Austria accuses this couple of a terrorist crime just for expressing solidarity for Palestinians
Austria accuses this couple of a terrorist crime just for expressing solidarity for Palestinians
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3680700
Austria accuses this couple of a terrorist crime just for expressing solidarity for Palestinians
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What I don't understand is why governments seem so willing to take action against expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. They routinely ignore activism and do whatever they want, and it works well. Activism has been a dead end for decades, why suddenly get weird about it? Are they worried that people will care this time around? Or that they know they're wrong and feel the need to double-down? It seems extreme and potentially counter to their own interests to draw so much attention to the issue when it feels like they could just go back to the standard playbook of putting out strong statements and doing nothing until the problem goes away.
That's because this is the first thing in decades that moved westerners into the good direction instead of their usual state of either choking on boot or being political amoebas. And the govts are fucking scared that it will lead, with combination of political and economical decline, to something way more serious. So the govts who didn't had to deal with any dissent for as long, reflexively revert to the first thought of all bourgeois dictatorship: police repression.
So is this kind of like the George Floyd protests for Europe? The pro-Palestinian protests in Europe seem more intense than anywhere else outside the Middle East
Yeah, something like that i think.
I literally am hearing hardly protests going in in Europe, outside of the UKKK. Those that do, fr don't show up in my feed until like 2 days later
Activism in solidarity is dangerous because it promotes internationalism, which is the only thing that can actually threaten the liberal state.
- Depending on the country, there is a large Arab and Muslim population (or Palestinian diaspora in already Islamic countries). They're vocal about the violence imposed on them, their families, and their people.
- Israel's lobbying industry is very strong. They pour a lot of money into various countries and the politicians and businessmen risk losing their income if they don't squash dissent
- The US will punish you. Zionism is non negotiable
- In the US and elsewhere, it may be election season and having thousands of people calling your candidate a supporter of genocide is not a good look. Even if they successfully arrest you and whatever, people are recording, the message spreads, and your name becomes associated with genocide. The average person may not fully believe it, but because of number 1, they may be hesitant let their own names be tainted because of someone they support
There's a decent number of large state actors (most of the non-western world and even some western states) who actually agree with the activists this time.
I don't know if this is true for Austria, but I've heard that for West Germany, they tried to atone for their guilt in the Holocaust by fully supporting Israel, and any criticism of this policy is looked at as antisemitism.
It's an artificial guilt especially in West Germany. If they had any guilt then they would not be cheerleading another genocide.
Exactly. Germany supports this genocide precisely because they learnt nothing from the Holocaust apart from how to run an 80 year PR campaign and assuage their own cultural guilt instead of addressing the root causes.
It's the liberal way of accommodating fascism
Germans have learned that the Holocaust was a 'dirty' thing and they are ashamed to have dirtied themselves and their home by committing it on european soil.
Now they focus on deportations, weapons exports and training foreign militants. The barbarians have joined the empire and become 'civilized'.
Honestly I think it has much less to do with their guilt from the holocaust, and way more to do with keeping fascism, white supremacy, and western settler-colonialism alive and well into the 21st century.
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The absolutely most charitable view is basically that, yes, but they've done so while never, ever truly addressing the underlying and material issues (basically every German institution has been riddled with unpunished Nazis allowed to hold onto their beliefs). But even if one takes that view, it's a strategy that has been pretty disastrous and counter-productive. This excellent article about how supposed Holocaust guilt as a national identity has become a twisted, toxic, and essentially racist tool of exclusion and whiteness is worth a read.
Personally I'm more cynical. I don't see most of Germany's supposed guilt and public awareness raising about the horrors of the Holocaust as much more than an 80 year PR campaign designed to reintegrate themselves with the white powers that were on the other side of the war and avoid being a pariah state. I think that the majority of Germans simply wanted to turn away from the horrors that they shared at least some small blame for and as a result turned a blind eye to the fact that German business, public institutions, and government was still riddled with unpunished, unrepentant fascists. And that those very fascists, with the defacto support of useful liberals as always, worked hard to disguise or rebrand white supremecy for the rest of the 20th century.
The Germans that did the Holocaust didn’t regret anything other than losing the war. The “culture of atonement” is a modern day invention. It’s revisionist history.
Hard agree.
A minor point of clarification: the former FRG allowed Nazis into every institution and basically let former Nazis be full participants in society. The former GDR was much, much more thorough in dealing with Nazis and did not let them anywhere near institutional power and influence.
Oh completely. One of the many reasons the wrong Germany won. I meant the FRG and German state since the wall came down.
AFAIK the Austrian way of dealing with the Holocaust is to tell themselves a story about how they were simply victims of the big bad Germans as well.
I struggle to think of any other issue that the public opinion is so out of step with the position of the people in power.