On the failure of multiculturalism in Europe

[oslo]

I'd like to springboard off of this post in another community to discuss a disturbing development in European culture and politics caused by the Syrian refugee crisis. In my view, it really calls into question whether we can really all just get along

Comments

[turk_diddler]

Okay, this is the sort of bullshit that gives liberals a bad name. We're 'intellectually sophisticated', we're utopians, we see through the prejudices of others, but we still need a scapegoat for society's ills. You happen to pick on Romanians and Bulgarians, Europeans foreign enough from most of us to be a bit strange and therefore legitimately scorned.

Well, as a matter of fact, Pegida began in Dresden, Gert Wilders is a Dutch politician. In Britain The likes of Norman Tebbit opposed the Maastricht Treaty back in 1992. Break up of the EU has been on the cards for decades, it's just taken two unprecedented crises to push the prospect closer than it ever has been before.

The issue currently most afflicting the EU is the debt crisis, principally the financial disaster that is Greece and political fallout of Germany's policies there, and obviously the Syrian refugee crisis is important also. They're both excuses the aforementioned right-wingers having been waiting for to peddle the easy answers of their isolationist rubbish.
I'll promise this much, if those two problems were solved and you'd probably be giving the Romanians a whole lot less grief for this something that isn't their fault.

Seriously, Romanians and Bulgarians not 'intellectually sophisticated' enough to be Europeans. There should be an extra verse just for you in that old Phil Ochs song regarding the shady opinions of the liberal.

[dexeron]

You're not wrong, really, but I should point out that the OP is in a lot of ways a satire: a funhouse mirror twisting of the words of certain specific "Romanians and Bulgarians" in another political community back on themselves to point out their intellectual and moral paucity. I don't think Oslo actually thinks Romanians or Bulgarians are actually, as a people, intellectually unsophisticated, though of course he's welcome to speak for himself if he disagrees. ;)

[johnny9fingers]

Rhetoric being what it is and all that....