The rise of Europe's extreme right

OneWorld.net ^ | 10 May 2004 | Nick Ryan

[Steve Eisenberg]

But, this article lumps parties such as the Progess party in Norway (My party), the Peoples Party in Denmark, List Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands into the same batch as the BNP and Le Pen.

Yep. I can't find any friendly links in English on the Progress Party. Do you know of any?

[Eurotwit]

I agree. The Norwegian "conservative" party is called Høyre (Which means Right). They are hardly distinguishable from the social democrats. Instead of 50 percent income tax, they want 45 percent. etc etc.

I would argue though that you have voices among the European parties who espouse values similar to American conservatism. I believe the Norwegian Progress Party is one of them. yet, this article lables them neo nazis.

The Progress party's main idology is one of libertarianism. They want to severly cut back government largess (to borrow mr. Robinson's words), give the money back to the individual. Their main principle is that the individual to have the right to decide over their own lifes without government interference.

I guess parties like these are more generally refered to as populist in Europe by more sober writers than the authors of this piece.

The one positive thing though is that the Progress party generally ranks as the number one or two in Norway, but no one wants to take them into a coalition government. The leftist European elites demonisation of their policies have left them too radioactive.

[Steve Eisenberg]

All in all, this is an underhanded smear of the BNP.

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.

[Skywalk]

I think the same applies to the Freedom Party in Austria. Yes, Haider made some very thoughtless comments about Hitler but the actual PLATFORM of the Freedom Party was something almost libertarian, for Europe, but proposed restrictions on immigration.

How terrible!

Then look at how the other European countries treated Austria after the Freedom Party's victory. Seemed a bit bizarre, considering that he was ELECTED and that he was not proposing any kind of "Final Solution" or anything other than restricting immigration.

[armed_in_sydney]

Ideologues like Rand and Friedman preach sickly-cry-baby systems that require a strong arm government to protect the weak and devious(just as Marxists require it to protect the weak and dumb).The character in 'Atlas Shrugged' would be more like a fairy accountant scared for his life than a superman in the real world.

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.

[Eurotwit]

Bjørn Sterk of this excellent blog:

www.bearstrong.net

writes about them quite often:

Here are some links,

Support for the US:

I wrote below that the Progress Party's support of the US in the conflict with Iraq is evidence of a deeply held belief, not mere populist tactics. Why else would they take such a clear stand for such an unpopular view?

In a new poll, however, the Progress Party is up 2.5% over last month, and election researcher Frank Aarebrot interprets this as a consequence of the party's support of the US. There is only one party in Norway that wants to have Saddam ousted, with or without the UN, and consequently there's not much competition for the small but existing pro-war segment of the population. Clearly, then, (as one NRK reporter suggested this morning), it's all a calculated attempt to gather votes.

It is true that the Progress Party has come out more clearly on this issue in the last couple of weeks - they're being quoted all the time now. (Today it's foreign policy spokesman Per Ove Width proposed providing the US with military aid - special forces, ships, transport planes.) This can suggest that it at first considered the issue too controversial for a clear stand, more likely to scare off voters than to collect new ones.

I don't think that's it, though. If this is calculated to appeal to anyone, it's not new voters, (who are more easily won over on other issues), but old ones, the party base. The Progress Party is always derided as populistic and unpredictable, without core issues. (This is a step up from a few years ago, when pundits conjured up the sound of stormtroopers' boots at any increase of PP support.) But it does have core issues, and support of the US - a feeling of ideological kinship - is one of them.

It's not unthinkable that Hagen's populistic instincts could have made him decide to keep his party quietly deferring to the government on this issue. It is unthinkable, however, that the Progress Party could have come out clearly any other way than in firm support of the US.

http://www.bearstrong.net/warblog/000097.html

More general:

Both Labor and the Conservatives have radical elements (mostly in the youth parties), but at the end of the day they're caretakers of the same system. They're highly skilled caretakers, if that's what you want, there's no doubt about that, but what the Norwegian right needs is a genuine conservative/libertarian frame of reference, and an injection of fresh ideas, new thinking. The Progress Party provides both. On foreign policy they take inspiration from American conservatism, (which unlike the Norwegian kind is in good health), and their libertarian core principles give them a fundamental skepticism of taxation, welfare statism and the public sector that should be taken for granted by any party that claims to be an alternative to social democracy. We need a party that cries out whenever some politician thinks of a new tax, and the Conservatives isn't that party. They're more likely to invent new taxes to make up for an unexpected budget deficit. The Progress Party too seems to have adopted social democratic ideas, but when they do, at least they often do so in an original way. In any case I'm not concerned with the areas where the Progress Party are just like all other parties - I'm concerned with the areas where they're different.

http://www.bearstrong.net/warblog/000356.html


That's some links.

I'll look for more.

Cheers.

[Eurotwit]

I thought the BNP are national socialist.

That is they support socialism and they are nationalists.

[Eurotwit]

Clarification:

That is why the Progress party in one sense cannot be called "conservative" in the European context as they are more properly labeled revolutionary, or progressive :-)

[CyberCowboy777]

Anytime the words "right" and Hitler are used together you can be sure you are reading an idiot.

Hitler was a Fascist and a Darwinist - neither equate to right wing politics of today.

Fascism is right of Socialism - both of which are just left of Liberalism - which is way left of right wingers like me.

[GOP_1900AD]

This is a very interesting analysis. Thanks!

[The Raven]

Fascism was a form of socialism.....

[CasearianDaoist]

Well my few certainly of conservatism includes the areas that you have mentioned that you support. Your broader list of player I would more term "the anti-left" rather than conservatism.

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.

[browsin]

Europe will die a natural death even without immigration. White European women aint exactly producing children.

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.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Basic Hegelian dialectic - left-wing extremism breeds the opposite. Communism fed fascism. The more Western culture and civilization are levelled and deconstructed by left-wing extremism and socialist engineering, the more likely that Far Right movements will grow.

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.

[cwb]

What's amazing about modern-day liberalism is that as they tout multiculturalism, diversity and tolerance in the West...they argue against all those things in the so-called East, as they literally defend this extreme conservatism.

In fact, as they roll-out the welcome mat in all our Western nations, they've excused Arab anger and hatred by blaming those who have attempted to liberalize a society still trapped in the 7th Century.

I actually read a liberal journalist describing the terrorist as "heroic" for trying to preserve their cultural and ethnic identity. Excuse me...but if conservatives in this country embraced these same attributes, it would be these same liberals waging war against them for their genocidal racism and bigotry.

It is simply amazing that liberals defend what is in essence, the most conservative ideology on the planet...that still sees absolutely no separation of church and state; no women's rights; no tolerance of diversity...or anything that liberals claim to uphold. As immigrants flood this country, not only refusing to assimilate but to establish their own sub-cultures, liberals blame Arab anger and hatred on those who would dare step foot on Muslim land and do far less. HYPOCRISY!

[Clemenza]

Birthrates have still fallen WAY below replacement level in places like Italy and Spain. The population of Europe is considerably older than it was 40 years ago. If you look at the population of white Europe as a share of the world's population 40 years ago, it was larger than it is now.

Demography is destiny, my friend. If you can't reproduce to replace yourself, you're share of the population will decline.

[CyberCowboy777]

The Third Way

- Mussolini wrote: "To Fascism the world is not this material world, as it appears on the surface, where Man is an individual separated from all others and left to himself.... Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual."

This collectivism is captured in the word fascism, which comes from the Latin fasces, meaning a bundle of rods with an axe in it. In economics, fascism was seen as a third way between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. Fascist thought acknowledged the roles of private property and the profit motive as legitimate incentives for productivity—provided that they did not conflict with the interests of the state.

Mussolini believed that economies did not operate constructively without supervision by the government. -

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html

The right believes that a man is a individual and association is a matter of choice, not birth.

Hitler was named "Man of the Year" in 1938 by Time Magazine. They noted Hitler's anti-capitalistic economic policies:

"Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism."

http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/id10.html

This fly in the face of Conservatism (right wing politics).

[CyberCowboy777]

I got this in FReepmail and the poster has been banned. Thought I'd share. I replied with somthing like what I posted above. Motherland, Fatherland - nationalism - different economic structures.

From Nasahapeepematilon | 05/10/2004 5:47:37 PM PDT replied

"Anytime the words "right" and Hitler are used together you can be sure you are reading an idiot."

You are mistaken. National Socialism and fascism in general are to the extreme right of the political spectrum. If you are saying that this spectrum is at best a crude tool, then you are right, but according to all the standards of political science, Hitler was to the right. Don't just change the meaning of terms because they make you uncomfortable, or the terms stop having any meaning whatsoever.

The fact that Hitler never nationalized industry and percieved his mortal enemy to be Communism should be enough to show you that your statement is not accurate.

Nationalism by its very nature is right-wing, but the right wing isn't always necessarily Nationalist.

[MegaSilver]

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.

We are about one-sixth of the world's population. In 1900, I believe we were about one-fourth.

[Ohioan]

You are mistaken. National Socialism and fascism in general are to the extreme right of the political spectrum. If you are saying that this spectrum is at best a crude tool, then you are right, but according to all the standards of political science, Hitler was to the right. Don't just change the meaning of terms because they make you uncomfortable, or the terms stop having any meaning whatsoever.

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