Thursday 2 January 2020

The Far-Right in 2020

In some far-off country, where the scars of the Civil War have been all but forgotten, a monster wakes. As happens in many other lands, the foreigners are chosen to shoulder the blame of all that has gone wrong for the poor (and the poorly educated). The foreigners take people's jobs (yet, at the same time, they are accused of living off unemployment and government handouts), they take our women and, look you, the crafty out-landers even stay open on Sundays.
Well, foreigners is a broad term: gypsies, blacks and Muslims, homosexuals and Jews, South Americans and transsexuals; plus in the case of that particular far-off country, the neighbours in the top right corner: the Catalonians.
The Nazis called all of their particular hate-groups: untermenschen. A term which diminishes them: sub-humans.
Simple answers to complex problems. Vox is born and within a short time becomes the third largest party in Spain's parliament. It talks of coup d'états (uh, we remember Franco's coup in 1936 and how that turned out, but they are thinking of something else) and of the 'Marxist threat' against the Motherland, and art the same time it encourages nationalism and flag-worship. Hatred triumphs over sanity and mutual respect.
In short, you can't have an us without a them.
A site called Maldito Bulo lists some of the bogus claims made by the far-right which are often found in the social media (the foreign children living on 2,000€ a month of tax-payers' money kind of thing) or printed up by the more inventive news-sites.
People ill-trained in logic believe this crap, and vote accordingly.
A leading black-shirt in 1950's Britain (a country where racism is sadly in ascendency) told my father that they didn't want intellectuals in their party, nor aristocrats, blacks, Jews, homosexuals and so on; instead they wanted 'the little people' to take their deserved place at the table - if down there somewhere below the salt.
In Spain there are lots of foreigners (we won't include the fifth columnist Catalonians, Basques, homosexuals and Marxists here), with somewhere around 10% of the entire population having been born elsewhere (4,720,000 in 2018).
Vox and its allies would have us blame them, hate them, imprison them and deport them.

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