Europe’s binary problem
Little Green Football’s Charles Johnson has been engaged in a very hostile to-and-fro with Fjordman, Gates of Vienna and Brussels Journal, all of which initially garnered a lot of support for being European blogs/bloggers (or Euro-Centric) that were aware of the Islamist threat to the West. Johnson’s concern is that these people/sites have ties that are way too close to neo-Nazi movements in Europe. Here’s Johnson’s most recent post on the subject, along with links to all his other posts.
I suspect that Johnson’s problem is that he’s running head first into a European problem, which is the binary nature of its politics. Europeans don’t really have moderate parties as we understand them, with everyone fighting around the margins of the middle. Instead, they have two defiantly opposed camps: The Left, which is socialism, and the un-Left which, no matter how sensible it can be on many subjects, sweeps in (voluntarily and involuntarily) all the aggressive race hatred that simmers under the European surface. I know that’s a gross generalization, and I’m not in a position time-wise to pick my way through various sources to back it up. It’s just a long-standing sense of I have from reading books about Europe and reading the European press directly. Because there aren’t viable third ways, the racists always go to the right.
In making this point, I keep thinking of British support (and, indeed, much German support) in the 1930s for the Nazis. What you discover if you look at it more closely is that many of these supporters were not pro-Nazi, they were anti-Communist. It didn’t occur to them that the Nazis were just as bad, if not worse; and it didn’t occur to them that there were other possible roads than the Nazi way to defeat Communism. They were completely binary. They could not conceive of being anti-Communist without being pro the opposite.
Anyway, that’s my take on the subject, which I freely admit is poorly expressed and relieved of the burden of actual facts.
UPDATE: In discussing the oldest hatred (antisemitism) and Europe’s new fear (Islamophobia), Uriya Shavit touches upon both Europe’s strong reactions to alien groups that it perceives as threats and the fact that, while Jews never gave rational reason to justify that fear, spokespeople for Islam are throwing fuel on the rising flames of European nationalism. The article isn’t quite on point when it comes to my post, but it’s close enough to include here.
