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rfmcdonaldMy previous post highlighted a minor ideology of 1930s North America, technocracy, that never quite managed to break through into mainstream North American politics. Any number of ideologies have been left to drift into the purview of historians interested in obscurities, or missed because they're highly contingent on local circumstances. It's not a coincidence, for instance, that the first generation of West Germans born after the Second World War often took to a particularly extreme left-wing radicalism--the Rote Armee Facktion's not that distinct in that regard--motivated in part by the fact that their parents actually did work for a genocidal and imperialistic regime with remnants visible in contemporary West German society. Modern Québec society, separatist-leaning or otherwise, is concerned with becoming and remaining a prosperous modern Francophone society, in reaction to a more conservative and insular past. In the Baltic States, support for membership in the European Union was rooted to the desire of Balts (not so much Baltic Russians) to be firmly embeddded in a benign multinational federation embodying the ideals they aspired to.
In some societies, actively practiced religion inspires movements, in others the legacies of religions practiced in the breach do, in many conflicts between religions and sects of religions determine the local political environment. Trotskyites, Hindutva activists, Pattani Malay separatists, Crimean Tatar revivalists, German Christian Democrats, immigrant political machines in multicultural Toronto: all of these particular movements and groups can trace their origins to fairly specific milieus in fairly self-explanatory histories.
There's not that much new here in Toronto, honestly, with a superannuated social democracy contending with left-of-centre and right-of-centre political movements and so manifesting in disputes over public spending and transport corridors, all in a fairly benign environment that has marginalized extremists of one type or another. It's boring, I guess. What's going on in your part of the world?
In some societies, actively practiced religion inspires movements, in others the legacies of religions practiced in the breach do, in many conflicts between religions and sects of religions determine the local political environment. Trotskyites, Hindutva activists, Pattani Malay separatists, Crimean Tatar revivalists, German Christian Democrats, immigrant political machines in multicultural Toronto: all of these particular movements and groups can trace their origins to fairly specific milieus in fairly self-explanatory histories.
There's not that much new here in Toronto, honestly, with a superannuated social democracy contending with left-of-centre and right-of-centre political movements and so manifesting in disputes over public spending and transport corridors, all in a fairly benign environment that has marginalized extremists of one type or another. It's boring, I guess. What's going on in your part of the world?
