As someone who doesn't live in Europe and never set foot in Europe, it seems like the #1 issue is immigration - both legal and refugees. Am I correct?
So, you need to distuigish between refugees that can’t return home safely because they are political activist, gay, or thousands of other reasons - and regufees who are, as the populists like to say “gold diggers” and are here to get a better way of living, regardless how they achieve that.
To distuigish that, you need to investigate each individual refugee, and that takes time and money by itself. Because you can’t keep them in a single building for months or even years at a time, you allow them to roam free. This however causes other issues, because there are bad apples in the bunch who then steal from the local population, or even commit atrocities against fellow refugees. However, the view of part of the public is that there isn’t sufficiently acted by the police or politics on this. And even sending them back costs money, in the form of airplanes and such.
I would put the slowing economic growth and aging population as more substantial EU-wide problems.
What's wrong with being "woke"? People can't tolerate the fact that some still want social justice as supposedly "less equal" people rush into the country? Yeah? Then they should just say it!
I just want people to openly express the racism in their minds without coming up with ridiculous terms like "anti-woke". Truth would be them saying "We don't want equality, we believe we are privileged and we want to live that", why is it so hard to say?
But no. We didn't want to throw away the government! We like equality, just not woke! This is all you hear.
We have democracy, not dictatorship.
What are you referring to? Read some history on being "woke", what part is problematic?
The zealots are problematic.
> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination".
This isn't even hidden. Advocates proudly declare: "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
Perhaps this is an instance of Goodhart's law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). Diversity is an excellent thing when it happens naturally as a result of equal opportunity.
But when diversity becomes the target, it inspires divisive race-based selection practices that people quite correctly fight against. That's surely a factor in the recent decline of the left.
Wanting to control your borders and reduce migration is not a „privilege“. Nor it has anything to do with racism.
How? Give an example.
> Wanting to control your borders and reduce migration is not a „privilege“. Nor it has anything to do with racism.
You can support reducing migration. That's nothing to do with being against woke or the point above.
Regardion migration, that's the vibe I got from OP. And I frequently see woke to bother about native and indigenous rights. But they shut silent about native europeans preserving their cultures.
The post above clearly states that anti-woke is being used as a cover for racism. Supporting controlled migration is no racism (by itself, to be clear). Probably we have very different opinions about migration but none of us need to be racist. Racist people are more likely to want to restrict migration but of course not all people who do so are racist.
It seems like the woke movement became something like Antifa, an imaginary enemy that supports everything that one doesn't.
Being alert to racial prejudice and discrimination doesn't mean you do or don't care about the European culture. It tells nothing about it. Like being a feminist also doesn't.
I see „alert to racial prejudice“ issues all the time. E.g. mass media writing Black but white. And all the „muh racism“ crowd is silent.
Woke seems to be all about hipocrisy tbh.
Antifa in my experience is much less hipocritical. More like they’re kids looking for trouble to went their frustrations in physical ways. Both types of skinheads, „antifa“ and „neonazis“ fit perfectly together.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/22/crisis...
"Germany is the only country where immigration is clearly in the lead when people are asked which crisis bothers them most when they think about the future. Estonians and Poles are focused on the war in Ukraine. Italy and Portugal see the economic crisis as their biggest threat. Spain, Britain and Romania are the countries where Covid-19 is seen as the biggest trauma. And in France and Denmark the climate emergency is considered the most important crisis."
So that leaves climate and immigration, but the question is very vague. "Changed the way you look at the future" doesn't imply you think there's a crisis or will vote for a party that treats the issue as a crisis. The Guardian and the organization they cite both think it does.
Middle-East refugees are coming here to EUROPE to escape OUR wars. Until we prosecute the war criminals involved, the immigration issue is not going to resolve.
Make Damascus Great Again, and you won't have Syrian orphans burning cars in Paris ... rebuild Mosul and Raqqa, and the immigrant kids whose lives were torn apart by those atrocities will have somewhere other than Cologne in which to party.
It is OUR wars which are forcing these much-derided immigrants to flee their nations and find refuge in the one places WE are not dropping bombs - our own nations.
Until we stop this, there will be victims of our wars attempting immigration to safer places .. our own back yards, of course.
The Western nations have a LOT of innocent blood on our hands, more so than any dictator you might care to identify as your hated enemy/Emmanuel Goldstein figure, used to justify further atrocities by our nations.
34 million refugees from OUR wars clog Europes borders, currently. That is the biggest issue we have to deal with: why are they there?
They are there because USA and and its allies in Europe have given themselves the false moral authority to destroy nations, cart blanche: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen - on the basis of a fundamentally racist ideology set in place by the oligarch ruling classes who seek to profit from these wars, and have DONE SO for decades now.
Yes, we are destroying nations in the Middle East on the basis of racist, intolerable policies set in place by known fascist oligarchs of OUR OWN MAKING.
We are NOT stopping genocide. We are actively funding and supporting them.
OUR failure to accept responsibility for this fact is why our nations are inundated with refugees and immigrants.
The criminal 5-eyes super-state is the worlds biggest violator of human rights, bar none.
There are plenty of lesser violators - Russia, Israel, Hamas - but by far the biggest fire is our own 5-eyes criminal endeavour: 34 million refugees from our wars.
5% of Iraqs population murdered in cold blood on the basis of lies.
Near endless destruction of formerly functioning states and cities of millions of people across the landscape.
A non-stop parade of propaganda designed to foment yet further war and atrocity. An absolutely dire and useless diplomatic corps .. the litany of OUR failures to prosecute our own war criminals goes on and on and on ..
1000 CIA-operated black-ops torture sites across the landscape, hidden from the prying eyes of our democratic institutions but not at all invisible to millions of other human beings whose lives were unfortunately started - and too often, cruelly ended - outside our Western morality bubble ..
If you, for a moment, consider that some foreign nation is inferior to your own, you are part of the problem.
Stop doing that. Instead, apply that critical thought to your own nation and DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OUR OWN WAR CRIMINALS.
Because we in the 5-eyes nations have a big, big problem with letting our war criminals have carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want with our military powers .. time and again, over and over again, they get away with it to repeat the act across the landscape.
This must stop. Public ignorance gets in the way of stopping this, and that is why we are all being distracted with hateful agitprop of other nations we believe are morally inferior.
WE are the morally inferior nation we need to be doing something about.