“The referendum outcome means Switzerland will follow France, which banned wearing a full face veil in public in 2011. Full or partial bans on wearing face coverings in public are also in place in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark and the Netherlands.”

    • southerntofu
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      4 years ago

      I’m not fond of any religion either.

      I can see that. But advocating against other people’s religions is already a religion of sorts. Even though i disagree with some fundamental assumptions it makes, i will fight for the right of people to have their own religion (or lack thereof) in the face of resurging fascism hiding behind the banner of “clashes of civilizations” and other racist nonsense. In the past decade the fascists have constructed the image of the “islamo-leftist” here in france which is the modern equivalent of the “judeo-bolshevik” conspiracy: it goes a long way to show who will be first on their extermination list. And if you think it’s only small fascist cliques advocating for genocide, you should be aware key public figures including government officials and famous writers have advocated for unregulated imprisonment and/or deportation of muslims and activists for years. Now even the heads of french government are advocating for cleansing universities from so-called “islamo-leftists”.

      I just think that even if muslims were the target of this law they weren’t the people hurt the most by it.

      Time will tell. I just know for sure it plays into a powerful fascist narrative and nothing good can come out of it, whoever gets the blame.

        • southerntofu
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          4 years ago

          I didn’t think it was that bad in France…

          Well it’s not the worst yet. Next year are the presidential election and we’ll “have to” choose between competing brands of fascism ;) I mean Macron was elected only because people wanted to vote “against” Le Pen, and he promised he would be the candidate of hope (etc), yet one of his first actions as president was to push new regulations to double the detention time of undocumented people (sans-papiers) from 30 to 60 days.

          Also, some countries are way further down the road of fascism/tyranny so i wouldn’t like you to understand from my messages that France is the worst place on Earth and i’m a poor little victim of society, that is really not my point. We are really privileged in many regards as a country and enjoy a lot of personal freedoms despite some huge differences following class/race/gender lines. But racist/nationalist terrorism is a thing throughout the western world and not just France.

          I mean you just have to look at the manifestos for school/church shooters blaming “feminists” and “immigrants” for all their problems to realize the actual terrorists the media frames as “deranged killers” are usually active nazis or another kind of neofascist. For example, the Christchurch shooter was heavily influenced by swedish neo-nazi mass-murderer Anders Breivik, and by french fascist-leaning public figure Renaud Camus. See also the Polytechnique massacre as an example of far-right antifeminist terrorism.

          here in Hungary it ain’t much better either, but instead of kicking people out of universities the government kicks out the universities themselves

          I heard repeatedly for about a decade that Hungary was turning into a dictatorship but i’m not familiar with your country. Do you have english/french-speaking resources you find interesting you would like to share, by any chance?

          I will have to say sorry because I didn’t know much.

          Yea, no worries, we all make mistakes. Just try to be super careful next you say something is not racist (or sexist), because history has been going on longer than we have and there’s often surprising explanations to situations which appear simple from the outside ;-)