Suicidal Psychopathy.

“Can I just ask you … not to get into politics, but do you think the AfD will win?” I asked my cousin at lunch, in a furtive whisper—I’d been warned to stay away from politics. There’s the proverbial crank right-wing Uncle at the table and my Mom had warned me to shut up to keep the peace.

“Yes,” my cousin said without doubt. His wife, who is German, concurred, even though AfD still lags behind the Christian Democrat party in polls. They both grimaced. Thankfully they were against this outcome. But why wouldn’t they be? My cousin, who is Bulgarian, lives and works as a doctor in Berlin. This was memory-holed, but for many years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western European countries feared that hordes of Slavs would flood their countries. Like now, with the current immigrants, stories circulated of Eastern European criminality. Like now, anytime some random shit-head from the former Soviet Block committed a crime, it was blasted out in media as, yes, proof of chaos and disorder and danger unleashed by immigration. Unlike then, now it’s far, far worse because of racism and Islamophobia.

There’s an infuriating trend on the glorious website X where someone will post, like, a picture of some Black men just standing around in Sweden, capped with “What happened to Sweden!? Suicidal empathy!”

As a psychological concept, “suicidal empathy” refers to a dynamic where a person empathizes so deeply with someone who wants to take their life that it wrecks their own mental wellbeing.

The way it’s been hijacked by racists is to assert that in letting in refugees, out of surfeit of empathy (please, Merkel just sucked up all the Syrian doctors and engineers because there was a shortage in Germany), Western Europe is committing cultural suicide. Out of overly soft-hearted, self-sacrificing multicultural liberal idiocy (again, please—there’s a reason my cousin was swiftly absorbed into Germany, there was a shortage of doctors), the Superior Western World is on the verge of collapse.

I humbly offer a different term: suicidal psychopathy. By electing Nazi parties out of a pathological lack of empathy Western Europe is actually just like cutting off its nose to spite its face.

A lot of doctors in Germany are Syrian. Many were part of the influx of refugees Merkel welcomed in 2015, a move that is widely believed to have ended her political career.

And, well, what? Germany has more doctors. “Whole areas in the health sector would fall away if all the Syrians who work here now were to leave our country,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has said.

But the fascist AfD, with full-throated support from Elon Musk and fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment, wants to kick them out.

"Whoever in Germany celebrates a 'free Syria' obviously has no reason any more to have fled," the leader of the far-right AfD party, Alice Weidel, posted on X. "He should go back to Syria immediately."

My god even a party billed as “left-wing populist” shares the sentiment.

Sahra Wagenknecht, who this year set up a new anti-migrant far-left populist party, echoed the AfD's rhetoric.

"I expect the Syrians, who are celebrating here the takeover of power of Islamists, to return back to their home country as soon as possible," she said in an interview with German magazine Stern.

Weidel has embraced the term “remigration,” a vague concept that seems to allow for the deportation of people who are in the country with secure status, even citizenship.

“Only AfD can save Germany,” Elon Musk famously opined.

Save it from what? Better food than gross frankurters? I’m being glib but the struggle is real: when I have a layover between New York and Sofia in Munich, I can’t eat a fucking thing at the airport because everything is a gross hot dog.

I could eat Syrian kabsa — chicken, rice, nuts, 900 spices— five times every day.

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Arab and African immigrants are demonized as existential threats: As violent criminals and rapists (which they are not) and cultural dangers threatening to transform, say, Sweden into a Taliban stronghold (which they are not). White woman’s fragility is weaponized: There’s a whole genre of video spread on social media where a white woman films herself allegedly being harrassed by immigrants of color. They’re blasted out by accounts that conclude, “Women in Europe are no longer safe.” The “Rape of Europa.” Semiotics 101, penetration of the body politic symbolized by sexual danger to young white women 🙄.

The right wing’s creepy rape fantasies aside, by every metric, immigrants of all kinds boost quality of life in their destination countries. I suspect that if the AfD is elected they’ll make a lot of noise about “remigration” but will be loathe to kick out the Syrian medical professionals. Just like Trumpian fascism will stop just quite short of booting the immigrants who are essential to providing Americans with food. That doesn’t mean that what they will do won’t cause pointless, widespread suffering as they criminalize and deport countless people anyway and re-fill Guantanamo.

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To end on a positive note: my 10-year-old nephew is freakishly smart; when we have family lunches, instead of staring at his phone, he latches on to my mother, who studied History, and they discuss, like, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact while the rest of us mindlessly shovel calamari down our gullets.

I asked him what he thinks of the AfD. Hopped up on sugar from Dubai Chocolate cake (oh the horrors of multiculturalism) he babbles to me for 20 minutes about how the AfD are “nazis” and that everyone in his class thinks so too. “Remember when Elon Musk made that sign?” The kid is about to do it and we dive in to stop him (I am not the only political liability in the family). “Of course it was a Nazi sign! And the AfD is Nazis too, just because they hate immigrants. It’s horrible. Immigrants are good.” Cheers kid.