By: Adam Paquin
The Bull article has an interesting take on populism and tells us that all over the world there are several different definitions for this term we call populism. With many different styles or ideologies and in most cases, it is set to a sort of moralism which turns the official into a person of good and their opponent into a person of evil. She also argues that often a populist leader uses ones memory against them creating fabricated visions of history while placing their enemy at the center and stating that they are the reason for the states downfall.
The Molnar article gives us and in depth look into racism, antisemitism and all-around fears of immigration that many of the German citizens had after the Second World War. He specifies the fact that during the cold war and up until the mid 90’s anti-immigration sentiment was on the rise and until then they only accepted very minimal amounts of immigrants under strict circumstances. But after the collapse of communism, they started to receive a massive spike of immigration. One part I found rather interesting was the fact that their welfare system was so good that many German citizens proposed the idea that many of the “asylum seekers” might not even be seeking asylum. But in fact, taking advantage of the German taxpayers and the welfare system. Which now began to spread large amounts of violence both from Germans and immigrants seeking asylum. Molnar proceeds to go in depth more on the violence and riots that erupt afterwards.
Hate 2.0 