{"id":14312,"date":"2017-10-26T16:42:38","date_gmt":"2017-10-26T11:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/jwt2015\/?p=14312"},"modified":"2017-10-26T16:42:38","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T11:42:38","slug":"white-nationalism-is-destroying-the-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/studykit\/currentaffairs\/daily-articles\/white-nationalism-is-destroying-the-west\/","title":{"rendered":"White Nationalism Is Destroying the West"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"White<\/a><\/p>\n

On July 14, 2016, as French families strolled along Nice\u2019s seafront promenade, a Tunisian man driving a large truck rammed into a crowd, killing 86 people. A month later, the mayor of nearby Cannes declared that \u201cburkinis\u201d \u2014 a catchall term for modest swimwear favored by many religious women \u2014 would be banned from the city\u2019s beaches; a municipal official called the bathing suits \u201costentatious clothing\u201d expressing an \u201callegiance to terrorist movements that are at war with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the law\u2019s first victims was a third-generation Frenchwoman who was ordered by the police to strip off her veil while onlookers shouted, \u201cGo back to your country.\u201d Still, many French politicians and intellectuals rushed to defend the ban. The former president Nicolas Sarkozy called modest swimwear \u201ca provocation\u201d; Alain Finkielkraut, a prominent philosopher, argued that \u201cthe burkini is a flag.\u201d But what they presented as a defense of secular liberal values was in fact an attack on them \u2014 a law, masquerading as neutral, had explicitly targeted one religious group.<\/p>\n

When rapid immigration and terrorist attacks occur simultaneously \u2014 and the terrorists belong to the same ethnic or religious group as the new immigrants \u2014 the combination of fear and xenophobia can be dangerous and destructive. In much of Europe, fear of jihadists (who pose a genuine security threat) and animosity toward refugees (who generally do not) have been conflated in a way that allows far-right populists to seize on Islamic State attacks as a pretext to shut the doors to desperate refugees, many of whom are themselves fleeing the Islamic State, and to engage in blatant discrimination against Muslim fellow citizens.<\/p>\n

But this isn\u2019t happening only in European countries. In recent years, anti-immigration rhetoric and nativist policies have become the new normal in liberal democracies from Europe to the United States. Legitimate debates about immigration policy and preventing extremism have been eclipsed by an obsessive focus on Muslims that paints them as an immutable civilizational enemy that is fundamentally incompatible with Western democratic values.<\/p>\n

Yet despite the breathless warnings of impending Islamic conquest sounded by alarmist writers and pandering politicians, the risk of Islamization of the West has been greatly exaggerated. Islamists are not on the verge of seizing power in any advanced Western democracy or even winning significant political influence at the polls.<\/p>\n

The same cannot be said of white nationalists, who today are on the march from Charlottesville, Va., to Dresden, Germany. As an ideology, white nationalism poses a significantly greater threat to Western democracies; its proponents and sympathizers have proved, historically and recently, that they can win a sizable share of the vote \u2014 as they did this year in France, Germany and the Netherlands \u2014 and even win power, as they have in the United States.<\/p>\n

Far-right leaders are correct that immigration creates problems; what they miss is that they are the primary problem. The greatest threat to liberal democracies does not come from immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on the inside who are exploiting fear of outsiders to chip away at the values and institutions that make our societies liberal.<\/p>\n

Anti-Semitic and xenophobic movements did not disappear from Europe after the liberation of Auschwitz, just as white supremacist groups have lurked beneath the surface of American politics ever since the Emancipation Proclamation. What has changed is that these groups have now been stirred from their slumber by savvy politicians seeking to stoke anger toward immigrants, refugees and racial minorities for their own benefit. Leaders from Donald Trump to France\u2019s Marine Le Pen have validated the worldview of these groups, implicitly or explicitly encouraging them to promote their hateful opinions openly. As a result, ideas that were once marginal have now gone mainstream.<\/p>\n

The trend is unmistakable. Hungary\u2019s ruling party has plastered anti-Semitic ads on bus stops and billboards; an overtly neo-Nazi movement won 7 percent of the vote in Greece\u2019s 2015 election; Germany\u2019s upstart far-right party, which includes a popular member who criticized Berlin\u2019s Holocaust memorial as \u201ca monument of shame,\u201d won 13 percent in last month\u2019s election.<\/p>\n

In France and Denmark, populist leaders have gone to great pains to shed the right\u2019s crudest baggage and rebrand themselves in a way that appeals to Jews, women and gay people by depicting Muslims as the primary threat to all three groups. But their core goal remains the same: to close the borders and expel unwanted foreigners.<\/p>\n

Cultural and demographic anxiety about dwindling native populations and rapidly increasing immigrant ones lies at the heart of these parties\u2019 ideologies. In America, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, worries about the impossibility of restoring \u201cour civilization with somebody else\u2019s babies.\u201d In Europe, the right frets about who\u2019s having the new German or Danish babies and the fact that it\u2019s not white Germans or Danes \u2014 a social Darwinist dread popularized by the German writer Thilo Sarrazin, whose best-selling 2010 book, \u201cGermany Abolishes Itself,\u201d warned that barely literate Muslims were poised to replace the supposedly more intelligent German race.<\/p>\n

The leader of the Netherlands\u2019 newest far-right party fears that Europe will not exist \u201cas a predominantly white-skinned, Christian or post-Christian, Roman-law-based kind of society\u201d a few decades from now. \u201cIf I go to a museum, and I look at these portraits, they are essentially people like me that I can see. In 50 years it won\u2019t be,\u201d he worries.<\/p>\n

France, more than any other country, has been the source of these ideas.<\/p>\n

IN FEBRUARY 2016, French right-wing groups descended on the town of Calais, protesting a huge informal refugee camp there known as the \u201cJungle.\u201d Members of the German anti-Islam group Pegida (the name is short for the German words for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) came, too. Demonstrators clashed with local policemen, and a decorated French paratrooper marching alongside them was arrested. A van marked with the logo of a medical charity aiding Jungle residents was set on fire one evening, and the group\u2019s volunteers had their tires slashed.<\/p>\n

A few months later, I met the leaders of a local anti-immigration group called Retake Calais. When I asked if they wanted to see the migrants leave town, they lamented that closing the camp \u2014 which has since been bulldozed \u2014 wouldn\u2019t help. \u201cThey\u2019re sending them to all the little villages in France,\u201d one of them told me. \u201cIn two years the villages will be dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the great replacement,\u201d his friend added, echoing the title of a 2010 book by the French writer Renaud Camus, which paints a dark picture of demographic conquest in the West. \u201cThey want to replace us.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Mr. Camus explains in the book: \u201cYou have a people and then, in an instant, in one generation, you have in its place one or several other peoples.\u201d He finds it scandalous that \u201ca veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture\u201d is legally considered as French as \u201can indigenous Frenchman passionate for Romanesque churches, and the verbal and syntactic subtleties of Montaigne and Rousseau.\u201d In Mr. Camus\u2019s eyes, groups like Pegida are heroic. He praises the group as a \u201cliberation front\u201d that is battling \u201ca colonial conquest in progress\u201d where white Europeans are \u201cthe colonized indigenous people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Le Pen, the leader of France\u2019s far-right National Front party, has a similar fear, and she sees birthright citizenship as the vehicle for replacement. Although she doesn\u2019t use the term favored by many Republicans in the United States (\u201canchor babies\u201d), she insists, as she told me in an interview last May, that \u201cwe must stop creating automatic French citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

This argument has a long pedigree. It can be traced back to the Dreyfus Affair, when the virulently anti-Semitic writer Maurice Barr\u00e8s warned that immigrants wanted to impose their way of life on France and that it would spell the \u201cruin of our fatherland.\u201d \u201cThey are in contradiction to our civilization,\u201d Barr\u00e8s wrote in 1900. He saw French identity as rooted purely in his bloodline, declaring, \u201cI defend my cemetery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s version of the argument is: if you have foreign blood and don\u2019t behave appropriately, then you don\u2019t get a passport.<\/p>\n

The notion of a Great Replacement has crossed the Atlantic and found an eager audience among groups who have long espoused similar white supremacist ideas. The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders warned in 2015 of \u201cmasses of young men in their 20s with beards singing \u2018Allahu akbar\u2019 across Europe.\u201d He labeled their presence \u201can invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year later, Mr. Wilders attended the Republican national convention, where he headlined an L.G.B.T. pro-Trump event along with the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller and the alt-right wunderkind Milo Yiannopoulos. Before he began his talk in front of a wall featuring photos of barechested men, \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d hats and a \u201cDon\u2019t Tread on Me\u201d flag, Mr. Wilders was introduced as \u201cthe hope for Western civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Calais and Charlottesville may be nearly 4,000 miles apart, but the ideas motivating far-right activists in both places are the same. When white nationalists descended on Charlottesville in August, the crowd chanted \u201cJews will not replace us\u201d and \u201cyou will not replace us\u201d before one of its members allegedly killed a woman with his car and others beat a black man; last week, they returned bearing torches and chanting similar slogans.<\/p>\n

Just as Mr. Trump has plenty to say about Islamic State attacks but generally has no comment about hate crimes against Indians, blacks and Muslims, the European far-right is quick to denounce any violent act committed by a Muslim but rarely feels compelled to forcefully condemn attacks on mosques or neo-Nazis marching near synagogues on Yom Kippur.<\/p>\n

Doing so might alienate their base. Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the newest party in the German Parliament, is adamant that his Alternative for Germany is \u201cnot the parliamentary arm of Pegida,\u201d although he did acknowledge in an interview that \u201ca lot of people who march with Pegida in Dresden are people who could be members, or friends, or voters\u201d for the party. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Gauland and Ms. Le Pen would never admit to being white nationalists, but they are more than happy to dog-whistle to them and accept their support.<\/p>\n

Those who worry that a godless Europe and an immigration-friendly America are no match for Islamic extremists have ignored an even greater threat: white nationalists.<\/p>\n

Their ideology is especially dangerous because they present themselves as natives valiantly defending the homeland. Because they look and sound like most of their co-citizens, they garner sympathy from the majority in ways that Islamists never could. White nationalism is in many ways a mirror image of radical Islamism. Both share a nostalgic obsession with a purist form of identity: for one, a medieval Islamic state; for the other, a white nation unpolluted by immigrant blood.<\/p>\n

If the influence of white nationalists continues to grow, they will eventually seek to trample the rights of immigrants and minorities and dismiss courts and constitutions as anti-democratic because they don\u2019t reflect the supposed preferences of \u201cthe people.\u201d Their rise threatens to transform countries that we once thought of as icons of liberalism into democracies only in name.<\/p>\n

By: SASHA POLAKOW-SURANSKY<\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On July 14, 2016, as French families strolled along Nice\u2019s seafront promenade, a Tunisian man driving a large truck rammed into a crowd, killing 86 people. A month later, the mayor of nearby Cannes declared that \u201cburkinis\u201d \u2014 a catchall term for modest swimwear favored by many religious women \u2014 would be banned from the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5285],"tags":[257,8438,1226,610,5889],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}