Fascism Returns to Europe
July 10, 2008
‘Italy’s campaign against the Roma has ominous echoes of its fascist past, and the silence of our leaders is deafening,’ writes Seumas Milne. ‘This persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe.’
At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race - with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi’s new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies - Roma and Sinti people - whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.
The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy’s three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy’s highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that “all Gypsies were thieves”, rather than because of their “Gypsy nature”.
New Labour Bequeaths Its Racial Politics to BNP
July 7, 2008
‘It’s no surprise that the BNP’s rise and New Labour’s demise are linked,’ writes Gary Younge. ‘The ruling party failed to make the case against racism and xenophobia, pandering instead of standing on principle.’
On Wednesday evening around 7pm, the Reverend Roger Gayler, vicar of St Marks parish, went to answer a knock on the door. It was the night before the Chadwell Heath byelection for Barking and Dagenham council in Greater London, and Gayler had recently written an open letter to his flock.
“I rarely enter the party political arena and do so very reluctantly, but as a matter of Christian principle I feel this time I must,” he wrote. “The [British National party] would divide our community, spread fear through lies, and reduce services to those in our community who most need them (they proposed huge cuts in services for the elderly and young people in their budget). They preach the politics of hate.”
Zionists and Fascists Unite
May 6, 2008
Just a few months back Gary Younge had observed that ‘plain old fascism has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe.’ What is talked about less, however, is the ally it has found in Zionism. This alliance was already in view in Austria, Germany, France and UK. Now it makes a debut in Italy. The following from the London FT. (Recall that the Italian centre-left was already at the service of Zion; Olmert was caught on camera instructing Romano Prodi on what to say during a press conference back in December 2006)
Rome’s election last week of its first rightwing mayor since the time of Benito Mussolini has been celebrated by fascists as a historic victory over the left.
Packs of young, thuggish supporters of Gianni Alemanno greeted the new mayor’s appearance at the Campidoglio city hall with straight-armed “Roman” salutes, shouting abuse at communists and foreign immigrants.
“Before, if you were a fascist you had to pretend to be part of the mainstream to have respectability. Now they are coming out of the closet,” said an aide to defeated centre-left candidate Francesco Rutelli.
Debate over the significance of the National Alliance’s first election victory in a major city has been intense - especially among the capital’s small but important Jewish commun-ity, which is widely thought to have swung in Mr Alemanno’s favour. Rome’s Jewish voters, numbering about 9,000, explain their shift to the right in various ways, most often because they see the National Alliance as firmly pro-Israel.
Rise of the Right
May 1, 2008
‘The use of fascist symbols, the threat of violence, the demonisation of minorities … hasn’t Italy been here before?’, writes Martin Jacques.
It is now clear that the left’s victory in the Italian general election of 2006 represented no more than a brief pause in the country’s remorseless shift to the right.
One hoped that election might have signalled an end to the degenerative and anti-democratic trends that had accompanied the rise of Silvio Berlusconi over the previous decade. In fact, it represented no such thing.
It is already clear that the third Berlusconi government will be markedly different from its two predecessors, which were primarily about Berlusconi’s desire to use public power to protect his private empire and to change the law in order to prevent legal action being taken against him. He was successful on both counts. Meanwhile the concentration of immense private and public power in the hands of one man signalled a serious corrosion in the fabric of democracy.
Il Fascista
April 24, 2008
Just a few months back Gary Younge observed that ‘the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not “Islamofascism”…but plain old fascism [which] has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe.’ And then comes this news: ‘Anti-Islamic prankster set to be Berlusconi’s deputy‘ (thanks Paulo)
A former dentist notorious for his anti-Islamic pranks is tipped to become Silvio Berlusconi’s deputy prime minister. Roberto Calderoli is a senior member of the Northern League, the party whose success in grabbing 8 per cent of the vote was the sensation of last week’s general election.
Mr Calderoli, who was the minister for reforms in Mr Berlusconi’s last government, startled Italians two years ago, at the height of the uproar over “blasphemous” Danish cartoons, by ripping off his shirt on live television, revealing a T-shirt printed with one of the drawings. Last September he registered his objections to plans to build a new mosque by organising a “pig day” to antagonise Muslim sentiment, pigs being considered unclean by observant Muslims.
Brave New World
March 18, 2008
MTV’s brave new world. Hard hitting ads on emerging police states.
On a related note, Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio are working on a film based on Aldous Huxley’s prophetic dystopia. ‘A prophet returns‘, writes Susan Salter Reynold.
A writer’s ideas are his legacy. After he dies, it’s up to executors, heirs, lawyers, agents and colleagues to keep them alive — and perhaps especially up to us, the readers, to thread those ideas through the weave of history, the passage of time, our own lives. Writers are the most potent of ghosts. Their spirits lodge in our quotidian decisions; we turn to them in times of change and times of terror. When their wisdom is unavailable, our choices get harder.Aldous Huxley — born in England in 1894, visionary author of 11 novels (most famously “Brave New World,” in 1932), seven short-story collections, seven books of poetry, three plays, two books for children and countless essays — is there for us when we need him most. All his life, Huxley concerned himself with the most pressing issues facing humanity: environmental degradation, capitalist greed, totalitarian oppression, scarcity of resources, war, human cruelty and human potential. After his death — on Nov. 22, 1963, the day JFK died — his widow, Laura, tried to keep his memory and his work alive, but a perfect storm of factors — personalities, family politics — kept most of the work from getting the wide distribution and range of media it deserved.
Charity Begins at Home
February 16, 2008
So much concern has been shown in the West in recent years for the plight of women in the Muslim world that feminists have actively supported aggressive wars against sovereign countries. Presumably they want to bring the same rights to the Afghan, Iraqi or Somali woman enjoyed by an American or a Brit. Just yesterday the main story on MSN Video was the chain of American restaurants where people have their Sushi off naked women. Very dignified, since the woman was actually referred to as a ‘model’. Now we see yet another right enjoyed by American women. For some reason I am not very sure if these rights should be introduced in the Muslims world. But maybe I’m just an unreconstructed misogynist from a premodern patriarchal culture.
You most probably didn’t hear about this, but imagine the headlines had the same thing happened in a Muslim country? Where are those Colonial Feminists?
Prisoners ‘to be chipped like dogs’
January 13, 2008
1984? No — 2008. Welcome to the British dystopia!
“Hi-tech ’satellite’ tagging planned in order to create more space in jails“, the Independent reports. “Civil rights groups and probation officers furious at ‘degrading’ scheme”.
Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.
Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record. Read the rest of this entry »
Creeping Fascism
December 27, 2007
The threat of fascism was hinted to by Norman Mailer before his death. More recently he has been echoed by Gore Vidal, Paul Craig Roberts, Naomi Wolf and Ron Paul among others. Here Ray McGovern brings to bear some ‘Lessons From the Past‘.
“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater…Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….”
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages-in English as “Defying Hitler.”
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America…this is almost unbelievable.”
The Evangelical Rebellion
December 24, 2007
The rise of the Christian Right is going to be a phenomenon to behold. Chris Hedges offers insights into the monster created by Dr. Frankestein (neocons and the corporate elite) breaking free of its chains.
The rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate represents a seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the radical Christian right. Huckabee may stumble and falter in later primaries, but his right-wing Christian populism is here to stay. Huckabee represents a new and potent force in American politics, and the neocons and corporate elite, who once viewed the yahoos of the Christian right as the useful idiots, are now confronted with the fact that they themselves are the ones who have been taken for a ride. Members of the Christian right, recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated to vote against their own interests around the issues of abortion and family values, are in rebellion. They are taking the party into new, uncharted territory. And they presage, especially with looming economic turmoil, the rise of a mass movement that could demolish what is left of American democracy and set the stage for a Christian fascism.
