Aceticon

Pretty similar to how Brexit reduced the popularity of being anti-EU in the rest of the European Union.

Being a fool has become a year-long occupation for many ...

I agree with that: I don't think any "people" has an intrinsically heightened disposition for racism.

In fact, if I thought otherwise I would be quite the hypocrite as that would be pure and simple racist prejudice.

What I do think is that the Press and Political environment in Germany for the past decades have promoted race-based thinking thus increasing the acceptance of racism and even a certain blindness to it because the dominant forms were "benevolent" racism. This is how Germany ended up were it is now: by the active normalizing of a dysfunctional behavior as being "benevolent" rather than due to predisposition of those living there for such things.

You see a lot of that too in places like the US were one party is Racist in the traditional sense and the other spins their Racism in the modern sense (but when it comes to, for example, Muslims, they're both traditional racists).

The really alarming thing is that rather than stop and re-evaluate that posture in light of how that ended up with the German Government supporting the most extreme Genocide of this century (so far :/ ) very overtly due to the race of the genociders, the German authorities have instead doubled down with authoritarian measures (IMHO, bypassing the Courts to expel dissidents is pretty authoritarian for a supposedly Democratic nation).

IMHO, such climate of race-based thinking and normalization of racial prejudice and discrimination (even if spinned as "positive") is also fertile ground for the growth of traditional racists such as the AfD in Germany and the MAGAs in America - the moral and ethical distance between "those people should be supported because of their race" and the traditional racists' "we should be supported because of our race" is much, much smaller than the distance between "people's race should not mater for how they are seen or treated" and "we should be supported because of our race" - "if it's OK to do it for them then it's OK to do it for us" is quite a tiny mental step.

I don't actually think that Germany is worse in this than for example the US, it's just that I had a far, far better opinion of Germany than I had of the US previously and the deep disappointment of figuring out the dark nature of racial policies in German Politics makes it hit me harder than what's happening in the US.

That makes sense.

I stand corrected.

Oh, casual Racism is a plague all over the World and, worse, some of the countries which supposedly have gone beyond it, really just changed the lists of "good"/"deserving" races and "bad"/"undeserving" races and called the discriminatory behaviour anchored in those new lists "positive", as if treating people differently depending on their race is a good thing as long as it's only for certain races but a bad thing for others.

Racism is always a coin with two faces - there are always some who are presumed to, due to their ethnicity, be relatively better people and thus treated in a relatively better way, and others who due to their ethnicity are presumed to be relatively worst people and treated in a relatively worst way - and just because one goes around empasysing the "positive" side of treating some better due to their race doesn't make the thing any less Prejudiced, Discriminatory and unjust.

The boundary between Racism and not-Racism is not defined by which are the races for which you will treat individuals better and which for which you treat individuals worst, or even on the focusing on positive treatment for some races (the modern spin on Racism) rather than negative treatment for other races (the Fascist spin on Racism), it's defined by judging and treating or not people differently depending on their race.

To eliminate Racism you need to eliminate the way of thing thinking that is the foundation of Racism: that the character of people, their worth and the treatment they deserved depends on their ethnicity.

"Positive" Discrimination doesn't eliminate Racism, it just moves the unfair, Racist, treatment to favour different ethnicities - a different list of ubermenschen and untermenschen rather than just treating all as equally being menschen.

Whilst you (rightly!) point out and criticize the casual racism all over the place done with the traditional (Fascist) spin on racism, you seem to be totally oblivious to the Racism with the modern neoliberal spin which is just as unjust, prejudiced and discriminatory (hence just as Racist) as practiced in Germany, where it is systemic and even weaved into the structures of power (exactly as shown in this news story, with people being deported without trial for being against it), and the powerful activelly practicing discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and suppressing criticism of it with laws that bypass the Courts, is a far, FAR worse situation than merely the powerless being casually racist.

The takeover of Israel by a nakedly ethno-Fascist regime which has started a full-blown Genocide along ethnic lines of proportions and cruelty exceeded only by the Holocaust, is what shined a harsh light on the reality that the whole business of presuming things and treating people based on their ethnicity is wrong even when you spin it as "positive", and Germany was so far down into Racism with that modern neoliberal spin that the country, unlike many other countries in Europe which also previously supported Israel, has been unable to pull itself out of it when it de facto transformed into support of a very extreme form of Fascist-style Racism.

True, I never lived in Eastern Europe, only in Northern, Western and Southern Europe.

Are you telling me that Eastern Europeans commonly support groups mass murdering children along racial lines if the ethnicity of the members of the group doing the mass murder is deemed more important than other ethnicities?

Because that's some pretty extreme Racism (as race-based discrimination goes, it's pretty hard to beat actually sending weapons to child mass murders and justifying it with one's "unwavering support" of their ethnicity), whilst the most extreme Racism I'm aware of in EE is in ex-Jugoslavia between mainly Serbs, Croats and ethnic Albanians which was also a Genocide but didn't leave tens of thousands of dead children, bombed out hospitals, a long list of murdered journalists and a list of babies murdered just in the first 6 months which is 17 pages long, not even close.

Even the stuff that happened following the break up of Jugoslavia did not get anywere as bad as what Germany supports in Gaza very overtly because of the ethnicity of the Genociders and I'm not aware of any present day EE nation like Germany supporting outright Genocide openly because of the ethnicity of the genociders (though from what I've heard there's a lot of Racism in Hungary, though I believe they fall short of supporting mass murdering of children if done by those of the "right" race).

In this Germany is almost in a class of its own (though not quite: it's there together with Brexiter Britain and Trump's America, hardly stellar company).

PS: Re-read how I named the Roma People, "Roma people" and how my use of the word "Gypsies" is very clearly framed as a clarification for those who do not know the proper name of that people. I expected that the way I wrote would make it pretty clear that the proper way to refere to them was "Roma people", but guess I was wrong in that.

I was born in a country which was under a Fascist dictatorship.

Not long after, there was a Revolution, the Fascist Regime was overthrown and the country became Democratic.

Still now, half a century later, people in my country of birth remain quite sensitive and easilly alarmed by practices of those in power which are similar to the kind of things that those in power in the Fascist regime would do (for example, things like civil society surveillance).

I expect exactly the same from Germans, maybe just less of it since their Fascist days have been gone for longer and (judging by my own country), people's alertness to and rejection of things "like what they used to do before" seems to fall the further away from the dictatorship days we are.

Or are you telling me that Germans are special and different from other people and hence it's wrong to expect them to have a higher tendency than those who never had Fascism to reject practices by those in power now which are similar to those of their very own past Fascist dictatorship?!

PS: That said, maybe a people who has freed itself from Fascism is significantly more sensitive to anything that bares even just a passing ressemblance to what the Fascists use to do, than a people whose Fascism was overthrown by others, in which case I was wrong in expecting Germans to have a natural rejection of Fascist practices. That being so, it would also explain just how easilly the German power elites keep on bit by bit, doing more and more things like they did in the "old days" and most of the population meekly accepts it or even defends and aplauds it.

I suspect the problem was that the attempt at making amends was framed in a way that kept the Racism alive and well (i.e. the duty of making amends was framed as being towards an entire ethnicity rather than being towards the actual people who were victims, their families and their descendants - so kept treating people as ethnics but a specific ethnic group is now "good ones" rather than "bad ones"). This both explains the repeated loud proclamations of "unwavering support for the Jewish People" and the complete and total lack of similar support for other etnicities targetted by the Nazis with the Holocaust, such as the Roma People (more commonly known as Gypsies).

That the making of amends was itself structured within a Racist thinking framework isn't exactly surprising given than the whole thing was done back in the 50, which was still very Racist by modern day standards, and that pretty much all of the Nazi "middle management" as well as the Nazi-supporting wealthy elites were kept in their places (it's easy to get old Fascists to loudly proclaim their disavowing of the last regime, but changing the actual way they look at their fellow human beings in the privacy of their minds is something much harder).

The surprising part (certainly it was hugelly surprising for me, who used to have a very good opinion of the country less than a decade ago) is that in its way to the XXI century Germany has not in fact evolved along with the rest of Europe away from a mental framework that sees ethnicity as more relevant than character.

Absolutelly, all Western nations have problems with the Far-Right and its favorite practices (Racism, Fascism, Might is Right, Nationalism and so on), to a less or greater level depending on the country, but the vast majority of countries in Europe had actually, before this period or moral and ethical regression started a decade ago, gone far further amongst the population in general in disassembling the ideological foundations of Racism and Authoritarinism supporting that kind of crap, than Germany.

I've lived all over Europe and once upon a time I naively expected that people in the country of Nazism would nowadays be the most sensitive to racist thinking and acting of all, and hence the least racist of all, but that's not at all my experience.

Germany and Germans justifying the racist practices of their own power elites and the fast slide back to authoritarian practices, with whataboutism and "legality" (as if most of the worst actions of the Nazis weren't things they first made sure to make legal) is, frankly, scary as fuck for any European who is not a far-right Muppet, not least because it shows the moral and ethical distance between mainstream German politics and the AfD is paper thin.

Most of Europe isn't supporting the mass murder of children by a nation because of the ethnicity said nation claims to represent and most of Europe hasn't made it legal to deport people who weren't tried and found guilty of something, and that Germany, of all nations, who did what they did almost a century ago and spent the time since telling us "Never again!" are back to the level of racism that knowingly sends wepons and ammo to a nation mass murdering chidren justifying that support with the ethnicity of the people of that nation, and is passing Fascist legislation to deport people without trial, is really making them stand out from the rest of Europe when it comes to Racism and Fascism.

Your peers in Europe on the Racist and Fascist scales are the likes of Hungary, not the Scandinavians or even the French.

I seem to remember that most of the actions of the Nazis once they got into power were also legal.

Maybe, just maybe, people should have a standard of right and wrong which does not delegate that definition to "legality", especially people in Germany.

"Good" old Nazi thinking never left the German elites, hence their "unwavering support" for a nation committing Genocide very openly because of the race of its people, hence the highly manipulated Press over there spreading and amplifying race-based views and hence their casual bypassing of legal rights to silence those who would demonstrate against such ultra-racism and the support of Genocide based on it.

They might have changed who the ubermenschen and the untermenshen are but they still keep on classifying people into those two categories by race and treating then very differently, as well as using force to silence dissent against such views and practices.

In light of Russia's aggressiveness, the recent news of Germany militarizing itself sounds like good news, but in light of the increasing regression of Germany back to their old extreme-racist and repressive practices those are very bad news - a Germany which thinks race justifies Genocide and suppresses by force dissent from such way of thinking is bound to sooner or later once again use such military power against those they deem "lesser races"

Now that just sounds like the arguments from the other far-right party in America in the Cultural Wars used to distract the people from the actual lack of economic prosperity and quality of life for the many.

"Strict immigration policies" needs not be the "so bad we even betray those we invited in" shit of the far-right: something as simple as having limited numbers per year and preferring the provision of help to the worse off refugees rather than economic migrants is a "strict immigration policy" whilst actually being a pretty Leftwing and Humanitarian posture.

It's reasonable that countries which are wealtier can't just allow anybody out of the other billions of human beings living in places which aren't as wealthy to come over and settle there, simply because several times the local population worth of people with far lower average education who can't even speak the local language coming over will basically destroy the very reason the country is a properous as it is (mainly because those people will be far less productive than the locals but still consume roughly the same amount of resources per-capita).

(This is without even going into the cultural clashes and subsequent rise of the far-right that happen when people from totally different cultures move to a country in large numbers within a short time period)

Once one accepts that no-limits immigration is mathematically and socially destructive, the conversation can then moves into the world of the possible, such as how to make sure it's the most deserving who get invited in, helping those who come integrate (as social clashes with immigrants are almost always just prejudice against the unknown and mismatched cultural expectations), managing the pressures of all those new people on infrastructure and so on: that's things like activelly looking for the worst off people in refugee camps in the worst areas and helping those (including inviting them over), adult education including of the local language to that those coming in can become fully productive citizens of their adopted country, making sure housing markets are properly supplying demand to reduce the pressure of the population growth associated with immigration and so on.

Immigration policy needs not be the anti-other hostility to the point of kicking out the very people who have been invited in (quite extreme when you think that treating one's guests well is an important element of lots of cultures) of the far-right, but it can't be the pie-in-the-sky open door policies of neoliberals cosplaying as lefties with Identity Politics.

Ultimatelly there have to be limits of a "number of people per time unit" kind, the difference between the rightwing take and the leftwing take is the criteria for chosing who gets in if there are more candidates than the limits.