The Election Was About Racism Against Barack Obama

[DonViejo]

Leon Botstein Dec. 13, 2016

Leon Botstein is President of Bard College

And our challenge is to confront the hypocrisy in our national ideals

The popularity of radical anti-immigrant nationalism in Europe, from Britain to Russia, and in the United States—the recent defeat of a right-wing candidate in the Austrian presidential election notwithstanding—unmasks a startling irony in the way history influences the present. Among the most common complaints leveled at the migrants and refugees now in Europe and the millions who seek to follow in their footsteps—primarily Muslims—is their unwillingness and failure to adapt to Europe and assimilate.

The controversies over burkas, head scarves and mosques suggest a widespread anxiety that the new populations, and therefore potential citizens of the future, will undermine and change cherished definitions of European national identities based on shared religion, shared language and, since the 20th century, a commitment to secular traditions, in which political practices and public culture presume a separation of church and state. The new immigrants, and their predecessors, particularly those in France who came after the independence of Algeria, are seen as determined to retain the customs, laws and way of life, and therefore the identities, they came with, all alien to long-standing, seemingly coherent but distinct national characters—English, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, Russian and Dutch—each rooted in a common history, Christian faith and a shared language.

The several generations of Muslim immigrants to Europe since the end of World War II may not be deeply versed in European history, but it would be hard for them not to sense the widespread and unavoidable shadow cast by the Holocaust and the liquidation of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945. Little in post-1945 European politics has not been shaped by the effort the grapple with the consequences of Fascism during the interwar era and the war itself, particularly the extermination of the Jews.

The ugly fact in that history is that the Jews, once Europe’s most visible and shared minority population, became more hated the more they successfully adapted and assimilated into European national cultures. Rabid political anti-Semitism—whether in France during the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer falsely accused of espionage; or at the turn of the century in Vienna when the city’s mayor, Karl Lueger, pioneered the use of anti-Semitism as a successful electoral strategy; or later, in Germany, when the assimilated Jew par excellence, the wealthy and brilliant foreign minister Walther Rathenau was assassinated by right-wing operatives in 1922—was directed not against pious Jews in black hats, who kept the Sabbath, deferred to rabbinical courts and ate strictly kosher food. Virulent modern anti-Semitism was directed against Jews who willingly shed all that, and became loyal, successful citizens of France, Austro-Hungary and Germany. Their command of the language, dress and social and cultural habits of Europe’s nations made them indistinguishable from their Christian counterparts.

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http://time.com/4597969/election-racism-obama/