And my real name is? :)
lol :)
It’s hard to grasp how they are historical victims of Islamic imperialism. Are people who live in the Home Counties historical victims of Roman imperialism?
A little glib , Scott. Serbia and Bulgaria only gained independence from The Ottomans in the late 19th Century after the most bloody of repressions and lived as second class citizens for religious reasons, for 500 years in their own countries. In Macedonia it only ended in 1912 (I lived in Skopje for a few years). So it isn’t quite as simple as you are making out here.
I know how stupid this appears :) It really does you are right! But I assure you historical memory (often selective mind) is alive and well in Europe.
I know its dumb, I know it was centuries ago. But really these old wrongs are not forgotten. I would invite any fellow Europeans to contradict me. Sadly I doubt they will. We live with the ghosts of the past.
The memories in the Balkans of Ottoman repression is as recent as the memory of the oppression of Jim Crow and more recent than that of slavery in the US.
And I won’t even start to talk about difficulties caused by collaborations with the Nazis in their crimes in the 40s by the Bosniaks, Albanians and Croats (Catholic) during WW2.
It just isn’t that simple.
Yeah I got an earful when I was in Romania back in the 80’s. I doubt its been forgotten in the intervening decades.
@Navaronegun
You rightly bring up Nazi Germany which as you note was like throwing gasoline on an embered fire. That didnt help. Neither did the monstrous Stalin.
Yeah in the Balkans the Ottomans are remembered just as vividly and about as fondly as the Crusades are in the middle east.
Yes, I know the history. I’m not the one saying it’s simple. You don’t really have to reach for historical precedent to justify racism. In my experience, the historical precedent is not a necessary component.
Yeah you are.
If you know the history, then you know that statement is just a wholly reductionist statement and a false equivalency merely meant to say "“they are wrong” and need to “get over it”.
They may be “wrong” but there ain’t no just “getting over it”. So unless you want to dictate their domestic policies to them (and deal with the consequences of that), then they’ll have to be listened to and compromised with.
This much change can be unsettling. For most of human history, people have lived, worked and died within a few miles of the place they were born. But in recent decades, hundreds of millions of people from poorer countries have moved to wealthier ones. This reflects an economic reality. Rich countries have declining birthrates and need labor; poor countries have millions who seek better lives. But this produces anxiety, unease and a cultural backlash that we are witnessing across the Western world.
What does this mean for the future? Western societies will have to better manage immigration. They should also place much greater emphasis on assimilation. Canada should be a role model. It has devised smart policies on both fronts, with high levels of (skilled) immigration, strong assimilation and no major recoil.
Oh coitus, we forgot the Balkans!
That thing is so freaking hilarious. You made me take time from the Halftime show to watch the whole thing again, @Enidigm
If period dramas are costume porn for women, historical dramas are costume porn for guys.
A Time of Violence is a Bulgarian movie made in 1988. Made before 9/11, and even before the end of the Cold War, it shows a very jaundiced view of Ottoman occupation, as the Aga, a Janissary stolen under the devirshme system, exacts revenge upon his home village under the auspcies of following orders from the Sultan.
It’s a long movie, it of course fails the Bechdel test in every way, and the second half is basically fur hat wearing peasants getting tortured to death (with some bizarre love triangle stuff that goes nowhere), but it has some great period scenery and feeling. And if you turn to around 3:36 you’ll see (imo) by far the best Janissary captain ever in cinema. He owns that silly hat.
It’s a “good” movie in that it isn’t particular great cinema but a great glimpse of a historic period through the others eyes, not influenced by modern sensibilities.
I broke the link to make it visible.
Glad to distract! Which reminds me I need to check how Oklahoma did this weekend…/flips over to ESPN.
There’s another Bulgarian film on the First Balkan War I’ve seen somewhere. Also this is highly underrated. Great film.
I will always stop to watch that whenever it gets posted
Again, immigration is a red herring. Populism rises through the fearmongering around immigration, true, but in Europe, the countries with more powerful populist movements are systematically those with lower non-EU immigration (and immigration overall too).
They are also not the ones receiving larger new numbers (some of them are ports of entry, but the immigrants don’t stay).
For example, both Italy and Hungary are at the bottom of the list in immigrant population and yearly net immigrant intake.
Holy shit, you seriously think this is a legitimate comparison? First off; how long did it take before the conflicts between Irish immigrants and ‘natives’ ended? You know, like the New York draft riots where Irish immigrants went around killing black people. That wasn’t dangerous?
Second; unlike today there wasn’t any cultural reinforcement from the homeland beyond newly arriving immigrants. That’s one of the reasons why immigrant groups tend to cluster together so they can maintain their own values. In case of the Irish, as time passed they began to diffuse over the entire continent and prolonged exposure to ‘native’ values shifted their own culture to something that was compatible enough for conflicts to end.
These days, however, thanks to the digital age, distance barely matters. There’s an old joke here that when looking at an apartment building you can tell where the immigrants live by the satellite dishes screwed onto the balconies.
Of course—and this is the real issue—the people living in said apartments aren’t actually immigrants. Their parents, or even their grandparents, were. Yet here they are, still watching origin nation tv, speaking their origin nation’s language, adopting the cultural values of a nation they weren’t born in and only visit on vacations.
Added on top of that are nations like Turkey, which actively encourage this maintenance of their culture, as well as rejection of the culture of the host nation. So unlike the Irish in nineteenth century America, the process of cultural adaptation is far more fragmented. A part will adapt like the Irish did, but another part will not adapt at all. These people are locked into a culture that clashes with the one of the nation they live in and this is what creates all the problems right-wing parties are so eager to capitalize on.
Europe doesn’t have an immigration problem. It has an integration problem. All immigration does is add some extra fuel to a bonfire that has no problem burning on its own. Shutting it down will only cause new problems for no real gain.
In some countries in Europe though, it definitely is related to immigration… mainly, in how terribly they’ve handled it.
For France, as an example, their treatment of immigrants is pretty terrible. There’s a hard core xenophobia towards immigrants baked into French culture, and that xenophobia has led to the creation of a permanent underclass of immigrants. And this kind of segregation results in other kinds of bad things, like increased crime rates and lack of assimilation, which then just continues to fester over time.
As you say, the problem isn’t immigration, the problem is allowing fear of immigration to segregate immigrants from the rest of society.
France polls regurarly very high in immigrant acceptance, compared to countries with far lower levels of immigration.
I’m not questioning the failure of integration (although it is magnified in foreign media), but the impression that French are particularly anti immigrant on average. They are not.
Zakaria makes an intersting comment on Spain. I think your take on immigration as an issue in Europe is far too sanguine. Your left wing populism theories are applicable to Spain however. Less so to France, much less so to Germany, and not at all to the Balkans and Eastern/Central Europe.
One way to test this theory is to note that countries without large-scale immigration, such as Japan, have not seen the same rise of right-wing populism. Another interesting case is Spain, a country that has taken in many immigrants, but mostly Spanish-speaking Latinos, who are easier to assimilate. While you see traditional left-wing economic populism in Spain, you do not see right-wing nationalist
.