https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil...
Fascism is gaining in many parts of the world today. But the 'other' this time aren't Jews, they're Muslims.
As someone from a Muslim country, this comparison strikes me as facile and ignorant. It’s not just a group of people being viewed as “the other.” Even Muslim majority countries are facing challenges. In Bangladesh, the government is taking actions that people in western countries would probably liken to “fascism.” E.g. banning Muslim political parties. The problem these countries are grappling with is that they’re not just dealing with a group of people who happen to be different. There is a political ideology that crosses national borders and seeks to supplant existing institutions and governments. There is a lot of foreign money flowing into Bangladesh, to fund madrasas (schools) that teach hard line religion. Egypt and Turkey both fought these forces for decades, struggling to maintain secular, western institutions, and ultimately lost.
That is not to say that I don’t find Modi’s actions, or Bannon’s rhetoric, etc., troubling. I do. It’s just that there is a lot more here than you can understand through shallow analogies or the lens of western politics.
The choices for all immigrants are assimilation or coexistence, and the latter is a strong lightning rod for the anxieties of neighbors wary of anything different.
In 1933, there were an estimated 15 million Jews worldwide[1], 9 million or so in Europe. In Germany, with the largest Jewish population, they accounted for less than 1% of the populace. In India today, Muslims account for close to 15% of the population. According to wikipedia, they're very close to 25% of the entire world population. There may be some vilification going on, but when the other group is as large as that, I doubt you can expect a similar outcome or as much of a one sided narrative in the places where it's attempted.
1: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-pop...
> One-fifth of the Polish population perished during World War II; the 3,000,000 Polish Jews murdered in The Holocaust, who constituted 90% of Polish Jewry, made up half of all Poles killed during the war.[15][16]
Given that Germany at the time had an official policy of expanding into its neighboring countries, some with very high Jewish populations, your statement is at best misleading.
Yes, but those weren't the countries that had successful info campaigns against that sub-population, to my knowledge. It took Poland's defeat by Germany before Germany could enforce their own policies (developed in a nation with a much lower Jewish population). Indeed, your own source notes that in the pre-war period while there was increases anti-semitism, and some increased violence, there was nothing like what happened in Germany.
> Given that Germany at the time had an official policy of expanding into its neighboring countries, some with very high Jewish populations, your statement is at best misleading.
I don't think so, but I can see how you might think so. I believe I misinterpreted what the top level comment was trying to express, and as such my comment isn't really addressing that. I think because of this you're also inferring that my comment is meant to convey something it's not.
So, to clarify, yes, I believe Fascism is on the rise and targeted at Muslims this time. I don't think it's the same as what happened in Germany for the reasons I noted, which wasn't what was stated so it's a bit of a non-sequitur on my part, but it is where my mind went when I was reading it.
Yes, the Poles were not trying to kill all the Jews in Poland. But "othering" Jews in Poland was _very_ par for the course, as was violence directed at them, discrimination against them, etc.
-Genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar
-Ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs in China
Then there's just garden variety xenophobic polices like travel bans from predominately Muslim countries in the US to the electoral gains of various far right parties in Europe because of the refugee crisis.
Pretty wide spread there, but clearly fascism is on the rise.
Countries included in the travel ban:
* Iran
* Libya
* North Korea
* Somalia
* Syria
* Venezuela
* Yemen
They are also other with respect to minority influence or substandard representation in national and international affairs.
Uh... you mean if you ignore Poland, Romania, and the USSR?
> they accounted for less than 1% of the populace
From the same article you cited, it was 9.5% in Poland, 3.4% in the USSR (which had a larger population than Germany), 4% in Romania, 4.9% in Latvia, 7.6% in Lithuania, 5% in Hungary.
The fraction of Jews in Poland, or the other countries I menioned, did nothing to prevent them being seen as "the other" there, if you read some contemporary accounts.
Yes, I was mistakenly going from numbers presented for Western Europe.
> The fraction of Jews in Poland, or the other countries I menioned, did nothing to prevent them being seen as "the other" there, if you read some contemporary accounts.
As I covered elsewhere, I was (because of my own misinterpretation) approaching this more from a Nazi Germany standpoint, and trying to highlight differences from that. I think there's a reason why Jews were able to be scapegoated to the degree they were in Germany, and why it wasn't as bad elsewhere, and I think a lot of that is to do with relative population sizes. At ~1%, you can force your will on a people. At 15-25%, that's a civil war if you try, and there's enough people of that population that it's very hard to not have exposure to a degree that deflates some of that "the other" rhetoric. It's like if the same were applied to latino and hispanic people in the United States, which account for just over 16% of the population in the 2010 census. Not illegal aliens, but all people of that race. That's a really hard sell, because almost everyone knows someone personally that falls into that category that helps go against that narrative just by existing and having contact. I'm willing to bet it's easier in some areas of the world with similar percentages because the influx of Muslims is more recent and less established, but I'm not immediately convinced it's enough to get to what we saw in Germany.
If you want to restrict the discussion to a very vague "the other" that's less extreme, then I'm not really in disagreement. I do believe there are attempts to use Muslims as convenient scapegoats. I'm just not sure to what degree it works in a lot of places, given how many Muslims there are there (and to the degree it works, I think the number of Muslims means there will be a very different response from them if some group attempts to ramp it up).
I agree with your point that mass murder by the millions requires something rather special, not least a combination of (1) feeling that you are not killing people and (2) industriousness that is fairly rare. Plenty of people in Europe in the 30s thought that Jews were worth killing if it wasn't too much work, but weren't quite going out of their way to do it the way the Nazis ended up doing.
This calls to mind the recent debates over Bill 21 in Quebec, that banned religious symbols for many government employees. It was clear that it was motivated by anti-Islamic sentiment, but it was disguised as a move toward "secularism".
Very sure.
Originally, the National Assembly was not going to remove the crucifix that had long been hanging in their chamber. Only after some uproar did they backpedal on this. More recently, the Premier of the province made the mistake of being caught suggesting that all French-Canadians are Catholic. This effectively exposes the lie that this was about secularism, rather than a bunch of white Catholics being afraid of a growing minority.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/catholic-quebec-cali...
I just finished reading it, it took me the better part of an hour but it’s certainly worth the time.
Then there’s China and its minorities being swept into mass concentration camps. Reminds me, I wonder what is happening in Hong Kong right now
Edit: update on hk https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-22/hong-kong...
Would you count the Bushes as a dynasty? The Clintons (had Hillary won)? The Adams? A surprising number of Americans do not see being president as disqualifying your close relatives from ever being president.
[Edit: Trump has said that he would like a third term. I don't know of any Americans that are actually OK with this. A surprising number are still OK with Trump after he said that, but that's not the same thing. You can support Trump and still expect - even demand - that two terms will be the limit of his power.]
Boy, we must not hang out in the same bars.