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Because you were, you twit

I spent part of my childhood in Ankara and part of it in Madrid. Commuting between Spain and Turkey in the early 1980s was a strange experience. ….. It often felt as though I was travelling from one end of Europe to the other.

7 thoughts on “Because you were, you twit”

  1. the rise of the far right is a clash of cultures not civilisations

    I honestly dunno what “far right” means anymore. When I were a young un, it meant lonely Hitler fetishists with blurrily photocopied newsletters and thuggish, tattooed skinheads, but now it apparently means anyone who doesn’t think we should pay millions of low-IQ rapists to colonise Europe.

    But anyway.

    Culture vs Civilisation is an interesting take. Aren’t they pretty much the same thing?

    Not all cultures are civilised (see: Wales), but all civilisations are essentially a shared cultural space, basically a common operating system of implicitly or explicitly agreed-apon “this is how we do things”, no?

    This is why multiculti doesn’t work, and why – for example – Turkey has so much trouble with the Kurds.

  2. Multi-ethnic works, Britain has had centuries of people from multiple ethnic backgrounds coming here with the intention of becoming British. Similarly America. The American Dream is to go to American and become an American.

    It’s multi-cultural that brings problems. When it gets above: I don’t care what you do at the weekend, to You must care about what I do at the weekend and must change your lifestyle and what you do at the weekend to accommodate it, and and the same time I’ll isolate myself from you, that’s the very definition of fractured society, and history has show it leads to: And I’ll hate you and this country and teach people to hate you and this country, yet will still insist on wanting to live in this country and insist on you changing to accommodate me continuting to hate you and your country and me continuing to live in this country.

  3. Pendant point: Ankara is in Anatolia not Europe but the upper middle class bits of it felt European in the 80s when Ataturkism was still going strong and you compared it with the deeply conservative countryside. Btw an unmarried couple couldn’t share a room in a cheap hotel in 1989. Kurdistan was a series of military roadblocks and invisible women. I call bullshit

  4. Spain in the early 80s was dirt poor, massively different from now. You still saw mutilados de guerra selling lottery tickets, men with missing limbs, hooks for hands, mashed up teeth. The society has changed so much that comparing Vox to the Falange makes no sense

  5. Not changed that much. You still see guys with missing limbs begging in the street. There’s a couple do, not far from where I live. Where they lose them, dunno. I suspect it’s not unconnected with being such appalling moto riders. The why, I imagine’s because the social security net’s pretty flimsy. But there’s also a cultural difference. Like it’s not unusual for someone to ask you for a cigarette.
    The Vox office happens to be in the building I have an apartment in. Guy who owns it is a Vox supporter. From the conversation I had with him, the platform’s lower taxes, smaller government & clamp down on corruption. This is Andalucia, where we keep the mayors in prison so we know where to find them. Good luck with that! Can’t say I got much Falangeist out of him They oppose independence for Cataluna. Most of Spain, not catalan, does, doesn’t it? They’re not ashamed to be Spanish? I can see why that would indicate far-far right in UK political terms.
    Even this long after the Civil War & Franco’s death, there’s still divisions in this country between the two sides. Town I lived in, up country, this bar was a Franco bar. Bar other side of the road, anti-Franco. Village up, the road, was referred to as a Franco village. So whichever party the Franco identifiers choose will get tarred with the brush

  6. Commuting between Turkey and Spain, eh? The Guardian doesn’t seem bothered about “carbon footprints” if the boots are on the right people.

    “Far Right” is now anyone in Europe still interested in national sovereignty, suspicious of the EU and intent on preserving their national culture.

    Actually, “Far Right” for many Guardian readers is anyone they don’t like.

  7. When I lived in Munich they were still having riots between the police and the Turkish community. Over what I can’t be sure, but even after 50/60 odd years a great many of them still hadn’t assimilated and many of the elder generation were unable to speak a word of German.
    I was friends with a couple of young lads of Turkish extraction and it was clear that they still inhabited a world that had one foot in the old country and one in the new.
    It was pretty clear that they had divided loyalties and never felt that they truly belonged in one or the other.
    Britain has done a much better job of accommodating a larger number of disparate immigrants, but at a cost of sacrificing much of what was English culture.
    Neither of those lads I knew were religious. How western Europe will cope with ever more immigrants of radically different culture and religion is yet to be seen, but if history tells us anything, it will be bloody and violent.

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