06-26-05
Recently I was scanning a web message board where people from many nations come to post about their favorite political subjects and wrangle with like minded souls or friendly apostates over national and international policy. Something I saw there really caught my eye. It was an exchange over whose nation was more racist. Was it the USA or was it any of the various Western European nations?
An exchange there went something like this:
bigenglish: "Well, obviously the USA is more racist because you fellows have the Ku Klux Klan running around ruling the South."
USPatriot: "What? The KKK is a nonentity over here and has been for decades. Heck, we don't even have any Klan members in government yet you guys have whole parties that are based on racist sentiment like the BNP."
This exchange really gave me pause to think. The American poster was exactly right, of course. Certainly the USA has a history from just prior to the Civil War up until the 1960's where outright, self avowed racists have held high public office. Of course, the Ku Klux Klan had many of its members similarly holding office in the "bad old" days here in the USA between 1870 and the late 1920s or so.
But those days are long over. When Congress broke the back of the KKK in the 1920's and drove it's members out of high public office and back into the back woods encampments they came out of, it signaled the beginning of the end for mixing politics and racists in the USA. And by the time the Republicans helped lead the nation to pass the 1964 Civil Rights bill, it was becoming obvious that racism in politics was on it's last leg.
Today, even the slightest hint of racism sends politicians and politicians to be running for the high grass. It sends the voting public running the opposite way, as too. (Well, for MOST politicians, anyway. Klan member Robert Byrd not-with-standing)
No, today there really is no such thing as a racist in US politics. Not openly, at the very least.
However, in Europe that isn't true. No, it isn't true at all. Nearly every major European nation has a heavily Nativeist party that tends toward or is openly racist toward one group or another.
France has the National Front Party headed by the controversial Jean-Marie Le Pen who has been in hot soup for his comments for several years. He has spoken lightly of the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. He has also been harsh against AIDS patients. Additionally, he physically attacked another French politician for which he was heavily censured. He has even been linked to torture during the war in Algeria, though the government has issued an amnesty for such actions.
In England they have a group called the British National Party and it is often excoriated as a racist group even though they have had some small successes on the British political scene.
One of the BNP's leaders, Nick Griffin, It is reported to have told Wales on Sunday in 1996, "We must preserve the white race, because it has been responsible for all the good things in civilisation". Not the most "inclusive" quote in the world, it should be noted.
The BNP was also not very sympathetic to the Albanian Muslims who were the targets of ethnic cleansing during the war in Ksovo in the 1990s and one of its organizers was convicted of attacking a mixed race couple with a broken bottle in 1993. Also, various members about the country have been convicted of one degree of racial attack or another for over a decade.
In Belgium the controversial Party of focus is called the Vlaams Blok. In fact, it has become so controversial that the national Supreme Court ruled that the Party should be banned from national politics.
The Vlaams Blok has advocated removal of non-European born Belgian citizens as well as other separatist policies. One of their goals is that they want the Flemish sections of Belgium to secede from the state and form their own enclave.
These are just a few of the Nationalist, often racist definitely anti-immigrant parties that have formed across Europe recently. These parties, whether overtly racist or not, have been gathering places for racist members many of whom have gotten into trouble with the law for their racist actions.
The National Front Party in France, the BNP in England, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the Austrian Freedom Party of Jörg Haider and the Dutch Lijst Pim Fortuyn, named after the murdered populist who created the Party are just some of the Parties surging in Europe today. And every one of them are replete with racists, strictly nativist policy and certainly unsympathetic to minorities.
So, the European fellow on that message board was pretty far off the mark when he posited that the USA had the more racist parties today. Unfortunately, he was indulging in an all too common European pass time; America Bashing. He was also indulging in a typically European penchant for avoiding any sort of introspection.
By Warner Todd Huston
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