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ara-la · 6 years

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A Specter is Haunting Europe

by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-LA/People Against Racist Terror

The spectre is unfortunately not communism but a resurgent, zombie neo-fascist racial nationalist populism. I visited Sweden, Poland and Germany this summer and became more aware of troubling developments in all three countries, indicative of the growth of far right forces, rooted in old fascist elements in northern and western as well as eastern Europe. You can come and learn more about anti-fascism in Europe from two German antifa visiting L.A. on September 27. Contact ARA-LA for details.

Anti-fascists in Stockholm told me that although their movement was still strong and there was substantial, broad opposition to open Nazis, the racist right had successfully moved away from demonstrative street actions and confrontations and into the electoral arena over several years. Shortly after my visit, the far right Sweden Democrats, with neo-Nazi roots, who have promised to freeze migration and want to take the nation out of the European Union, became the third largest party in the elections, with 17.6% of the vote (up about 5% but short of the 20% that had been predicted).

Although there was much greater diversity in Sweden, apparently comfortably, than I saw in a visit 8 years ago, the ruling center-left coalition, led by the Social Democrats, had paved the way for the election outcome through over a decade of neo-liberal privatization policies and recent efforts to embrace anti-immigrant sentiment. The Social Democrats came in first, but their coalition, including the Greens and the Left Party, barely led a mainstream center-right coalition, and the outcome of the deadlock is unclear. Jimmie Akesson, leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats (a misnomer) portrayed himself as a kingmaker. "We see that we are this election's winner, but now we enter a new mandate period and now we are going to get influence over Swedish politics for real." If the center-right is willing to accept their support to take over the government, Sweden will join the ranks of European countries where neo-nazi-based parties are now part of ruling coalitions.

In Austria (Hitler's birthplace, and once united with Nazi Germany in the Anschluss) the mainstream right's junior coalition partner, the Freedom Party once led by a former SS officer, now controls the defense, interior and foreign ministries. The Daily Beast reports that hackers discovered that the party’s chairman, Johann Gudenus, once had the Facebook password “heilheil”.

The neo-nazis have also taken aim at the intelligence services. A police unit headed by a Freedom Party member raided the homes of four staffers and an office of the domestic Austrian intelligence agency known as the BVT (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismus Bekämpfung, i.e., Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution and for Counterterrorism) in May of this year. The bureau had released, supposedly accidentally, an intelligence report on right-wing extremism.

Herbert Kickl, Austria's Minister of the Interior from the Freedom Party, claimed they were investigating "corruption" in the BVT based on documents that exposed sex parties among staffers. The material, attributed to a BVT employee, was noised around for a year until Kickl took over the interior ministry. Peter Gridling, head of the BVT for the last 10 years, was fired several days after the raids. According to the Daily Beast, he had been the object of a virulent campaign by the website unzensuriert.at (known as “the Austrian Breitbart”). The former editor in chief of unzensuriert.at is now Kickl’s communications director. Gridling has been reinstated, but Germany's intelligence agency has limited its sharing of information with the Austrians after it turned out that some of their material was seized in the raids.

Austria also hosts the largest regular gathering of neo-Nazis in Europe. On May 12, about 10,000 Croatians – including neo-Nazis and Catholic officials – gathered in a field in the southern Austrian town of Bleiburg to commemorate the defeat of the Ustaše army in May of 1945. The fascist movement which collaborated with the Nazi invasion, was responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma, Serbs and Muslims during World War II, many in the organization's Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia. It was the only concentration camp run without any German involvement. Thousands of Ustaše members were captured and killed by Allied forces in Bleiburg. According to VICE, the annual event mourning that fact is organized by the Croatian Catholic Church, which claims that the gathering is not political, but simply a Mass that aims to "remember the dead".

In Poland, where I visited with anti-fascists at a squat in Warsaw, I learned that the mainstreaming and embrace of open neo-Nazis has also taken place there. Whereas in earlier years, antifa had been able to forestall or disrupt neo-Nazi marches in the capital, beginning in 2015, the Nazi element had become part of a larger, nationalistic march on Nov. 11, Polish National Day (anniversary of the end of World War I when Poland again became independent). That year, several hundred neo-Nazis peeled off from the larger march and physically attacked one of the autonomous movement's squats in the city; although the squatters and supporters were able to fend off the attack, it was from a clearly defensive position.

In 2017, the 99th anniversary, 60,000 people including right-wingers from across Europe marched in Warsaw, in the "unofficial" celebration, many chanting "Sieg Heil" (Hail Victory, the chant of Hitler's Nazis) and carrying banners reading "Clean Blood" and "White Europe." Warsaw was by far the "whitest" and least diverse city I visited in Europe as compared to Gothenburg or Stockholm in Sweden, Frankfurt in Germany, or London. Vessel cancellations forced me to skip a visit to Bialystok, Poland, where my father grew up, but from what I was told, it is now a hot-bed of neo-Nazi activity, with swastika graffiti everywhere, and antifa forced to keep a low profile.

Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party [PiS] has taken a hard line against immigrants and refugees, and defended the racist and nationalistic Warsaw rally. Jaroslaw Kaczynski is the "power behind the throne" in Poland. With no official government or state position, he remains party leader and is considered the most powerful man in the country. The party has tightened its grip on the security services, the courts and the civil service, and the media, purging and replacing personnel at the public TV channel with party loyalists.

In Slovakia, the People's Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), led by Marian Kotleba, similarly moved from the fringes to winning seats in parliament. Kotleba used to wear a uniform modeled on the militia of Slovakia’s wartime Nazi puppet state. He rails against the Roma people (AKA "gypsies", also victims of genocide under Hitler) and is an admirer of Jozef Tiso, the Catholic priest and wartime leader who deported tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. In the post–World War II era, European politics have seen a long series of extremists, generally raging on the sidelines and creating a lot of noise while wielding limited power. His People’s Party-Our Slovakia got 23% of first-time voters in the last election, and took 14 seats in the 150-member parliament. Similar to Sweden, the left-wing populist Prime Minister Robert Fico had repeatedly vowed to protect Slovakia from an influx of Muslims, saying Slovakia would take in 200 Syrian refugees, but only if they were Christians. By legitimizing such anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim politics, he paved the way for the acceptability and electoral success of the openly racist far right.

But as Sweden shows, electoral success for the Nazi-rooted far right is not limited to former Warsaw Pact countries or former soviet republics like the Ukraine, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The Dutch PVV and Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France are now partnered with the neo-Nazi Austrian FPO in the European Parliament. Other allies include the Danish People’s Party (DPP) and Vlaams Belang (VB) in Belgium. Filip Dewinter, who is now the leader of Vlaams Belang, published a 70-point program in 1992 calling for the forcible deportation of all ‘immigrants’ -- up to the third generation born in Belgium -- back to their countries of "ethnic origin" — in practice, this would imply the repatriation of the majority of ethnic Belgians, whether or not they were Belgian citizens. Dewinter opposed efforts to integrate “non-European foreigners” into “Flanders and eventually all of Western Europe” as a dangerous plot to create “multi-racial utopias.”

According to an article on Medium, Belgian philosopher Etienne Vermeersch, professor emeritus at the University of Ghent, points out that Dewinter founded the NJSV (Nationalist Young Student Association) in 1980, with a flag bearing the traditional Nazi colors — black, white and red. Dewinter’s NJSV published Signal, a magazine which in several issues featured a sword with a ribbon, stating, “My honor is loyalty”, the original slogan of the Nazi SS.

Meanwhile, in Italy, two far-right parties formed the core of a new government earlier this year. The right-populist, anti-establishment Five Star Movement agreed to form a government with the Liga Nord (Northern League) after Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, which had been part of an electoral coalition led by the League, agreed to support the government in Parliament "from the outside" (without entering into the government itself or getting any cabinet posts). League leader Matteo Salvini took the post of Interior Minister, and in addition to blocking entry to refugees (he refused to let a vessel carrying several hundred migrants rescued at sea to dock in Italy), he has ordered a census of Roma, with the aim of deporting those who are not Italian citizens.

The other noteworthy lesson I learned while in Europe is the similarity of other struggles going on over housing and gentrification/displacement, in Stockholm and Frankfurt, although with less police violence than is the case in Los Angeles. But those cities, and according to reports from British antifa, London among others are seeing poor people and migrants driven out of areas by rising housing costs or new upscale and corporate construction projects. Comrades in Frankfurt were involved in a rent strike and in efforts to build a tenants' union; they were very interested in developments in Los Angeles along those lines.

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