A Trump supporter. Wikimedia Commons/Fibonacci Blue. CC-BY-2.0.It’s historic, I guess. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland recently became the first far-right party to enter its parliament for over fifty years, and maybe the silliest. I say silly because one AfD election poster featured a heavily-pregnant woman, lying on German grass, smiling towards a German camera, under the words ‘New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves’. And with the far-right Freedom Party crashing into mainstream Austrian politics, a party which last year released a video telling asylum seekers to keep their fingers off “our women”, I suppose we’re already halfway to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, where women walk around in bonnets and sensible shoes, hands piously clasped, while men drive round and point at things.
I suppose we’re already halfway to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, where women walk around in bonnets and sensible shoes, while men drive round and point at things.
Across Europe there seems to be a far-right Mercedes breaking all political speed limits, powered by the engine of National Truism, the philosophy of today. How does National Truism work? It’s a minestrone, combining ideas like ‘parthenogenesis’ (rebirth) and ‘lebensraum’ (living space) with a civilizational decline story and a fear of ‘others’: immigrants, muslims, and, worst of all, muslim immigrants. And it’s a supreme national truth to say we should live in ethno-states with ‘our own kind’, speak ‘our own languages’, and eat ‘our own food’ – which, for me, being British, means eating potatoes, drinking tea, and talking about football.
