In America, immigration is a charged topic and framed mostly along the lines of people coming across from Mexico, legally and illegally, along with policy questions over H1-B visas that rankle the tech sector in particular, mostly out of proportion to the relatively small number of visas actually granted. Periodically measures come up attempting to normalize our immigration policy with Mexico, but mostly over the last decade we’ve been militarizing the border, sinking lots of money into various kinds of fences and generally trying to pretend that our half-baked ‘solutions’ to a problem that stems in no small part from trade policies enacted under NAFTA to begin with are working.

I bring this up to analogize for our largely American audience; Europe has been facing a similar crisis of identity over its own immigration policies of late. Waves of far-right politicians, often openly-Fascistic, have been gaining significant ground in European nation after nation. Americans think of Europe as a hopelessly left-wing socialist dystopia, and to some extent that’s true (except for the dystopia or hopeless part), but on immigration policy Europe has a far-right extremist fringe to rival anything America’s Minuteman movement has to offer.

France has decided to outright ban religious dress it finds offensive. Switzerland, a nation you might think would feel the least bit reticent about jumping on the religious intolerance bandwagon, sitting as it long did on the Nazi’s stolen gold, banned the construction of new minarets after a flagrantly hateful and arguably racist campaign. Germany… ah. Germany:

Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have “utterly failed”, Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

She said the so-called “multikulti” concept – where people would “live side-by-side” happily – did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate – including learning German.

The comments come amid rising anti-immigration feeling in Germany.

A recent survey suggested more than 30% of people believed the country was “overrun by foreigners”.

…

In her speech in Potsdam, however, the chancellor made clear that immigrants were welcome in Germany.

This is going to end terribly well, I can just tell.

Even the Scandinavian bastions of liberalism haven’t been spared the creep of neo-fascism, as a fascinating NYT piece from February explored the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-refugee fervor in Sweden, a country which once encouraged immigration for labor, then abandoned immigrant favoring policies when said labor was no longer needed… but kept taking refugees for whom it had no jobs or apparent plan.

In the grand and unfortunate tradition of using Anti-Zombie movies to explore contemporary social dilemmas, some enterprising Swedes have made a Zombie Apocalypse film that is a *very* thinly veiled take on the Scandinavian aspect of this conflict, entitled Zombie 261:

Landskrona, Sweden, 2013. A ship crashes into the harbor dock. Police enter the wreck – and are attacked by the infected crew. Bitten policemen fall in a coma – and wake up as rabid monsters.

The disease spreads like a wildfire. Everyone tries to escape.

But the city is quarantined – the military erects a concrete wall around the city. The few non-infected – Swedes and immigrants alike – take shelter in the citadel.

As the infected try to claw their way into their sanctuary, the non-infected have to decide who the worst monsters are: their former enemies inside – or the infected on the outside.

As the tension inside the citadel escalate to boiling point, the non-infected, in order to survive, have to decide if they view their former enemies as monsters – or as brothers and sisters; if they see each other as immigrants and Swedes – or as fellow humans.

Yes, it’s time to rally all the Living people of Sweden together against those awful, awful Zombies. Truly a heartwarming tale of how you can unify a divided populace behind mutual hatred of someone else.

Which is a bit like the story about the old woman who swallowed a fly…

You can see the trailer here, which makes the Anti-Zombiism of the movie unfortunately very obvious. The question left for the ZRC seems to be, once we watch the final full length picture: Anti-Zombie? Or Living Supremacist.

Joy.

ZONE 261 – Trailer from ZON 261 on Vimeo.

Tags: Euro-zom, Movies, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.