By all standards, I’m an average European, despite having spent 15 years of my youth all over Canada. I was raised European, knowing we would return once Europe recovered from the war.
I never did fit into any pseudo-culture that aspires to call itself an ethnic melting pot because I found it too detached from the real diaspora that Europe is to this day. It’s not like I can identify with nationality as North Americans try to tokenize it, let alone, these divisions of liberal versus conservative. Europe is simply too complex for either to dominate without disastrous results. Politics is one thing, culture another. The latter is about heritage, custom and tradition, whereas politics attempts to maintain social ideals, although the question will always be; for whom and to what end?
What we call “Liberal” usually has to do with free enterprise, whereas conservatism usually refers to old school ethics, though not necessarily religious. Socialism is about the rights of labourers and the disadvantaged. It is a necessary element in maintaining integrity in a diaspora as densely populated as Europe. The American alt-right can’t seem to understand the consequences that would ensue by excluding any one of these elements. Nor is it a conspiracy theory that these populist movements were instigated by your supremacist factions for want of global dominance in countries whose languages you can neither speak or nor customs you neither understand. Family divided by war and greed, I grew up in a country that suffered the consequences of such single-minded populist ignorance. I know the rhetoric, so spare me from your alt-right propaganda. Gender is just a drop in the bucket of the real problems such fanaticism presents. Transgendering, gay marriage, abortion and unisex toilets are not issues here so kindly keep instigators like Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage to yourselves. I’m just simply sick of that polemic. It fails to understand that one size does not fit all.
