I’ve lived in The Netherlands for almost a decade.
The idea that the Dutch would go along with crackdowns on protests because “Wilders” is hilarious and the idea that they would do so inspired by what’s going on in America is even more so: this is a country that’s had rose buurts (red-light districts) and coffee shops for decades - during the period of peak American cultural dominance, with its weird moralism with strong religious undertones - and where the first leader of the Far Right (from were Wilders’ party descends), Pim Fortuyn, was from the very start very openly gay: what other nation on Earth is so open minded that their Far Right took off under the leadership of an openly gay person?!
I mean, this is the only country I lived in where if somebody is being a disturbance in the train (say, playing music out loud) and refuses to stop when politelly asked for, the entire carriage gets up against that person.
Whilst I’ve been out of that country for over a decade, I think it take an incredible profound shift in their actual culture for people to go along with a crack-down on demonstrations in general, much less because some politician in America got shot at. Now, Germany, on the other hand, I see as far more likely to go down that route since the power elites there already do a number of somewhat-autocratic things towards their population (such as tighter surveillance than most of Europe and the recent “anti-semitism” legislation that’s really about supressing criticism of an ethno-Fascist state) - that place hasn’t actually got rid of certain perspectives amongst the Power Elites that made it so easy for the Nazis to take over.
I mean, I don’t disagree that weak “Democracies” (say, Orban’s Hungary or Modi’s India) might use this as a pretext to crackdown even more on political dissent than they already do (as they would use just about anything that’s even remotelly useful for that purpose), but beyond such highly subverted Democracies and Autocracies, the visible effects of the peculiar intersection of American politics and gun laws aren’t really something that would sway the locals elsewhere into changing their practices of civil society movements and and thresholds of acceptability of suppression of them - I’ve even lived in the UK - which in some ways is the closest to America country in Europe - and what happenned to Trump is the kind of situations that Brits see as “the kind of thing that would never happen here” and would inspire exactly zero pushback against anything in Britain.
Yet another shooting in “one school-shooting a week”-America isn’t really an inspiration for other countries to crack down on anything.
I’ve lived in The Netherlands for almost a decade.
The idea that the Dutch would go along with crackdowns on protests because “Wilders” is hilarious and the idea that they would do so inspired by what’s going on in America is even more so: this is a country that’s had rose buurts (red-light districts) and coffee shops for decades - during the period of peak American cultural dominance, with its weird moralism with strong religious undertones - and where the first leader of the Far Right (from were Wilders’ party descends), Pim Fortuyn, was from the very start very openly gay: what other nation on Earth is so open minded that their Far Right took off under the leadership of an openly gay person?!
I mean, this is the only country I lived in where if somebody is being a disturbance in the train (say, playing music out loud) and refuses to stop when politelly asked for, the entire carriage gets up against that person.
Whilst I’ve been out of that country for over a decade, I think it take an incredible profound shift in their actual culture for people to go along with a crack-down on demonstrations in general, much less because some politician in America got shot at. Now, Germany, on the other hand, I see as far more likely to go down that route since the power elites there already do a number of somewhat-autocratic things towards their population (such as tighter surveillance than most of Europe and the recent “anti-semitism” legislation that’s really about supressing criticism of an ethno-Fascist state) - that place hasn’t actually got rid of certain perspectives amongst the Power Elites that made it so easy for the Nazis to take over.
I mean, I don’t disagree that weak “Democracies” (say, Orban’s Hungary or Modi’s India) might use this as a pretext to crackdown even more on political dissent than they already do (as they would use just about anything that’s even remotelly useful for that purpose), but beyond such highly subverted Democracies and Autocracies, the visible effects of the peculiar intersection of American politics and gun laws aren’t really something that would sway the locals elsewhere into changing their practices of civil society movements and and thresholds of acceptability of suppression of them - I’ve even lived in the UK - which in some ways is the closest to America country in Europe - and what happenned to Trump is the kind of situations that Brits see as “the kind of thing that would never happen here” and would inspire exactly zero pushback against anything in Britain.
Yet another shooting in “one school-shooting a week”-America isn’t really an inspiration for other countries to crack down on anything.