Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul D
I was born in Europe. Go away with this derpy crap.
France has Le Pen and a ton of people who wanna shackle Muslims.
Greece has Golden Dawn and were having fabulous street fights not long ago.
Spain really has some ****ed up **** that has gone on forever with the Basque. Catalonias want to gtfo for whatever reason.
In general Europe has a lot of bad nationalist bull**** going on atm that people gloss over with rose-goggled glasses.
Nah it's not bad in Spain. I lived there for 3 years. Catalonian independence stuff flares up once a year and ETA is no longer a thing. Not to say that there is no racism. There is. But they aren't locking people in cages and separating families.
Greece is ****ty for a whole lot of reasons. When I visited Athens, the government was looking to lay off a bunch of firefighters and there was a major protest about it. I mean when you're basically saying, "We're so low on money that we'd rather let our buildings go down in flames, you're ****ed." The street I stayed on in Athens had a couple of heroin junkies who hung around the area and went to the city park at night to shoot up. The refugee crisis was a thing when I was in Crete and a few residents who I chatted with there were bitching about it. Pretty much frustrated about their country having enough problems already and now they have to deal with refugees who are only there because of America.
My time spent in France was with a French-Moroccan and French-Algerian couple. They were totally awesome and my interactions with them and their friends was totally different from your typical French person. I definitely noticed a share of casual racism though. This was likely amped up by the fact that I had arrived the day of the attack at Orly Airport. When I first got to Paris, I had to wait for my AirBnB hosts to show up at a cafe across the street from them. I had a conversation of broken French/broken English with a table of Frenchmen and they jokingly claimed that I was a member of ISIS due to the enormous beard I had at the time. They made sure to refer to the group by its derogatory name, Daesh. I knew it was in jest but I'm sure that people making those jokes likely share anti-Islam sentiment.
The places where racism and nationalism were most clear were in Central and Eastern Europe. At least it was subtle in the west. It was looks, an off-color joke and the like. On the opposite side of the Iron Curtain, the people I interacted with in Poland and Hungary were pretty loud and clear and weren't the joking kind. Hearing about the **** my AirBnB host in Warsaw had to deal with as a gay man was pretty depressing. There is a significant correlation between high degrees of racism and a low percentage of foreign-born population in a country.
Here's a link to maps related to racism in Europe
https://www.boredpanda.com/racism-in...ap-bezzleford/ (
Source - Discrimination in the EU in 2015)
The most racist countries out of that group (Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria) have foreign-born population percentages of 4%, 3.3%, and 1.2% respectively as of 2015. The least racist (Sweden, Luxembourg, The Netherlands) have foreign-born population percentages of 18.5%, 43.3%, and 11.1%.
You can't really say that those countries aren't as bad as America because they don't cage immigrants and separate their children from their families. They don't have the means to effectively do it. The question is would they do it if they could. I have no doubts that a lot of people in Central and Eastern Europe would have no issue with caging refugees and separating them from their parents.