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Counter rallies in Kaufbeuren show split between supporters of AfD and locals who acknowledge the Bavarian town’s Nazi past
Soaring church spires, the 1,000-year-old town centre unblemished by second world war bombing or graffiti, snow-capped Alps in the middle distance – Kaufbeuren, in Bavaria, can count many blessings.
Unemployment is in the low single digits, the Luftwaffe backed away from plans to move its training school for Eurofighter and Tornado jet technicians elsewhere and crime is at a historic low.
However, as voters prepare to elect a new European parliament next month, deep-seated fears have gripped a significant share of the electorate in one of the most affluent pockets of Europe’s top economy and delivered it to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
The bond between the party and its voters appears unshaken even by a cascade of recent scandals. The AfD’s lead candidate for the election, Maximilian Krah, was forced by his party leadership on Wednesday to resign from its board and stop campaigning after he told Italy’s La Repubblica that the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force which ran the death camps, were not all criminals and could only be judged on the basis of “individual guilt”.
Recognising mass-immigrantion as non-ideal can be valid if coming from a place of compassion. But with this perspective, mass-immigration is seen as a symptom of wider socioeconomic problems (or non-societal factors such as natural disasters), not as a problem in itself that needs to be “fixed” by sending immigrants “back home”.
Furthermore, seeing immigration as a cause for socioeconomic problems only comes from a place of racism, ascribing negative expectations to people according to their country of origin / culture / ethnicity. It is clear that you stand with this camp from how you phrased what you think “the left” thinks:
It implies that a person’s country of origin plays a factor in whether or not they can be considered a “good” immigrant. That’s racist.
So you’re telling me it’s as easy to integrate your average Syrian into a labour market with dearth of opportunities for people with low educational attainment as it is to integrate your average Nigerian. One’s an illiterate refugee (that is, can’t even read Arabic, knows no second language), the other, in my experience, has a master’s degree and couldn’t find a job back home as the state of Nigeria’s education system is quite a bit better than the rest of their infrastructure as well as economy.
And, sure, there’s educated Syrians. There’s uneducated Nigerians. More so in their home countries than when looking at the people who arrive here, and seen at the population level yes we can integrate way more Nigerians than Syrians on account of the former taking up way less integration capacity.
No, not everybody is the same. Not every source country is the same, either. Material conditions are not subject to universalism. It’s called “material conditions”, after all, not “ideal conditions”.
Second thing to note is that the countries that are still growing population-wise will stop doing that within the next decades, and with that their economy and emigration pattern will shift: We can’t keep relying on immigrants to plug our pension funds, it’s not sustainable. Or do you suppose we should make sure there’s always enough war abroad to generate enough refugees.
So… are we gonna pretend that colonialism played no part, and continues to play no part (via capitalism), in today’s “material conditions”?
You mean while Syria spent 400 years under Ottoman rule Nigeria was busy raiding for slaves and selling them? The socio-political conditions in the countries are almost flipped in comparison to the past, Nigeria has some vaguely but not terribly authoritarian socdem-thirdway thing, while Syria is straight-up fascist: Modern-day Syrians are practically slaves, Nigerians aren’t.
Or did you just want to use the c-words as a thought-terminating cliches? Is any of those forces stopping the Syrian government from increasing literacy? Are those forces in the room here with us? Maybe if the Syrian government spent money on throwing books at people instead of poison gas canisters the situation would look different. But it doesn’t. Syria is a hellhole. Modulo Rojava, of course, but that’s not where the refugees are from that’s where refugees go.
What do you suppose we do with Syria? Invade and rule it for a while to teach them our superior ways? I’d say that’d be quite colonial. I certainly wouldn’t mind the US stopping to implicitly back Turkey in its anti-Kurdish stance as well as Russia going so bankrupt they can’t prop up Assad any longer.
Look, I’m always down for learning more about history, but who’s “Nigeria”? To who was “Nigeria” selling slaves to? Modern states are never representative of specific / homogeneous cultures, let alone individual peoples, let alone societies from before the state was even formed. After skimming a few wiki articles, it’s clear that the region has had its own fair share of struggles against authorities, slavery, and racism, even before European colonisation, some of which continue currently.
Still, none of this reached the scale of european colonisation / “the scramble for Africa”, and the continued political and economic influence and control that ‘the West’ continues to hold and wield (neocolonialism / recolonisation). I know nowhere near enough about critical theory, but I’m sure these processes can be understood as a form of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (I wasn’t able to find a freely available copy, but this article seems like it could be a relevant, interesting read: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of the Orisha Religion in Africa and the New World (Nigeria, Cuba and the United States).)
Regarding Syria, “my approach” would be simply to support more movements / projects like Rojava (which is clearly not something that ‘western’ political powers are interested in doing). As an anarchist I don’t think liberation from state authority can be achieved through state authority.
The broad geographical area, inhibited by neighbouring tribes. Nigeria stayed Nigeria in that sense same as Europe stayed Europe.
Regarding the sheer size of the unit – most of Nigeria was unified by Cameroon (same approximate geographical thing) jihading the Hausas. Hausas have always been a single polity in the same sense that Greeks already were a polity when they were separate city states, the concept of nation didn’t suddenly spring up with the age of the national state. Similar things apply to the other groups.
You don’t want to open the can of worms that is “Should there be Yorubaland, Igboland, and Hausaland”. Not to be too geographically determinist but creating a land-locked state in is a rather courageous idea. Also see Ethiopia. And that’s before all the other trouble that it’d cause for the 300+ other ethnicities.
So… Orisha, a Yoruba religion, is spreading to the Americas. That has anything to do with governance in Nigeria vs. Syria… how? Syria isn’t poor as such. They have the same if not more resources to pour into their own development as Nigeria, as can be seen in Rojava, they’re making rapid progress. Syria before the civil war had 5x of Nigeria’s current gdp/capita. Their education system still sucked, social mobility, completely absent you’re either in the right clan or aren’t. And no, Europeans didn’t come up with the Arab clan system. I guess an argument can be made that Russia propping up the Assad regime over the port in Tartus is colonialism, but Syria’s problem didn’t start there, Russia didn’t cause them as-such they’re merely exploiting.
Ah, fuck, I usually at the very least skim things before I share but this time I just assumed from the title… my bad, the article has nothing to do with this topic.
Still, my general point is that European colonialism in Africa can’t be considered a “solved” issue, because of capitalism’s (and ‘western’ capitalists’) roles in continuing to exploit its natural resources and perpetuating systemic wealth inequalities. I think that profling populations by nation/culture is a fundamentally flawed way of approaching the difficulties of (mass) immigration, plus it’s an even more dangerous road to go down. Whatever the qualities of cultures and hegemonies that persist in whichever regions, populations aren’t homogenous, and states fail to represent their peoples.
Of course, there are many factors and actors involved in the many social instabillties / conflicts plaguing the world, and anything I might value as an anarchist (e.g. open borders and mutual / humanitarian aid) would be nonsensical to apply as government policies. I don’t have a ‘counter’ solution to propose.
lf all this is “thought terminating” in the sense that I’m unwlling to go down the path of ‘pragmatism’ in which peoples’ worth is profiled and measured and weighed, then so be it. As I see it, that kind of thinking as part of problem, not the solution.
I mostly counter-steered here because of another pragmatism: The corrupt domestic powers that be in plenty of African states love to blame everything on colonialism, skirting responsibility for their own role in their country’s abject poverty. They’re the ones commanding the armies letting Wagner run around exploiting mineral resources and massacring people. And that isn’t even capitalism as such it’s plain ole feudalism.
The Ukrainian thing is not by culture or anything, it’s by “has a Ukrainian passport”. Which means you have a good educational standard because the basically one thing that the Soviets got right was education, and Ukraine kept that intact and even built on it.
I’m quite sure if those Ukrainian refugees were South Africans they’d get the same treatment, 95% literacy are nothing to scoff at.
Oh I don’t doubt that those in power are complicit in the exploitation (I disagree with calling it feudalism, however). Ridding themselves of responsibility by blaming colonialism sounds akin to Israel deflecting criticism by claiming anti-semitism.
The statist perspective is unable to properly address these inequalities and injustices because it cannot reject the hierarchical power structures that caused them in the first place. Foreign intervention is just colonialism 2.0, but the more “reactive” alternative is just leading to a situation where measuring immigrants by their worth as ‘skilled workers’ and ‘ease of integration’ is pragmatic. I’m not gonna deny that there’s a kind of sense to this, because that’s exactly what makes it so worrying. At least with the old racist pseudoscience we can point and laugh at how nonsensical it was.
No. This is the bit that you all make out is what is going on and it isn’t. It’s an outright lie of what people think the issue is.
Good and bad individual immigrants can come from anywhere that much is obvious, no one is ever saying otherwise.
Not as a view as hard data. Governments have collected information on groups of people. They can group people by country so they absolutely have said immigrants from country A as a whole contribute more in taxes than they take out and commit less crime than locals. They also say immigrants from country B take more in taxes than they contribute and commit more crimes than locals.
You can’t deny that.
And this is where people think everyone on the left or fair left is mental for wanting such high levels of immigration from countries that have been shown in unbiased data that they make the country worse (as a whole obviously). It isn’t racist to want more from country A than B.
This says nothing of immigration causing wage suppression and housing price inflation. Of course that’s going to happen its basic supply and demand.
So if you read the article you would know that some don’t want Muslim immigrants from Muslim countries.
I’m not saying you think that, but I’ve seen plenty (like the person in the article), specifically state they don’t want certain races/ethnicities/religions in their country.
This is a tactic I’ve seen with right wing people. They defend something obviously wrong but pretending that the stance has always been sane. Basically presenting a crowd full of people thinking A is actually a crowd of people thinking B with a few As.
Indeed. And you shouldn’t be led astray by that tactic in your own analysis, it should still be purely material.
You can then argue “we need to counter that narrative” and that’s also true, however, countering a narrative in a way that doesn’t make sense to people is also not a good idea, to wit, people having the impression of “the left doesn’t care about the small people”. Don’t allow the right to push you into that trap. That, precisely, would be falling for their tactic.
Like, I’ve seen people on here, mostly from .ml domains, calling Germany’s policy of automatically handing Ukrainian refugees work permits racist because other refugee groups are treated differently. But the reason is simple: Ukrainians don’t exert pressure on the low-wage sector, meaning they’re not taking away jobs from people having trouble getting a job. Individual people from other countries also don’t exert that pressure and also get work permits, on an individual basis. Ukrainians not needing individual work permits is a recognition of the fact that their education system is en-par with that of Greece, far far above other conflict-torn source countries.
The US (which I assume many of those posters are from) does that filtering before people even arrive, try getting a work visa in the US without being sponsored by an employer. Not an option if there’s no ocean between you and whatever country the yanks are destabilising today.