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Unrest in the UK

TBL

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What do you make of the far-right agitation currently occurring in the UK?

It follows after a second-generation Rwandan immigrant stabbed a number of young girls in Southport. Before his identity was released, rumors spread online that he was Muslim and born outside the UK. Even though that turned out not to be true, it didn't stop right-wing protesters from attacking mosques and denigrating Muslims. What started out as a riot in Southport itself has spread across the country, with anti-immigrant protests flaring up in various cities, often met by anti-racist counterprotesters.

Immigration is a hot button issue in the U.S. as well, but it seems to be boiling over in the UK in a way it isn't here.
 
I wonder where all this anti-immigrant sentiment came from.



If you recall, America had a large outbreak of anti-Asian violence when Trump blamed COVID on Chinese people.

With the rampant anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from conservatives in the US, such violence is likely to increase soon.

 
As long we’re doing the media criticism thing, I will criticize the media for focusing endlessly on “misinformation”. This isn’t just due to misinformation. These thugs would be out there even if they had known from the beginning that the perpetrator was not Muslim. The point is they are opposed to all immigrants and people they see as “other”. This isn’t just because misinformation spread for a few days. This is opportunistic mayhem.
 
I wonder where all this anti-immigrant sentiment came from.

Yeah thank you Daily Mail in particular. It should tell us something that in 2017, the English language edition of Wikipedia banned citation from Daily Mail as a reliable source. Yeah.

In my most cynical moments I could think that illiteracy isn't such a bad idea after all, even though the cost savings on omitted education are certainly illusory in the longer run.

And in the USA? Well for sure, Murdoch's FauxNoise and its lesser emulators and Sinclair Group keep beating the "immigrant crime" drum ad nauseam. But I guess they must mean "recent immigrants". The ancestors of most Americans came here from somewhere else. Successive waves of immigrants have developed a certain level of amnesia about their ancestral history. and sometimes it doesn't take long. It begins to look like an endless game of "my turn in the barrel is over: get in and take yer lumps." All that sort of thing makes us less like a melting pot and more like a tossed salad. It works for food. In politics, maybe not so much.

As to the larger question of where does anti-immigration sentiment come from? Some of it stems from actual immigration but a lot of the fears and behaviors associated to "anti-immigration" evolve into other forms of xenophobia

Pretty often, economic downturns raise a reversion to tribalism and protectionist instincts. Sometimes the downturn is elsewhere and for political reasons, e.g. the spinoff of behavior by oligarchic governments or dictatorships (and drug cartels) in some Central and Latin American nations drives emigrants from there to Mexico and the USA.

Post-indepedence hangovers: Sometimes, as in France and in particular with respect to north Africa, there can be a backlash from a post-colonial government's decisions on legal classification of immigrants from its former colonies.

France complicated things for itself by past maneuvers like having made Algeria a department of France (so like the USA's state of Alaska or Hawaii) and figuring that would somehow stave off a drive for independence, and when later cynically granting Morocco independence -- in order not to have to fight in Algeria and Morocco at the same time-- but also deciding for mostly economic and foreign alliance reasons to carve out Tangiers and leave that as a multinational protectorate for awhile.​
That move with Tangiers exacerbated the loathing of the West by observant north African Muslims, in particulary regarding Tangiers as a city of apostates and haven for uninhibited indulgence in shady criminal dealings, booze, drugs, sex. So there was a different kind of immigrant-host loathing later on in France, with some immigrant Moroccans holding dim views of what they had been taught was French colonial (and other Western) disrespect for Moroccan culture.​
France for a long time also had "immigration" issues with its own colonials returning to France, people who had settled the North African holdings and were enraged when France was "giving them up.".​

Political opportunism: Sometimes different forms of xenophobia are provoked intentionally by those seeking to "divide and conquer" in order to gain or retain political power in the short run. This pops up at different scales. Sometimes it's a prelude to civil war or a more grandual devolution from democracy to autocracy.

Example: Modi's behavior before his most recent re-election effort, pandering to the Hindu vote in a northern state by allowing construction of a $200M+ Hindu temple on a site where in 1992 a Hindu mob had razed a 16th century mosque (built by the Mughals atop the ruins of an earlier Hindu temple). An Indian court had ruled that the 1992 razing of that ancient mosque was an egregious violation of secular rule of law in place since India's 1947 independence and partition, but then only granted Muslims an alternate and isolated site for a replacement mosque, and left the razed site in Hindu hands. Perfect example of a repeating clash of cultures over centuries in one geographic area. Nonetheless this is an isolated instance. No one is sure whether India's vibrant secular democracy will tolerate Modi's efforts to keep extending his power.​

Nationalistic autocracy: Sometimes a selectively defined xenophobia is stirred up for purposes of cementing national allegiance during times of enmity vs neighboring countries or perceived enemies within the state. Flare-ups can be almost instantaneous and not just aimed at recent immigrants, but against those of "other" cultures, races, religions or political parties that were already extant in country for decades or far longer. Sometimes the enmity converts to civil war or efforts at genocide...

This is the stuff of nightmares where people work and live side by side until "something happens" and then overnight your next door neighbor or same-street shopkeeper is your enemy. Sri Lanka comes to mind. Sometimes the ruckus is over shortly but recurs again and again. In Lebanon, people have lived like this on and off since the French ran the place​
Similarly in some cities in India, areas where Muslims and Hindus still live or work nearby each other despite the great partition at independence. In Pakistan, conflicts between Sunni and the minority Shia also are a recurrent problem. In Iraq, the US invasion and its lack of a post-invasion plan infamously triggered a sectarian war that dragged on for years. And then there is Syria... where Assad and the Alawites so far still prevail but you need a scorecard in their long running civil war to keep track of the factions, including all the foreign nations with mercenaries or favored militias in tow.​

A example with more permanent ramifications: when Nasser came to power in Egypt in the mid-20th century, and the (at first voluntary, but then forced) exodus of Europeans began in earnest, the animus against Jews picked up steam. From around the 1860s, in the time of the European pogroms and the eventual opening of the Suez Canal, the Jewish immigrant population from Europe to Egypt had grown to perhaps 80k overall.​
But as Nasser's nationalistic focus on Arab power took hold, expulsion of Jews from major population centers grew to include even the relatively small remaining settlements of native Egyptian Jews who had lived along the Nile in rural areas for centuries.​
The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty (Camp David Accords) amounted to a cold peace, i.e. formal conclusion of prior hostilities and a flexible demilitarization of the Sinai, but hardly a welcome-back sign to Jews regarding life in Egypt. So the Six Day War with Israel had indeed provided emphatic punctuation to a 200-year history of Jewish immigrant life in Egypt (leaving aside prior historical timeframes when Jews had sometimes populated parts of Egypt.).​
As of around ten years ago there were fewer than 20 Jews still living in Alexandria or Cairo. A few years later it was said that only three were left, in Cairo.​
 
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As long we’re doing the media criticism thing, I will criticize the media for focusing endlessly on “misinformation”. This isn’t just due to misinformation. These thugs would be out there even if they had known from the beginning that the perpetrator was not Muslim. The point is they are opposed to all immigrants and people they see as “other”. This isn’t just because misinformation spread for a few days. This is opportunistic mayhem.
A constant stream of misinformation over years built a belief that immigrants are doing all sorts of terrible things.

I agree with you that it’s highly hypocritical for the media to decry short-term misinformation, when they have run inflammatory “immigrant crime is out of control” stories for decades. And the Tories are absolutely complicit as well, constantly running campaigns of anti-immigrant hate.
 
A constant stream of misinformation over years built a belief that immigrants are doing all sorts of terrible things.

I agree with you that it’s highly hypocritical for the media to decry short-term misinformation, when they have run inflammatory “immigrant crime is out of control” stories for decades. And the Tories are absolutely complicit as well, constantly running campaigns of anti-immigrant hate.


The TL;DR of the playbooks on "immigration and crime"


"Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something.​
Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime."​
--W.E.B. DU BOIS, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935​


Preying on fear is a tool with longstanding bipartisan appeal. Turns out it's not that hard to turn normal human beings into violent creatures hell bent on killing "the other," especially since the advent of mass media.
 
Thailand, Nigeria, Malaysia, India, Australia, and Indonesia. What do they all have in common?

Their governments have all issued travel warnings for their citizens, telling them to avoid the UK.
 
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