cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3680700
Austria accuses this couple of a terrorist crime just for expressing solidarity for Palestinians
As a European, there is no doubt that Europe is genuinely descending into fascism. Every country puts in new, worse laws every year, the internet gets censored even heavier, more forms of protest get outlawed and control of media (TV/News/Social) is in ever fewer hands. We are quite literally at the point of punishing anybody who dares to suggest improving society somewhat
But remember it’s China that’s a police state
OUR sensible and proportionate limitations on free speech.
THEIR totalitarian censorship laws.
Not being allowed to kill my wife is 1984
Facing trial for my crimes is CEE CEE PEE TOTALITARIAN WINNIE THE POOH AUTHORITARIAN TIANANANANAMAN SQUARE FASCISM
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Speech in the US does have some bare protections that helps, but mostly I think the situation in Europe is a lot less stable and the chance of something really popping off there is higher there than the US (though still small), mainly due to the rapidly degrading economic situation in Europe directly related to Europeans shooting themselves in the foot w/r/t Russia and the fact that they are stuck being the junior partner to the US, who is more than happy to screw over Europe for their own benefit.
There is a directly inverse relationship between how much free speech a country has and how destabilizing free speech is to the current order. Sure, the USSR didn’t have as much free speech in the 20s and 30s compared to the US, but there was a crisis situation at the time and a real threat of capitalist restoration from the inside and out. Same with Cuba, maybe speech was restricted after the revolution but when the CIA’s budgeted for toppling your government is larger than your country’s GDP, you gotta make tough choices.
The US respects free speech now because it isn’t a threat to the capitalist order at the moment, not even a bit. Once it does become a threat, all those ideals of “well at least in the US, at least we can criticize our government unlike in CHINA!” will get thrown out the window faster than a Czech Catholic priest does by Protestant reformers.
get thrown out the window faster than a Czech Catholic priest does by Protestant reformers.
Assuming you mean the 1419 defenestration, those guys yeeted from the windows weren’t priests, but city council.
Was that the First Defenestration of Prague, or the Second? I’m pretty sure local legend says they were either saved by angels or deposited on a pile of manure.
1419 was the first. Well, few of them did survived since that window wasn’t terribly high, unfortunately for them city hall was surrounded by angry mob who finished them.
The one with angels was the Third Defenestration in 1618, this time everyone survived (also there were no clergy thrown out afaik) because while the window was higher, they fell on the pile of manure which were in fact the leftovers of their own earlier feasts thrown out the same route (this wasn’t angelic enough for official history but the real version was passed too).
The first amendment does actually make it difficult to pass laws that lead to the shit in the OP.
My analysis is that everything is already in place so that the bourgeoisie can use features of fascism when they need without taking the risk of giving total power to a bunch of anti-intellectual tinfoil hat nutjobs.
WW2 taught capital one lesson. You better posture as democratic and free like the US while committing the worse atrocities for money, rather than trying to combine revolutionary aesthetics and reactionary ideology.
The fascists in the 20s and 30s had to try and co-opt revolutionary aesthetics because everyone at the time wanted revolution. Communists and communism in Italy and Germany were gaining ground every year that went by. The communists in Italy were within a hair of taking power in the 20s. That’s why the capitalist west loved Mussolini - he put an end to a surging leftist movement. As the left grew in power, capital turned to fascism to counter it.
Today, the situation is entirely different. Fascism is just as much of a threat of course, but it’s going to look different from 20th c. fascism.
Totally agree. I have this horrible hypothesis that the new fascism is going to adopt the NGO style righteous consciousness of the new left. We already had a tiny bit of this in France, when a prominent far right group used an enormous budget to make a “defend Europe” demonstration where they went to the mountains to supposedly prevent immigrants from coming. The video they made had all the tropes of this mix between corporate coolness and NGO wholesomeness.
What I don’t understand is why governments seem so willing to take action against expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. They routinely ignore activism and do whatever they want, and it works well. Activism has been a dead end for decades, why suddenly get weird about it? Are they worried that people will care this time around? Or that they know they’re wrong and feel the need to double-down? It seems extreme and potentially counter to their own interests to draw so much attention to the issue when it feels like they could just go back to the standard playbook of putting out strong statements and doing nothing until the problem goes away.
That’s because this is the first thing in decades that moved westerners into the good direction instead of their usual state of either choking on boot or being political amoebas. And the govts are fucking scared that it will lead, with combination of political and economical decline, to something way more serious. So the govts who didn’t had to deal with any dissent for as long, reflexively revert to the first thought of all bourgeois dictatorship: police repression.
So is this kind of like the George Floyd protests for Europe? The pro-Palestinian protests in Europe seem more intense than anywhere else outside the Middle East
Yeah, something like that i think.
I literally am hearing hardly protests going in in Europe, outside of the UKKK. Those that do, fr don’t show up in my feed until like 2 days later
Activism in solidarity is dangerous because it promotes internationalism, which is the only thing that can actually threaten the liberal state.
- Depending on the country, there is a large Arab and Muslim population (or Palestinian diaspora in already Islamic countries). They’re vocal about the violence imposed on them, their families, and their people.
- Israel’s lobbying industry is very strong. They pour a lot of money into various countries and the politicians and businessmen risk losing their income if they don’t squash dissent
- The US will punish you. Zionism is non negotiable
- In the US and elsewhere, it may be election season and having thousands of people calling your candidate a supporter of genocide is not a good look. Even if they successfully arrest you and whatever, people are recording, the message spreads, and your name becomes associated with genocide. The average person may not fully believe it, but because of number 1, they may be hesitant let their own names be tainted because of someone they support
There’s a decent number of large state actors (most of the non-western world and even some western states) who actually agree with the activists this time.
I don’t know if this is true for Austria, but I’ve heard that for West Germany, they tried to atone for their guilt in the Holocaust by fully supporting Israel, and any criticism of this policy is looked at as antisemitism.
It’s an artificial guilt especially in West Germany. If they had any guilt then they would not be cheerleading another genocide.
Exactly. Germany supports this genocide precisely because they learnt nothing from the Holocaust apart from how to run an 80 year PR campaign and assuage their own cultural guilt instead of addressing the root causes.
It’s the liberal way of accommodating fascism
Germans have learned that the Holocaust was a ‘dirty’ thing and they are ashamed to have dirtied themselves and their home by committing it on european soil.
Now they focus on deportations, weapons exports and training foreign militants. The barbarians have joined the empire and become ‘civilized’.
Honestly I think it has much less to do with their guilt from the holocaust, and way more to do with keeping fascism, white supremacy, and western settler-colonialism alive and well into the 21st century.
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The absolutely most charitable view is basically that, yes, but they’ve done so while never, ever truly addressing the underlying and material issues (basically every German institution has been riddled with unpunished Nazis allowed to hold onto their beliefs). But even if one takes that view, it’s a strategy that has been pretty disastrous and counter-productive. This excellent article about how supposed Holocaust guilt as a national identity has become a twisted, toxic, and essentially racist tool of exclusion and whiteness is worth a read.
Personally I’m more cynical. I don’t see most of Germany’s supposed guilt and public awareness raising about the horrors of the Holocaust as much more than an 80 year PR campaign designed to reintegrate themselves with the white powers that were on the other side of the war and avoid being a pariah state. I think that the majority of Germans simply wanted to turn away from the horrors that they shared at least some small blame for and as a result turned a blind eye to the fact that German business, public institutions, and government was still riddled with unpunished, unrepentant fascists. And that those very fascists, with the defacto support of useful liberals as always, worked hard to disguise or rebrand white supremecy for the rest of the 20th century.
The Germans that did the Holocaust didn’t regret anything other than losing the war. The “culture of atonement” is a modern day invention. It’s revisionist history.
Hard agree.
A minor point of clarification: the former FRG allowed Nazis into every institution and basically let former Nazis be full participants in society. The former GDR was much, much more thorough in dealing with Nazis and did not let them anywhere near institutional power and influence.
Oh completely. One of the many reasons the wrong Germany won. I meant the FRG and German state since the wall came down.
AFAIK the Austrian way of dealing with the Holocaust is to tell themselves a story about how they were simply victims of the big bad Germans as well.
I struggle to think of any other issue that the public opinion is so out of step with the position of the people in power.
We really are seeing what the limit of
that exists in the west.frozen pumpkin?
Freeze peach
Yeah, the austrian trots actually have solid and good positions. They have been hard at work since 07.10 to educate people on Palestine, and have been solid in their solidarity the whole time. I disagree on other matters with thwm, but rn, they are doing good work in my opinion.
was just about to say, i clown on trots a lot, but most of them that are serious, especially these folks, are still infinitely better than a bernie demsucc. facing state violence just for expressing solidarity with palestine is both an insane reality and also importantly consistent work.
They are part of the IMT, which is the only Trot party that I read. Their internationalist line is pretty solid, since they consider the USA to be the biggest, most dangerous Imperialist power.
my only beef is that they take every opportunity to demonise the USSR and suck off Trotsky, and I think it’s really funny in the UK that it took them over 30 years and several additional succdem purges to get them to give up entryism like their former comrades in the CWI
I still subscribe to the paper though cause you gotta support whatever Left media there is
They are at least very well read, you can talk about the USSR with trots and have a productive and respectful discussion. Other groups that actually demonise the USSR(western rad libs), just insult you, and refuse to engage with any argument.
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I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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