Do you feel a surge in far right support in your country/ local area?

[Craig_J]

I'm from the UK and am starting to feel very shocked and disapointed by the rise of support of the EDL and other rightest groups in my local area. I live in Suffolk and recently in my town there's been quite a few cases of people graffiting vile racist words like "paki" on Asian family run shops and I've seen "EDL" written in certain places which have come about over the last 6 months, and to a lesser extent BNP.

The town that I live in has a population of about 20,000 so isn't a big town at all. In the last 10 years it's gone from a town where you'd NEVER see a non-white person or hear any language other than English to having a large arab and asian population as the town I live in is a racing town so many people come over for stable work etc. and there's also a large Polish community now. All this racism though is totally unwarranted, they've caused next to no trouble compared to some of the English people round here and have also been victims of quite a few racist attacks.

I'm interested to now whether you feel thr right is growing in your local area. In this area I feel it growing strongly, but I go to college in Cambridge which is 13 miles away from where I live and it's reassuring to see that in that city at least the left seems to be slowly gaining momentum among my age group.

I wonder if it's any coincidence that the right is growing in my town, which has a very poor school, whereas the left is growing in Cambridge, which is famous for it's fantastic education...

[liberlict]

No. I feel a surge of religious views around me, because we are becoming a lot more multicultural. Perhaps immigrants might be considered 'right-wing', but I don't think of them that way. I welcome them.

[BIXX]

No. I feel a surge of religious views around me, because we are becoming a lot more multicultural. Perhaps immigrants might be considered 'right-wing', but I don't think of them that way. I welcome them.

I don't think you know what we mean by right wing. Religious views are not what defines so wine as right wing, rather, their economic views are what decides that.

To answer the OP: I live near Reed College (kinda) and I have noticed a HUGE amount of reactionary viewpoints regarding racism, queerphobia, all forms of genderism. Plus, I lived in a petty-bourgeois neighborhood for most of my life, and they all looked down on my parents (and consequentially, me). They were really condescending. Luckily we are moving to a working class neighborhood where I can hopefully begin agitating in some way.

[liberlict]

I don't think you know what we mean by right wing. Religious views are not what defines so wine as right wing, rather, their economic views are what decides that.

To answer the OP: I live near Reed College (kinda) and I have noticed a HUGE amount of reactionary viewpoints regarding racism, queerphobia, all forms of genderism. Plus, I lived in a petty-bourgeois neighborhood for most of my life, and they all looked down on my parents (and consequentially, me). They were really condescending. Luckily we are moving to a working class neighborhood where I can hopefully begin agitating in some way.
Social phenomena are superstructure of economics, so yeah, I do know what you mean by right wing.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

i notice a lot of confusion and disillusionment where i am at the moment. its an old mining town on the west coast of scotland that was destroyed in the thatcher years. once a strong working class community that was stamped on by the neoliberal agenda and which has resulted in a community ridden with poverty and deprivation - meanwhile, whatever services remain are being sold off to the highest bidder (by london) and the unions are in bed with the government. all of this is being dictated to by london too, so the time is right for a movement. the trouble is the lack of confidence and organization, amongst the poverty and joblessness. its a mess and sadly, i don't see it being fixed any time soon

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Here in the U.S.? Well, yes and no. The right wing here in America hasn't neccessarily grown, per se, but it is becoming increasingly more brazen and, at the same time, increasingly more unhinged. The recent Supreme Court decisions reguarding DOMA and Prop 8 have started new calls for seccession, and the court's de-fanging of the VRA has allowed various states to attempt to inact rather nakedly racist voting restrictions all over the country.

'Course, the American right has always had a little bit of crazy in its ranks, its just that up until fairly recently they were able to hide it pretty well. Now that they see their previous cultural dominance slowly slipping away from their grasp, their sanity seems to be slipping as well.

[Bright Banana Beard]

Not really, the media in the US only began to pay attention to them for a decade already.

[Rural Comrade]

The US is going through a decline in national spirit. This could lead to the rise or fall of the right-wing. Though rural areas have a bigger tendency to be right wing.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

I definitely feel the surge in the right or, at least, a sudden acceptance of right wing views if not an outright boost to right wing organisations. I'm from Plymouth, a very working class city that is far from London, and there is a lot of confusion and resentment that has been channelled towards supporting UKIP and shit like the EDL. I was talking to a friend the other day who heard Tommy Sheridon on the radio that time and was telling me that he agreed with a lot of what he was saying and I simply couldn't believe it because my friend has previously come across as someone very astute.

I'd say that people simply hate the mainstream parties and simply want to find an alternative but with how the left is pretty much a joke at the moment in terms of being fractured and marginalised all that anger is working in favour of the right.

[Philosophos]

I don't mean to brag but we have Golden Dawn :grin:
But basically yeah there is a huge rising of the fascists around the world. I suppose it's because people feel dissapointed by the whole crisis thing and they need a new way out. Fascists' ideology is closer to what they have in their minds (long live the nation, we are gonna make our nation strong etc etc).

On the other hand communists don't gather a lot of people in their circles because let's face it our ideology is the exact opposite of what we live right now...It's very difficult for people to accept our facts.

Here in Greece we have lots of people who vote and support Golden Dawn but they are not neo-nazis. I mean most of them are fascists and racists but not neo-nazis. They just want the current situation changed and that's what they think is good.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Well there's just been a rally here by conservative MPs and people were chanting 'TURN THE BOATS AROUND! FILTHY MUSLIMS!", and I am continuously meeting people who rant about 'welfare communism' and how natives are RICH because they 'have benefits for school, live off welfare and steal things from people'.

I do not like the direction the population of which I am a part of is going in. People are already sounding like members of the leading Hungarian party here. And they don't listen to criticism, either - if politics has taught me anything it's that political coverage encourages people to relish rhetoric and ignore or shun opposing arguments. It makes it really hard to have a fair discussion when someone complains that you are not giving them enough breathing time then goes on to talk about how you're a 'filthy red' who's 'betraying the country'.

In other words, the place where I live is filled to the brim with white, racist arseholes. And its getting worse.

[Buzzard]

The mood about politics is odd in my area, a majority of people are vaguely liberal with no real beliefs and are mostly working class, and despite doing my best to confront and inform people on issues such as class struggle,capitalism, etc etc. only a few have given it any consideration, people here have some strange aversion to anything remotely political even when it connects directly to their everyday life :confused:

[TooManyQuestions]

I am not sure it is a surge in numbers, but I am seriously concerned about right-wing violence. I feel like there is a growing feeling on that side of the aisle that they can only get their way by force, and are willing to accept that. I think it is only a matter of time before we see a big increase in hate crimes and terrorism directed at non-christians, LGBT, immigrants, and of course lefties.

[OHumanista]

I am not shocked at all, it's quite natural that the fascists try to seize the moment. They present a number of scapegoats to desperate people who want an explanation for the crisis of capitalism.
Thankfully they are still pathetically weak here in Portugal (where I am currently living). Sadly I can't say the same for Brazil where the old (old as in not the ones just risen out of poverty) "middle-class" has always been strongly right-wing.(especially the petit-burgeois) and they're doing their best to hijack the protests there.

I am not saying the situation in Portugal is good though, the extreme right is getting a lil bolder, and the traditional right often flirts with it's ideas as usual.

[Ace High]

Here in the US, we are having alarming surges of those crazy "patriot movement" types. Not as bad as neo nazis or fascist demonstrations in Europe, but still something to be concerned about. These "patriots" generally pander to the tea party and libertarianism.

[Quail]

I am not sure it is a surge in numbers, but I am seriously concerned about right-wing violence. I feel like there is a growing feeling on that side of the aisle that they can only get their way by force, and are willing to accept that. I think it is only a matter of time before we see a big increase in hate crimes and terrorism directed at non-christians, LGBT, immigrants, and of course lefties.
There already has been a crazy surge in anti-muslim violence, ever since the Woolwich murder.

In response to the OP, the EDL have been more active recently, and recently in Sheffield we had some British Movement guys doing a stall and handing out absurdly racist flyers about how it's not too late to return to "our indigenous ethnic makeup", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. The EDL are also pretty violent and although it's kind of easy to take the piss out of them for being drunken idiots, they do cause trouble and they are a threat to anyone they assume to be muslim (and antifascists).

[darkblues]

db

[Sasha]

Here the extreme-right became "acceptable" with the rise of Geert Wilders but while it did a lot of dammge in the sense of the mainstream parties moving more openly to the right it also utterly destroyed fascist/neo-nazi street activism, so in a sense immigrants are safer in some aspects than before...

[Igor]

yeah, and it's not only the rise of the political far right (because that too is happening) but basically the window overall is slowly moving to the right where even the more traditional parties are slowly taking more reactionary stances on everything

just a few weeks ago a quite prominent politician here commented on how women in military are fit to computer work at best and a decade ago this would've caused a much bigger backslash but now it was kinda forgotten because the whole political field is drowning on this shit. i'm not sure how much far right attitudes actually have gained popularity because they've always been out there and more influential most would like to admit but the fact that they are now entering public discussion fast as entirely acceptable ideas is scary as fuck

[Leonid Brozhnev]

Don't really feel it that much where I am right now. It's quite a multicultural area where I live, it's mostly old people and Asian owned shops, there's also a small Islamic cultural centre not that far away, everything is pretty peaceful and I haven't heard of any racially aggravated stuff going down nearby. Shame I'll be leaving the area in a few months to move back down South where it's less multicultural and certainly much more racist.

[GerrardWinstanley]

I'm not sure about a surge. My area has always been shockingly racist (as in so bad, you could correct somebody for usings racial epithets as an appellation for Chinese takeaways or Asian off-licences, and they would look at you as if you're insane), partly through a general lack of interaction with migrants or non-whites (99% white most places) and the fact anti-racism never seemed to take off here.

So Islamophobia spread like wildfire after 9/11 and the tube bombings. But make no mistake, stories in the racist press about 'muslim bombers' or 'muslim rapists' are automatically interpreted by the provincial racist as 'P*ki bombers' and 'Asian rapists'. Old-fashioned biological racism won't be going anywhere for a long time in this part of the country unless the establishment stops pretending racism all just a thing of the past in the 21st Century.

That video circulated online of the EDL in Newcastle chanting 'send the black c*nts home' shocked a lot of people, but without meaning to sound like a snob, that is actually acceptable language to a lot of white geordies, mackems, etc and wouldn't have raised an eyebrow in some local pubs.

[Arlekino]

My area where I am living I am not sure but only one person as me a foreigner. For the moment I don't get any racial abuse or something like that, people are friendly to me. But I do feel outside my street few times I had non nice comments about East Europeans, once I went in corner shop to get some tobacco and wanted pay with card she grab my card looked at my surname well English surname and my ascent are not English she refuse to serve me, another time I went and again I asked for tabacco she told me " I don't speak Japanese" after that I never back in this shop.

[Fakeblock]

Even though the right has been quite strong in Denmark for the past twelve years, it feels like it's growing stronger. I think the social-democratic led center-left coalition government has alienated a lot of people, because of their increasingly right-wing policies. Many voters vote for them, because they're the lesser evil and many former supporters have moved further to the left. Even more have gone to the right though.

On the one hand people are becoming more sympathetic towards the People's Party, the biggest far-right party predicted to gain 16 percent of the vote in the next election. However, many of their votes probably come from seniors supportive of their generous line on elderly care. They are openly hostile towards non-Western European immigrants, but the leadership tries to contain the open racism of the party core, because otherwise they seem insane. On the other hand, the revolutionary Red-Green Alliance have also received a massive boost in supporters predicted to gain 11 percent. They formed out of three old communist/far-left parties in 1989 and their membership consists of both communists and quasi-radical social democrats.

[Comrade Jacob]

I do, in my area we just elected several UKIPers. It's not so much more people have become right-wing it's just more of the conservatives (centre-right in this country but still pure evil) have become UKIPers who are a much more ultra-right privatise EVERYTHING kind of attitude, more power to the church and monarchy, it's bloody mental. I know that the Torries and 95% of parliament's plan is to have a fully private economy, but UKIP's honesty and the amount of support that they have is really scary.

[rednordman]

Rise in xenophobic views yes, Rise in support for the far right, no. Well not enough to give them much of a platform or any power. Thing is, while the EDL have gained support, i feel its a bit knee jerk. I also think that their supporters are getting delusion of grandeur and believe that the public actually views them as something more than a load of thugs/hooligans out to cause trouble at demos. Having xenophobic views is not always the same as supporting the far-right. I think what is going on at the moment may subside once the economy starts to get better. Its just a bit of a trend. But a trend to take seriously though.

[Mark the Leninist]

A lot of liberals and right wingers around here in Massachusetts where I live. Teachers tend to be very biased around here against atheism and left wing ideologies. I once heard one of my history teachers in class say that Russian life in ww1 under the Tzar was better than anything Lenin could do. It sucks here ;p but that's cold war propaganda for you.