Posted on 05/10/2004 1:08:58 PM PDT by MegaSilver
It was autumn 1996. Four men were sitting around me in a central London pub. Little distinguished them from the passing commuters. Other than their baseball caps, jailbird tattoos, or talk of white revolution, they might have been just about anyone.
Those four men were the leaders of a notorious neo-nazi gang called Combat 18 - the 1 and 8 in the name signify the position of “A” and “H” ("Adolf Hitler") in the alphabet.
The gang was connected to Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, a violent “white power” music scene, numerous football hooligan “firms”, and the British National Party (BNP) - the most prominent far-right political movement in modern Britain.
The gang may have crumbled into internecine strife and murder during the 15 months of our encounters - which formed the introduction to my book Homeland - and its dream of an Aryan Homeland in the wilds of Essex was perhaps laughable. But the far Right itself and the tensions which feed it are no longer a joke.
Coming of age
Last month the BNP leader Nick Griffin welcomed the French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen to the UK. It was a sort of “coming of age” ceremony for Griffin and the BNP - recognition that they might be on the verge of an electoral breakthrough at forthcoming local, European and London elections this June.
Le Pen had recently travelled from his native France where, despite lacking representation at national level, around one in six voters recently supported his Front National (FN) party in regional elections.
In 2002 this notorious godfather of the Right – to whom almost all other far-right parties have paid homage at one time or another – took nearly 20 percent of the vote (over 5.5 million people) and beat Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin into second place.
Le Pen’s Front National has links to other extremist and ultra-nationalist parties across Europe. Even where such links are more tenuous, the FN has often had an influence.
If you look at fledgling movements such as the BNP, you will see imitations of the FN’s web strategies, its media monitoring units, “influence circles”, even down to taking the same name for its annual festival.
Shifting perceptions
Yet despite its political rise, the popular perception of the extreme Right remains latched onto the Combat 18 stereotype.
Perhaps it is comforting to believe that xenophobes and violent racists represent a tiny minority of our populations; that they are not like “us” – rather, that they inhabit some shadowy world from which they lurch every so often into the pages of tabloid newspapers.
Too often I have seen even respected commentators write off the rise of the Right as a mere protest movement. Yet I would argue that the rise of the extreme Right represents the flipside to Al-Qaeda, both physically and metaphorically. As fundamentalism rises in the East, so our own zealots grow here in the West.
Aside from the FN and BNP, there are now prominent extreme Right and anti-immigrant parties across Europe today: in Belgium (the Vlaams Blok); in Norway (Progress Party); Denmark (Danish Peoples Party); in Germany (the Republicans, the German Peoples Union and the skinhead National Democratic Party, plus a dangerous alliance of “comradeship” groups); in Austria (Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party); in the Netherlands (Pim Fortuyn List); in Switzerland (Swiss Peoples Party); in Portugal (Popular Party); and in Italy (Northern League, and the National Alliance).
But perhaps perceptions are shifting. Mainstream politics and public opinion are affected by fears – some would say hysteria – over immigration, asylum, terrorism and Islam. These phrases are often used interchangeably on the street and in casual conversation.
Immigration and terrorism regularly feature among the top voter concerns in rich Western Europe. Demonisation of the “other” is commonplace.
There are widely held beliefs – from the bars of Flanders to the alpine chalets of Bavaria – that someone else must to blame for the breakdown of traditional communities; for the lack of certainty; for the increased pace of change; for job insecurity, higher tax bills, and a loss of belonging and identity in an increasingly globalised world.
Harking back to mythical better times is commonplace among the people I encountered, whether neo-nazi thugs or educated professionals.
I have listened to voters explain that being swamped by asylum seekers causes them to support the far Right, even when I can prove no such asylum seekers exist within their community.
All too often, settled minority communities are tarnished with this same brush, viewed under the label of Allah, as “other”, foreign and alien. Belief is a hard thing to challenge.
The Right also benefits from many first-time voters, as well as from the rise of single-issue politics. Ironically, studies in France showed that the greatest support for parties such as the Front National came from the suburbs, propelled by a fear of “invasion” by the city and its supposed immigrant gangs.
Multiculturalism vs integration?
Strange times are forging stranger alliances. I have witnessed gatherings of Islamic radicals with western Holocaust deniers, united in mutual anti-Semitism.
With anti-Semitic feelings surging across Europe, some Jews have even turned to the far Right as a result of their own fears of attack and intimidation from North African or Turkish youths.
Those same youths are being torn apart by an identity crisis, belonging neither in the West nor to their parents’ culture of the East or South.
After race riots in northern Britain during the summer of 2001, it was revealed that the white and Asian communities had self-segregated long before any mass outbreak of violence. There was little real communication across the divide.
Trevor Phillips, leader of the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality, has recently said that multiculturalism is dead and that integration is the way forward. Rather as with US citizenship rights, European states have begun to emulate the USA and focus on a “greater” embracing identity.
Is this the way forward, or closing the stable door after the horse has bolted?
The coming decades will be a time of identity politics and identity beliefs. If we are to avoid George Orwell’s future (a place where, he said, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”) we need to take stock now.
Or Orwell’s predictions may be nearer than we think.
Yep. I can't find any friendly links in English on the Progress Party. Do you know of any?
That is true. It is also true that the BNP supports leftist causes such as more money for socialized medicine, more money for public transport, and shifting farmers to organic gardening. The British National Party is just as far away from anything most Freepers could support as it is from the Nazis.
Income tax and any type of 'federal' power(which Randian philosophy depends on) was unheard of in my own country until certain politicians wanted to 'commercialize' our economy and society after the 1930's.I dont want a government for the people and by the people,i hate the friggin concept of the 'people'.I dont know if that makes me a nationalist or a social darwinist......and i really dont care.Financial schools of thought mean nothing to me,they all end up in the same government controlled system.It's just from one frying pan to another.
Freedom is not a financial system,it is absolute self-reliance.And the Europeans certainly dont have the monopoly on being government reliant.
Fascism is right of Socialism - both of which are just left of Liberalism - which is way left of right wingers like me.
I think there are two things here, both particularly American in one degree or another.
First, American conservatism is very much drawn from American political traditions, history and mores, and yes, there is a great deal of American "exceptionalism" to it. That "exceptionalism, however, is rooted in the universal struggle of man, and oddly and ironically much more rooted in the major and profound historical, social, moral and intellectual thrusts of history - particularly European history - then the current order in Europe. It is the odd conundrum of America: Practical yet idealistic, visionary yet suspect of human nature, forward looking but in an intellectual and a moral sense more deeply rooted to Europe's past than the current European. It is difficult to explain this to Europeans (or even our version of them, the Democrat party.)
American conservatism harks back in the time of a basic philosophical divergence between Europe and the US in the late 18th century and the 19th Century: We came to understand the promise of the fall of the Ancient Regime - that the future was the common man, that man could rule himself. This is at once deeply visionary and deeply skeptical (almost bordering on cynical.) Europe,on the other hand, never really saw the way out. They merely sought to ape the old aristocratic order with a new one, replacing the old aristocracy with a new and "unnatural" one, and replaced the false gods of the failing old aristocracy with various new false gods. Fascism, Nazism, Socialism, "modernism," all failed in turn because they did not really face the crisis and the promise of the decline of the old European order.
This is what truly separates us from the European and it is even more pronounced because we have actually put our notion into practice and have gotten grand results. We are the Europe that might have been. In this sense we are more "European" then the Europeans are. When we say we "love Europe" and will defend "Europe" we refer to this grand, golden Europe that we sprang from, that we decocted and improved. The Europeans, of course, destroyed not only that Europe but that sort of European almost a century ago.
We are so close to this that we do not see how exceptional the American gamble is. The European is so close to the decline of his civilization that he cannot see the golden Europe which haunts him is gone never to return again.
The second point is that we actually believe in the nobility of man with all of his many sins, faults and limitations yet scarecly believe that he can be perfected. Improved here and there perhaps, changed to a degree over time, yet he is now and shall always be very much what God made him. And that is more than enough for us, given enough freedom and responsiblity everything will be fine and the best in man shall come forward. We feel this because our system has worked for a very long time - ironically enough longer than any other regime out there today. Our belief in mankind is not really idealistic but practical, yet it is still visionary. Mankind is not a project for us; no "new socialist man" in the making yonder. We take man as he is and understand that the liberties, talents, faults, wants and needs of the many, the few and the one must be balanced, and that the many, the few and the one all must have rights, duties and limits. There is nothing particularly mystical or even intellectual (in any systematic sense) about it. This is of course particularly irritating to intellectual and social elites in Europe for obvious reasons.
We are a common people doing uncommon things. This infuriates the European as much as it baffles him: He does not really believe it for he does not like man very much at all. There must be a catch - what is it?
Watching the EU evolve has given me much entertainment over the years as they get everything wrong, confuse effect with cause, symbol with substance and in general stand the reality of America on its head.
A single currency unites America and gives it power - let us create the Euro. No, It is a strong and united country that created the currency. They have big, expensive projects - let us get governments together and order built a bigger jet than theirs, a bigger rocket, a bigger atom smasher. No, it is the exuberance and the nature of the grand challenges that cause us to do these things, now we will move onto different grand challenges where size is not the issue but system integration and systems of systems is appropriate, just as size was appropriate. It is their dastardly control of the system, their constant gaming of it that makes them rich - let us build up a protected market in the EU and rule over it from Brussels. No, it is less government and less gaming of systems that makes us richer.
The EU is like a cargo cult, but the great white gods that so favored America are not coming, the bonfire are turning to embers.
The Europeans latest false God - "Europe" - is one of their more hilarious ones. Let us hope is is as harmless as it has been so far.
I must admit that I get some real amusement out of them. All the little snares, hierarchies and traps they lay for us yet once again we slip through the net and go on to yet another American future. It drives them mad.
This may perhaps be wishful thinking on your part.There has never,in recorded history,been a time when Europe/North America/Australasia has had a higher population of people of white European ancestry than each do today.And there has never been a time when people of white European ancestry have had a higher percentage of the worlds population,had more power(even compared to Roman times),or extended to more corners of the globe than they do today.Ageing populations are cyclic,and populations with a low median age have,throughout history,always been the poorest and wielded the least power.
There are three racial/cultural groups in the world today who face a much larger crisis.It is those of the African continent whose numbers could be more than halved within 5 years due to the aids epidemic,Jews in Israel who,if current trends continue,will be outnumbered by arabs in their own nation before you can say allah akbar,and indigenous people throughout the south pacific islands/Australia,whose birthrates are one quarter of that of the so called 'low-breeding' Europeans.
So dont buy the far-right crap about the dying white race,there are others who are dying out at a much,much faster rate and there are only two ethnic groups who are currently outbreeding white Europeans at a significant rate,that is those of South America and those in South East Asia.Both of which face terrible crisis' unless a.they immigrate or b.they enlist measures such as China and India have done to restrict birthrates.
Even on the level of moderate conservatism, the conventional Right, liberalism and its disasters in the 1960s and 1970s helped propel Reagan towards the White House.
Demography is destiny, my friend. If you can't reproduce to replace yourself, you're share of the population will decline.
We are about one-sixth of the world's population. In 1900, I believe we were about one-fourth.
You here accept the Big Lie of the Nazis. The fact is that they were to the Right of the Communists, but to the Left of everyone else. (See The Lies Of Socialism, where we offer a long list of indices of where the Nazis stood on the Left/Right spectrum.) The German Right--as the French Right at the time the spectrum came into usage--were the Monarchists. Why do you think that the Old Kaiser died in exile in the Netherlands, 8 years after Hitler came to power?
There is virtually no significance to the fact that Hitler did not directly nationalize most German industry. The present crop of European Socialists do not nationalize industry either. But Hitler controlled German industry. Hitler redefined the German class structure--and openly announced his goal of a Classless, Casteless Germany. (Of course, as with the ideological cousins in the Kremlin, there were exceptions made for those who were politically correct.)
The parallels between Hitler and FDR were enormous, but FDR never pushed the agenda quite so far. In short, FDR was to the right of Hitler, but he was no Conservative.
For an effort to take the confusion out of the Left/Right spectrum, we offer a table as part of the Conservative Debate Handbook: Political Spectrum.
For those who do not want to take the time to view the linked documents, we would merely suggest that the confusion over whether the right and left are equally totalitarian grows out of a misunderstanding of the differences between the European and American traditions.
Consider this: Within the European groups whose prerogatives the right was ordinarily identified with, there was a great deal of libertarianism--much less control over their personal habits than most of us, even in America, are forced to accept today. The difference between the European Right and the American Right is that we were much more inclusive. We allowed the average man to have the same personal liberty that had been reserved for an Aristocracy in Europe. But the planned economy, the social engineering, etc., which bedevils the modern world, grows out of some of the egalitarian presumptions of the Far Left.
William Flax
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