"Far Right"

What does this term even mean now?

**SEE IMAGE NOTE BELOW

At school the other day, I was on my way to grab some lunch when I heard my name being called from across the playground. It turned out to be an old colleague who’d come back for a visit.

We’re going to call him ‘Stephen.’

Stephen’s a great guy. Beautiful wife, beautiful kids, great teacher. Just an objectively good dude, with a good family. There is no country on earth that would not benefit from having his people move there to live. No country on earth that would look at this family and think, “nah, doesn’t meet our standards.”

I was disappointed when they picked up stakes to move to Germany a few years ago, but such is life for an international teacher. You get used to the transience of friends and neighbors. I was surprised to see him back in Thailand because I hadn’t heard he’d be visiting. Turned out he wasn’t visiting. He’d moved. He was back back.

When they left for Frankfurt, they expected their move to be an upgrade. There’s a kind of unwritten hierarchy of countries in which it’s desirable to be an international teacher, and Germany has historically been very high on that list. The pay is great, the schools are great, the benefits are great, and until very recently, Western Europe was more or less synonymous with high quality of living.

They lasted just three years.

Talking to him, I could almost smell how relieved he was to be back in Southeast Asia.

Thailand isn’t as high on that desirable countries hierarchy as you might think. Yeah, it’s a tourist paradise, but…it’s a tourist paradise. There are tourists everywhere. Tourists suck. And the salary picture is complicated.

International teachers earn good money for Thailand. Most are in the top 2-3% of earners here; phenomenal by western standards. But the Thai baht doesn’t perform well internationally. You can live like nobility so long as you stay in the Kingdom, but the second you step foot out of it, you’re a pauper. When we go back to the states, it costs me as much to take my kids to McDonald’s once as it costs me to buy groceries for a week here.

For most, this isn’t such a great bargain. You can’t save for the future, you can’t travel outside the region. Even just going home for a wedding or funeral can effectively wipe you out financially.

The highest paying international schools are mostly in China and the Gulf States, but there are major trade-offs. China can be repressive and inhospitable, and the Gulf is culturally dismal. So Europe was always regarded as a kind of sweet spot. Good packages, good work-life balance, and hey, you get to live in Europe! There are castles, and galleries, and museums. There’s great food and great night life. It was the pinnacle of civilization (Stephen’s words).

And in just ten years, a cadre of moralizing ideologues have rendered its urban spaces unrecognizable.

Stephen didn’t actually want to raise his kids in a place where the central train station is a bombed out hellhole full of whores and junkies. He didn’t like having to answer questions like, “Daddy, why does that man have a needle in his arm?” or “Why does that lady have no pants on?”

He didn’t like having to walk his children past a screaming meth-head taking a shit and trying to wipe his ass with Die Welt. He didn’t like having to steer them around open drug markets, and carry them over the bodies of passed-out vagrants. He didn’t like three, separate apartment blocks in his neighborhood catching fire because people in the street torched garbage bins and the flames licked up the sides of the buildings.

He didn’t like his rent going up 40% in three years (while his salary flat-lined) because people had to shell out more in taxes to accommodate these lovely folks. And he didn’t like that the decision-makers preventing these messes from being cleaned up were all either deranged zealots or aged-out boomers in gated communities, with no families to raise anymore, and no skin in the game.

So Stephen packed up his things, packed up his family, and they got the fuck out.

“Everyone’s a liberal until they have kids,” is what he said to me. This wasn’t a guy I’d ever talked much politics with, but to the extent we did, he was like me. Classically liberal, multiculturally-inclined - a “global citizen.”

And while it was awkward for him - for me too - it wasn’t possible for him to avoid naming the problem, or identifying the demographic responsible for the drug dealing, and the street walking, and the train station shitting. “I can’t actually be sure who kept setting the bins in my neighborhood on fire, but it probably wasn’t the German doctors and lawyers.”

In just ten years, 6.5 million people from failing, war-torn states in the Middle East, Africa, and south Asia turned Germany’s metropolises into unlivable cesspits. This cohort was single-handedly responsible for an absolutely momentous surge in narcotics and opioid abuse, sexual assault, robbery, homicide, and generalized civic chaos.

In a dice roll worthy of Sky Masterson, Germany (and the UK, and France, and Sweden, and Italy, and the Netherlands, and, and, and) handed in stable cities that were the envy of the world in exchange for being considered “kind.”

No one voted for this. It wasn’t decided by popular referenda or direct, democratic action. The decisions were top-down, and made by professional politicians.

Citizens were told it was a matter of humanitarian need, and also that it would be temporary. When things calmed down, most of these visitors would be able to return home. In the meantime, they would stabilize shaky economies, enrich home cultures, bolster the European sense of identity, and anyway, it was simply the right thing to do.

And when citizens of Germany (and the UK, and France, and Sweden, and Italy, and the Netherlands, and, and, and) questioned or objected to this policy choice, they were called “far right.” They were called “racists.” They were compared to the Nazis.

Because they didn’t want to have to explain to their daughters why the man at the train station wasn’t going poop in the bathroom like everyone else, and why he was wiping his bottom with newspaper, and why he was screaming and drooling the whole time, and why no one was stopping to help him.

Nazis.

I’ve actually been to a lot of the war-torn states these new entrants to Europe are coming from. In times of peace and stability, they’re wonderful places. The people I met there were wonderful too. The idea that I have some inherent objection to their becoming my neighbors, or the neighbors of my friends in Europe, is offensive to me. I am phenomenally drained of my patience for the xenophobia accusation. Fuck all the way off with that.

This isn’t about race or identity, it’s about behavior. A man’s home is burning down around him, and you call him a bigot for wanting the fire department to intervene? “Far right” isn’t a political designation, it’s a slander.

Stephen had to actually look over his shoulder when recounting how serious the social problems caused by rapid, mass migration have become in Europe. He doesn’t like being thought of as “far right” any more than I do. But the consequences of this initiative were not ignorable. They were in his face. And they were a preference.

This gets overlooked, though it really shouldn’t. Rapid, mass migration was not an extension of existing policy. It wasn’t the result of popular clamor, or real economic need, and it mostly wasn’t tempered by input from skeptics. It was undertaken by a ruling class that believed so fiercely in its own righteousness, it came to see critics as morally equivalent to the worst conductors of torture, suffering, and death the world has ever known.

This, because they suggested, “You might be inviting too many people too quickly.”

And when this unilaterally imposed preference went wrong? When things turned south? When the skeptics were proved right, did the instigators change direction?

Of course they didn’t. They doubled down. For some reason, this policy preference was unlike any other in history, in that its impact could not be dispassionately evaluated. Mass migration could not be judged in terms of whether or not it had succeeded. It certainly couldn’t be reversed.

Germany just lost a great family because of this preference. A family that wanted to contribute, to build a life there. To be part of a great society.

If it is “far right” to not want to live in a decaying husk of a country, “far right” to not want to hear syringes crackling under your kids’ feet when they walk to school, “far right” to not want junkie poop staining your pant legs, “far right” to prefer fires in fireplaces to garbage cans, and want drug deals out of the central train stations, if it’s “far right” to remember that this wasn’t happening 10 years ago, and “far right” to notice that the newcomers are badly overrepresented among those now making it happen, then really, what does “far right” even mean?

By these standards, there are about 200 people on earth who aren’t “far right.” How did they all end up working in western governments?

**IMAGE NOTE: I fed ChatGPT some pictures I mined from Google of Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (the central train station) and asked it to riff on them to generate a representation of strife at the train station caused by mass migration.

It said it couldn’t do it. It wasn’t allowed to attribute social problems to a particular demographic like migrants. Fair enough.

I said, “okay, make it diverse,” and it gave me the somewhat janky image at the top of this piece.

Out of curiosity, I then asked if it would have been able to fulfill my request if the problems being illustrated were attributable to the “German far right.”

No problem.