The New Authoritarians

David Renton

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781642590043
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The eighteen months between June 2016 and the end of 2017 saw the victory of Leave in Britain's EU referendum, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and unprecedented support for Marine Le Pen of the Front National in her campaign for the same office in France. Nearly a decade after the great financial crash, it is these figures and the alarmingly confident and radical version of right-wing politics they represent that have gained the initiative over a moribund center and a still weak left.

But what exactly does this new reality represent? While some argue that we are hurtling towards fascism in a replay of the 1930s, and others insist there is little substantial change from "politics as usual, " Renton takes a different and more nuanced view. In country after country, under the clouds of economic austerity and post-9/11 Islamophobia, we have seen a convergence between traditional conservatives, the authoritarian far-right, and previously marginal fascists. The result is a new, still emergent, and deeply troubling form of right-wing radicalism, at once more moderate than classical fascism in its political strategy, yet indulgent of the racism of its most extreme components.

CHAPTER ONE

The subordination of the war

For several years the centre right and the far right have been co-operating, forming a new and unprincipled alliance.¹ One theme of this book is that neither Brexit nor Donald Trump are fascist and indeed there is a problem in overusing the term fascism to understand today’s politics for the simple reason that fascism is today a less important component of the far right than it was 20 or 40 years ago. Indeed, the popularity of the far right and the decreasing influence of fascism within it are connected. The right’s rejection of fascism has contributed to its growing support. Non-fascists and fascists within the far right can be distinguished on the basis that the former have a long-term commitment to electoralism and do not seek to fight their opponents or purge the state. Fascism is a form of politics saturated in violence; in contrast to the non-fascist far right whose criticism of the status quo are more muted and which can be satisfied by less dramatic change. It follows that when distinguishing between fascist and far-right parties, one of the clearest indicators of a fascist party is whether it maintains a private militia to carry out attacks on racial and political opponents and potentially as a means to taking on the state. In the last decade, there have been few mass parties in Europe which have maintained their own street army or held demonstrations in uniforms. The clearest examples are Jobbik in Hungary, Greece’s Golden Dawn and the People’s Party Our Slovakia.² None has prospered in recent years, not even in the favourable circumstances since 2016.

Jobbik has been trying to reinvent itself as a purely parliamentary movement, using a language of detoxification similar to that of Marine Le Pen’s Front National, claiming to reject anti-semitism in favour of Islamophobia and standing down its militia. This has led to splits within Jobbik. A more militant faction broke off to form the Force and Determination party to the right of Jobbik. Yet in the most recent elections Jobbik’s vote fell, leading to yet another split between hardliners and moderates.³

As for Golden Dawn, this is a party which has insisted on its National Socialism and loyalty to Hitler. It has organised torchlight processions, complete with fascist salutes and a meander flag similar to a swastika. In 2008–10, Golden Dawn established its Athens base through the formation of a citizens’ committee, which was obsessively concerned with the supposed Islamisation of the city. In 2011, supporters of the committee carried out a pogrom against Afghans and other migrants. Since 2016, however, Golden Dawn has been struggling following the arrest of its leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos for the murder of the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. The trial began in 2017 and at the time of writing was still ongoing.⁴

Among Our Slovakia’s candidates have been Rastislav Rogel, the former singer from the Neo-Nazi band Juden Mord (Death to the Jews). After the party secured 8 per cent of the vote in November 2016, there were mass anti-fascist protests and Our Slovakia’s leader Marian Kotleba was charged with using Nazi symbols. In regional elections in November 2017, the party’s vote fell sharply.⁵

Even those traditions which seem to struggle the hardest under the weight of their own history can on occasion reject the borrowed slogans, old costumes, and cramped spirits of past generations. Later sections of this book explore the history of the MSI/AN in Italy and the events of the 2017 elections in France to describe the main way the right has been turning away from fascism, i.e. through a sustained turn to electoral politics, which compels even former fascists to treat the liberal state as the sole terrain for politics.

There is also a second, subtler but more significant way in which the fascist-inflected far-right of the 1960s and 1970s has given way to something new. For those on the immediate post-war right who wished to carry out attacks on their left-wing opponents or on blacks or Jews or who had romantic visions of a revolutionary war against the state, the virtue of fascism was that it provided a philosophy of action which could justify the adoption of violence and the defeat of their enemies. This decision was reinforced by reminders of fascism which were all around them. The founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, converted to fascism in 1952–3, during a year spent at the Keflavik Naval Station in Iceland, during which he read and reread Mein Kampf. During the same years Rockwell met his wife, Thora, who he was able to take on a honeymoon to Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat.⁶

In Italy, fascists maintained an ‘underground memory’ of the final years of Mussolini’s regime, telling themselves that his (Nazi-backed) Republic of Salò had been a radical regime, the authentic successor to Mussolini’s pre-1914 socialist ideas. Numerous of the far-right cadres of the 1960s were the sons of unrepentant fascists, defending the legacy of past generations. Claudio Orsi, involved in the bombing of Piazza Fontana in 1969, was the son of the Italian fascist Luigi Orsi and the nephew of Italo Balbo, the Governor of Mussolini’s Libya. Roberto Fiore, leader of today’s fascist group Forza Nuova, and previously tried for his involvement in bombings at Bologna in 1980, was the son of a fascist who had fought for the Salò Republic.⁷

Everywhere in Europe, the immediate post-war fascist parties had similar links with the past, whether that was the presence in their leadership of veteran fascists, funding from similar sources, or support from the children of interwar fascists.⁸

Today, by contrast, more than 70 years have passed since the end of the war and legends of Hitler or Mussolini or their supporters play a smaller part in the memory of the US and European right than they once did.

The presence of fascism within the far right is shaped by the way in which society as a whole remembers the Second World War. As the latter fades from our collective memory, so its relevance to the far right also diminishes. The war has not disappeared; it is still a presence in popular culture, in films and novels and computer games, and it continues to structure conventional as well as far-right politics. It has been joined in the Western imagination by the legacy of 9/11 and the fear of Islamic terrorism. The mainstream has persuaded millions that Islam is a mortal threat. These dynamics in turn shape the far right. Since 2001, much of the growth of the far right can be seen through the success of street-fighting groups, not connected to any party but to identitarian racism. The tradition of fascism and Nazism has been subordinated. Fascism is still a part of the far right but it has ceded its primacy to other organising models better directed to the crisis of our times.

The war in collective memory

One metaphor which captures something of how we assume memory works is a flashbulb;⁹ a bright shining light which endures for a single intense flash before fading to black. The collective memory¹⁰ of the Second World War differs from this model in at least two respects. First, the intensity with which the war has been recalled did not begin at its sharpest only to disappear soon after. If anything, the memory increased in the post-war years, so the war was a more immediate presence in popular consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s than it had been before. Second, what and who we remember has changed. There was not a single flashbulb moment but many different flashes all at once. Some have faded much faster, while others are more visible now than they were in 1945. When most people think about the war today they remember different people and events from those that mattered to previous generations.

In Britain, the war was understood in its aftermath as a heroic struggle in which the country had stood alone against an enemy which had occupied most of Europe. In countries liberated by foreign troops, such as Italy or France, the most important memory was the story of the domestic resistance to fascism. Communists were an important part of this wartime story and remained so at least until 1947–8 and the start of the Cold War. Yet other stories were ignored. Everyone knew that millions of Jews had died, yet no one seemed capable of accepting how they had died or the part played in their murder by tens of thousands of ordinary Germans, Poles and Italians. The chemist Primo Levi’s masterpiece If this is a Man told the story of his journey to Auschwitz, of the search for bread and the immediate proximity of death; and of Levi’s eventual survival of the death camps. In the 1960s and 1970s, Levi’s memoir would become a bestseller in many countries, and at the end of the 1990s it was regularly named as one of the great books of the last century. But in 1947 Einaudi, the doyen of Italian publishers, declined to publish Levi’s book. If this is a Man appeared in a limited edition within a minor, regional publisher, Francesco de Silva. A decade later around half of the book’s original 2,500 print run remained unsold.¹¹

Elsewhere, indifference gave way to hostility. In August 1947, Britain suffered its first post-war race riots, their victims were British Jews, variously blamed for the murder of two British sergeants by supporters of the Zionist Irgun movement. Slaughtermen in Birkenhead refused to process meat for kosher slaughter. Crowds in Manchester broke the windows of Jewish shops and tore down the canopy on the Cheetham Hill Road synagogue. Supporters of the pre-war British fascist Oswald Mosley held meetings across a dozen London sites, the largest of them in South Hackney with up to three thousand people at a time listening to Mosley’s speeches.¹²

One of the obstacles to a complete memory of the Holocaust was that Western troops had liberated the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, with television crews recording the emaciated bodies of Hitler’s surviving victims, while Soviet soldiers liberated the death camps such as Auschwitz where the deaths had been much greater.¹³ In Britain and the United States, the killings were assumed to have been a process of forced labour rather than willed genocide. Meanwhile, in so far as most British people thought about the Holocaust, they regarded the UK as having played a proud role as the eventual liberator of the Jews. There was very little discussion of the role politicians had played earlier in the war as hostile bystanders refusing a home to Jewish refugees fleeing occupied Europe or the part played by the officials of the occupied Channel Islands in collaborating with deportations. Another barrier was that few Jewish people wanted to be reminded of what had happened. A complex mixture of feelings including fear, shame and survivor’s guilt combined with the apparent lack of sympathy on the part of the gentile majority. Meanwhile there were others who had their own reasons to forget the war; the 390,000 Italian civil servants who were accused of complicity with fascism and the 1,600 who actually lost their jobs, the victims of Soviet war crimes,¹⁴ the civilian survivors of conventional war.

French historians have written of a ‘Vichy Syndrome’, to describe the persistent difficulty of acknowledging what happened during the war. Others speak of ‘memory lapses’ to describe the way in which anti-semitism was erased from Italian memory and the blame for the deaths of Italian Jews was placed squarely on the shoulder of the Nazis (who all Italians had supposedly rejected) rather than the Italians themselves.¹⁵ This process of deliberate forgetting was by no means restricted to Western Europe but was every bit as pervasive in Latvia and Romania with their tens of thousands of volunteers for the Waffen SS, in Austria, with its shallow denazification programme or in Norway, much of whose military had joined Quisling’s National Rally.

The later recollection of the Second World War, in which the defining fact of Hitler’s terror was his genocide against the Jews, was shaped not just by the War itself but by subsequent events, including Israel’s 1967 and 1973 wars, the hostage-taking at the 1972 Olympics and the deaths of the Israeli athletes. These aftershocks of 1939–45 created the space for the Holocaust to be commemorated.

Between 1970 and 1985, the war was a recurring presence in European and American books, music, films and theatre. It could be seen in Judith Kerr’s children’s novel, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971), in Frederick Forsyth’s bestseller, The Odessa File, about an attempt to relaunch Nazism from Argentina (1972), and in films such as Cabaret (1972), The Night Porter (1974) and The Boys from Brazil (1976).

The legacy of the war was a theme for musicians of the late 1970s, with bands such as Joy Division (later New Order) naming themselves after moments from the history of fascism and playing in a cold, repetitive, industrial style in songs such as They Walked The Line (‘All dressed up in uniforms so fine, / they drank and killed to pass the time…’). Numerous punk bands wore swastikas: the Damned, the Sex Pistols,¹⁶ Siouxsie of Siouxsie and the Banshees.¹⁷ Even Mick Jones of the Clash, later a supporter of anti-fascist campaigns, named his first punk band London SS.

The war was an increasing presence in US politics. In 1976, an attempted march through the Jewish district of Skokie by supporters of the National Socialist Party of America led to litigation and months of news coverage; in 1977, the TV mini-series, Holocaust, was watched by just under 100 million Americans.¹⁸

A number of Europe’s politicians in the late 1970s or 1980s had been participants in fascist movements or on their periphery. For example, François Mitterrand, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Convergence on the right
• 1. The subordination of the war
• 2. When right-wing parties change
• 3. Brexit and the prospect of convergence
• 4. Remaking the G.O.P.
• 5. Breaking the centre: the Front National and its rivals
• 6. The internationalism of the far right
• 7. Benefits and trade
• 8. Could the far right change back?
• Conclusion: Stopping the right
• Notes
• Index