The Radical Camp

11-12-2017

The Radical Camp

[caption id="attachment_19303" align="alignleft" width="300"] (Source: Reuters)[/caption] Yesterday, tens of thousands of Poles marched in Warsaw as many "chanted “fatherland,” carrying banners that read “White Europe,” “Europe Will Be White” and “Clean Blood.”"

"The Radical Camp’s followers argue, on their social-media accounts and in their literature, that the influx of Syrian refugees into Europe is part of a conspiracy driven by Jewish financiers, who are working with Communists in the European Union to bring Muslims into Europe, and with them, Shariah law and homosexuality. The group has regularly held events to mark a 1936 pogrom against Jews. Its symbols were displayed on a banner that appeared over a Warsaw bridge, reading: “Pray for Islamic Holocaust.”... “This march is just an expression of a bigger social phenomenon, which is definitely very troubling, and is the growing acceptance of extreme nationalism and xenophobia among young people in Poland,” said Rafal Pankowski, a political-science professor at private university Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. “It is a contrast: Polish parents and grandparents are paradoxically more liberal than their young.”

Form more information visit: https://www.wsj.com/articles/polish-nationalist-youth-march-draws-thousands-in-capital-1510429006

The Australian Plan

The one issue that unites the rising nationalist, neo-fascist, and far-right parties around the world is the influx of foreigners including immigrants, illegal immigrants, and refugees. Sasha Polakow-Suransky has an exceptionally reported essay on the way European nativist parties have modeled their anti-immigrant and anti-refugee criticisms on Australia's refugee policy.

"In October 2015, six weeks after Tony Abbott was deposed as Australia’s prime minister in a fit of intraparty backstabbing, he arrived in London to give the Margaret Thatcher memorial lecture at Guildhall. Standing before an audience of Conservative party luminaries, he praised the Iron Lady before launching into a spirited defence of Australia’s controversial immigration policy. According to Abbott, his government’s harsh measures – forcibly turning around refugee boats to prevent them landing, and sending asylum seekers to detention camps on remote Pacific islands – had ended the arrival of unwanted migrants in Australia. After a summer when more than a million asylum seekers had streamed into Europe, Abbott lectured the assembled Tories about the perils of loving one’s neighbour as oneself, calling it a “wholesome instinct [that is] leading much of Europe into catastrophic error”. Due to “misguided altruism”, Europe was weakening itself, argued Abbott, and the only way to reverse the tide, he insisted, was emulating Australia’s policy. Whether those turned away died in another country’s waters or back in the countries they initially fled did not figure in his equation. By removing images of boats capsizing off Australia’s shores from local television and ensuring that more migrants seeking asylum did not arrive in the country, his work was done. Nor was he bothered by the fact that the offshore camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea were still operating, at a cost of billions of dollars. The core of Abbott’s argument was that refugees seeking asylum were simply trying to cheat the system by travelling to wealthier western countries. “In Europe, as with Australia,” he said, “people claiming asylum – invariably – have crossed not one border but many; and are no longer fleeing in fear but are contracting in hope with people smugglers. However desperate, almost by definition, they are economic migrants,” – even though many asylum seekers arriving in Europe and Australia have passed through countries that are unsafe or do not offer asylum because they are not party to the UN refugee convention. “Our moral obligation is to receive people fleeing for their lives. It’s not to provide permanent residency to anyone and everyone who would rather live in a prosperous western country,” said Abbott. He denounced the EU and Nato rescue missions in the Mediterranean as too kind. For Abbott, rescuing migrants on capsizing boats was “a facilitator [for migration] rather than a deterrent”. But as the rest of his speech made plain, the real allure of Australia’s offshoring policy was ideological, not simply logistical. For Abbott, the seas surrounding Australia and Europe were fronts in a new battle, in which desperate asylum seekers appeared as an invading horde threatening western civilisation itself: “It will gnaw at our consciences – yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it for ever.” An anonymous Tory minister labelled the speech “fascistic”. Nigel Farage called Abbott “heroic”. Although it rarely makes the news, Australia’s immigration policy has become a beacon for Europe’s far right."

At the center of the Australian Plan is the denial that those desperate persons seeking entry to Australia are indeed refugees. By claiming that most of the asylum seekers are actually economic migrants seeking to jump immigration queues, Australia justifies a brutal strategy that detains all who claim refugee status in large off-shore internment camps. This is the new model for the right around the world. The Australian plan is easy to criticize, but alternatives are hard to find. In a world of nation-states, the first right of the state is control over borders and immigration. The great difficulty with refugees is that there are only two solutions to the refugee problem: repatriation or naturalization. Repatriation is impossible as the refugees are not welcome back in their countries and international law rightly forbids refoulement, sending refugees back into a dangerous situation. And naturalization fails when confronted with masses of refugees in numbers unmanageable. The result of this “problem” is the rise of mass internment camps for refugees. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that refugees are, “the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics.” She saw that refugees had become a class of illegal aliens, people living in countries yet deprived of citizenship, the right to work, and the right to residence. “The stateless person, without the right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law.” And for such people who are in essence “illegal” residents, the temptation for nation states is to follow the inexorable logic of illegality and submit refugees to the unimpeded authority of police?—?the creation of refugee camps that are concentration camps, that concentrate refugees in defined spaces where they can be controlled, a policed no-man’s land that exists between the two impossible solutions of repatriation and assimilation. The political danger of the rise of masses of refugees is that they would justify and normalize the increasing reliance on police and military forces in political life. Arendt saw with uncanny clarity the way that the arrival of refugees in a free country could, quickly, lead that country down the road toward totalitarianism.

Form more information visit: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/12/how-europes-far-right-fell-in-love-with-australias-immigration-policy

The Resistance

Perhaps the best thing to happen in the last year of American politics is the rise of new political groups under the rubric of the Resistance. Judith Shulevitz takes the occasion of last week's victory for the Resistance to dig a bit into the composition of this exciting new American political movement.

"Probably the greatest misconception about the resistance is that it’s a youth movement. By an overwhelming majority, the leaders of the groups are middle-aged women—middle-aged white women, to be exact. A great many of them have never been involved in electoral politics before. Many never even went to a protest before they got on a bus to the Women’s March back in January. All this describes the make-up of my own Indivisible branch—even though it’s in Harlem. Skocpol found the same general demographic profile among the groups she is interviewing in “Trump country” for her recent research (which is largely white to begin with) .... Resistance groups usually revolve around “a pair of women who are friends,” says Skocpol. “Maybe they weren’t friends before, but they’ve become friends” since Trump’s election. Maybe they were in Pantsuit Nation, and when Clinton lost, they spent a month grieving, then went to the Women’s March. “One may be the charismatic one, and the other the nuts-and-bolts one,” says Skocpol. “They’re in touch all the time, they form a node that the others build around.” As parents and often churchgoers, they have broad networks of family and friends. Maybe they recently retired and have time on their hands. Their groups shrank a bit over the summer, but Trump’s belligerent tweets and reckless executive orders have served as a kind of reveille, rallying at least some of the troops back to the flag. According to conversations I’ve had or lectures I’ve listened to (including a webinar about a nationwide Indivisible “listening tour”), the big issues for the resistance are health care and gerrymandering, followed by dark money in politics, education, and the environment. (Voters in Virginia cited health care as their top concern in Tuesday’s exit polls, and Maine’s successful referendum to expand Medicaid suggests similar apprehensions.) Immigrant rights are on the list, although immigration activists tend to skew younger. On the whole, identity issues do not seem to be top-of-mind. Some of the women in anti-Trump groups in Trump country are “avowed progressive feminists,” in Skocpol’s words, but others see themselves simply as good citizens, and they resent national organizations coming in and trying to impose litmus tests of progressive values."

Form more information visit: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/09/year-one-resistance-research/