I don't understand what everyone is so surprised about. We have our own bigots, hell, one of our national parties makes no bones about catering to them. Passing civil rights legislation and publicizing the evils of segregation and bigotry has not shamed our own racists into changing their ways. What stopped the most virulent hate crimes in this country was when the criminal justice system stopped protecting the perpetrators. The hatred and bigotry is still there.
Anyone who thought that the Holocaust would have shown the Europeans that bigotry and prejudice and racism is wrong was just fooling themselves. Nothing has changed, other than they do not have the Germans to put their nativist hatreds into practice. One should not forget that in nearly every nation the Germans invaded, it was the locals who rounded up the people that the Germans wanted to deport to the concentration camps. (Only one occupied nation actively stood against the Holocaust: Denmark.)
People don't change that quickly. The rise of the
This isn't surprising to any of us who've watched European race relations over the years. Brits love to have a spot of Paki-bashing between cricket matches, German skinheads love assailing random Turks they encounter on the streets, and Algerians in France have been denied French citizenship even though they've lived there for close to 50 years now ever since they fled Algeria in the wake of France's disastrous war there. Europe is a profoundly ethnocentric and racist continent and usually don't even try to hide it -- e.g., your resume' has to have a photo on it in Europe so they can make sure you're not some wog trying to pretend to be a real Englishman, and racial discrimination is *not* illegal in most of Europe.
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Sad Facts Penguin