I know that is a somewhat explosive topic. It's one of those topics that tends to trigger passionate or heated debates, usually ending in an avalanche of a lot of ugly and derogatory terms.
And for this and other reasons i generally like to stay as far away as possible from these discussions.
Yet, i hope that here, on the DMT-nexus site, a more mature discussion is possible.
Personally, i don't realy have a very strong opinion on the issue of multicultural society.
I think the whole situation is actually quite complex when it comes to where the fault lines are situated and what they tend to be about.
I see that there is an element of racism and xenophobia. It's hard to deny that these sentiments exist and play a huge role here, both in the united states as in western europe. I live in the Netherlands, and to give just one example of how racism and xenophobia have taken hold of dutch society: the word many ducth people use to describe africans who've drowned in the mediteranean sea, trying to get to europe...'floatniggers'. I would say that word says a lot about the mentality of many dutch people, not to mention the posts on Facebook, twitter or other of these so called 'social media' everytime several hundreds of drowned africans make the headlines, because those many of those comments are like "yippee, 900 less of those bloodsucking leaches".
You could say that this is a fault line between basically black and white.
Then there is the fact that the vast majority of the people making those kind of comments, are poor and poorly educated. In Germany, most of the people protesting against immigration and most of the people supporting pegida or the AFD, are referred to as 'wendeverlierer', meaning people who have had a hard time adapting to the fall of communism. They tend to be poorly educated or unskilled. I suppose that in america, most of the trump-supporters are also people without a degree or a nice pension. So there's a fault line here between...well,
what? Rich and poor? Educated vs uneducated? or simply intelligent and not so intelligent?
Then there is the migrants communities themselves. Hard to deny again, that serious problems do exist. There IS a lot of antisemitism, homophobia and misogyny amongst many muslims. There have been serious incidents in cologne and other german city's during new years eve, there have been serious incidents in sweden during many music festivals. Many if not the vast majority of the muslims in europe reject terrorism, but there are also quite a few muslims who either openly support it, or who seriously argue that there is no islamic terrorism, but that it's actually jews try to make islam look bad, who're behind all the terror attacks we've seen over the past few decades. There's no use in downplaying the dark side of islamic community's within europe. Many jewish people are leaving europe because they no longer feel safe here, many gay people don't publicly dare to show any kind of affection (like holding hands) anymore, at many schools, teachers don't want to teach about the holocaust anymore...These things áre happening, and they are real. Not twisted fantasy's or exaggerations of some rightwingnutters, but stuff that realy happens.
That's definately another fault line there.
It's making me sad. And i don't have answers. I only think that we should try not to escalate the whole situation, and that politicians are doing exactly the opposite because it tends to pay off.
And for this and other reasons i generally like to stay as far away as possible from these discussions.
Yet, i hope that here, on the DMT-nexus site, a more mature discussion is possible.
Personally, i don't realy have a very strong opinion on the issue of multicultural society.
I think the whole situation is actually quite complex when it comes to where the fault lines are situated and what they tend to be about.
I see that there is an element of racism and xenophobia. It's hard to deny that these sentiments exist and play a huge role here, both in the united states as in western europe. I live in the Netherlands, and to give just one example of how racism and xenophobia have taken hold of dutch society: the word many ducth people use to describe africans who've drowned in the mediteranean sea, trying to get to europe...'floatniggers'. I would say that word says a lot about the mentality of many dutch people, not to mention the posts on Facebook, twitter or other of these so called 'social media' everytime several hundreds of drowned africans make the headlines, because those many of those comments are like "yippee, 900 less of those bloodsucking leaches".
You could say that this is a fault line between basically black and white.
Then there is the fact that the vast majority of the people making those kind of comments, are poor and poorly educated. In Germany, most of the people protesting against immigration and most of the people supporting pegida or the AFD, are referred to as 'wendeverlierer', meaning people who have had a hard time adapting to the fall of communism. They tend to be poorly educated or unskilled. I suppose that in america, most of the trump-supporters are also people without a degree or a nice pension. So there's a fault line here between...well,
what? Rich and poor? Educated vs uneducated? or simply intelligent and not so intelligent?
Then there is the migrants communities themselves. Hard to deny again, that serious problems do exist. There IS a lot of antisemitism, homophobia and misogyny amongst many muslims. There have been serious incidents in cologne and other german city's during new years eve, there have been serious incidents in sweden during many music festivals. Many if not the vast majority of the muslims in europe reject terrorism, but there are also quite a few muslims who either openly support it, or who seriously argue that there is no islamic terrorism, but that it's actually jews try to make islam look bad, who're behind all the terror attacks we've seen over the past few decades. There's no use in downplaying the dark side of islamic community's within europe. Many jewish people are leaving europe because they no longer feel safe here, many gay people don't publicly dare to show any kind of affection (like holding hands) anymore, at many schools, teachers don't want to teach about the holocaust anymore...These things áre happening, and they are real. Not twisted fantasy's or exaggerations of some rightwingnutters, but stuff that realy happens.
That's definately another fault line there.
It's making me sad. And i don't have answers. I only think that we should try not to escalate the whole situation, and that politicians are doing exactly the opposite because it tends to pay off.
