Europeans these days are shaking their heads. We’re looking at America, and wondering what happened to make the country everyone secretly aspired to be more like, to turn it into the ongoing Cirque de Absurdité that we are witnessing these days. But we are busy overlooking our own problems in the process, we justify them with words like “necessity” and expressions like “making the tough decisions” or “taking responsibility”. In the end, it all boils down to the same thing.
Hatred.
It’s not fear. It’s not xenophobia. Phobias are irrational fears. This is about hate.
Six days ago, on the 3rd of December, the roughly 4.15 million automatically registered voters of the small, fairly insignificant nation of Denmark went to the polls to vote in a popular referendum. In the grand scheme of world politics, this is an event roughly on par with the Yemenite president making a grand declaration or a state election in North Dakota.
We don’t matter. We like to think that we do, but the fact is that we are too few, our country is too small and our opinions matter too little for anyone to take notice, unless someone around these parts suddenly decide to play forerunners in a European attempt to outrage the collective followers of the world’s second largest religion by publishing a series of deliberately hurtful drawings. We’re morons like that. Please forgive us for it.
In any case, the referendum concerned a very complicated, deeply contentious issue; namely whether we, as a nation, should drop one of our long-standing special agreements with the EU, to be left out of certain parts of the union’s legislative process. This agreement is 22 years old, and has been a thorn in the eye of the vast majority of Danish politicians all those years. The referendum went 53-47 in favor of the nays, and consequently, the agreement remains in effect, much to the consternation and horror of the political establishment. The winners were the most extreme neo-cons (in this country called neo-liberals, since “liberals” in Europe are considered right wing), the ultra-nationalists and the Unity List … a party made up of all the old, fragmented pieces of the communists and other far-left parties in Denmark. But the ultra-nationalists were unanimously hailed as the great winners, who daily argue in favor of ending all immigration into Denmark completely, and if we are forced to take any refugees, to them strip them of all belongings right down to their wedding rings upon arrival to let them pay for their stay in the country that way, only supplying them with an income considerably below starvation-level to “help them get started”.
The ultra-nationalists successfully argued, that if we dropped our special agreement, refugees would overwhelm us by the hundreds of thousands, painting images of Denmark being swamped under a veritable flood of ISIS-sympathizers.
The neo-cons argued that we should say no because of a technicality that few people really paid attention to, and a majority of their voters disregarded the party line and voted “yes” anyway. And the far-left party tried to factually present each part of the agreement to be disbanded and explain the consequences of doing so. It was a noble attempt, but high brow and it had nowhere near the impact that the “Refugees will bankrupt us and take our jobs!”-argument from the ultra-nationalists had.
We are no different than the rest of Europe in our reaction to this.
In England, the British National Party has lost all semblance of relevance, and has been eclipsed by the officially less outrageous but unofficially just as extreme United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP for short). UKIP has only one MP, due to the convoluted and admittedly antiquated British electoral system, but they got over 12% of the popular vote in the general election this past year, and should have had a massive representation in parliament as a result, if the British system was based on number of votes overall instead of each electoral district electing one person and tossing everyone else’s vote in the gutter. UKIP is anti-LGBT, anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-Islam, anti-equality, anti-atheist, anti-Irish, anti-Scottish, anti-more-or-less-everything, because there are more votes in being angry and shouting “NO” than there are in being rational and trying to speak to people’s common sense.
The British Tories have caught on to this and are starting to use the same language. Not only against foreigners and immigrants, but against their own people as well … woe betide you if you’re unemployed in England today or, Gods forbid, that you have a disability of any kind. You’re officially labeled the worst scum on the planet, a leech, a moocher, a useless excess and a cancerous growth on society to be expunged in whatever way necessary. Watch any speech on the issue by Iain Duncan Smith, up-to-and-including him going on TV on the BBC and making a speech in which he literally said the words: “Work actually helps free people”.
It’s easily googled. Don’t mind the Swastikas and the references to the Auschwitz gate-motto.
England may be voting itself entirely out of the EU by 2017, isolating itself and basically telling Europe “We’re not part of you, because boohoo, The Channel” and the rest of the world “Sod off!”
There’s so much hate in the United Kingdom, and it’s directed the exact same places as in much smaller and much less significant Denmark., namely the weakest members of its own society … the unemployed, the ill, the outsiders, the immigrants and the refugees allegedly sucking money out of the state and by extension, out of the pocket of everyone “unjustly” forced to pay taxes.
How horrible. Being taxed. How dare the state subject us to something so cruel?
Over a quarter of a millennium ago, American colonists came up with one of the catchiest campaign slogans in history; “No taxation without representation”. Nowadays, the Rght Wing is howling up a storm in order to achieve “representation without taxation” and bedamned anyone who is left behind, destroyed in their wake. That, in itself, has become a laudable, worthwhile goal. The destruction of existences is no longer seen as a detriment or a societal evil, but as something to literally strive towards and attempt to accomplish on a large scale.
Because blame.
Because if you’re not rich and important, it’s your own fault and you should be punished for it. If you’re sick, you don’t deserve happiness. If you don’t have a job, you’re automatically lazy and a moocher, regardless of any attempt you make to find employment.
But it doesn’t end in England or in Denmark.
Last week, French ultra-nationalist party Front National won massively at regional elections throughout France. Its leader Marine le Pen is the daughter of the infamous holocaust-denier, Jean-Marie le Pen. Her party is an extremist one, with openly anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, anti-equality, anti-abortion, anti-union and anti-pretty-much-everything-under-the-sun views. Jean-Marie le Pen was recently expelled from his own party, after yet again denying holocaust in public, but his views remain the same, and he openly advocates France allying with Russia against the rest of Europe and America, because Russia knows how to handle the horrible, evil gays.
Yet all the while his daughter officially renounces such historical revisionism, the anti-Semitism in her party is rife and public and open for all to see.
France is coming apart at the seams … not because of immigration or because of unemployment or because of any other number of factors. France is suffering because of hatred. Because people choose to take their frustrations out in the least productive but easiest way available to them … and no one has ever benefited more from that, than Right Wing extremists. No one. Not even monsters like Daesh, Al’Qaida or the Taliban.
In Sweden … the most politically significant Scandinavian country, the Sweden Democrats are poised to become the largest party at the next general elections. Its leader maintains close ties with parties so extreme that they’d be banned in most other countries, who openly advocate violence against the LGBT community and any immigrant not of the right racial stock (presumably Americans are dubious due to how many interracial marriages you have, but I suppose Danes are okay as long as we don’t stay too long). Double membership between these parties and the Sweden Democrats is possible and widespread. Videos have been shown on European newscasts of members of parliament for this party violently assaulting immigrants and homeless people in the streets.
Sweden has long had a policy of openness towards refugees and immigrants, leading this country with roughly nine and a half million inhabitants to receive hundreds of thousands of immigrants over the years. Sweden has also had significant success with its integration of these refugees, but bad apples are bound to spring up anywhere in the world, and as usual, they are the only ones you hear about in the press, leading to a sinister and badly distorted image of complete lawlessness, which is exploited by the extreme, fear-mongering and hate-peddling Right.
By now, Sweden has turned on its own as well, and is posed to devour itself in internal bickering and hatred. In Germany, long held as the voice of common sense, sanity and reason in Europe, tens of thousands march with an organization called “Pegida”, which claims to be unaffiliated with any political party, but which still supports neo-nazi organizations primarily in the old East Germany which has never recovered from Helmuth Kohl’s disastrously botched, rushed re-integration of east and west Germany after the collapse of the Warzaw pact, and the dissolution of most of the old communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Germany has received so many refugees from Syria that they are starting to buckle, and Germans are attacking asylum-centers and refugees all over the country. Angela Merkel’s government is holding firm, but with everything going on around Europe, people are starting to wonder how long she can hold on before Germany begins to crack around the edges as well.
And so, Germans are slowly turning on themselves and each other, laying blame for everything bad that has befallen their country on people fleeing for their lives, on the unemployed, on the sick, on the elderly, on anyone who isn’t part of the middle class or up, in fact. German newspapers print hateful headlines again. German TV-hosts take time out of their scheduled programming to speak up against hatred in personal appeals, rather than one coming from their network. A highly respected German actor is now opening an asylum center with his own money, because he’s sick and tired of watching the hate that is consuming his nation. He’s vilified and reviled for it in large sections of the German population … while others hold him up as a paragon of decency. But what both sides forget is that what he’s doing is just as much a clarion call to action for the German government, because in no part of the world should what he is now doing be the responsibility of private citizens.
And Europe holds its breath.
Even in the less central countries in Europe, hatred is on the march. In Austria, the Freedom Party is regaining its former strength.
This is the same party that had the rest of the world mortified when its frontrunner and later political leader for the district of Kärnten, Jörg Haider, stood up and publicly reduced the holocaust to a triviality in history. The EU imposed sanctions on one of its own member states as a result, because no one could stomach the idea of a man with family ties to Hitler’s third reich (his parents were both members of the nazi party), coming into power in a member state.
Nowadays, no one in European newsrooms outside Austria even bothers with the Freedom Party, because frankly, what they are saying is so mainstream it’s not newsworthy.
In Hungary, Jobbik is the spiritual inheritor of the fascist Arrow-Cross party which collaborated with Hitler’s regime. Not only are they not hiding this fact at their rallies, but their uniformed thugs, standing guard and looking menacing at these events frankly come across as nothing more than modernized brownshirts, right down to the armbands and the color of their pseudo-militarized clothing.
Jobbik is growing in power and more and more people are attending its meetings, where rabid hatred is thrown into the air against anything “un-Hungarian” like the LGBT-community, immigrants, the homeless, their neighboring countries, the unemployed who mostly make up their electorate are given a pass only insofar as they vote for Jobbik, otherwise they are also the enemy, and the list goes on and on and on.
And so, Hungary is turning on itself, like much of the rest of Eastern Europe. In Poland, always seen as one of the most “Western” of Eastern European countries, the extreme, nationalist conservatives recently retook power, after promising to close off Poland and put the EU in its place. In Greece, Golden Dawn is growing with each boatload of desperate Syrians trying to get out of the way of Assad’s murder-squads and the rabid, foaming-about-the-mouth insanity of Daesh. Close off the borders, Golden Dawn argues. “Throw them back in the ocean”, “Let them drown, why is that our problem?” and “Greece for Greeks!” are common, everyday utterances nowadays, from a party whose leader openly stands on the floor of the Greek parliament, in the nation which birthed the original concept of “Demokratia”, and hails Hitler as a great visionary and an even greater man.
Greece, already buckling under the absurd and completely irresponsible fiscal policies of forty years of center left and right-wing governments, none of whom were willing to do anything to staunch the insanity going on in their own departments, or look at some necessary reforms while the Greek economy tanked more and more each year, has been saddled with one of the harshest and most unforgiving debt-repayment schemes in modern history, practically ensuring that Greece will not be a financially viable state until sometime in the 2030’s at the earliest.
While people in Greece see their livelihoods go up in so much proverbial smoke, and every cent they can scrape together go towards paying off debts rather than building their country into a viable, profitable state, extremists see fertile ground for recruitment and Golden Dawn is doing precisely what such extremists have done everywhere, at any time in history. Again, it’s the outsiders paying the price for their hatred, but it sells, and Golden Dawn is gaining in strength as well.
In Italy, you’ve had Silvio Berlusconi putting his mark on several decades of politics already, and while he is apparently history by now, his old companions and political parties consist, among others, of the Italian Neo-Fascists. Italy has had so many governments since the Second World War that the mere notion of them being a stable democracy is a standing joke.
The last ten or fifteen years has, admittedly, seen more stable governments but it has not managed to rid itself of the corruption so endemic in its halls of power, and Berlusconi has had to pull one rabbit after another out of his hat to avoid jail-time for nepotistic corruption over and over and over again.
Italy, already perilously close to the collapse of their economy that many consider it a tossup between them or Spain as to whom will need massive, international loans next, is turning on itself with neo-fascists on the rise and an unsustainable level of unemployment, especially amongst young people. While human rights for for example the LGBT community are improving, the same cannot exactly be said for the refugees arriving in Italy, who are seen as the source of all evil in a country that has, historically, been more than capable of supplying its own and whose citizens, historically, have been very bad at admitting it to themselves.
Deflection and redirection of blame is an age-old tactic, and it works just as well in the 21st Century as it has always done. Perhaps even more so, since mass media allows dissemination of ideas so readily.
In short … Europe is a place boiling in its own festering hatred these days … of itself, of each other, of outsiders, of the less-fortunate, of the oppressed and of everything unknown and therefore uncomfortable. And yet, we have the audacity to look at America and say “At least we’re not that bad”.
We look upon American politics as an example of everything to avoid, perhaps because we are so numbed by the same problems at home. We see a man like Ted Cruz , caught on TV in one of his signature open mouthed, eyes narrowed, Joseph McCarthy-impersonations, and we breathe a sigh of relief that he’s your problem and not ours.
We hear him open his mouth and we hear the incoherent ramblings that come out of him (yes, we heard about Green Eggs and Ham as well all the way over here, and yes, we did laugh at the phonybuster every bit as much as most Americans fortunately did).
In Europe, except in all the aforementioned circles, Ted Cruz is the laughing stock and genuinely seen as an example of absolutely everything that is wrong about American politics … or at least he was … right up until the next contestant on Celebrity Presidential Candidate joined the fray.
You see, we look upon Donald Trump as he does his constant duck-face or his waxen Joker-smile and then we look to the skies and give praise to anything from Jehovah to Odin to the Flying Spaghetti-monster that we’ve dodged that particular bullet.
We hear him speak of Latinos and Syrians, and even some of the people I’ve mentioned from Europe, take umbrage and speak up against it. We aren’t quite sure if Trump is having a blast at the American public’s expense and if he’s just doing this as a long-running dare, or if he’s actually serious, in which case most of us agree someone ought to help the poor man into therapy, before he hurts himself and billions of others in the process.
He has found an obvious niche in American politics, by taking the hatred spewed by other Republican candidates like aforementioned Mr. Cruz or others towards select groups in society, and turning the volume up to 130 decibels. The one good thing one can say about him is that at least he seems to reserve his hatred for only some groups. He’s not particularly anti-LGBT and he’s oddly lenient on women who dare to get pregnant, but that just means he’s got extra loathing and revulsion to spare on those groups he really do hate.
It’s disturbing. And not just for the smile and the duck face.
And of course, we do also hear about Ben Carson whenever he open his mouth, and we try our damnedest … usually without much luck, and without putting too fine a point on it … not to break down in sobbing snickers at the effluence of uneducated gobshite coming out of his mouth. He’s hilarious, but at the same time, he’s horrifying, simply because, for a while, he looked like he might have a shot at the Oval Office … though thankfully, that madness appears to have passed.
Then we look at a picture of the pyramids and we have another bloody good giggle. Until we realize that he has the support of tens of millions of probably heavily armed Americans and then we start to shiver and shudder, regardless of whether the United States is a NATO-ally or not. We think of the Republican Party as the world’s largest and longest-running Performance Art-project, and we are still secretly awaiting Rupert Murdoch going on TV to publicly apologize for letting that particular joke go on for thirty six years too long. In short, we can’t take the Republicans seriously, if it wasn’t for the fact that they are actively and in complete knowledge of the impact of their actions, pursuing life-destroying policies, wars that impact Europe both financially and socially in ways that Americans could never even fathom, and the simple truth that they occasionally win a presidential election and then we learn to hold our breath for eight years, hoping against hope that no one pushes the big red button in the Oval Office, because guess what continent lies between Russia and the United States if you go east from New York and West from Moscow?
Exactly.
We do.
Hatred is endemic nowadays in politics.
America doesn’t hold a candle to Europe, and ours is arguably even more vicious than yours. At least there is still a good deal of genuine outrage in the United States when Trump suggests closing off the borders for all Muslims. In Europe, we long since passed the “close the borders”-line and moved up to “let’s send every one of those already here back out, dump them off on a landing strip somewhere after taking all their belongings, and blow the dog-whistle to alert Daesh where to find some target practice”.
The author of this is ashamed to be Danish, ashamed to be a European and ashamed to be a human being these days. The old expression “stop the world, I want to get off” seems appropriate. But this isn’t just a cough of anger or disgust. It’s not simply a doomsday prediction.
There is a saying around these parts that “you always get the politicians you deserve”.
Now, before you fly off on a tangent, please take time to consider the deeper meaning of this. Politicians are elected representatives who, in most of the Democratic world, no longer do much representing. But before they were that, they are people like everyone else. There was a time when even Ted Cruz was a moronic teenager … in his case, he apparently never grew out of that phase, admittedly, but I digress … and yes, Hillary Clinton was a high-school student once upon a time too.
At some point in every politician’s life, they make an active choice to enter public service. Some of them do it for the power, some of them do it for the money, some of them do it out of a genuine, idealistic sense of wanting to help people live better lives. Along the way, they have to swallow some mountain-sized camels to get elected, and they have to learn the fine art of, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel so poetically sang in 1964, “talking without speaking” and “hearing without listening”. They need to learn how to compromise because even the most uncompromising politician really does little else. They just know how to spin it to avoid looking that way, to an electorate which, by and large, doesn’t understand back-room deals and political double-dealing.
But no politician ever accomplishes anything whatsoever, without the backing of voters. Every single election is a popularity contest, from choosing a Prom-Queen to electing the President of the United States of America.
And if we do not like the message presented to us by Bethany-the-blonde-bombshell we can always vote for Rita-the-rambunctious-redhead instead. If we do not like Standardized-A1-Flavorless-Republican in the red corner, we can always direct our vote at Standardized-A1-Flavorless-Democrat in the blue.
Or more precisely: We can always elect Obama if we don’t like Romney.
But doesn’t this mean that those who did vote for Romney don’t get the politician they deserve?
No.
If they had done a better job at selling their candidate and making people want to vote for him, they would have gotten him instead. In which case the roles would have been reversed. This means that by their failure, they got exactly the man they deserved. And those who did vote for Obama got the man THEY deserved, flawed though he may be, because they managed to convince enough that they had the right candidate.
If you didn’t agree with either of them and didn’t vote, you deserve whatever you get, because you can’t even be bothered to take part in the most important civic duty in the Free World.
And if you voted for a third party candidate … well, they often deserve to get elected, but because of America’s idiotic state-funding of election campaigns which only awards funds to the two largest parties from the previous election, it’s never going to happen. Consequently, those voters deserve what they got for not running for an established party on a platform of changing those rules to make it possible for others to get a slice of the cake, thereby changing the system from within.
In the end, we all get exactly the politicians we deserve.
Because we choose them.
And politicians get exactly the voters they deserve. Because they are in charge of selling their message, and thereby attracting voters. So when a Republican like Trump fires off a broadside against Latinos, he’s catering to a specific group of voters and he will certainly gain their support, but at the cost of other voters. This is a calculated risk. When he then doesn’t get elected, like anyone suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder as was recently explained in an article in Psychology Today, he will deflect the blame rather than admit that he made errors. He will blame the Latinos he professes to want to keep out, for not voting for him, possibly using racial slurs and certainly in grossly demeaning terms in general. He may even do so publicly, because to admit that he was wrong is anathema to someone with NPD. It can’t happen. Everything is everyone else’s fault and this is where Trump truly fails as a politician.
Because a politician who fails ultimately has no one to blame but him- or herself. Eric Cantor’s fall from grace came only due to himself. So did the unfortunately named Anthony Wiener’s collapse in the public eye. Because they get the voters they deserve, and if they had convinced enough people not to care about scandals, or that their message was good enough, they’d still be in the halls of power.
Consequently, when we see the peddling of hate that is going on in Europe and the United States, we are watching the politicians we deserve tear into decency like a hungry wolf into a wounded lamb.
Because we gave them that power and that opportunity. We did not stop them from getting to a position where they could do that, and in the end, that is one of the many things that Democracy can be boiled down to. The ability to stop people you disagree with from getting into power.
We have that ability.
We, the people.
Not just in the United States of America. But in Great Britain. In France. In Germany. In Greece and in Hungary. In Japan and in India, in Australia and New Zealand.
Every democracy in the world is based on the simple premise, that if you can win enough popularity contests, you get to decide what goes and what doesn’t, and you get to decide the discourse for the foreseeable future. And we must realize that we can’t win every battle. Someone always has to lose, and sometimes, it’ll be you. That shouldn’t dissuade us from trying again next time. Even after two losses. Even after ten. Even after a hundred. Because not trying is not only un-democratic, it is anti-democratic. It is actively destroying the system by inaction.
And just as importantly, it means that those we disagree with win by default, and those who are that apathetic have voided their moral right to disagreement.
Saying “I couldn’t be bothered to speak up, but I really hate what’s happening” is pathetic and will never hold validity in any serious discussion.
Therefore this article. Therefore this meagre attempt at illustrating the sorry state of affairs.
Therefore this pointing out, that neither Europe nor America has anything to boast about compared to the other, and that Europe’s biggest export these years, politically, is a vicious, seething, infectious form of hatred. And that America’s biggest export is much the same.
It’s in our hands to change it. We who have the right to vote.
Speak up.
Stand up.
Act.
You’re the only one who can.