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.
What an idiot.
Even if we grant that that a good portion of the extreme right is, in fact, racist, there is no correlation between it and Islamic fundamentalism. Europe's extreme right arises a desire to be left alone and to preserve their nations. Islamic radicalism is based on holy war, conquest, and sheer destruction.
They're basically just fighting for survival.
Hysteria? Only to those who seek to perpetuate multiculturalism as a blunt instrument against traditional Western secular governance, and as a means to prevent looking at Islam in an objective manner:
Beyond Madrid: Winning Against Terrorism
A RAND report released in March categorized Muslims into fundamentalists, traditionalists, modernists, and secularists. The report recommended that the West support the modernists first; support the traditionalists against the fundamentalists; confront and oppose the fundamentalists, and selectively support the secularists. Such an approach is a start. But I believe that it oversimplifies the problem by failing to recognize what all Muslims share in common. It overstates the differences within the global Muslim community.
It is a fact that there is a living, vibrant Islamic ummah, or global Islamic community, perhaps more so today than in any time in modern world history. The ummah is not monolithic. But the identification that all Muslims feel for events affecting other Muslims has become real and visibly stronger and more widespread since global communications have facilitated the dahwa, or missionary activities of the Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia preaching and spreading Wahhabism with its oil wealth. Denying that there is such a globalized Muslim political and religious consciousness, or trying to argue that a universal ummah is a danger or somehow undesirable, only mobilizes all Muslims to dig in as they feel their religion is under siege.
What we are confronted with is a dynamic spectrum and not static categories within the ummah. When we ask why is it that moderates in such a spectrum do not raise their voices to challenge extremists, we must acknowledge that one reason is that, on many issues, they share much common ground, even when they disagree on particulars.
Do you seek to change the world by prayer and faith? Do you work with an imperfect reality and strive towards its perfection? Do you not reject all that is not Islamic and seek to destroy it by force so as to re-establish the perfect caliphate? These are all questions that vibrate and resonate around a single axis of faith.
We know that we should work with the moderates and isolate the extremists. But as we seek to separate the wheat from the chaff, we need to recognize that both come from the same plant.
And, of course, they'll be the whipping boys of the political and cultural Left, even as Muslim maniacs ("black and brown people, historically discriminated against by European colonial/imperial facists"/lefty agitprop) from Third World cesspools continue to murder innocents to advance their agenda.
On one hand, yes. On the other hand, Hitler also had in mind to create an Aryan "superman" by breeding his race to perfection.
Also, given the horrific things which developed from National Socialism in the 1930's and 1940's, do you really think that Europeans would be toying with the far right now if they didn't feel threatened?
The socialist governments are doing little or nothing to remedy the situation, and are actually giving way to the invading hordes.
Since the left-wing secular socialists are failing to confront the threat, the right-wing is taking matters into its own hands. Unfortunately the right is part of those decadent secular/pagan socialist societies and has taken on the secular morality.
Therefore the right takes on some of the secular/pagan characteristics of the Nazis. The secular/pagan right has little resemblance to the political right in this country. It is important to note that it is the failure of the European political left to deal with the social ills that has handed the right-wing groups their power.
In this case, they're somewhat justified in at least being afraid. The multicultural gurus have refused to accept the fact that different cultures are sometimes--if not usually--incompatible. Case in point: there are several prominent (quite likely a LOT more) radical Muslim clerics who want jihad and the conversion of Europe. And Islam is, by nature, an imperialist religion that has never drawn distinctions between religion and politics. Oriana Fallaci is right: Europe is selling its soul "like a prostitute."
While I'm not a fan of Le Pen or of the BNP, I do wonder if Europe's only hope lies in their electoral success in the near future.
Good to know. Thanks.
The BNP has openly supported David Duke, which doesn't exactly endear them to me. And while they're trying to clean up their public image, I hear they do have a history that's quite appalling.
Given current demographic trends in Britain, though, they may be the country's only hope, unfortunately.
It would be very intersting to make a grid of 40 identifiers "supports nationalized healthe care" " supports continuing welfare" "supports current levels of immigration" "supports support for America in Iraq" and see how these parties, the Dems and R's , the traditional left in Europe (Labor, Social Democrats, ) all compare. I bet the Republican party is more different from all of these then most of these are from each other of the socialists. The American Libertarians would really be the most "off the scale" in my estimation.
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