Fascism Returns to Europe
December 23, 2007
‘But the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not “Islamofascism”…but plain old fascism’, writes Gary Younge. ‘For fascism…has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe.’
‘In Europe, Where’s the Hate?‘, asks Younge.
Over the past year or so the rural Italian idyll of Colle di Val d’Elsa has played host to a bitter battle for Enlightenment values. On one side, the hamlet’s small Muslim community has raised a considerable amount of money to build a large mosque. Having gained the mayor’s approval, the Muslims signed a declaration of cooperation with the town hall and even planted a Christmas tree at the site as a good-will gesture.
In response, other locals pelted them with sausages and dumped a severed pig’s head at the site. On a wall near the site vandals daubed: “No Mosque,” “Christian Hill” and “Thanks to the communists the Arabs are in our house!!!”
Such is the central dynamic in European race relations at present. It is probably not the dynamic you have heard most about. The most popular one making the rounds this side of the Atlantic involves hordes of Muslims, rabid with anti-Semitic and misogynistic views, running amok as they bomb, bully and outbreed their clueless liberal hosts in a bid to build a caliphate.
“Do you have a child back in England?” an elderly Los Angelena asked a British reporter on a recent National Review cruise.
“No,” he said.
“You’d better start,” she replied. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”
Nor is it by any means the only dynamic. There are a handful of nihilistic young Muslims keen to bomb and destroy and a far larger number sufficiently disaffected that they are prepared to riot. There are also many Europeans keen to see equality and meaningful integration, defending civil liberties and opposing wars against predominantly Muslim lands.
But the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not “Islamofascism”–that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning–but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority.
For fascism–and the xenophobic, racist and nationalistic elements that are its most vile manifestations–has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe. Its advocates not only run in elections but win them. They control local councils and sit in parliaments. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, hard-right nationalist and anti-immigrant parties regularly receive more than 10 percent of the vote. In Norway it is 22 percent; in Switzerland, 29 percent. In Italy and Austria they have been in government; in Switzerland, where the anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party is the largest party, they still are.
This is not new. From Austria to Antwerp, Italy to France, fascists have been performing well at the polls for more than a decade. Nor are they shy about their bigotry. France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen has described the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”; Austria’s Jörg Haider once thanked a group of Austrian World War II veterans, including former SS officers, for “stick[ing] to their convictions despite the greatest opposition.” But the attacks of 9/11, the bombings in Spain and Britain and the riots in France gave the hard right new traction. The polarizing effects of terrorism facilitated the journey of hard-right agendas from the margins to the mainstream. Islamophobia became de rigueur. Recently German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a Christian Democrat party congress that “we must take care that mosque cupolas are not built demonstratively higher than church steeples.”
In September 2006, British novelist Martin Amis told the Times of London: “There’s a definite urge–don’t you have it?–to say, ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation–further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan…. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”
Far from being the principal purveyors of racial animus in Europe, Muslims are its principal targets. Between 2000 and 2005 officially reported racist violence rose 71 percent in Denmark, 34 percent in France and 21 percent in Ireland. With few governments collecting data on racial crime victims, it has been left to NGOs to record the sharp rise in attacks on Muslims, those believed to be Muslims and Muslim targets.
None of this means anti-Semitism and jihadism don’t exist among Muslim communities in Europe. But it does provide a context for both. Muslims are a relatively tiny percentage of European citizens–there is a higher proportion of Asians in Utah than Muslims in Italy–and are overwhelmingly concentrated among the poor. More than 40 percent of Bangladeshi men in Britain under the age of 25 are unemployed. All of this excuses nothing but explains a great deal. According to a Pew Research Center survey, the principal concerns of Muslims in France, Germany and Spain are unemployment and Islamic extremism. Integrating into a society that won’t employ you, educate you or house you adequately is no easy feat. Participating in a political culture that scapegoats you is also tough. Attacked as Muslims at home and abroad, they defend themselves as Muslims. Every respected report in Britain has shown a direct link between the war in Iraq and recruitment to Islamist movements. And so the symbiosis of Islamophobes and Islamists is complete, with each thriving on polarization and prejudice: picking at scabs that might have healed, until the blood runs freely.
The most potent anti-Semites and bigots in Europe do not live in run-down housing projects but grace the corridors of power. They are not Muslim; they are Christian. The continent is not suffering from some new strain of bigotry imported from the Arab world or the Maghreb–it is simply suffering from one of its oldest viruses harbored among its most established ethnic populations.
December 23, 2007 at 5:29 am
Italians have never come to terms with their past in anything approaching the manner in which Germans have had to deal with theirs. A country whose last Foreign Minister, Giancarlo Fini called Benito Mussolini the “greatest statesman of the 20th Century” needs to be pressured to clean up it’s act both internally and externally and to overcome it’s disingenuous “unwillingness to critically examine and accept its own history”.
December 23, 2007 at 11:06 am
“In response, other locals pelted them with sausages and dumped a severed pig’s head at the site.”
Earlier tonight I was reading about a similiar incident that occurred in Australia back in November in response to the proposed building of an Islamic school in the Sydney suburb of Camden.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g_f-8ymPlvX15GgLthcV7JG0lPgg
There was also an ugly story in the news last week about a local Camden residents rally/meeting opposing the school. I don’t know what the outcome of the meeting was but the news footage of the hateful Islamophobic rednecks in action, was genuinely grotesque. What was also staggering was that no Muslims or spokespersons for the Muslim community was seemingly invited to attend.
tp://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2123570.htm
*sigh*
what a world eh?!
December 23, 2007 at 11:58 am
unfortunately for everyone it is a better dressed veast than it was before.
December 23, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Gary Younge has an admirable record of speaking out against injustice and this piece is another example of the crusading journalism The Nation has sponsored since the days when it ran articles by Albert Einstein and Franz Boas.
Still,while the resurgence of fascism in Europe is
a matter of concern especially for muslims on the end of it,the Younge commentary like much liberal analysis today,obscures history in a way that serves imperialist interests.
In The Nation piece above,Younge decries current use of the term:”Islamo-fascism”.Clearly Bush uses the phrase self-servingly to justify his War on Terror.
The corporate literati and media,especially its current Islamophobic doyens Christopher(excuse me while I throw up)Hitchens,Melanie(Zionist charlatan)Phillips et al,and the utterly obnoxious Amis have gone along with and made careers out of the Islamo-fascist idea!
Sadly,writers on the left have failed to understand the meaning the term actually carries.
Yes,Islamo-fascism exists but not to any great extent among some fifth-column community of muslim migrants.
Islamo-fascists were the natural allies of Italian and German fascists in Bosnia and Kosovo during WW2.
Likewise they are the natural allies of US imperial interests in Kosovo today.
The forebears of the Greater Albania militia groups on the brink currently of taking control from NATO in Kosovo like their Bosnian muslim counterparts fought for Himmler in WW2.
Himmler,indeed actively revived the militant and jihadist strain of Islam he saw as encouraging the fanatical blind obedience deemed necessary for soldiers.He ordered the Bosnian muslim Handzar Division to wear the fez because it was associated with reactionary and militant forms of Islam.
Regarding the Kosovar muslims who fought with the Waffen SS,Himmler was quite explicit that they should be a revival of the Albanian division of the Austro-Hungarian army from Habsburg times.Like the Nazis,Austro-Hungary had also favoured a Greater Albania.
Ethnically the Ghegs of Kosovo and Northern Albania were said to be of Aryan stock kept pure in their mountain fastness over centuries.
Who were the victims of Kosovan Albanian Islamo-fascism?
The Christian Orthodox Serb minority in Kosovo were subjected to expulsion and extermination in an Islamic purge that targeted priests,churches and Serb civilans in tens of thousands during WW2.The Nazis saw encouragement of the Greater Albania aspirations of the muslim Kosovars and their allies in Albania as a means to forward their plans for conquest and domination in the region.
Jews in Albania,Kosovo and occupied Yugoslavia also suffered abominably.
Typically,for a nation that suffers from bouts of willed blindness to history,the US Holocaust Memorial Museum describes Kosovo as having been a Serbian province during WW2.Kosovo was actually annexed to Albania and these US efforts to conceal the crimes of their current proxies are on a par with their pathetically self-serving denial of their Turkish allies’ Armenian Holocaust.
The Museum is of course sponsored by the US State Dept.which is the present sponsor of the Greater Albania solution to the Kosovo problem.
Does anyone see any real difference between the US willingness to use militant Islam in Kosovo today and that same strategy when employed by Italian and German facism in WW2?
To pretend that militant Islam and Fascism are entirely antithetical misses the point entirely.The Islamist fighters used by the US in Bosnia and Kosovo were funded by Kuwaiti and Saudi petrodollars and the Muslim Brotherhood has for some time banked in Switzerland!
The phenomenon of Islamo-fascism is actually an essential conceptual tool to those of us on the left who want to fully expose the entirely fraudulent nature of the War on Terror.Islamo-fascism seen in its geo-political dimension helps explain the deceit and malevolence that lies at the root of all wars of conquest.
Today fascism has like Janus two faces.There is the corporate one represented by the US military and its vast mercenary and drug-running support network and there is the jihadist one that colludes with its depredations.
Perhaps commentators on the left should spend more time trying to understand and repulse this aggressive alliance instead of luxuriating in the victimhood undoubtedly endured by European muslims that will likely permit the NATO/US occupation to pretend that a Greater Albanian solution in Kosovo is evidence of the US Empire’s even-handedness.
History teaches us that nothing could be further from the truth.
December 25, 2007 at 4:33 pm
“Recently German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a Christian Democrat party congress that “we must take care that mosque cupolas are not built demonstratively higher than church steeples.””
Edmund Stoiber from the CSU (the Bavarian version of the CDU) said the same on a different occasion. I really wondered where this obsession with size comes from… but then I remembered Freud. Now I wonder if this is the reason why the Christians destroyed the Irminsul and the Oak of Donar
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