This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. If a group of nationalist dickheads is operating in an Eastern European country, this is cognized as evidence of nationalist dickheadism permeating the whole society, while a group of nationalist dickheads in a Western country is cognized as an aberation. Not many people go around talking about "the deep xenophobia of the French," and then pointing to the National Front as proof.
The reason for this is that Western Europe has for hundreds and hundreds of years -- hell, maybe since the Church Schism -- defined itself as the "good/enlightened/Catholic (later in the Germanic countries Protestant)" group versus the "bad/backward/uncivilized/Orthodox barbarians." You see this stuff way back hundreds of years ago, when the British were ranting about the dark backwardness of the Russians at the same time as they were lopping off people's hands for theft and sticking the heads of criminals on poles along the Thames -- while incidentally the death penalty was almost never practiced in the Russian Empire, Catherine the Great having had an abhorrence for it and Empress Elizabeth actually abolishing it. It is perhaps Western Europe's central recurring ideological theme, and it is a mark of its resiliance that it actually survived Hitlerism, the greatest barbarism of all time.
--- On Wed, 8/6/08, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> And the backward-looking Russian chauvinist movements like
> Pamyat are pretty marginal today. Making them emblematic of
> what Russia is really like would be like saying that Gordon
> Brown was just the front man for the British National Party.
>