6 Modern Countries With Shockingly Backwards Views

5 In Germany, Racist Stereotypes of Asians Are (Literally) Rewarded

After winding up with some serious egg on its face thanks to that whole Holocaust thing, Germany became a pretty progressive place. Today, its culture is shaped by a variety of inclusive policies suited to its multicultural citizenship, about 20 percent of whom are foreign-born. One group that isn't quite so well-represented? East Asians. It's hard to get an accurate count, since about half of Germany's two million "Asian" citizens are from the Middle East (which is indeed part of Asia, but still), but there are at most one million Asian-Germans in a country of 82 million people. Having apparently figured "what they can't see won't hurt 'em," Germany has become very cool with making fun of Asians. In fact, they give out awards for it. Specifically, for this, an ad for a Wagner concert by Japanese conductor Kent Nagano.

Yes, that's Richard Wagner himself reimagined as your least-favorite uncle. This ad would trigger a tsunami of offense in the U.S., but Germans mostly didn't care. The one group of people that did, a Berlin advertising organization called the Art Directors Club, awarded the ad a gold prize that year. Their spokesman said the ad " charming and funny and shows openness and multiculturalism," and called it "an excellent poster that goes beyond cultures to form a great work and that very strikingly and succinctly shows Asian culture." We're gonna hazard a guess that the Art Directors Club doesn't include a lot of Asians.

Related: The 5 Most Bafflingly Racist Beloved Fictional Universes

4 All Jews Are Welcome In Israel (Except Ethiopians)

In 1977, Israel decided to bring over 56,000 Jews from Ethiopia, and then treated them like a trendy pet that turned out to be more work than they'd bargained for. Thirty-five years after they were forced into ghettos and isolated from mainstream Israeli life, various surveys found Ethiopian Jews were dead last on the list of desirable employees -- 75 percent of non-immigrant Israelis wouldn't allow their children to marry one, and fewer than 50 percent supported mixed classrooms. Oh, and in 2016, Israel's top police official said that it's natural for police to be more suspicious of Ethiopian Jews, as their "community is statistically involved in crime more than others." Sound familiar?

In 1996, it was discovered that all the blood Ethiopian Jews donated to Magen David Adom (Israel's equivalent of the Red Cross) was quietly destroyed, for fear of HIV infection. Blood donation has been a hot-button issue for Ethiopian Jews ever since. They were only granted permission to donate blood without restrictions in 2017. It gets worse. A 2012 documentary revealed that Ethiopian Jewish women were forced to take contraceptives if they wanted to keep their healthcare. Some didn't even know what they were being given. As a result, Ethiopian immigrants' birth rate fell by half in one decade. You'd think that, as a people, Israelis would be a little less comfortable with the idea of eugenics.

Related: A Mystery Man Impersonated Truman To Make Israel A Country

3 In The UK, Poles Are Viewed As Job-Taking "Vermin"

We've all heard dumb jokes about the Polish for reasons we never quite understood, but they're deadly serious in the UK. A 2014 survey reported that 81 percent of UK Poles suffered physical or verbal abuse, or knew somebody who had. In 2013, 585 people were arrested for hate crimes against the Polish. This explosion of animosity seems to stem from Poland's entrance into the EU in 2004, after which Poles began immigrating to the UK en masse -- though not quite as massively as the tabloids would have you believe.

The Sun once claimed that an entire Polish city up and moved to the UK. The city sued, presumably on the grounds that anyone who's ever been to a city council meeting knows how hard it is to get an entire town to do anything, much less physically uproot. This paranoia about foreign workers infiltrating the country and taking everyone's jobs is at least in part what led to Brexit. After the vote, laminated cards that read "Leave the EU / No more Polish vermin" were found in Cambridgeshire.

Laminated, we say!

That means they were super serious.

Related: 6 Terrible Stereotypes (That Came From Positive Things)

2 South Korea Has A Seriously Messed Up View Of People With Dark Skin

Until recently, racism was an unspoken way of life in South Korea. Biracial models were called "mongrels," the 200,000 children of "marriage migrants" were often treated as second-class citizens, and a shocking number of businesses can still legally refuse to serve foreigners. In South Korean media, black people face the same kind of stereotypes you'd expect from a Civil-War-era KKK pamphlet. We kid you not:

1 Concentration Camps Still Exist ... For The Roma In Italy

The Roma have historically not been well-liked by, well, anybody. But they've been frighteningly oppressed in Europe, and recently. The Czech Republic forcibly sterilized Roma until 2007, France evicted over 10,000 Roma from their settlements in 2013, Swedish police were found to have a secret register of 4,000 (mostly Roma) names the same year, and Denmark cleared out 25 Roma camps in two months, after making them illegal in 2017. It seems like an unnecessarily big fuss over a group that doesn't even crack 2 percent of the European population.

But that's all nothing compared to Italy. In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi's government declared that the existence of Roma settlements (one quarter of a percent of the population) constituted a state of emergency, and henceforth required that all Roma be fingerprintedand evicted from their settlements into "nomad camps." What do you think the chances are that those camps were in scenic Tuscan villas? Surprise: They were filthy, vermin-infested shacks, lacking in even the most basic services.

This was A-OK with the people of Italy, 86 percent of whom have an unfavorable view of Roma, as well as with the courts, who declared discrimination against Roma acceptable "because they are thieves." Again, this seems like a country that should be a bit more wary of xenophobia-based roundups, but hey, as long as the trains run on time.

Kent Nagano is really quite the conductor, give it a listen.

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For more, check out 5 Shocking Laws Modern Countries Had Until A Few Years Ago and 5 Shockingly Progressive Policies From Insane Dictatorships.

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