EU Parliament triggers procedure to ban AfD's EU Party
(www.euronews.com)
EuropeAin't it the same parliament that recently passed mass invigilation of EU citizens without a vote?
Quite the contrary. That mass surveilance was pushed through by the EU commision against the parliament that already rejected it (twice).
That mass surveilance was pushed through by the EU commision against the parliament that already rejected it (twice).
Commision and the council. Especially the most recent chat control 1.0 proposal that the parliament will vote for tomorrow (July 9)
EU ambassadors agree to push a temporary revival — unprecedented, as Parliament’s rejection was considered final. Because an expired regulation cannot be extended, the Council proposes a formally new law with identical content via an expedited procedure.
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/chat-control-overview
Hey, german government, parliament and federal council. This is how that works, now do that, too. For fucks sake!
But their party leader is a lesbian who thinks her party's official stance on homosexuality is "just politics" and doesn't effect her personally (because she lives in Switzerland, of course)
So that means they can't be fascists, right? ...right?
So theyre banning the group these parties are a part of, and no the parties. Thats not even clickbait, thats just misinformation if im reading this correctly.
This is about parties in the EU parliament which are made up of representatives from national parties. The EU can't ban parties on a national level.
Good news for once
Maybe, but they only trying to silence them, not to solve the problems that cause their rising...
Racists and fascists should be silenced.
I'm sorry they are upset that they saw a minority or that they overheard people speaking a foreign language while being brown. They can get over themselves
You don't need to pamper these beliefs. You can lead the voters to the actual cause of the issue without allowing them to empower fascists.
Usually the real issue is economic. Lack of housing, low wages, failing Healthcare. Those can be addressed. You don't have to allow the group trying to blame poor minority groups a seat at the table. You address the real issues
Which problems do you mean here?
Neoliberal policies that take wealth way from everybody but the rich and gives it to them.
Neoliberal policies that take wealth way from everybody but the rich and gives it to them.
I do not know about other EU countries but in my country these far right voters want MORE Capitalism/Neoliberalism, not less.
Oh yes, that is the whole stupidity about it. They suffer from it, like we all do, and then they want more of it. But they need to be dragged towards leftist policies or they will drag us all into the abyss.
Because fascist parties have a scapegoat and clear things they want to change. Meanwhile the centrist parties that claim to be "left" are just sputtering around doing more of the same or window dressing approaches that do nothing, and are more interested in stopping the actual leftist movements that will help people and stop fascism.
You don't believe that causes people to vote rather left instead?
Wealth inequality effects everyone and so it changes how everyone votes, but it also causes certain "answers" to that problem to become more popular or tolerable. So what we're seeing around the globe is the rise of the far right who are providing the "answer" that rising inequality and lowering standard of living is entirely the fault of immigrants, the loss of the "traditional family", and pretty much any "answer" except for useful ones. So no, this typically starts by driving people to the right as the right will most easily attempt to maintain the status quo at the expense of the scapegoat.
The follow on effect is the rise of the "radical" left which provides the answer "tax the ultra wealthy, invest in public infrastructure, and strengthen worker rights" - all things that reduce wealth inequality or increase the standard of living.
We're currently figuring out which side will win out in the long run or if the fundamentals will continue to not change and delay this issue further. For example Merz and the CDU in Germany making life better for the rich and worse for everyone else, delaying the inevitable decision of either the AFD winning or some party like Die Linke (hopefully) or Die Grüns winning. So Germans get to watch their lives get worse until they're ready to vote in parties with real positive change on their mind (or the opposite, real terrible changes like AFD).
Sure, a certain part, but if I look at my country or other democratic countries the right manages through their control of the media to convince a lot of people that it is the immigrants fault and we just need to be more xenophobic and then we will all be better off.
What planet are you even living on? Have you not seen the state of America? Remember Brexit? Why do you think fascists are surging in the polls everywhere? If a declining standard of living and quality of life created leftism out of thin air every developed economy would be on the verge of socialism in 2026.
Neoliberal/Conservative policies make the working class poorer and the rich richer, who use their capital to seize the means of democracy, kill competition, create monopolies, consolidate ownership of the media, etc and engage in wholesale propaganda aiming to divide and conquer the working class. The greatest threat to the Epstein classes wealth and power is a truly democratic government working "for the people", so they're promoting the same fascist populism everywhere to implement totalitarian dictatorship and remove the threat of democracy.
The uneducated moron who "doesn't do politics" is the easiest mark for fascism to con, because they can't see the incongruence; the patterns of lies, crimes, corruption, and psychopathy only learned from studying historic parallels.
[Insert racist & fascist propaganda here]
Colored people 🫣😱
Sigh
That's better than not silencing them, no?
You can snip the vocal cords of all the vicious dogs you want. Sure they stop barking, but they will still maul you
Then send animal control after the ones who bite.
But these aren't dogs. These are humans with voting rights and the ability to run for office. Banning fascist political parties is a good thing, and it's strange that you seem to think otherwise.
If you want to be a fascist you can't complain when you get shot for it
...to pass chat control resolution
Do anyone have full list of parties that may get banned?
Article mentions obvious German afd, forum for democracy - fvd from Netherlands, Bulgarian revival and spd from Czechia directly. European esn party as mix of these and 6 more. Guess that's all about them?
While EU gov on many levels, have way more far right or extremist groups, would they be affected too (pls be)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_of_Sovereign_Nations_Group
Scroll down to MEPs
pls make it happen
ESN is all about freedoms and democracy unless it goes against their interests
Maybe the people downvoting your comment should've read the article to figure out what ESN stands for.
to clarify: ESN is the EU's far right party pool.
You just enabled people to continue not reading the article :(
Just your average fascists. It's always the same with them, wherever you look.
Yup
🎻😭
Banning a party will not magically make the support they have disappear. When people with fascist views get isolated, we only make them close more and more in their own bubble, which will just create more extremism. It's the same with people that make fun of flat earthers. You are not going to change their mind, you are just sending them deeper into their delusions. People still don't get that banning everything we don't like is not a long term solution, but makes the problem worse (war on drugs, forbidding prostitution, etc)
It will not magically cure all problems, but it is indeed important to ban them. It will do multiple things, for example they will not receive any EU funding or other support. It will also prohibit them from advertising their views and they will not have a platform anymore in television and radio. Which will reduce the amount of propaganda they can spread and therefore reducing the impact they have on the population and in return reduce the support they have.
And this is just one aspect.
I disagree. Trump got elected (twice) with >30 felonies and after having said all sort of things that only few years ago would have made him completely uncandidable. Deplatforminng doesn't have the impact that it used to have and only make the person look like "they are going against the strong powers", that's why the afd in germany keeps getting stronger despite the multiple bans, Trump in the US, the neo-fascists movements in the uk, the neofascists in Italy. What has calling these people "fascists" and isolating them has achieved? Only raising their consent. Also, television and radio are not so meaningful anymore as they used to be, internet has made them completely obsolete and most people take their info from the latter. It's counterintuitive, but the political history of the last 10 years has proven this multiple times. It's very useful to look into how cult works and what's the best way to unlock them. Isolating the people in the cult is the worst move one can make.
Trump was not deplatformed, if anything the total opposite of that.
True, but not because they didn't try, which is my point. The attempt was to make him so much of a monster and demonise him that nobody would have voted him. The point was to isolate him and they achived the opposite, as you correctly said.
Reporting on his crimes and policies is not demonising him.
I agree with you. When i say demonising i mean from the point of view of maga folks. The democrats wanted to show how shitty and corrupt he is, they ended up making him a working class hero that is fighting the power and then president for the second time. Trump won thanks to inhability of the democrats and the american public at large to understand that times have changed. Trump understood it and made the "persecution" his winning horse. They manage to transform his mugshot in a huge political win ffs.
If the republican party was banned after the first trump presidency, they wouldn't have recovered fast enough to get a second presidency. Most likely they would have stayed fractured and we may have gotten actual reforms.
I'd love to hear the thoughts of the people that downvoted. If they disagree with what i said, or if stimply they don't like it and want it to disappear. Unironically, the (very expected) reactions to my comment are proving my point.
What would you suggest we should do, if one day, flat earthers find themselves in positions of power and start demanding their bullshit to be taught in schools?
I'm not suggesting to let anybody say what they want and offering them a platform. I'm saying that if you don't want these people in power, like you didn't want trump in power or fascists in the streets, the key is not to do the easiest thing that comes to mind, but to listen to what people that study other people say, and they all say the same thing: the more you isolate shitty people, the more and more shitty they will become, because they will create their own closed community, which history tells us will only grow. What happened when the flat earthers became mainstream and people started to ban them everywhere and threat them like idiot? Their numbers decuplicated and the closeted flat earthers suddenly were public, to the point that athletes, politicians and other public figures came out as flat earthers. The point was to isolate them, they ended up way more and widespread than before.
Letting more and more people radicalise further is no solution either. We've seen what happened in the US.
No, the key is general education, deradicalisation for those most prone to spreading fascism, and improvement of life standards.
Restricting immigration is one way, but we should add an article that for all the anti-immigration statements fascists make (even about refugees), they're forced to live like the refugees did.
What, don't want to live in a tent in a starved area? Or not have access to medication? Then how about you go improve their life standards instead of sucking oligarchs', oil and gas industries' dicks?
If you can't neutralize a toxic spill you contain it instead.
Exactly, but seems that we have been proven multiple times that banning/shunning/shaming only achieves the opposite.
They are already in a bubble and it's extremely hard to pull them out. Their influence is spreading, so clearly current efforts to deprogram them are less effective than their recruitment efforts. At that point containment is the best option we have, even if it's not the one I'd like we had.
Yes, because current efforts seem to be focused in only trying to isolate the people we don't like. During pre-internet time might have relatively worked, now it's clear it doesn't and saying "it's the best option we have" is just false. It's the easier option that people (but not sociologist or social psichologist) keep adopting because it's very easy, fits with our desire to not have shitheads around us and because people assumed that's how it worked so far.
Stop ignoring the reality and accept the fact that despite attempts to isolate them, the right is getting stronger everywhere. It's time to change approach or to start to get used to the new reality. Don't trust me, go beyond social media and go check what experts of hate and extremism say, not the politician we like this year.
This is already an improvement over the previous policy of shooting Nazis.
I don't know if that's true. Here in Sweden people were deadly afraid of being called racists for a long time. Being a nazi wasn't acceptable in the public eye. Then being a racist nazi got normalised and here we are.
Giving bigots a platform and visibility serves to normalise them. They should be shamed into nonexistence.
I don’t know if that’s true Please inform yourself about it then, because that would change the entire discussion. This is an entire field of study, it's not hidden stuff.
I agree they shouldn't have a platform and visibility. Definitely shouldn't be normalised. Shaming them and isolating them is HOW their ideas grew so much. The key is to invalidate their points with arguments, even if they don't listen, it's important they are out there and visible to other potential viewers. If you cannot do that because you are isolated from the fascist/flat earthers or whatever, their bubble will grow constantly because they talk to the belly of the people, and these folks will look for the opinions their belly tells them their are right. This is how we got wehere we are now. People saw something they could relate to when they heard these extremists complain about immigrants, corrupted system, secret plots to rule the world. Without access to a counter argument (becuase of the isolation) the spiral started to go deeper and deeper, until full extremization. We have seen something similar with covid.
For example i think banning Hitler's Mein Kampf, like they do in Germany, is a mistake. The only copies in circulations will be from people that probably simpatize with him and there will be little or no control over the content, which could be altered. This is very dangerous. If the book is freely available there could be laws that force to have notes on the book, which explain why Hitler was a bullshitter and out of his mind. People will be in contact with this content if they look for that book for any reason, it's not a small thing. They will still find the "altered" copies, but they will be much less attractive (not fascinating because forbidden and easy to find) then will be much easier to see the alteration and to counter it. I hope my point is clearer now
Not a fan. This is inherently anti-democratic, regardless of the views that the efn espouses.
Check out the concept of the tolerance paradox, it might shift your point of view a bit. Think there's a copy pasta of a nazi bar that's in a similar context
I'm familiar with both, and the nazi bar equivalency is a false parallell.
The antidote to anti-establishment movements in democracies (which AFD & their related parties across Europe are at this point) is strengthening public trust and legitimacy, not creating the tools to dismantle it.
These groups are themselves anti-democratic. Democracy is allowed to defend itself.
Well, this is democracy undermining itself. Parties with millions of supporters don't just randomly pop up for no reason. They come about due to real people having real problems.
Banning parties is a good way to become blind to that.
That is just a pragmatic argument, independent of my conviction that every citizen should have a right to equal representation, a right to be heard. No ifs' and buts' and no "but not like that" if I find their opinions unpalatable.
It is the same foundation I stand on to assert my own right. I will have my say. If that were taken away, I'd be inclined to tear it all down.
One very angry person can do a lot of damage today. How about the ten million who voted for AFD in the most recent German election? Or maybe just the seventy thousand who are active members? They are surely more extreme than you or I. That's more people than there are jail cells in Germany right now.
It is definitely far too late for this, it should've been done 10 years ago, but better late than never. The cancer should've been surgically removed when it was small, now it has grown very large and removing it means losing an arm and half a lung but that's no reason to give up and let it overtake the rest of the body.
I would go further, democracy must defend itself. It's an embarrassing failure to allow anti-democratic parties to gain power through democratic means.
There is no room for fascists.
