet people are still calling Trump and by extension them horrible people....because they are. And that is why they want to get ride of the Media, because they hope that they can create a reality where nobody criticizes their ideals, which ironically always makes it worse.

Finally since Tumblr only allows 5 videos per post, here is part 6, where Ian talks about how to deal with these problems This comes off as a tad naive today but it still applies, and this is why it is so important to try to keep people around you from buying into simplistic narrative, particularly because seemingly innocuous nonsense always gets co-opted by bigots and turn into a recruiting tool for the Alt Right. That is why these guys are so horrified by the notion of progressive politics making people happy, they find the notion that bioware games have gay relationships terrifying because the moment they acknowledge that is good, they start to validate the progressive arguments and they don’t want to go down that road. Hey, has anybody had something they need to do but they keep putting it off, and you can kinda live with that until a friend says “Hey weren’t you suppose to turn into those papers?” and you find yourself getting suddenly mad at them? Its that, because they don’t want to face the shitty part of the world, and if left alone, they will concoct a little alternate reality where they don’t have too, but they can’t do it if people keep poking the bubble. Remember, so much of this reactionary bullshit is coming from an emotional place of insecurity and is kinda pitiable if it wasn't for how many people they are hurting, and even as the left condemns and opposes them, we need to understand them, because otherwise we won’t be able to defeat them. And for all of their talk of how tough they are, they are remarkably thin skinned. But this is the most important thing, keep up the fight and keep attacking their arguments and proving them wrong, because while it doesn’t seem like you get any results, every time you do that, particularly when you conduct yourself in a more civil, mature, and above all intellectually honest way than your opponent, you keep a pupil form of an Angry Jack from joining up. They don’t say anything, they don’t comment and say “Thanks dude, your take down of that MRA made me reconsider my life choices’ instead they take that comment and it sticks with them later in life, and it makes it that much harder for them to make a pact with Neo-Nazis. And this is important, Gamergate and Trump seem inevitable now, but this is what matters,it took a lot of work for these movements to get started, /POL/ had been trying to get a Gamergate Going for at least three years before this one took off, and the Alt Right have been trying to get a trump going since the 1930s, it takes tremendous amount of effort to craft the sort of narrative to make this double think possible, and it took decades of work for them to make it this far. And if the left hadn’t gone with Hillary Clinton, it wouldn’t have worked, by choosing somebody as bad as Clinton, it provided them with the psychological tools they needed to rationalize supporting Trump, which wont’ be true if we go with somebody with less of a dark past. “They go high, we go low” actually does work, its just that Clinton didn’t go high, she stayed in the middle. And the more pressure we keep up on them, the more their movement frays. They seem powerful now, but this current state of affairs is on a very weak wedge, and it can come crashing down on them in an instant. The only way they can keep this up is if we either give up, or support morally debased responses to them.

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idadayalla-blog · 5 years

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Brazil’s emotional election period got me emotional ...

So it has already been two weeks since the elections and the news about Bolsonaro have spread globally meanwhile. On the night of that election Sunday, I had actually been very calm. I picked up the result at the counter of a bakery as a cashier quietly updated another cashier and it was just my turn to pay my bill. I was on my way home by bike from a little hike with friends. Some cars honking had been passing me and I heard noises of firecrackers justifying me that Bolsonaro had won. This behavior of victory celebration, like after soccer games, personally matched my notion of Bolsonaro voters.

The week before the second ballot I had become very emotionally touched because of all the news considering street violence linked to the elections, conversations with friends about politics and experiencing the effort at my university to demonstrate resistance against an anticipated far right shift for the country. I became extremely worried about what is actually going on in the world right now. Right-wing populism isn’t just a phenomenon in Brazil; it is gaining more and more popularity in many countries of the world right now and has already settled within positions of power. If I am thinking of going back to Germany, I would certainly not return to a soil not being infected by that cancer yet having the AfD as the third strongest party right now within the Bundestag (German parliament).

Well, I literally felt that major bricks regarding democracy are breaking right now. Usually I used to not take myself and the world I am living in too serious, however these days something just felt so profoundly serious about this planet leaving me literally unable to focus on stuff I wanted to do during the day like writing this text.

The internet totally consumed my mind shortly after the election Sunday.

- The Pittsburgh shooting (to me: a brutal evidence of anti-Semitism and basically hate)

- Angela Merkel’s (Germany’s chancellor) speech to announce her retirement after the current election period (although I am not an elector of her party, her speech left me impressed on her rhetoric capability and honest attitude regarding the current government’s work. But the intention of her speech also left me sad.)

- chatting with my mom and my former host dad from the states regarding politics, as my host dad writes that they would “joke (for now, at least) about civil war between far right and the left, problem is, the far right has all the guns!” (right after that message, I saw and read a then recently posted vice article with the headline “A new American Civil War feels closer than ever after Pittsburgh”)

- youtube documentaries on Brazilian politics

- the usual random madness within the facebook feed: Seeing the latest news on post elections violence in Brazil: A kid being killed by a gun during Bolsonaro victory celebrations, vandalism in indigenous communities, people wearing T-Shirts with the number “64” which dates the initial year of the past military dictatorship in Brazil (comparable to Neonazis wearing shirts with the number “88”.). But then also videos plopping up about positive thinking vibes, a kitten drinking milk “to brighten your day”, some holiday pics from long forgotten classmates, a video about an American motel trying to give shelter for people which are basically totally lost in their life, a video collecting all homophobe statements of Bolsonaro and so on… within the mess theres had also been a call to sign a petition to attack the plan of a pro Bolsonaro student deputy (as far as I understood the news) who wants to led professors be videotaped while holding lessons. The student deputy says: ‘what do they say which society is not allowed to hear as well?’

By the time I saw news that the “Nigerian army is using Trump’s words to defend gunning down dozens of protesters” (vice), I’ve luckily already made my way out of this depression trap called internet. However, when I was walking along my street for instance and passing neighbors I just felt so little trust in the faces I saw. Like I was thinking meanwhile: “Oh she/he probably voted for Bolsonaro as well”. And many of them did so for fact, as there is apparently a lot of arguing going on in my street’s groupchat on WhatsApp, which is what my hairdresser neighbor told me the other day while giving me a new look. Gosh, am I glad that I am not in that group. I am hating group chats in general. But anyway she voted for him as well, as she didn’t really answer to my concerns and criticism on Bolsonaro except “He might had been kidding a lot” and “Well let’s see”, in Portuguese ‘vamos ver’, also belonging to one of the most outspoken sentences over here and expressing the uncertainty within the Brazilian mentality pretty much on point. Well, she might had voted for a radical candidate but during my appointment she had been a bit afraid and hesitating in giving me, as she said, a ‘radical haircut’. I was asking her to do me a very straight-lined hair. “Do many people have that haircut in Europe?” Me: 🙄. Well, back to the group chat misery:

A guy I met at a friend’s birthday said that the group chat of his apartment complex is full with pro Bolsonaro content and he wouldn’t dare to text something contra. Most of the people he is sharing the building with are apparently evangelic. “I’d be probably screwed leaving a red scarf or so on my door handle”, he was joking. Because the Pro Bolsonaro side argues/d that the left-wing would want to turn the country communist.

So now, post elections, many people are very afraid, especially the ones belonging to minorities or being activist. Uruguay is a considered country among those and professors and artists and maybe other people as well to emigrate to. Some of them have already left the country prior to the elections because the victory of Bolsonaro had been a pretty save prediction. A friend of mine told me that he basically doesn’t see a future for him. On election day he held a specific meditation, to mentally prepare himself for a new era. Within the WhatsApp group of my university, ‘UDESC against fascism’, a five screen long guide with security advise in fascist times had been dropped immediately after the result was final. And last week in my ceramics class I could definitely feel a despondent mood capturing the studio.

But how am I feeling eventually? First of all, the major voting motivations seemed very ridiculous. At the second ballot, the majority of people would vote for one of the two candidates to not let the other win. I mean, voting for a party based on being supportive on their political plan is totally left out in this sort of voting scheme. In general, many people voted for Bolsonaro as a matter of protest against the past year’s corruptive politics by the PT. On the other hand, had many Haddad voters (in the second ballot) not been convinced by him or his party, but basically voted for him to save democratic values in their country. A fact that made me very angry is that many people of my social environment haven’t gone vote because they didn’t transfer their voting region in advance. They moved to Florianópolis within the past years, e.g. to go to university here, but they didn’t officially change their location of residency to then be able to vote at the polls here. They are all against Bolsonaro and saying that his voters are ignorant but to me this way of letting the election just happen is ignorant as well and letting shine through a pretty lazy attitude on top. Some people drove back home over the weekend to go vote but many whose parental residency are farer away, like outside of Santa Catarina or its bordered states, didn’t due to the travelling effort and expenses.

Postal vote isn’t possible in Brazil which is what I am usually doing in Germany. Thus I suppose all the Brazilians living in the exterior, which certainly aren’t just a few, didn’t influence this election at all. So, I guess there could have been a chance on flipping the result if left orientated people would have made use of their right to vote having been more urgent than ever to make use of, and if the voting conditions for people living outside the country would be sorted out in some way. I mean, ultimately the voting difference had only been 10% and something between the two candidates.

Above all it is kind of crazy to already feel that this election will very likely divide the country’s society in two sides, as already happening in the United States. Over here, the two mindsets clash with each other even within inner family circles. In many families the older generations, parents and grandparents, are pro Bolsonaro and the children contra. And so it is in the family of my former flat mate, thus he decided to not travel back home for Christmas this year.

In general, it is very disillusioning to see another success of an election campaigning targeting to create fear and anger within the people and doing this mainly via social media platforms. It feels nasty that there is a specific agency supporting Trump, AfD, Bolsonaro and surely many more right-winged politicians and parties in other countries besides USA, Germany and Brazil, and thus supporting that antidemocratic and inhuman behavior becomes accepted again. It is kind of ridiculous to see that people turn very nationalist again while everybody is making use of a globalized world on a daily basis. And yes, here you can receive a “Go back to your country” as well, as this sentence became very common to hear in public in Germany after its refugee wave in 2015.

Well, but Ida come to a point: I realized that living in a democracy had been something very unquestionable for me. I guess people of my generation take it very much for granted. And so far, my political interest had been very low or not there at all. But I can feel that the circumstances over here and the emotions I am absorbing are making me aware to become more involved. We, the generation Y and close by generations, are spending so much time by dealing with ourselves. We are so busy in discovering ourselves, finding the sense and fulfillment for our lives. But meanwhile, the shelter to do so, to develop our personalities freely, is losing its power. And that is frightening me. I surely do not want to live in an environment where repression is ruling, where being oneself, being authentic in public, is in danger.

#elenao #brazil politics

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