CHANGING VENUE, BUT THE DANCE REMAINS THE SAME.

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999) (From the book jacket: "Dark Continent is a searching history of Europe's most brutal century. Stripping away the comforting myths and illusions that we have grown up with since the second World War, Mark Mazower presents an unflinching account of a continent locked in a finely balanced struggle between tolerance and racial extermination, imperial ambition and national self-determination, liberty and the tyrannies of Right and Left. It is an attempt to trace the origins of 'Western values'--the ideological terms we now live by--and to ask what remains of the struggle of previous generations." "Instead of seeing Europe as the natural home of freedom and democracy, Mazower argues that it was a frequently nightmarish laboratory for social and political engineering, inventing and reinventing itself through war, revolution and ideological competition, Fascism and communism should be regarded not as exceptions to the general rule of democracy, but as alternative forms of government that attracted may Europeans by offering different solutions to the challenges of the modern world, By 1940 the prospects for democratic government looked bleak, and Europe's future seemed to lie in Hitler's hands, yet freedoms given another change with the defeat of the Nazi New Order, and it prevailed decades later across the continent with the collapse of the Iron Curtain." QUERY: But can it sustain itself in light of the challenges of the twenty-first century, including anti-immigrant policies. Growing economic gap between rich and poor fueled by an evaporation of the middle class, and there rise of far-right an authoritarian politics? From the text: "In his 1973 film Fear Eats the Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder depicted a love affair between a Moroccan 'guest worker' and an older German woman, Emmi. They are 'just a rabble,' her friends tell her, 'mean, filthy swine.' Surrounded by prejudice, the two get married, however, and have their wedding mean in a Munich restaurant once frequented by Hitler. As Fassbinder implied, pre-war and post-war racism were closely linked, and the influx of foreign workers brought out the enduring sense of superiority, cultural anxiety and prejudice that were never far beneath the surface in west European society. In 1955 it had been London's Cypriots whom teddy boys had attacked in the name of the 'white man', three years later it was West Indians living in Notting Hill. Although racist violence and overtly xenophobic politics were relatively uncommon and indeed criticized by mainstream opinion, a milder form of racism was widespread ad growing  In the early 1970s, the economic climate changed ,and became more hostile to continued immigration on a large scale." Id. at 324-325. QUERY: Were conditions any better in the United States during this same period? And how are things in America today in Trump's 'Make-America-White-Again' America?).