Some memorable quotes from Dr Charles Kriel’s guest post on bylinesupplement about Marco Rubio’s Munich speech: Trump and The Far Right Know What We’ve Forgotten

In 1983, the political theorist Cedric Robinson published Black Marxism, a study of how enslaved Africans resisted the most comprehensive system of information dominance in modern history. The plantation controlled everything: who counted as human, who could speak, what counted as knowledge, what constituted reality. Total narrative control. And it failed.

Escaped enslaved people constructed autonomous societies, maroon communities and quilombos, settlements in the forests and mountains beyond the plantation’s reach. They built networks of mutual support and escape that stretched across continents. Robinson’s insight cut deep: this resistance did not operate by opposing the plantation’s narrative. Its success was in constructing something else.

And

Europe has already become the object of desire.

Europe’s political response? Panic. Walls. Frontex patrols. Deportation agreements. Europe treats the proof of its own desirability as a security threat.

Marco Rubio spoke about migration threatening “the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people.” He framed desire as danger. European leaders have adopted the same framing. They have let the far right define the meaning of the most powerful evidence of European success available to them.