European parliamentary elections held from Thursday to Sunday show a marked shift to the right across the Continent. Both moderate and far-right parties made substantial gains.
It didn’t matter if the right wing was in government or opposition. Across the whole continent, the right did well, and the left lost out. Leading historians worry that these election results could contain a grave warning for Europe.
David Kynaston, research fellow at Kingston University and author of Austerity Britain, says (emphasis mine throughout):
As Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, said of Stalinism in her book Hope Against Hope, “Don’t think it can’t happen to you.” There are definite parallels between Germany in the prewar years and now, most obviously the economic crisis that sparked mass unemployment. The Wall Street crash took place in 1929, but it wasn’t until January 1933 that Hitler became chancellor of Germany; I would suggest that we are a long way from seeing the worst of our own economic crisis, and if we date the start as being September 2008, then we still have a while to go in which the far right could gain a stronghold.
More worryingly, the recession has been accompanied by a rise in populism and a loss of faith in democratic politics; the sort of people who, a generation ago, did not used to be cynical about politics now are. Worse still, people are not just indifferent to politics, they are ignorant about it: The level of hostility to intellectualism in this country is deeply depressing.
Richard Overy, professor of history at Exeter University and author of The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, says he is mainly worried “about the drift to the right in the rest of Europe [other than Britain], where the mood is fearful, anti-immigrant, anti-Islam and deeply hostile to the left. Europe clearly feels embattled because of factors such as terrorism and the rise of China, and has been moving to the right for some time.”
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You may disregard this as being a 'conspiracy theory' or 'right wing' propaganda, I am sure you can twist it. Fact remains that this observation is relatively nuanced and holds a great deal of the truth.
Relating it back to this article, possibly a drop of water in a bucket that is slowly starting to overflow. God forbid this day comes. Therefore, acknowledge the problem now, and see how to deal with this without having to go through a period of political dominance of extreme right/left.
[Quote] The Trumpet....
European parliamentary elections held from Thursday to Sunday show a marked shift to the right across the Continent. Both moderate and far-right parties made substantial gains.
It didn’t matter if the right wing was in government or opposition. Across the whole continent, the right did well, and the left lost out. Leading historians worry that these election results could contain a grave warning for Europe.
David Kynaston, research fellow at Kingston University and author of Austerity Britain, says (emphasis mine throughout):
As Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, said of Stalinism in her book Hope Against Hope, “Don’t think it can’t happen to you.” There are definite parallels between Germany in the prewar years and now, most obviously the economic crisis that sparked mass unemployment. The Wall Street crash took place in 1929, but it wasn’t until January 1933 that Hitler became chancellor of Germany; I would suggest that we are a long way from seeing the worst of our own economic crisis, and if we date the start as being September 2008, then we still have a while to go in which the far right could gain a stronghold.
More worryingly, the recession has been accompanied by a rise in populism and a loss of faith in democratic politics; the sort of people who, a generation ago, did not used to be cynical about politics now are. Worse still, people are not just indifferent to politics, they are ignorant about it: The level of hostility to intellectualism in this country is deeply depressing.
Richard Overy, professor of history at Exeter University and author of The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, says he is mainly worried “about the drift to the right in the rest of Europe [other than Britain], where the mood is fearful, anti-immigrant, anti-Islam and deeply hostile to the left. Europe clearly feels embattled because of factors such as terrorism and the rise of China, and has been moving to the right for some time.”
______________________________________________________________
You may disregard this as being a 'conspiracy theory' or 'right wing' propaganda, I am sure you can twist it. Fact remains that this observation is relatively nuanced and holds a great deal of the truth.
Relating it back to this article, possibly a drop of water in a bucket that is slowly starting to overflow. God forbid this day comes. Therefore, acknowledge the problem now, and see how to deal with this without having to go through a period of political dominance of extreme right/left.