We had the electoral register knocking on the door yesterday.Hooray, Austrian voters are to a great extent stupid. They elected a charlatan who out-xenophobe'd the traditional Austrian xenophobes from the Freedom party, despite the fact that this person - Mr. Kurz - was minister for immigration for the last fucking 6 years!!! - and deflected the voting public from his puppet masters, the national chamber of commerce/Austrian industrial association (who, not surprisingly, are already grinding the axe for further social security cuts), the same chamber of commerce which pumped endless money to the tabloids/private TV to beat the propagandadrum for the "new conservative movement" of Mr. Kurz, formerly known as Austrian's people's party (somehwhat comparable with UK's Tories).
The stupidity of voters the last few years throughout the western world is astounding.
“A multicultural Bosnia was a compromise that Republika Srpska’s leaders had been forced to accept by international pressure, at a time when they had been openly pursuing genocide and ethnic cleansing. In truth, they’ve never really accepted it,” Emir Suljagic, a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre who later served as deputy defense minister of Bosnia, told me recently at a cafe in Sarajevo. “In the Balkans, any call for redrawing borders or declaring statehood is a signal for violence, and everyone knows it. Ordinary people may not be ready for war, but their leaders are banging the drums nonetheless.”
Indeed, the resurgence of right-wing nationalism in Europe has turned Bosnia’s war into an object of lurid nostalgia — a model for the future, even.
“The Serbian nationalist cause in the 1990s was a hobby horse for the far right in Europe. In their view, Bosnia was an avatar for the types of political developments that they wanted to see happening in the continent,” said Jasmin Mujanovic, a political scientist focused on the region who wrote the recent book “Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans.” “After the Cold War, the next great ideological struggle for the far right was going to be about the question of the nation and identity. The idea of having a genocidal ethnic war like that which occurred in Bosnia — to use their own language, a ‘race war’ — was the whole point. As a result, they continue to sympathize with the people who advocated, perpetrated, and continue to defend that genocide.”
Is this the default Nationalism thread?
@craner, you'll like this. I'm casting around for jobs at the moment and am considering rejoining the civil service. Saw an analyst position come up that looked fairly promising, as it was for the Senedd in Cardiff, but with the option to WFH. Then I get going in the application process and find that it's necessary either to already have "courtesy Welsh language skills", or to promise to acquire such skills while on the job.
It's a maternity cover position, less than a year's work.
She's done better than she did last time and she's only 53. I can't see her disappearing any time soon.the other far-right candidate was doing better than her for awhile, to the point that her own daughter quit her campaign and went to work on his. not sure what changed. but she's started to get the tag of a perennial loser, surely this will be the end of her presidential quest if she loses for the third time.