By Lauren Sampson
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bonds and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicions can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own.”
--- Rod Serling, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, The Twilight Zone (1960)
Amidst the paranoia of the Cold War, Rod Serling recognized the dangers of a frightened population and their search for a common enemy, a “scapegoat” for all social and economic ills. That fear, so vehemently directed at Communists of all stripes during the First and Second Red Scares, has found new targets in Europe: immigrants and Muslims.
The trend towards European election or increased support of far-right, anti-immigration parties originated in 2004, when most of Eastern Europe joined the European Union. This catalyzed a fear of the excesses of post-modern culture and a retreat to traditional, nationalist values. In his 2007 campaign for re-election, Polish prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski called for a bureaucratic purge, blaming Communists and leftist intellectuals for corruption within the Polish government and criticizing the EU for failing to protect “traditional family values” (New York Times, 2007). To combat what Kaczynski views as “invading secularism”, his government supported an increased role for the Catholic Church, believing it could act as a safeguard against the “globalization of consumerism, social mobility and new values” (New York Times, 2007).
But Kaczynski is only part of a larger trend. Indeed, in September 2008, two far right Austrian parties, the Alliance for the Future and the Freedom Party (founded by a former SS lieutenant and Holocaust denier) gained 29% of the vote, the same share as Austria’s governing party, the Social Democrats (Daily Mail, 2009). Hundreds of people gathered to honour an Austrian-born Nazi fighter pilot in November 2008, whose date of death eerily coincides with Kristallnacht and the German massacre of 92 Jewish citizens (Daily Mail, 2009).
Meanwhile, in October 2010, “Red Vienna”, a socialist and subsequently social democratic stronghold since the 1920s, saw a staggering 27% of the mayoral vote go to Heinz-Christian Strache, a vocal extreme right leader in the Freedom Party (Guardian, 2010). Strache’s views have taken on a populist flavour. He ran strongly on banning minarets (as in Switzerland) and Islamic headgear (as in the Netherlands). More specifically, he pledged to “keep the city’s blood Viennese” while his party gave away computer games where players shoot at “mosques, minarets and muezzin” as part of their campaigning strategy (Guardian 2010). Appeals to Islamophobia and anti-immigration have proved unilaterally successful for far-right parties across Europe. Indeed, in Bulgaria, the National Union Attack Party, a xenophobic anti-diversity group won 13% of European Parliament elections vote in its first year of existence and two seats (Macleans, 2009).
Within Britain, these values are most clearly embodied in the British National Party (BNP), a party formed as a splinter group from the explicitly fascist National Front. The BNP seek to restore the white ethnicity of pre-war Britain through opposing “the immigration invasion of [their] country, the threat to [their] security posed by Islamism and the danger of the European Union to [their] sovereignty” (British National Party, 2011). The BNP has taken advantage of English dissatisfaction with Labour and Conservative reactions to the ongoing economic crisis, finishing fifth in the 2008 London mayoral election with 5.2% of the vote and one of the London Assembly’s 25 seats (Tetteh, 2009).
But the most shocking victory was claimed in 2009, when the BNP won two seats in the European Parliament, one of which is held by party leader Nick Griffin (Tetteh 2009). In an interview with the BBC, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg stated that while politicians should be “uncompromising” in their approach to the a “party of fascists”, he warned: “We should not dismiss the reasons why people have voted for the BNP – the anger, the frustration, the sense of alienation, the sense of powerlessness. We must listen to that and must react to that” (BBC, 2009).
Clegg’s point is invaluable. Though comparisons to Nazi Germany are stale and arguably constitute fear-mongering of a different kind, David Kynaston, a research fellow at Kingston University, notes the parallels between the 1929 Wall Street Crash (four years before Hitler became the German chancellor), the financial uncertainties of the 1980s (which precipitated the birth of the radical, populist right) and the mass unemployment catalyzed by the current economic crisis (Guardian, 2009). Additionally, the recession has come hand in hand with a rise in populism and a growing cynicism with as well as hostility towards intellectualism, liberal politics and the democratic process. Such attitudes are mirrored in the expanded support for the Tea Party movement within the United States.
Arguably, the encroachment of extreme conservatism necessitates a reassessment of the tools available to populaces mired in dissatisfaction and stasis. It is the task of citizens and politicians alike to learn from history and determine whether the answer lies in the election of groups like the BNP, the Freedom Party or the Attack Party – indicating a willingness on the party of the domestic population to be represented by openly racist groups in the international sphere – or even revolutionary explosions of anger at the status quo in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.
Today, we pass judgment on the fascist parties of the past for their violent, racist and authoritarian responses to socio-economic crisis. Tomorrow, when future generations reflect on us, on Silvio Berlusconi passing laws that make prosecuting his media empire illegal and the desecration of Muslim graves by Freedom Party supporters, how will we be judged?
References
http://www.bnp.org.uk/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1160972/The-far-right-march-rise-Fascism-Austria.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8088381.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/world/europe/04iht-letter.1.7748106.html
http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/06/18/why-the-fascists-are-winning-in-europe/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/09/bnp-fascism-meps-far-right
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/oct/11/vienna-far-right-gains
Electoral performance of the British National Party in the UK". Edmund Tetteh (House of Commons Library). 15 May 2009.http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/briefings/SNSG-05064.pdf.
Gros, Daniel. “A More Conservative Europe and EU”. Centre for European Policy Studies. http://www.ceps.eu/book/more-conservative-europe-and-eu
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