Fast-forward through tragedy

[sovay]

I feel as though it must signify something that the Schweizerische Volkspartei's breathtakingly anti-Islamic poster (and its successful vote) came out in the same year as images of Nazism are being flung nonchalantly around the American political arena, but past the absolute failure of historical memory, I'm not sure what that something might be.

Comments

A Mere Day After I Reloaded this Icon...

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Ghost-slaps all around, I think. I am not sure if a ghost slap comes from a ghost or it's what happens when you slap someone so hard their soul falls out.

[sovay]

I am not sure if a ghost slap comes from a ghost or it's what happens when you slap someone so hard their soul falls out.

Or tell me how hard you have to hit someone to knock a soul back into them, because way too many people right now are missing theirs.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

If I knew, I would never stop slapping people.

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

Does it have to go beyond failure of historical memory?

I'd been wondering for a while why the reaction to Muslim immigration has been so much more brazenly bigoted in famously liberal northern Europe than in the United States. Not that we don't have our problems, but our politicians are at least better at couching their concerns in euphemism. Then, while reading The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, it occurred to me that that part of the world didn't experience any significant non-Christian immigration between the Middle Ages and the past few decades.

[sovay]

Does it have to go beyond failure of historical memory?

I don't require it to: it's sad enough on its own. I'm just not certain if more specific issues are in play, and I'm not sure I'm sleeping enough to articulate the questions that might elicit them.

Then, while reading The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, it occurred to me that that part of the world didn't experience any significant non-Christian immigration between the Middle Ages and the past few decades.

I hadn't even considered that as a factor. I suppose when your most recent template for cultural interaction is the Ninth Crusade . . . Good grief.

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

As a frequent visitor to Switzerland in the Seventies and Eighties, I can report that Swiss xenophobia is nothing new.

http://www.hindu.com/2000/03/17/stories/03170007.htm

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2007/09/05/swiss_party_wants_to_revive_nazi_policy

(And remember: Jews were banished from Swiss towns in the 1620s.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Switzerland

A nice place to bank, but you wouldn't want to live there. (As I discovered.)

The trains run on time, though.

[sovay]

As a frequent visitor to Switzerland in the Seventies and Eighties, I can report that Swiss xenophobia is nothing new.

I may be more depressed that I'm not surprised than depressed by the fact itself . . .

A nice place to bank, but you wouldn't want to live there. (As I discovered.)

What were you doing in Switzerland at the time?

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

Visiting in tow with my father, who required the contacts as cred for morphing from "white-collar criminal" to "SUPER white-collar" criminal. I spent many afternoons abandoned in cold, quiet hotel rooms while he met with bankers, watching incomprehensible TV that oocasionally featured topless women.

I found almost no one my own age with whom to play. I'm convinced that if the Swiss have children, they keep them locked up somewhere.

[hans-the-bold.livejournal.com]

Weren't the Swiss also complicit in hiding stolen Jewish assets during and after the Holocaust? And didn't they turn Jews away from their borders during the Holocaust? Not to mention the way the Swiss helped the Nazis sell the stolen goods on the international market.

I could say more, but I would quickly slip into profanity.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/aa072397.htm

[sovay]

Weren't the Swiss also complicit in hiding stolen Jewish assets during and after the Holocaust?

. . . Livejournal ate my reply. I attempt to reconstruct: It's not even that I imagined Switzerland to be the hallmark of religious welcome (because you want more from a society than tolerance) in Christian Europe and in consequence am specifically disappointed in them; it's more like enough already, globally. I know the national attention span is shrinking to whatever takes less time than a soundbite, but does it have to be planetwide?

I could say more, but I would quickly slip into profanity.

I'll turn on that Adult Concepts setting . . .

[wind05.livejournal.com]

I like the point that we want more from a society than tolerance--that "the other" really would hope for (religious, or whatever) welcome.

The law is a surprising and really troubling blow to religious freedom. If the free practice of one's religion cannot be guaranteed by Western Europe, then the West looses its moral voice in critiquing the curtailing of human rights throughout the world.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Lately every time I see a Nazi-invoking protest crop up I find myself harboring an unworthy desire to go hold a one-man counter-protest across the street with a sign that says HITLER HATED LIBERALS.

[sovay]

Lately every time I see a Nazi-invoking protest crop up I find myself harboring an unworthy desire to go hold a one-man counter-protest across the street with a sign that says HITLER HATED LIBERALS.

I would fund your one-man counter-protest.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I wish I could figure out what that something is, myself, but I'm drawing a blank the now.