:AyyyyyOC: "i want the socialism of britain and scandinavia"
I'm Danish and I can thoroughly debunk this.
Yes, they don't want too many "non-westerners" to live in the same place but they also don't want too many unemployed or people on disability there either. And it only affects social housing, good decent people who own their own homes are safe.
So you see, it can't be racist because they also hate the poor.
Probably describes himself as "socially liberal, economically conservative"
The democratic defence, formerly known as the republican defence.
Wait, so it only goes one way? There isn't a limit on the number of westerners or rich living in an area?
so I found a Guardian article on this (I know, I know, they're TERFs). and this is so fucking bad, worse than you realise.
they're " reducing the number of “non-western” residents, scrapping the controversial term “ghetto” in its proposed legislation".. they literally originally called PoC areas in the first draft ghettos. fucking racist anti immigrant rhetoric, but it gets worse.
" a review of existing legislation on combatting “parallel societies” " literally 5th column fascist shit. this is 100% the actual direct reason nazis used against Jews. this idea of the internal enemy who will betray the nation and must be stopped and forcibly integrated or... you know what
TL:DR they're fucking fascist scum using nazi talking points
Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. :chad-stalin:
Hey Europe, how are you doing?
:yea:
More seriously, as other people have pointed out, we're only seeing a few million refugees that are resulting in Europe and American going outright ultranationalist. What's going to happen in a few decades when we see tens of millions fleeing?
I've been beating that drum for a long time, since 2014. what are we going to see as more and more Indian harvests fail due to soil erosion, erratic weather, and ethnic violence. what about when North Africa and the Middle east get too hot to live in, we already saw Iraq hit 54c a couple years ago. what about when the water wars start and the violence forces people to flee. there are going to be so many refugees. and then when the pandemics come from melting permafrost that was keeping bacteria frozen in there dormant, or we get more mutations of things like covid, giving the fash carte Blanche reason to 'keep us safe' by stopping the refugees. things are going to get fucking ugly. and that's when this whole shit about the 5th column boils over and the genocide starts, the seeds are being laid right now in policy that dehumanises and otherises refugees
Yeaaaahhhhh...I feel it could go 1 of 2 ways, essentially:
Either the ensuing chaos over the next few decades, as the contradictions in capitalism become more clear, result in western society having a seismic shift leftward in favor of human rights/worker rights/etc, we do all we can to combat climate change and aid countries suffering the worst effects while taking in their people as needed
or
We militarize further, double down on the dehumanization of minorities/foreigners, and ramp up efforts to destabilize stable leftist powers which pose a threat to the capitalist paradigm, while also attempting to supplant leaders in countries suffering most severely from those crises in order to get them to force their people to stay (and/or kill them).
I'm not gonna say which I think is more likely.
I think a little of column a a little of column b. the reaching hand of empire has taken so many Ls of late and is high as a kite on copium, but does not seem to have the organisation or capacity to even hold onto places in their own 'back yard'. capitalism will continue its decay, as will all the institutions of the imperial core that give us our luxury filled lives, this will be blamed on refugees and foreign powers such as china iran ect you know the usual line up.
I expect the imperial core to more retreat inward and consume itself, as the US has already started doing, rather than reach out to grab more resources. the capacity for empire is completely collapsing, and the anti imperialist wave only grows more and more as China allows for an alternative multi polar world that they will absolutely happily trade with to facilitate an independence from the US bloc.
I'm very pessimistic about this development. There is no more welfare to distribute so the driving force of most European politics becomes "cultural" issues of which an ever accelerating racism is the dominant.
Europe hasn't done it's last genocide yet.
Europe hasn't stopped doing genocide ever. the denial now of refuge to so many drowning people is an act of genocide in my honest opinion. it is willing letting an ethnic group they dislike struggle and die because of there inherent racial characteristics, en masse. this is going to turn inwards as that dehumanisation goes further, and violence against brown bodies is more and more seen as a solution to the problem. at the moment it's still seen as unacceptable to murder you own population openly, you have to do it via covid and shit. but I don't think that will happen forever.
eventually we're going to hear about how refugee women have too many babies, and it's just unsafe to let them because we need to think of resource shortages. then it's going to be that they can't be trusted and are fighting the interests of the nation and the native people to be greedy and 'steal' 'our' resources for their own. and then it's going to be the 'final solution' to the problem of all the refugees created by imperialist and capitalist policy for 70 years since decolonisation. the extrapolation of current rhetoric already there is all this needs, and the material conditions will fund it.
if you want to stop it, community defense, antifascist organising, anti racist coalitions, this is what we need to build to fight for our fellow workers the fascists want to kill
FYI the Danish government is working on outsourcing its asylum system by creating a refugee camp in Rwanda, inspired by Australia's concentration camps in Nauru and Manus Island.
:cringe: I used to be a nordic socialism guy when I first got into leftism
I think most of us started off that way - or at least, we used those talking points so we wouldn't seem to extreme to our Cold War-brained dads.
I mean, Social Fascism is an improvement over "normal" Neolib Fascism, I guess.
Weren't we all? Chasing that idea led to leftism- how can something like universal Healthcare be so difficult to achieve in the USA? Investigating that question helped radicalized me.
This would almost make sense as part of an anti-segregation campaign, to prevent immigrants from being corralled into lower income neighborhoods that can then be ignored like what happens in most Western nations
Buuuuuuuut it turns out it's forcibly relocating immigrants to other parts of the country so that they can't accrue any economic or political power. Cool.
You don't fix the "lower income" part of lower income neighborhoods by demolishing the buildings and forcibly relocating the people to more expensive housing. You are just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic and even making things worse by increasing poverty-stricken peoples housing and transportation expenses.
My personal approach would be to either build affordable housing in majority white neighborhoods or force the sale of homes at below market prices to immigrant families. And it would be more like zip code to zip code, not city to city, so that people aren't isolated from each other, just more evenly distributed demographically.
In lots of cities you have these hard lines that delineate good and bad neighborhoods. Instead of one white neighborhood in one non-white neighborhood right next to each other, it should be two mixed neighborhoods with no real border between them.
At least they all access the same hospitals and schools, right? Like I imagine shitheads going "OMG leftist akchually want to segregate brown people"
Denmark is a little country with short distances so everyone goes to the same hospitals. School districts are small enough to have noticeable social differences but they are small compared to what you see in other places in the world.
However going to the same place doesn't mean you're treated the same. In the same public school you find kids who comes from families that can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a school trip to New York and kids who comes from families that can't. In the same retirement home you find seniors who can afford to pay for extra cleaning and personal hygiene, and you find seniors who can't.
Hmm, I see. Well at least poor danish kids don't have to worry about the school ceiling crumble on them, else the rich kids' parents would complain.
Yeah, something like that. There is an increasing tendency though of more well-off families sending their kids to private schools so maybe at some time in the future public schools will become poor schools for poor kids.
Lol “non-western” definitely means PoC. I guarantee you they don’t make a distinction between the two. Not that it would matter if they did, it’s all fucking racist
Actually there is a legal definition of non-western countries and the Danish national statistics office maintains a "non-western immigrants and descendants" column in many statistics, including local demographics, crime and unemployment.
Non-western people are anyone from countries outside of the EU/EEC and Anglo area.
I know. But from my experience with some Danes, implicitly it would mean anyone not Danish, or half Danish or without noticeable accent
Apartheid but woke™
Nah it's just straight up apartheid.
What are they going to do to the neighbourhoods that are already more than 30% non white? Are they just going to do a district 6 and kick everyone out?
They're doing several things. First they've changed the rules so that undesirable poor or "non-western" people aren't allowed to move into social housing deemed at risk of becoming "ghettos", despite having been on the waiting list for years and being first in line.
They're also doing various things to stress citizens of these areas, regardless of whether the individual is poor or "non-western" or not. Residents of the areas are being treated as second-rate citizens in many regards. For instance they are subject to much harsher control and workfare regimes than usual of they become unemployed, some crimes are punished twice as hard as if they were done anywhere else and parents are only allowed to send their children to non-"ghetto" kindergartens. All of this is presumably meant to better the low-quality residents of these areas.
A more direct way of getting rid of unwanted residents is by urban renewal. It has the added benefit of looking nice to outsiders. You're not being mean to people, you're improving a neighborhood and giving people in social housing good modern apartments. Of course urban renewal means that rents skyrocket and undesirable poors are displaced.
Finally there is the nuclear option that they are reserving for "hard ghettos" (yes, this is an official term used by very serious people in high positions): Getting rid of social housing in the area. Either by demolishing buildings, because presumably the bricks are cursed or something, or by forcing the housing associations who own them to sell them off to private speculants, usually at fire sale prices. The new owner will then be legally entitled (and encouraged) to terminate the leases of tenants, something that would otherwise be highly illegal to do when an apartment building changes owner.
People displaced by urban renewal, demolition or forced sales are offered re-housing in other social housing. Each household receives one offer, take it or leave it. In normal cases it has to be in the same neighborhood but people displaced by the "ghetto law" can be placed anywhere in the same municipality. Usually housing associations will try to find something in the same price range and in a sensible distance from school, work etc. but they are not obliged to and cheap non-"ghetto" social housing in larger cities is in short supply. I've heard enough horror stories about families having their rents doubled to have any faith in the process.
What are they going to do to the neighbourhoods that are already more than 30% non white?
Redlining, baby. We'll just make it financially impossible for them to live there.
Scandanavians tend to be unbelievably naive.
I've seen the issue framed as "minority neighborhoods are under served and don't have any job opportunities so we need them to have the same opportunities as everyone else" in the past.
This is just a ridiculous claim, the general size of things in Denmark taken into consideration. I live in one of the "hard ghettos" (yes, that's an official legal term now) and the area of the entire "ghetto" is less than a hectare. No one is going to tell me that your job opportunities change dramatically by moving a few hundred metres.
wait, you guys have public housing and relocation services for immigrants?
next you'll be telling me that immigrants aren't just held in cages without basic sanitation while a white nationalist "doctor" sterilizes them and until the detention center kingpin brokers some arrangement for transport and sale to human traffickers. because that's how the US is operating.
you'll have to excuse the occasional starry-eyed look we give to the nordics. for some of us, it's our first look over the wall. like that line from Slaughterhouse Five, when the author describes seeing pre-bombed Dresden for the first time from a POW train car as "Oz", before admitting that the largest city he had seen in his life up until that point was like Topeka, Kansas pop. 40,000.
Don't get me wrong, decaying capitalism with healthcare and social services is a lot more livable than decaying capitalism with a prison-industrial complex. This doesn't mean that there is a fundamental difference of character between the class societies of the US and Denmark. For various reasons Denmark has been more sheltered than the US and usually we're hit later and less intensely by capitalist destruction than you are.
Denmark is going to be completely fucked up by climate change and capitalist decay, were just a bit further down the line than the US.
The Danish communist party (DKP) was never that big outside of intellectual, artistic and activist circles. They became relatively popular right after WWII because of their role in the anti-fascist resistance movement but were quickly beat back into obscurity by cold war propaganda. And by "relatively popular" I mean they got 12,5 percent of the votes in the 1945 election. They were never in a position to challenge the social democrats as the main workers' party.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the DKP lost its subsidies the party imploded into what is basically a glorified study circle. Their newspaper (which had a reputation for being dull and badly written) was closed. Public figures left for greener pastures in other and more "moderate" parties. Public activities and electoral efforts were taken over by The Red-Green Alliance, a coalition of small socialist parties that quickly evolved into a kind of demsoc party.
