Europe’s Obamazombies Having a Hard Time with their own Paraodox

Andrei Markovits and Jeff Weintraub, writing in the Huff-Po plausit quite simply why it is that Europeans are so GObama when in fact:

All very heartwarming. But having followed the European media with some care since my arrival in Vienna on June 1, I have seen very little acknowledgement of one inconvenient complicating reality. Obama, or someone with Obama's social background and political style, would have a hard time getting elected dog-catcher in any of these European countries,

Nonetheless, there is something puzzling about the euphoria shared with the fringe left in America: the strange willingness to idolize and fetishize a political figure, to lionize and make heroic government and the state, when they just spent the past 8 years trying to convince the world that a much less emotionally needy and less intervention-minded POTUS had been guilty of so many things that he could be compared to Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin, all of who, by the way, were leftists whose goal was to channel in it’s entirely the state the ruling of society, the individual, and create a monoculture ruled by a clenched fist in an iron glove. Promoters of “diversity”, the thing we celebrate because it just is may want to reconsider their apparent blind fealty to any mortal being and go back to their animist worship of Gaia until they can consolidate the disparate features of that paradox of their own.

But back on the benighted continent of the wise and divine, no such trust of “the other” is even remotely possible. In the absence of having much of a platform, and with little airing of it in EUtopia, their attraction to Obama is one of imagery and perhaps the hope that he’ll handicap the thing competing with their hubristic pride as the imagined sages of humanity. It may have more to do with a humger they have for their own devilling distrust of “the other” that they hope this passive aspiration of theirs will somehow cure with neither substantive words nor action.

In France (depending on how the calculations are done) roughly ten per cent of the population are of Arab or sub-Saharan African origin. But the 577 members of the Chamber of Deputies do not include a single person of color. The German Bundestag has a few members of Turkish origin, but their numbers are minimal and none of them plays a prominent role (as compared with some heavyweight African-American, Cuban-American, and Mexican-American Congresspeople and Governors in the US). And so on. One can find isolated exceptions here and there (Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, for example, before she had to flee the country?), but the point is that they're isolated exceptions.

Nor is this just a question of race (and racism). In comparison with the US, European societies have more ethnically restricted and exclusionary conceptions of full citizenship and of political community that make it difficult for outsiders of all kinds to succeed politically. Consider who is Governor of the largest and most important US state, California -- the Austrian-American immigrant Arnold Schwarzenegger. Is it even conceivable that a foreign-born immigrant with a funny foreign-sounding name and a heavy funny-sounding foreign accent could be elected Prime Minister of the most important German Land, North Rhine-Westphalia? (You don't have to guess -- the answer is no.) And ditto for Italy, Britain, France, and the rest.

(Frankly, it's hard to imagine someone with Schwarzenegger's career profile getting himself elected to an important political office even in his native Austria -- which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective.)

Further, the likes of the late Tom Lantos, a holocaust survivor from Hungary managed to serve in Congress, in spite of this society that Europeans generally try to convince one is horribly racist. The list goes on and on, but the implication is clear: they don’t want “someone that appeals to them” in the White House, they want someone that they think would not appeal to their imagined notion of America in the White House.

One thing is clear. Europeans can’t vote here, and for the most part their own votes at home under party-lists of people they don’t get to nominate, elections that are repeated until the desired results are achieved, etc., don’t amount to much either.

In the face of their “friendly advice” which is at best an ongoing series passive-aggressive emotional terrorism attempts, they need to start by not lecturing the rest of humanity and get a grip on their own feeble distrust of their own populations.