Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 07, 2016 12:58 pm
by Karmamatterz » Sun Feb 07, 2016 1:49 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 07, 2016 1:53 pm
by Karmamatterz » Sun Feb 07, 2016 2:37 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 07, 2016 2:40 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 07, 2016 2:41 pm
Pegida Anti-Muslim Demonstrations Attract Thousands But Don’t Leave Big Impression
By: David Israel
Published: February 7th, 2016
7Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)7Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
A Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) march in Dresden, Germany, drew only 8,000 on Saturday, as well as 2,000 pro-tolerance demonstrators—who began their march in a Protestant service at the Dresden Synagogue. Similar anti-Muslim rallies in several other European cities also did not manage to turn into the massive events organizers had hoped for, several media outlets reported.
In Prague, around 5,000 people turned out for a march organized by two far-right groups. In Birmingham fewer than 150 supporters and 60 counter-demonstrators turned up. In Warsaw about 1,000 anti-Muslim protestors marched. In Dublin several hundred anti-Pegida demonstrators occupied their meeting and beat up Pegida supporters. In Calais about 150 demonstrators clashed with police when they protested outside the local migrant camp.
“Europe is now invaded by organized groups of people who want to dominate our continent,” said the leader of the Polish National Movement Robert Winnicki. “Central Europe is still in rather good situation, because there are not millions of Muslims here, as it is for example in Germany.”
In Amsterdam on Saturday night, riot police clashed with about 200 Pegida protesters, who were outnumbered by the cops and left-wing demonstrators. Several people were arrested.
Considering the fact that more than 1 million refugees came to the European Union countries in 2015, half of them Syrians, many of whom have gained a reputation for violence and sexual molestation of local women—Europe appears unperturbed so far.
by jakell » Sun Feb 07, 2016 3:33 pm
by American Dream » Sun Feb 07, 2016 9:30 pm
Autonomous social center Klinika attacked by Nazis
On 6th of February in Prague, the autonomous social center Klinika was attacked by Nazis after solidarity demonstration against Fortress Europe.
By a member of autonomous social center Klinika collective
On 6th of February following a day of protests in Prague both for and against migration in Europe, the autonomous social center Klinika came under attack last night. During the day’s demonstrations, a legal, permitted march against “fortress Europe,” organized in cooperation with Klinika's collective, came under attack by more than twenty fascists and neo-Nazis. They came from behind the march, attempting to cut it in half as it turned a corner. As the peaceful protestors in the march turned to protect themselves from the fascists, an overwhelmed group of police offers intervened and stood between the two groups. The neo-Nazis began throwing whatever they could find at the marchers, including rocks, sticks, and small explosive devices. The marchers defended themselves by returning the projectiles; eventually the much larger numbers of the marchers intimidated the attackers into retreat and they turned and ran away.
This group of fascists had been antagonizing people throughout Prague earlier in the day. I personally saw the same group earlier on public transport as I went to the rally. They were very aggressive with riders, including accosting one young woman as they tried to get her to come with them. She quickly left the train, visibly shaken, at which point one of them – previously speaking Czech – claimed she was a good “Deutsches mensch.” I got off at the same stop as them and we went different ways, I walked toward the beginning of the march, they went in a direction that would put them exactly in the position where they attacked the march.
Upon completion of the march – which included continuous antagonism from nationalist elements and a few more radical characters – people made their way back to Klinika at differing speeds? When I arrived, there was a small group of people that had just learned that the Nazis were coming to attack Klinika. We prepared as best we could, but quickly came under attack. As they attacked, we pepper sprayed them--which kept them outside long enough for us to lock and barricade the door. At this point they started throwing rocks at the windows, shattering the old medical clinic’s windows with ease. As we attempted to barricade the windows, glass and debris flew everywhere. One member of the Klinika collective was hit, creating a gash on his forehead. The rocks were followed by the Nazis throwing in a lit flare that sent sparks and flames all over, but the flare got caught in the shards of the multi-paned glass still jaggedly protruding from the window. We quickly put this out as the rocks stopped flying.
At this point, things calmed down for a few seconds as people throughout the building checked on each other. However, the calm quickly ended as one collective member yelled “Fire!” Several of us ran into the hallway the smoke was coming from and found thick smoke throughout the entire atrium--the entire downstairs cafe area was full of smoke, with flames leaping from the window at the entrance. The Nazis had apparently broken the windows downstairs in the same fashion as upstairs and thrown another incendiary devise in, which lit the drapes on fire. We were still able to put it out without much permanent damage to anything but the windows and furniture.
This was a brazen and coordinated attack on an autonomous social and community center in the heart of Prague that offers a free non-commoditized space for people of all ages and persuasions to take free language lessons, have a quiet beer, take their kids to nursery school, attend free lectures, and even attend meditation classes. However, the center has also been a hub for aid and relief for migrants, and therefore a target within the migrant crisis gripping all of Europe. The center acted as a staging area for relief goods going east and south for newly arriving refugees from the war-torn areas of the Middle East and Central Asia. Given the day’s protest event against migration in Europe and the escalating anti-Muslim rhetoric and political climate it foments, Klinika’s aid to migrants could easily be said to be the rationale for the attack – if there ever could be a rationale for such an irrational act of violence, or, better put, terrorism. For this was, by definition, an act of terrorism. This group of fascists attacked an innocent group of people providing a safe space for the community and aid for those in need.
Whether you agree with Klinika's politics or not, with migration or not, there is no justification – nor can there be – for the same type of terrorist attack that these fascists and their nationalist brethren portend to be against. If you hate Muslim people because .000001% are engaged in radical politics and use violence in an attempt to get their way, then how is anyone to condone the same thing within our own midst? Again, whether you agree with Klinika's politics or not, if this is a democracy in which everyone is entitled to their political beliefs, then you have to respect Klinika's political efforts and condemn this brazen act of violence against peaceful protestors and an autonomous community center simply trying to help people. Klinika exists in peace, and now – as 400 plus people have come to show solidarity today – Klinika survives and excels in defiance of violence and terrorism.
by jakell » Mon Feb 08, 2016 6:16 am
by American Dream » Mon Feb 08, 2016 2:05 pm
The Far Right Comes to Sweden
Swedish politics has taken a xenophobic turn with the explosive rise of the Sweden Democrats.
by Petter Larsson
A Sweden Democrats subway ad.
“We are on track to win,” Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the radical right Sweden Democrats, told supporters at the party’s annual November congress. “In recent weeks we have seen how the other parties, and especially the Social Democrats and the Conservatives have approached our standpoints on immigration policy at a furious pace. Essential parts of our immigration policy are now being put in place by the Social Democratic government.”
Four days earlier, the red-green coalition government had presented a new package of drastic measures to lower the number of refugees granted asylum in Sweden, in an effort to mitigate increasing popular support for the radical right. Perhaps the Sweden Democrats are not on track to victory, whatever that means, but there is little doubt they have now established themselves as the country’s third largest party, and wield enough power to scare social democrats into doing their work for them.
If you want to explain the dramatic sharpening of Sweden’s asylum policy, it is not enough to point to the small country’s acceptance of more than a hundred thousand refugees (mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq) over the course of three autumn months. Despite the pressure this has placed on officials — imagine the US taking in 3.3 million refugees in the same short period — the recent reversal would not have happened without the political threat posed by the Sweden Democrats.
The Social Democrats and the Conservatives have dominated Swedish politics for nearly a century. Both now face a challenge from a party formed only twenty-five years ago as a violent Nazi sect. The Sweden Democrats took a mere 1,118 votes in its first election in 1988, and did not clear the 4 percent hurdle needed to enter parliament until 2010.
This remarkable development undermines many traditional theories explaining the success of radical right parties, most of them drawn from the experience of European fascism in the 1930s. It underlines the necessity of developing a new understanding of the social forces behind radical, populist right-wing mobilization in Europe, built on a study of the past two decades, in which far-right European parties have grown by seizing new political opportunities rather than merely responding to worsening socioeconomic conditions.
Most political scientists seem to agree that the popularity of the radical right has something to do with the emergence of multicultural societies, globalization, deindustrialization, and other tectonic social shifts. But theories so broad cannot be proved empirically.
Leading Dutch scholar Cas Mudde gathered dozens of recent studies into his 2007 book Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe and found no clear correlation between high rates of unemployment, immigration, or crime and the electoral success of radical right parties. These parties are, Mudde laconically notes, “unlikely to find fertile breeding ground in countries that are (perceived as) monocultural, crimeless, and without political problems, but neither do such places exist.”
Over the past two decades, Western European countries have charted largely similar social trajectories. Most of them also contain reasonably large portions of the population — often 15–30 percent — whose views align with those of radical right parties. But only in some of them, and only occasionally, have these parties managed to achieve significant electoral success.
Contemporary Sweden would not seem like a natural place for a radical right party to grow. The economy is in good shape. Government debt is the lowest it has been in four decades, and growth has held steadily between 2 and 3.5 percent for many years. In just twenty-five years, GDP per capita has risen by more than 50 percent. Unemployment, around 7 percent, is below the European Union average and is predicted to fall further.
The 2008 financial crisis only mildly affected the country. In the first year, GDP plummeted by ten points and unemployment rose by two. Compared to most other countries, however, the crisis was neither very serious nor prolonged.
Racist, homophobic, and misogynist attitudes have been decreasing steadily for decades. In European rankings, the country usually places first in immigrant friendliness and racial tolerance. The public’s trust in politicians has recovered after a long slump, and today polls at the 1970s level of 61 percent. As in most Western countries, crime is falling. The number of murders per capita has halved over the past twenty-five years, and property crime rates have dropped steeply.
No changes in the standard economic or social indicators can alone account for the success of the Sweden Democrats. The party is like the bumblebee — able, against all physical odds, to fly.
The Culture Wars
What has changed, however, is the political landscape. In Western Europe, the dominant line of political conflict has long been drawn between a socialist left and a liberal right. In both rhetoric and practice, this line has been particularly bright in Sweden. The country may well be the most secular on earth, with religion long separated from politics. It also lacks seriously politicized regional divisions and is relatively ethnically homogenous.
Crudely put, political battles in Sweden have typically pitted proponents of an exceptionally strong social democracy, drawn from the working class and a large portion of the middle class, against a center-right bloc led by the Conservatives seeking to lower taxes and limit the state’s involvement in the market. For much of the twentieth century, the Right’s accommodation to social-democratic hegemony was so pronounced that American readers could take the Swedish center-right for US Democratic Party figures.
Historically, cultural issues have not featured in the country’s electoral politics. As in the rest of Western Europe, this began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, with the rise of the new social movements. The left-right conflict over redistribution did not, of course, disappear, but it was gradually transvalued by disagreements between authoritarian and liberal ideals on sociocultural issues.
The first new political formation to emerge in response to these developments was the Swedish Green Party, which appeared in 1980. Claiming to have moved beyond the left-right division, party members built their entire platform around “new” issues. They were the children of the cultural revolution, and their program came to color the entire political landscape, as other Green parties did in parliaments across Western Europe.
The radical right parties that have emerged in Europe over the past two decades represent the cultural counterrevolution. They mobilize on the same issues as the Greens, but for opposing ends, seeking to reestablish traditional values, hierarchies, and ethnic homogeneity. Structured by mutual antagonism, these two party families have together reshaped Swedish politics.
The changing priorities of the mainstream parties have been followed by a shift in their respective class bases. The Greens and other cultural-liberal parties find most of their support in the well-educated middle classes, while the right populist parties tend to draw votes from male workers and those with lower levels of formal education.
Like their counterparts in Denmark, Norway, and Austria, about two-thirds of Sweden Democrats voters have backgrounds in blue-collar professions. They are not members of the country’s poorest or most vulnerable populations, but those clinging to the upper rungs of the working class. The typical Sweden Democrats supporter holds steady employment, receives a near median income, and owns a house.
It could be seen as a tragic displacement of the class struggle. The same lines remain drawn, but the conflict is expressed in narrowly cultural terms. One might say the Sweden Democrats and other radical right parties have created a sort of identity politics for white men with low education, who seek to overturn their cultural, rather than economic, marginalization.
Into the Mainstream
The breakthrough of the radical right came comparatively late in Sweden. In the early 1990s, an economic crisis far more serious than the 2008 recession hit the country, prolonging the economy’s domination of the political agenda for the entire decade and leaving little room for new issues or parties.
When the crisis subsided, the political landscape had shifted. The ruling Social Democrats had been pushed to accept the neoliberal dogmas of low inflation, budget surpluses, privatization, and supply-side labor policy.
The Social Democrats’ right turn was the first great movement into the new political frontier. In the same period, liberal cultural ideals firmly took root in Sweden’s political foundation, and the Social Democrats began to rebrand itself as a feminist, antiracist, gay-friendly party.
The second great movement began in 2005, when the Conservatives took a big step to the left. Party strategists finally accepted that they could only rarely win elections with an agenda that overtly challenged the welfare state and workers rights. They busily jettisoned the symbols that associated the party with the upper class, even issuing a ban on pearl necklaces for their representatives. They scrapped the tax cuts for which they had always fought, started to defend existing employment security laws, vowed to preserve public-sector funding levels, and even declared themselves the “new workers party.”
They also made concessions to prevailing liberal views on cultural issues. After winning the 2006 election, the Conservatives’ popular minister of finance, Anders Borg, called himself a feminist. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt took every opportunity to make antiracist statements. In power, the center-right government took steps to continue dismantling the military, enforced protections for gay marriage, and tended to support what is often described as the world’s most liberal rules for migrant workforce immigration.
By the 2014 elections, this double movement had progressed to the point where the traditional right-left divide between the major parties on economic issues had become thinner than ever. The leading parties sounded, and largely acted, like clones.
The Sweden Democrats could now convincingly portray themselves as the only real opposition to a united establishment out of touch with popular opinion. They established immigration as the proxy issue through which the conflict would be waged. When the votes were tallied, the party had won 12.9 percent, cutting into the Conservatives’ constituency and in the process securing a pivotal role in parliament.
For Sweden Democrats voters, politics is no longer primarily about the economy. With no party to fight for their material interests, they choose the one that pursues their cultural priorities — that promises to stop “Islamization,” crack down on perceived freeloaders and criminals, keep gays marginalized, bash “politically correct” elites in Stockholm and Brussels, and, in short, “give Sweden back to us,” as the Sweden Democrats’ slogan puts it.
The process that led to this new status quo in Sweden, in other words, resembles those that have delivered sizable constituencies to the UK Independence Party and Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. Perhaps it is the beginning of a long-term Americanization of European politics.
The 2014 election returns initiated a sea change within the center-right. With the Sweden Democrats capturing larger portions of the electorate, the party’s ideological framework has been normalized, and is now reinforced even by those hostile to its agenda.
It was only ten years ago that many newspapers lifted a ban on the party’s advertising and began to publish members’ opinion pieces. Now, media outlets across the country make sure to include the party and its platform in opinion polling, and take pains to avoid describing it as racist or xenophobic.
A handful of influential papers have shifted their editorial lines so far that they now almost resemble party organs, employing a populist rhetoric previously consigned to the radical right. Immigration, pundits bleat, threatens the welfare state; immigrants create social problems and commit crimes; refugees carry a Trojan Horse packed with Islamic State terrorists; a preening elite of unworldly do-gooders rule Sweden; and so on.
Increasingly, local politicians spring up to champion legislation of an unmistakably right-populist cast. At the national level, the small Liberals party, in coalition with the Conservatives, has flirted with anti-immigration sentiment by proposing language tests for citizenship, a ban on Muslim veils in schools, and narrower asylum eligibility.
Today, 55 percent of Swedes say immigration is the most important issue; the environment ranks a distant second at 13 percent. This in a country where until just a few years ago no issue could compete with education, health care, or jobs. Swedish politics is now trapped in a vicious circle. The larger the Sweden Democrats grows, the larger immigration looms in the public’s mind, and vice versa.
Three of the four parties that make up the center-right parliamentary bloc have concluded that they can stem the leakage of voters to the Sweden Democrats by taking positions that resemble the new party’s, and now vie to outpace one another in a race to the authoritarian side.
Over the course of just a year, the country’s political discourse has so drastically transformed in both tone and content that the Sweden Democrats’ worldview no longer appears as part of a radical fringe, but rather a prominent fixture of the mainstream.
For now, all major parties still refuse to explicitly cooperate with the radical right. But if this balance of forces persists for even a few more years, the Conservatives will be forced to choose between irrelevance and coalition with the Sweden Democrats, which would likely guarantee a stable right-bloc majority for many years to come.
Next Moves
The radical right has not passively inherited its success, but diligently labored to create an opening for itself. At least three moves have been key: working to remove the stigma around the party, establishing friendly media outlets, and rebirthing itself through a concentrated regional campaign.
The biggest obstacle facing the Sweden Democrats in their quest for mainstream respectability has always been the party’s origin in the fascist and white supremacist movements of the late 1980s. Well into the nineties, party militants, many of them drawn from neo-Nazi sects, marched the streets in uniforms under heavy police protection. The party’s rhetoric and its programs dripped with unconcealed racism, antisemitism, and contempt for democracy, making it anathema to all but a few voters.
The effort to break ties to street fascism and make the party presentable to the electorate have long been the Sweden Democrats’ overriding concern — especially since a younger, more professional leadership took over in 2005. The Sweden Democrats’ ongoing de-demonization project resembles the one led by Marine Le Pen for its French sister party, the National Front.
Biological racism has been replaced with cultural racism, which casts non-Europeans — Muslims in particular — as militants pushing values incompatible with supposedly organic “Swedish” ones. Antisemitism has been almost entirely abandoned and replaced by a more politically viable Islamophobia.
The Sweden Democrats actively cultivate the counter-jihadist conspiracy theory that Europe is facing an invasion of Muslim immigrants, who in time will destroy the welfare state and Swedish culture. Muslim immigration, party leader Jimmie Åkesson once said, is “our greatest foreign threat since World War II.”
The party is still full of adherents who cannot keep their mouths shut, and the de-demonization campaign has not been easy. Setbacks have included brazen expressions of homophobia and calls by local representatives to “eliminate” Minister of Migration Tobias Billström and to grant asylum to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian fascist terrorist who murdered seventy-seven people in 2011.
In response, the party has expelled scores of members and, in September, even severed ties with its youth organization, which the leadership viewed as embarrassingly extreme. It has managed to project an image of the party as not totally unblemished by racists and extremists, but now in the hands of a leadership doing all it can to clean out such odious elements.
De-demonization has also entailed a broadening of policy and ideology. The party has dropped several demands proven to be unpalatable, such as deporting naturalized foreign-born residents and reintroducing the death penalty (abolished in peacetime since 1921).
In 2011, the Sweden Democrats designated social conservatism as part of its official ideology, a pillar equal to nationalism in the construction of its new agenda. In recent years officials have developed new programs for almost every area of politics and added to immigration new concerns, including “law and order,” military defense, pensions, and elderly care. The party has now proven itself able to appeal to voters far beyond its traditional core.
Parallel to the Sweden Democrats’ ingratiating efforts, the larger radical right movement has established countless new internet propaganda channels. Most important are a few websites for daily news and commentary from a radical right perspective, most of them amateur blogs only recently professionalized. Together they reach several hundred thousand readers every week, a figure on par with that of the major broadsheets.
The radical right is well on the way to establishing a public sphere of its own, in which adherents can find their beliefs reinforced without challenge and budding fascists can be recruited. Since these outlets are officially independent from the party, Sweden Democrats representatives can reap the benefits while dissociating themselves from any crimes or distasteful transgressions committed by extra-party actors.
The final noteworthy move is the canny strategy the party adopted in the early 2000s. The Sweden Democrats entered the decade mostly unknown, financially weak, and still stigmatized by its association with the extreme right. It chose to concentrate its meager resources on the southern region of Skåne.
The area was well known for a receptiveness to fascist traditions reaching back to the 1930s. More importantly, there were already a number of small protest parties, many of them outspokenly xenophobic, with representatives in local governments. Some of these parties were persuaded to fold themselves into the Sweden Democrats, others joined them in alliances, and the rest were simply outcompeted.
In 2006, while the party only received 2.9 percent in the national elections, it conquered seats in one local government after another in Skåne, often with more than 10 percent of the vote. In the rundown, industrial town of Landskrona, the party took 22 percent.
These regional victories granted the party several million krona from the country’s tax-financed campaign system. More importantly, the party had proven itself a real political force, and its success occasioned sustained media debate. Skåne, and Landskrona in particular, became a national advertisement for the far right.
Nine years later the party attracts comparable levels of support nationally, counting more than 19 percent in opinion polls.
If the Left fails to halt their momentum, we may very well witness the greatest transformation of Swedish politics since the breakthrough of the Social Democrats in 1911. And it is a truly horrible one.
by American Dream » Mon Feb 08, 2016 10:34 pm
On the Racist Attacks in Stockholm (January, 2016)
February 8, 2016 by Beyond Europe
On the weekend of the 29-30th January a lynch mob roamed through the streets of Stockholm. A mob whose goal was to intimidate and beat dark-skinned young people gathered around the Central station and the central Sergel Square – places where Moroccan street children are frequently present. The black-clad mob would prove to consist of football hooligans from two of Stockholm’s hooligan firms, Djurgårdens Fina Grabbar (DFG, Nice Guys of Djurgården) and AIK’s Firman Boys (Firm Boys).
It is extremely rare that Swedish football firms unite across club borders. It is also extremely rare that firms take positions on political issues and participate in political manifestations. Yet it was exactly what happened this weekend. First was the Friday hunt for Moroccan street children, followed the next day by participation in the so called “People’s demonstration”, a demonstration organised by the followers and comment section of the hate-site Avpixlat. At the manifestation the hooligans and right-wing extremists from, amongst others, Nordic Youth placed themselves as a guarding block between Sweden Democrat sympathisers and the anti-racist counter-demonstration. A massive police operation prevented hooligans from attacking the anti-racists. When the media reported on the weekend’s events, the hooligans presence was described as a tail to the nationalist organisations. In fact, the situation was the opposite. The initiative for this weekend’s “hunt for street children and commies” was instead organised directly from the football firms.
When the sexual abuse on New Year’s Eve in Cologne became known, rightwing extremist websites began calling for the formation of vigilante committees that would patrol the streets in search of unaccompanied refugee children. The topic is of immense strategic importance to the extreme right movement. They have been spreading an image of an extensive media blackout of asylum seekers crime, that the police forces have lost control of the situation and that feminists are uninterested in raising the issue of migrants sexual abuses against women. In addition, the alarmism from politicians and editorialists about a “refugee crisis” that is threatening to become a “system collapse of the Welfare state” played right into the hands of extremists. In the flyer that was handed out for Friday’s patrols argued that “The judicial system has given a walkover and the social contract is thus broken.” Thus, a different kind of violent capital needs to come in.
by American Dream » Fri Feb 12, 2016 12:49 pm
Your life ends here
Another day, another report of deaths at the borders. On Saturday, two women froze to death in the Bulgarian mountains. One of them was a teenage girl. This mountain pass is the way of desperation, for people who can not afford the death boats to Greece.
People subject themselves to this misery and this fatal risk because it offers them the one thing that matters: getting closer to safety, stability and a new chance at life.
This possibility is now rapidly being eroded. Only three nationalities still have it, and even they will only be allowed to stay in Europe while their “home” is suffering war. Then they have to go back. Their possibility of family reunification, which has allowed relatives of healthy young adults to join them later via safe routes, is being restricted. Fences are being built, pushback agreements signed and camps, which no person should ever have to live in, are being proposed as an endpoint for the refugee trail.
Thus everything is brought back to normality. Arabs stay in Arabia, Africans in Africa, and Europeans can again pretend they’re not racist by throwing money at refugees over the five-meter razor-wire fences. People fleeing war will again be portrayed as impotent beggars, not as autonomous subjects that are free to move on their own terms. Freedom of movement will again be reserved for the people who only move if they want to, but never have to. It will again become our luxury product.
Resistance to this apartheid has mostly been offered by the migrants themselves. Ever since thousands of refugees, fed up with delays and blockages, ran across the Macedonian border last August, they have been the dominant force in the course of events.
Since then, hundreds of thousands have made it through borders that kept them from realizing their dreams, and they’re still coming. It is an achievement that decades of European open-border activism could only dream of. But now that such a force has entered the stage, our activism has taken an unexpected turn. Instead of fierce battles for freedom of movement, we have directed our attention at providing food, clothes, shelter. Things to make it more bearable to be stuck somewhere. For the first time in decades, the European public has its eyes on the consequences of border politics, but the drama has been focused on the beaches rather than the fences. Where are the lock-ons, sit-ins, roadblocks, black blocs, banner drops and paint bombs? Where are the protests, political appeals and actions? The European public’s attention is waning, the state’s actions are growing more determined, and still we’re mostly providing the refugees and the public with feel-good activism.
Obviously, food and clothes are important. But they are not what we are being asked for. We are being asked: how can we get to Germany? This, the ongoing possibility of movement, is the all-important point that no amount of soup will resolve. It is also the point that the state is now clearing up all on its own, month by month, by chopping up and regaining control of the Balkan route.
The political activism has largely been left to migrants – and it’s been impressive: They’ve marched to the border against police orders, attacked fences, protested against detention while in prison and blocked roads when they’ve been kept stuck. In the prison at Corinth, two Moroccans even tried jumping out of a window to make a run for it. They broke their legs and got apprehended. When brought before a judge, they named bad food as one of their grievances. The food handler got changed as a result. They now face deportation.
Their case reminds us of two things. Firstly, change comes in small steps. We won’t open all borders with One Big Action – but we do need to start somewhere. There are fences, prisons, camps and government offices all around, offering opportunities for protest and direct action. There are companies, essential to the functioning of refugee segregation, that specialize in separating nationalities by listening to their accents. These methods and practices have to be protested, one by one, to resist their ever harsher use.
Secondly, the Moroccans’ fate reminds us how easy and risk-free it is for us to protest. We are not at risk of being deported into the cold, hard hands of a repressive regime. We have experienced protesters and activists in our ranks and passports that give us significant political freedoms. It is essential that we use them, not just for migrants, but for our own society’s sake. A society that kills people at its borders, segregates them, makes them drown and freeze to death, a society that resolves a mass movement of people fleeing war by storing them in containers for years, is a society that breeds evil. It is imperative that we resist it.
by American Dream » Mon Feb 15, 2016 12:46 pm
The far-right demonstration in Stockholm on Saturday that grabbed global headlines.
Published: 01 Feb 2016
Swedes tell racists: 'We are not your women'
Swedes are hitting back following a series of far-right violent marches over the weekend which targeted asylum seekers and migrants.
Swedes took to social media to hit back after violent far-right groups attacking refugee youths in Stockholm over the weekend handed out flyers and posted online messages claiming they acted to protect “Swedish women”.
The hashtag #inteerkvinna (#notyourwoman) was trending in Sweden on Sunday, with women posting pictures of themselves on Twitter alongside messages saying “not in my name”.
“I'm not your woman. I don't want your protection. You're the ones making me scared, worried, angry and sad,” tweeted one.
“No racist will use me as an alibi to commit their acts of violence,” wrote another.
The campaign came in response to a series of violent weekend incidents in the Swedish capital which began on Friday evening when gangs of up to a hundred masked men marched through the city, beating up non-Swedes and handing out leaflets threatening further attacks.
The march, the most extreme reaction seen so far to the murder last week of social worker Alexandra Mezher, has been linked to football gangs and far-right groups.
According to Aftonbladet newspaper, men were distributing leaflets on Friday evening with the slogan “It’s enough now!” which threatened to give “the North African street children who are roaming around” the “punishment they deserve.”
On Saturday there were also reports of violence linked to an anti-immigration protest in Stockholm, where at least three people were arrested for assaulting counter-demonstrators after members of neo-Nazi groups and hooligans gathered in the capital's central Norrmalmstorg square.
Meanwhile, refugee teenagers living in the city's 16 homes for teens and underage asylum seekers arriving in Sweden alone without their parents were told to stay inside following the violence.
“It's of course sad that we have to do this. But it's still important that we put the young people's safety first,” Alexandra Göransson, social services manager in Stockholm, told the Expressen newspaper.
After Friday's attack the Swedish Resistance Movement, a neo-Nazi group, issued a statement claiming that the groups had “cleaned up criminal immigrants from North Africa that are housed in the area around the central station”.
“Swedish men and women deserve security in their daily lives and we therefore urge all others who see problems to follow in our footsteps, both in Stockholm and in other locations around the country.”
by 82_28 » Mon Feb 15, 2016 1:10 pm
by tapitsbo » Mon Feb 15, 2016 5:22 pm
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 176 guests
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
Site design by Likely Arts based on "Deluxe" by Artodia.
