General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Greenwald calls-out the dominant Brexit narrative [View all]appal_jack
(3,813 posts)I recall a conversation I had with one of the Hanford nuclear waste site activists back in the early 1990's. He told me that as the cancers climbed and the local economy fell apart through the 1970's, and the full scope of pollution on the Hanford Reservation in Washington became known many hate groups and fringe activists attempted to leverage the issue to their own ends. The KKK recruited there on the basis that the nuclear waste was due to Jewish bankers, Stormfront types said in local meetings that the USA cared more about giving welfare to black urbanites than helping rural white people, LaRouch-ites said whatever nonsense they always do, the Revolutionary Communist Party said that capitalism depended upon poisoning the working class, etc. All of them saw the crisis of nuclear waste ruining a whole community not as something that needed to be solved, but as an opportunity to spread their preferred narrative. My activist friend was smart enough to ignore these campaigns, and stuck to pressuring the US Department of Defense to clean up its mess (an issue not yet resolved today, from my understanding). But some of his neighbors embraced the Klan or other hatemongers. Desperate people will take desperate measures.
I see the failure of modern western neoliberal entities as a similar moment, but on a global scale. If we don't fix the underlying issues, the racists and xenophobes will definitely make hay of it. But their hateful opportunism does not excuse modern western neoliberal institutions for their oligarchic and anti-democratic practices that cause the underlying problems.
-app