UK poisoning

[Dill]

(04-05-2018, 12:21 PM)hollodero Wrote: Can I ask a question - where is all this Europe hatred from the US right coming from. It's not just Germany. It's also Sweden, the UK and especially London, and notably the EU as a whole. European countries are called all kinds of evil and Europeans are called stupid idiots all the time. Why?

Maybe some of that hatred would dissipate if we could get a small "thank you" for saving Europe twice!

Seriously, Hollo, hating Europe is not new, but a newer brand may be more visible at the moment.

Here is my hypothesis, which I think will square with and supplement Dino's--

1. There has always been a strong strain of nativism in the U.S. (google "know-nothings"), but the targets of xenophobia have shifted with circumstances--from Irish to Chinese to Italians to Russians/Poles to Germans during WWI.

2. Post WWI, a lot of this xenophobia is deeply inflected with anti-communism--"leftism" and socialism become a threat to essential American values, and are imported from Europe, a bad place with many problems which immigrants bring with them. ("Exceptional" American has not had those problems.) "Socialism"--as explained to Americans by right wing Christians and rich capitalists-- is seen as political problem of European origin, and more of problem than fascism.

3. Post WWII, the cold war exacerbates this xenophobia and anti-Communism leading to the national embarrassment of McCarthyism. They remain a force against the push for civil rights and de-segregation, but increasingly on the political fringe, renounced by respectable conservatives like William Buckley. I.e., the more conspiratorial, racist and xenophobic elements are rejected, though not the distaste for "European" socialism.  50 years ago rumors to the effect that fluoridation and vaccination were Communist plots and the government was going to outlaw Christian broadcasting had no legs, no media circulation.

4. The rise of the New Right in the 80s begins the transfer of fringe paranoia/conspiracy-thinking/xenophobia to the mainstream of political discussion. The rise of talk radio, the founding of Fox News, the event of 9/11--all these combined to construct a public sphere in which the most odious caricatures of "foreigners" (or Americans as foreign--think of birtherism) circulate with roughly the same appearance of authority as respectable journalism and scholarship.  "European-style socialism" is supposed to be a goal of the Democrats and self-evidently bad.  You may remember Fox News pushing "Freedom Fries" and stories of people pouring French wine in the street because the cowardly frogs exercised that FREEDOM! Americans claim to defend by choosing not to throw money and lives down the Iraq rat hole. Europe--untrustworthy, leftist, inferior, and weak girly-men to boot.

Keeping this history in mind, I don't see any indices of elevated hatred of Europe.  On the contrary, the Net has allowed the connection of US and European right via their common Islamophobia, nationalism and hyper concern for territorial integrity and immigrant rapists.

Maybe what has struck your radar are newly prominent misinformed and groundless critiques of the EU.  That is an extension of the older critique of  bad "statist" Europe run by socialists or fascists, viewed through the lens of good 'ol "states rights" vs Big government, projected across the pond.  But from that same sector there is also much approval of the resurgence of European nationalism and the fetishism of borders. So beneath it all you are still our brothers, LOL.