Thank for clarifying, I believe I was responding to a general"Europe" comment, and I could have been more specific.
That is a good thing in my opinion.
While I find those comments revolting, they should be permitted - and certainly not worthy of any prison time. Also, their side of the story also claims they are not permitted to question anything about the holocaust (locations, numbers, methods...the normal things that historians change as new evidence is found)
Again, their side of the story is that they are certainly not given the same permits and protections as other demonstrators. They are only recently - with the rise of crime from the "refugees" - given more air time.
anecdote here - I was at a bar in Maui last year drinking with a German college professor. He was liberal on most issues and he was amazed that Trump was winning primaries...When he found out I'm an Army officer, we discussed Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria....and how much he hated the Bush doctrine.
When the topic of conversation came to the refugees, he got quite vocal and loud about what was happening to his country and felt like his people didn't get the chance to even vote on the option to let them in. And, then he whispered, "it's the Jews."
I was shocked he went there, but he went there. This liberal German college professor...
Wouldn't be better for the refugees and these host nations, if these refugees went somewhere in the Middle East? Why send them into a culture that obviously clashes with theirs. It doesn't seem fair to them - or those receiving them.
Despite the EU, there is no one Europe, so there is no "situation in Europe".
I'm not sure if you are aware much about the current governments in Hungary and Poland. I'm not saying it's a bad thing per se if the government is on your side, but in this case: Victor Orban is openly peddling anti-semitism and strong xenophobia. The Polish government is trying to follow in his footsteps. Hungary has been rounding up and imprisoning refugees, including children, in inhumane conditions. Orban is employing openly hostile language against refugees, claiming once again our European culture will be imperilled by their arrival and so on (“We may lose our European values, our very identity, by degrees like the live frog allowing itself to be slowly cooked to death in a pan of water”). There’s never talk about how Europe can help them, how we can accommodate them while trying to improve conditions in Syria or Iraq, only dog whistling and generating fears that somehow our delicate culture will be swept away and replaced by Islam once refugees are allowed inside. If you don’t want to be called racist, don’t argue in racist terms. Discuss the challenges, not some phantastical doomsday scenarios. Most refugees are way too tired to take away your religion or culture. Quite a number of them aren’t even Muslim.
As a German, I find the naiveté in this freedom of speech absolutism to be astonishing. I don’t expect you to understand my perspective. Maybe you will should the worst-case in the Trump scenario ever materialise. I hope it won’t come to any of that. Let me just recommend this essay as food for thought:
https://medium.com/@juliaserano/refusing-to-tolerate-intolerance-f24c1bff513f
Below a few passages:
A second point Fish makes — one which haunts many legal cases and debates regarding “free speech” — is that nobody would dare say that we are entitled to “freedom of action.” Sure, we generally have the freedom to do as we wish, but only up to the point where our actions infringe upon the rights and autonomy of others. I may be free to drive a car, but if I run through a red light, or drive way over the speed limit, or purposefully crash my car into a crowd of counter-protesters (as one Nazi did in Charlottesville), then most people would agree that I have crossed a line and should be sanctioned accordingly.
Given these facts, the only way that the ideal of “free speech” makes any sense is if we presume that “speech” is entirely distinct from “action” — that is, speech is imagined to be an entirely abstract collection of utterances and ideas that are incapable of directly harming other people or infringing upon their rights. And frankly, this view of speech is naive and flat-out incorrect.
We do not speak to simply listen to the sounds of our own voices. We almost always speak with intention, with the hopes that our words will have tangible consequences.
[…]
People often use speech acts to suppress other people’s freedom of speech. […] Throughout human history, dominant majority groups have often freely expressed hatred and bigotry toward minority and marginalized populations with the intended effect of silencing them and making it unsafe for them to peaceably assemble or have a collective voice.
“Hate speech” is a catch-all term to describe language that promotes hatred or hostility toward people based upon their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and possibly other characteristics.
[…]
The standard free-speech-absolutist response to hate speech is to simply call for “more speech” to counter it. More speech can be helpful in situations like the recent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where far more U.S. citizens condemned all the Nazi slogans, symbolism, and slurs than supported them. Although it must be said that the turnout of hundreds of white nationalists, the firearms they brandished, and the terrorist act one of them committed, are likely to make some people hesitant to speak out against them in the future.
But what about the suppression of my speech as a young trans person? Back then, trans people had some allies, to be sure, but they (like us) constituted a tiny minority of the population. And I can tell you first hand that the “more speech” strategy actually does far more harm than good when greater numbers of people hate your minority group than accept you. In such cases, calls for “more speech” simply enable and promote hate speech against you, rather than mitigating it.
Calls for “more speech” also suffer from the misconception that we, as a society, are all in the midst of some grand rational debate, and that marginalized people simply need to properly plea our case for acceptance, and once we do, reason-minded people everywhere will eventually come around. This notion is utterly ludicrous. Prejudice and discrimination are not driven by rationality or reason. They are primarily cognitive biases.
[…]
Slippery slope arguments are generally considered to be logical fallacies — here is an academic paper detailing why. The TL;DR version is that slippery slope arguments presume that we are incapable of distinguishing between different things. […]
The free speech absolutists’ slippery slope argument typically goes something like this: “If we censor transphobic speech (or other forms of hate speech), then what’s next Julia? What if people start banning things that you want to say?”
For starters, who said anything about “banning” or “censoring”? Free speech absolutists love to toss around those terms because they evoke an Orwellian dystopia of massive government suppression, which I am most certainly not advocating. What I am proposing does not in any way involve “banning” or “censoring” or government intervention. I am talking about me (and potentially other people) making the personal decision to refuse to tolerate blatant and purposeful expressions of transphobia (and other expressions of hate speech). […]
Second, this slippery slope argument attempts to shift the conversation from whether we (as individuals) should refuse to tolerate transphobia (and other forms of hate speech) to some imaginary scenario where the “thought police” come after people for saying relatively benign things.
[…]
Most free speech absolutists have a huge blind-spot that they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge: They have generally lived lives where virtually everything that they think or say falls within the realm of tolerated discourse. Perhaps a few of their opinions or word choices are considered by some to be “unsavory” or “edgy,” but none of it dooms them to the status of abomination or pariah. So they are unable to see constitutive intolerance — the fact that some people and ideas (such as trans identities and perspectives several decades ago) have been excluded from that discourse a priori. Then, when the status quo eventually shifts, and things that people could previously freely say (such as making transphobic remarks) are suddenly met with protest, it feels like an attack on “free speech” to them.
That’s quite a bit. The whole essay is well worth a read.
So what are we talking about here? Well, what you are advocating is that in the country where there once was a thriving Jewish population of half a million, and where this religious group now has fewer members in the country than there are even Buddhists (by 1990, there were only some 30,000 Jews living in Germany, it’s now slightly over 100,000), the remaining members should again be intimidated by violent speech, and the denial that the crime that set out to annihilate them never happened. As argued in the essay, speech is not merely blabbing on. It has meaning, it has consequences, and more than 2000 houses (intended to house refugees) didn’t burn down over the past two years in the absence of speech, but because of speech.
You are equivocating vast conspiracy theories of “the Holocaust never happened”, brought forward by anti-semites, with new evidence gathered by historians about the Holocaust which, if anything, prove it was even worse. Denial of the Holocaust is not brought forward by people who are sympathetic with Jews (or any of the other groups of victims of the Nazis), but who are annoyed the job wasn’t fully done.
After 1945 and up until the late 60s, when the first post-war generation came of age and started to question why history always ended in 1933, why there was a wall separating a fifth of their country, why there were no Jews around even though there were so many Jewish people represented in German culture and academia pre-1933, and why their fathers were so terribly depressed and regularly hanging themselves, there actually was a strong attempt to just keep silent about WWII, the Holocaust and all the other inconvenient facts about the Nazi era. It had to be brought to the fore, and in order to protect the remaining Jews (and Sinti & Roma etc.) it was impossible not to protect them from hate speech, hate symbols and the denial of the atrocities committed against them.
“Their side of the story” has been pulled from their arses, to be honest. The last European country with a major reform in terms of the rights of assembly was Spain. Spain has been very hard hit by the recession and austerity politics. Youth unemployment soared. As a result, youths took to the streets to protest against the harsh austerity policies. To quell the protests, the then right-wing government introduced what has been dubbed the “gag law” imposing fines on any forms of peaceful demonstrations, and even hindering registered protests by threatening fines for deviations from the routes, or for vaguely defined “serious offences” which include, among others, protesting in front of the Parliament. Hidden away in this law was also this perk: “The law also consolidates the practice of summary expulsion of migrants from the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla to Morocco, restricting the right to seek asylum and violating the principle of
and the prohibition of collective expulsions.” (Source:
https://www.fidh.org/en/region/euro...pression-and-assembly-and-restricts-the-right)
Elsewhere, the right to assembly has not undergone major changes. It was possible to register for a demonstration even if it was critical of immigration. Cities would make sure the streets would be closed to traffic, and police would accompany your march to make sure everyone is safe. The city cleaning services will even clean up after them. And it doesn’t cost you a cent. I’m not aware of any country in Europe since 1990 where people were unable to voice their opinions, as long as they were peaceful, didn’t carry illegal symbols or contained speeches that called for violence or constituted any of the limited restrictions on the freedom of speech.
What people are complaining is that they cannot protest without being pestered by counter-protestors (tough luck) and that they cannot say the most outrageous things (i.e. call for the persecution and death of other people).
There is no reason to put refugees in quotes. The vast majority are. And as for the migrants, that we look down upon: Enjoying your smartphone? We don’t mind our luxurious lives. But as soon as the people start showing up who we have to thank for the low prices of our gadgets, we start criminalising them.
There’s crime by refugees and migrants. No doubt. About three percent of society are committing crimes. You know how many refugees have been found to be criminal? Around three percent. Wondrous.
Every third woman in a EU-wide survey stated they had experienced any form of sexual harassment. Suddenly, all sexual crime is being attributed to immigrants and refugees. The overall crime rates are not rising out of control anywhere in Europe. There are legitimate and important arguments to be made about sleepers among refugees, about different attitudes on sexual liberties etc. There are a lot of topics. And they are being debated at lengths. But what is not ok is to generalise, criminalise, and call for violence against people. That’s not expressing concern, it’s not trying to genuinely figure out solutions, and it’s not merely opinions that you might have, or might not have. Let’s discuss crime, but then let’s discuss it holistically. There’s no point in scapegoating.
Anti-semitism is not exclusively right-wing. There are many on the left buying into the same shit. It’s not surprising to me that you would encounter an otherwise liberal-minded professor who still thinks the Jews are the great evil behind everything. At the same time you will find conservative professors who will passionately defend Jews. We need to get out of the simplistic view that conservative automatically encompasses all these views, and being left-progressive is this fixed set of attitudes.
Of the 65 million refugees, 48 million are internally displaced persons (technically, they don’t even count as refugees). There are more Syrians displaced inside Syria, than there are exiles. Further, 97% of refugees are not getting any further than the neighbouring countries. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq is hosting 250,000 Syrian refugees, and more than one million Iraqis (these are IDPs). The population of Kurdistan is estimated at 5.5 million. The population of Lebanon grew by 25%. All of them Syrian refugees. Turkey and Jordan also host millions of Syrians. Kenya, Iran and Pakistan are completing the top five of host nations to refugees. Refugees are fleeing the Assad regime (ISIS is not as large a factor). Lebanon is factually controlled by Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a large factor in why Assad is still in power. It’s short of a miracle the refugees in Lebanon are still living in relative safety. Nonetheless, there is no shortage of stories of violence, intimidation and abuse of refugees. If you are openly anti-Assad, you can’t stay in the country.
The refugees are living in camps, in the streets, or in unfinished buildings. Only if they are lucky can they afford proper apartments. I’ve been in plastic tents in 50°C heat (122°F). Families of up to 15 are living in there, from toddlers to elderlies, all crammed together. Kids were playing pool billiard in one of these tents. I could barely stand it a minute in there, they are living in it. During winter, it gets muddy and freezing. Nonetheless, only a tiny fraction of these people are even thinking of going to Europe.
Those who do make it outside, are going voluntarily. At least in the sense that no one is putting a gun to their head (anymore). They are not being forced to come to Europe. They are attempting the journey, knowing that they will face police and border guards who are pushing them back (which is illegal), beating them, insulting them, and robbing them. Knowing that they will have to pay their life savings to a smuggler who will put them on a rubber boat to navigate waters this boat is not made for. Having imprinted on their minds the image of Aylan, yet seeing no other way than putting their own children in such a boat.
I would also not suggest it to anyone, but it’s not like they need my advice. The people who are attempting to come to Europe either are so unbelievably desperate that any “clashes” with a different culture cannot possible be imagined to be worse than what they are enduring, or the differences are not as stark to begin with. Despite all, exile is tough. Treating a traumatised person in the country of their origin is a challenge. Treating a traumatised person who on top of that is living in exile is a double-challenge. But despite all this, it is them who are adapting. It is not us.
The EU aspires to be the strongest economic zone in the world by 2020. That was quite optimistic even before Brexit, but it shows what potential the region sees for itself to begin with. It counts more than 500 million citizens. If two or three million refugees are threatening our prosperity, our culture and our safety, maybe we should be a little more surprised why the Middle East, Africa and Asia haven’t taken over world domination decades ago.
