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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: The events overtaking the United States are echoes of events occurring worldwide. This “2017 World Tour” examines aspects of ascendant global fascism, including historical and ideological trends stretching back to the World War II period.
Yet another of the fascist/Nazi/racist influences on Steve Bannon is French writer Charles Maurras. A doctrinaire anti-Semite, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for collaborating with the Third Reich.
Setting Maurras’s activities in an historical context, we recap an excerpt from FTR #372 (August of 2002) detailing the French Fifth Column that subverted the French military resistance to the armies of the Third Reich. Maurras’s L’Action Francaise was among the journals influencing French fascists, who saw the German invasion as a vehicle for eliminating democracy and, at the same time, blaming the defeat on government of Leon Blum, whose murder was advocated by Maurras.
In Italy, Bepe Grillo’s Five Star Movement is leading in the polls, and may come out ahead in the 2018 elections. Observers have seen the party as an heir to Mussolini’s blackshirts. We note, in passing, that the populist idealism officially endorsed by Five Star is similar to aspects of many left-populist agendas, while incorporating features of contemporary fascist politics.
Traveling northward, we observe the resuscitation of Slovakian fascism and the celebration of Nazi quisling Josef Tiso’s World War II collaborationist government. Social media/Facebook are a key element of the success of the “neo-Tiso’s.”
An American/Swedish axis, of sorts, manifests as a collaborative effort between Trumpenkampfverbande supporter Richard B. Spencer and Daniel Friberg, a key figure in the Swedish fascist milieu of Carl Lundstrom.
Traveling to Asia, we note the re-emergence of Japanese fascism, instituted in the Abe government by organizations like Nippon Kaigi. In addition to instituting revisionist teaching in the Japanese educational system, the Abe government is curtailing that country’s free press.
Several of Abe’s cabinet ministers are supportive of Hitler’s electoral strategy, seeing it as a blueprint for the implementation of Japanese reaction–among them Tomomi Inada, the new defense minister.
The program concludes with a look at Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist/fascist government and it selection of a hard-line anti-Muslim bigot to govern the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Program Highlights Include:
- Review of Modi’s BJP as a cat’s paw for the Hindu nationalist/fascist RSS.
- Discussion of the economic links between German and French industrialists that underlay the development of the French Fifth Column inspired, in part, by Charles Maurras.
- Review of the links between Carl Lundstrom, WikiLeaks and Assange aide Joran Jermas, a doctrinaire Holocaust denier.
- Review of the “Nazified AI” at the heart of Cambridge Analytica’s data manipulation engine.
1. Another of the fascist influences on Steve Bannon, Trump’s top strategist, is French anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator Charles Maurras.
Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, recently spoke approvingly of the ideas of an anti-Semitic French intellectual who was sentenced to life in prison for cooperating with the Nazis during World War II.
In an article on Bannon’s interactions with European right-wing nationalists who want to break apart the European Union, Politico reported last week that Bannon has “expressed admiration for the reactionary French philosopher Charles Maurras, according to French media reports confirmed by Politico.” Recent articles in French media claim Bannon favorably cited Maurras to a French diplomat. . . .
. . . . But Maurras was more than a nationalist. He was an infamous anti-Semite, whose anti-Jewish views were central to his outlook. From 1908 to 1944, Maurras edited the anti-Semitic paper L’Action Francaise, the organ of an eponymous movement that was anti-democratic and pro-monarchy. The movement was born out of the Dreyfus Affair, an international controversy in which an innocent Jewish soldier was convicted in 1894 of passing secrets to the Germans, a crime for which he was later exonerated. The movement’s “founding prejudice” was that Dreyfus was in fact guilty and that those who supported him were undermining France, according to Frederick Brown’s The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914–1940. Maurras spent years writing anti-Semitic articles. He referred to the French government, known as the Third Republic, as “the Jew State, the Masonic State, the immigrant State.”
In 1936, Maurras served eight months in prison for inciting the attempted assassination of Jewish politician Léon Blum and other French officials. According to Carmen Callil’s Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France, Maurras penned numerous articles calling for Blum to be lynched and shot in the back and have his throat slit.
Maurras blamed World War II on the Jews, faulting them for the German occupation of France. “The barbarous occupation of 1940 would not have taken place without the Jews of 1939, without their filthy war, the war they undertook and they declared: our occupiers were introduced by them, it was the Jews who launched us into catastrophe,” he wrote, according to 2001 article by Callil in the New Statesman. Callil also noted that Maurras’ newspaper supported the Nazis and “named names, hunted down enemies, and called for hostages, resistants, Jews and Gaullists to be shot.” In his political column during the war, Maurras wrote that “if the death penalty is not sufficient to put a stop to the Gaullists, members of their families should be seized as hostages and executed.”
At the end of the war, Maurras was sentenced to life in prison for complicity with the Nazis. He reportedly called his conviction “Dreyfus’ revenge.” Due to his failing health, he was released from prison shortly before his death in 1952.According to Politico, Bannon approvingly cited Maurras’ distinction between what the French philosopher called the “real country” of the people and the “legal country” led by government officials. Maurras put Jews in the latter category, according to Brown, and referred to all Jews as foreigners. . . .
2a. Next, we excerpt part of FTR #372, discussing the French Fifth Column to which Charles Maurras belonged.
The account of the actions of the French Fifth Column relies heavily on the account provided by Pierre Cot, the French minister of aviation under the Leon Blum government. In his 1944 book Triumph of Treason, Cot discussed the subversion of the French military resistance to the Germans by members of the armed forces sympathetic to the fascist cause. The Vichy government then undertook to pin the stunning military defeat on the Blum government, instead of the conspiratorial activities of some of its own sympathizers.
Triumph of Treason; by Pierre Cot; Copyright 1944 [HC]; Ziff-Davis; p. 14.
. . . First of all, it was necessary to ‘preserve the honor of the Army.’ General Weygand thundered these words like a command. He used, unconsciously, the same terms that leaders of the French Army had invoked during the Dreyfus affair to prevent public opinion from discovering their critical mistakes. ‘Preserve the honor of the Army,’ to French military men, is to secure by every means-including those outlawed by moral law and the Penal Code-the defense of the military corporation.
The question of the responsibility of military leaders in the military defeat of France either had to be evaded or posed in distorted terms. To ‘preserve the honor of the Army,’ the scapegoats of the defeat had to be chosen from the political personnel of the Third Republic. . .
2b. The combination of ineptitude and deliberate subversion by elements of the armed forces was relatively well known at the time.
. . . In truth, at the end of June, 1940, the question of who was responsible was in everyone’s mind. In the two weeks preceding the armistice, I was in touch with the crowd of refugees that slowly and painfully followed the roads southward. In the offices of the prefects, in the town halls, restaurants, and relief centers, I listened to many conversations received many confidences, heard many opinions. Opinions differed on governmental policy, but all agreed in denouncing the blunders of the French General Staff. The country was unanimous, not against Blum, Daladier, or me, nor even against Laval, Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Georges Bonnet, or Jacques Doriot, but against the generals who had been incapable of understanding the conditions of modern warfare and who were guilty of not knowing the rudiments of their profession. ‘Just as before 1914 they had prepared for the war of 1870,’ the people said, ‘before 1939 they prepared for the war of 1914.’ . . .
. . . .The severest condemnation came from the soldiers. Lost on the roads in pursuit of dispersed divisions and phantom regiments, thrown together with the refugees whose uncertainties and anxieties they share, the men in uniform cursed the conduct of their leaders. They repeated that they never had been schooled in the techniques of modern warfare, especially in the combined use of tanks and aviation, and they were amazed at the ineptness of their commanders in the battles of May and June. They asked why the Meuse and Seine bridges had not been blown up before the arrival of German motorized columns; why Paris had not been defended street by street, as the Spanish Republicans had defended Madrid (and as the Russians were to defend Stalingrad); and they wanted to know why more than half of the tanks and airplanes had been left in the rear-in Orleans, Toulouse, Lyon, North Africa-instead of being massed for a counterattack that might have changed everything. They knew that the depots were bursting with the cannon, airplanes, and equipment they had needed. . . .
. . . . One began to hear quoted the disturbing remarks with which General Weygand had tried to persuade the cabinet to ask for an armistice: that he needed his tanks to master the revolutionary elements, if it should become necessary. That is to say, the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army preferred fighting French workers to throwing all his forces against the German troops. The soldiers praised the bravery of certain leaders-Giraud, Lestien, De Gaulle, Lucien, Delattre de Tassigny, and many others-but they declared that most of the officers had been the first to flee. ‘They left in automobiles and we left on foot,’ they said, talking about those officers, faithful followers of l’Action Francaise, [Bannon influence Charles Maurras’s publication–D.E.] Je Suis Partout, Gringoire, and other Fascist newspapers which had said in various forms, during the winter, that this was a democratic war and consequently did not interest them. . . .
. . . Their anger was legitimate. It was inexplicable, after all, that the General Staff, after deciding to abandon Paris and thus opening the east to the Germans, had not ordered the troops which occupied the Maginot Line to fall back toward the south. More than a million men, the best of the French Army, were caught in the German trap, a disaster which could have been prevented by an order from General Weygand. . .
. . . . By its composition, the government of Vichy was representative not of the French people but of the General Staff. Its first cabinets were headed by Petain, the spiritual leader of the French Army, the man who had played the most important part in the preparation of the war and in the formation of the General Staff. And these cabinets were composed largely of members of the General Staff-General Weygand, General Pujo, Admiral Darlan, General Huntzinger, General Bergeret, and Admiral Platon. As the French proverb says, ‘the wolves do not eat each other’! . . .
2c. Cot discusses in detail the appointment of Cagoulard fascists to positions of influence within the Vichy government, in addion to the use of Fifth Column activity by fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. (AFA 10 contains an account of the 1934 coup attempt in the United States by powerful economic interests who hated Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.)
. . . . To their astonishment the French people saw Petain slowly fill the most important posts of authority in local, departmental, and central administrations with men who had taken part in the Cagoulard plot, with those who had repeated the infamous refrain ‘rather Hitler than Leon Blum,’ and even with some of those who before or during the war had been arrested for treasonable domestic and foreign activities. The people were applying to the government the old proverb, ‘tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.’ They were alarmed to see Vichy employ for its most delicate missions Ferdinand de Brinon, Jean Montigny, Jean Goy, Jean Luchaire, and Gaston Henry-Haye-members of the Comite France-Allemagne, an organization which, before the war, had been inspired and financed by Otto Abetz, after 1940 Hitler’s Ambassador in Paris.
They learned with fury that on the night of the armistice, when France was in mourning, Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of the aristocracy, high finance, and industry had drunk at Bordeaux to the defeat which had rid them of the nightmare of democracy and the Popular Front. The people understood that the Fifth Column in France, as in Spain, had opened the door to Hitler’s agents. And they watched with awe the agents of the Fifth Column become masters of France, the France of Petain, Weygand, and Laval.
The activity of the Fifth Column will not be considered by historians a special phenomenon of French public life, but as an integral part of Fascism. The Fifth Column has appeared wherever Fascism has tried to gain a foothold. It was at work in Spain, Austria, and Czechoslovakia before it turned up in France, and there are Fifth Columns in the United States, India, and Latin America. By the Fifth Column I do not mean only spies and licensed traitors. The Fifth Column includes all who, by accepting fascist doctrines or methods, become the conscious or unconscious accomplices of a foreign power. Treason and complicity have their degrees and nuances. The General Staff of the Fifth column consists principally of ambitious men who try to seize power by destroying or paralyzing the democratic system.
The body of the Fifth Column is composed of people who think they are saving their country from the ‘communist menace’ or from ‘British imperialism,’ and who do not even know in whose favor their actions are operating. Through hate of the Poplar Front, good Frenchmen, or men who considered themselves such, served Hitler gratuitously by doing work to which they would never have consented, had they had been offered payment. Why? Because they detested the Republic and democracy more than they loved France.
They accepted the idea of the defeat as a necessary evil which permitted them to rid France of the democratic system and to keep in power, in the neighboring countries, the Fascist dictators whom they considered solely capable of maintaining order in Europe. They then became unconscious collaborators of these dictators. They thought they were doing their duty in letting Hitler free France from the ‘Judeo-Masonic’ influence, and Europe from the Communist peril. . . .
. . . .They preferred the risks of an entente with a victorious Hitler to the risks of a democratic victory that would cause the collapse of the Fascist dictators in Europe. Considering Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Franco in Spain as knights of an anti-Bolshevist crusade, they became precursors and later partisans of ‘collaboration with Hitler’s New Order.’ . . .
2d. More about Cot’s account of the Fifth Column:
. . . . Enough evidence has been published already to prove that France was stabbed in the back by those who saw in Hitler the new St. George who would slay the Communist dragon. When Pierre Lazareff, former editor-in-chief of Paris Soir (the French newspaper with the widest circulation), reports royalists as saying: ‘We need the defeat to wipe out the Republic;’ when Elie Bois, former editor of the Petit Parisien (the most influential political newspaper), reports great industrialists ad admitting to him, during the winter of 1939–1940, that a plot had been organized to replace the democratic regime by a ‘government of authority’ and that this plot presupposed a Nazi victory. . .We have every reason to accept their affirmations, which tally so perfectly with the events. . . .
. . . . No, France received no exceptional treatment from Hitler and Fascism. A general plan coordinated the activity of the Fifth Columns all over the world. All were recruited from the same circles and had the same social and political composition. The object was the same everywhere: to divide and unnerve public opinion, weaken the resistance of the regime, and prepare a governmental group ready to execute a Fascist coup d’etat at a moment of trouble or confusion. The methods were the same everywhere: cultivation of the seeds of disunity which normally exist among free men and in free countries, exaggeration and inflammation of all racial and religious conflicts, all class rivalries, all political antagonisms, gradual conversion of opposition and dissent into hate, creation of an atmosphere of civil war. The means used were the same everywhere: campaigns of calumny against the democratic leaders capable of opposing Fascism (Blum in France, Roosevelt in the United States), the development of anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism is the first manifestation of racism and contains in petto the whole doctrine of Hitler, use of the fear of Communism among the middle classes, because anti-Communism is the best way to prevent the union of all anti-Fascist forces. This last device has been the most efficacious; the fear of Communism has become, in European and American politics of recent years, a much more important factor than Communism itself. . . .
3. Here’s a reminder that even if the EU makes it through 2017 without one of the national elections handing the far-right a major victory, there’s always 2018!
Italy’s anti-establishment 5‑Star Movement, benefiting from a split in the ruling Democratic Party (PD) and divisions in the center-right, has built a strong lead over its rivals, an opinion poll showed on Tuesday.
The Ipsos poll in Corriere della Sera newspaper put the 5‑Star, which wants a referendum on Italy’s membership of the euro, on 32.3 percent – its highest ever reading and 5.5 points ahead of the PD, which was on 26.8 percent.
The survey suggests that the 5‑Star is likely to emerge as the largest group in national elections due by early 2018, although it might struggle to create a government given its stated aversion to forging coalitions.
Such a scenario could spook financial markets wary of both the 5‑Star’s euroskepticism and the threat of prolonged political instability in Italy, which has the heaviest public debt burden in Europe after Greece.
The PD appeared to be paying the price for its internal feuds, dropping more than three percentage points in a month, as former prime minister Matteo Renzi battles to reassert his authority following a walkout by a left-wing faction.
…
“Political parties that preoccupy themselves with their internal divisions are electorally doomed,” said the British-based think tank Eurointelligence in a note.
“We are now at the point where it becomes increasingly improbable for the PD to regain power after the next elections.”
The center-right is riven by its own divisions, with former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looking to take charge of the bloc once more, but struggling to find common ground with old ally the Northern League, which has shunted to the far right.
Tuesday’s poll of some 5,000 people put the anti-immigrant Northern League on 12.8 percent, with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy!) on 12.7 percent.
A small center-right party, which is in the government coalition and is led by Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano, has seen its support gradually erode and was put at 2.8 percent, meaning it risks failing to even enter the next parliament.
Alfano’s group, which rebranded itself at the weekend as the Popular Alternative (AP), is the only mainstream party besides the PD and MDP, which openly touts a pro-EU agenda, raising the prospect of a euroskeptic government taking power in Italy.
Parliamentarians are still trying to draw up a new electoral law, with political analysts expecting them to agree on some form of proportional representation that might reward a stable majority to any party or group that wins 40 percent of the vote.
The Ipsos poll suggested that both the traditional center-left and center-right blocs would fall well short of the 40 percent threshold, leaving the 5‑Star in the driving seat.
However, the party, founded by comic Beppe Grillo, has repeatedly ruled out forming an alliance with other groups, suggesting Italy could face months of political uncertainty following the next election, as happened last year in Spain.
“The survey suggests that the 5‑Star is likely to emerge as the largest group in national elections due by early 2018, although it might struggle to create a government given its stated aversion to forging coalitions.”
4. Is Italy in store for a 5‑Star revolt next year? Well, a lot can change between now and Italy’s early 2018 elections but don’t forget that one of the biggest changes over the next year could be something like a far-right victory elsewhere in Europe. But if current trends continue it’s looking like the EU’s 2017 electoral scares aren’t going away any time soon. What that means for the EU as a whole if Italy decides to go down the ‘populist’ route remains to be seen. And, interestingly, what a 5‑Star victory would mean for Italians really remains to be seen too in part because it’s unclear what exactly 5‑Star stands for although the distinct Trumpian flare gives us an idea:
The party harps on the messianic theme of redemption for the betrayed, is allied with Britain’s far-right UKIP, and is controlled with an iron hand by leader Beppe Grillo.
When 38-year-old Virginia Raggi, a lawyer and relative newcomer to politics, was elected mayor of Rome in June, it was a stunning victory for her party, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), or Five Star Movement. Raggi beat her Partito Democratico (PD) rival in the runoff vote by a crushing margin of 67 percent to 33 percent, symbolically slaying the governing PD, also the incumbent in the city of Rome.
Though the M5S had previously gained power locally in a few places, Rome was much bigger political prize, an internationally visible arena where the three main postwar power groups, the neo-Fascist far right, the Catholic center, and the Communist left, had each fought for its piece of ground for decades. Now the M5S, distinguished mainly for its ferocious attacks on the political establishment, was to have its place in the sun. In Turin, too, the M5S triumphed, when Chiara Appendino, 32, with a background in business management, won a surprise victory over the incumbent mayor Piero Fassino, a PD veteran whose political career goes back to the Italian Communist Party.
So the Movimento 5 Stelle had finally stormed the Winter Palace… or should we say, carried out its March on Rome?
Therein lies the problem. If only we knew what they stand for.
For the M5S is far more mysterious than it has appeared to some observers, to whom it seemed to resemble Spain’s Podemos or Syriza in Greece. The movement took off in 2007 with stand-up comedian Beppe Grillo’s successful Vaffa rallies, where crowds turned out to shout “Vaffanculo!” (“Get Screwed!”) at Italy’s corrupt politicians. Grillo’s hugely successful blog soon became a rallying point for the disaffected. In 2009 he and the late Gianroberto Casaleggio, an eccentric, sci-fi loving web-marketing guru in favor of both enlightened despotism and direct democracy, founded the M5S. Today only a few acolytes seem to remember what those five stars in the name and on the party symbol signify.
The five stars were born, one journalist mused recently, because the pampered Grillo and Casaleggio measured well-being by hotel standards. “We could have a five-star life!” the comedian used to scream at his rallies. That is, if those thieving politicians didn’t steal all the money.
No, the five stars stand for “water, environment, transport, connectivity, development” shot back one ardent Grillino in a tart comment. It’s true, those were the watchwords in the very early days, just after “vaffanculo” was discarded, although you do have to wonder what “five-star water” might be (merely uncontaminated, or positively delicious?), and why a ranking system for resource-guzzling luxury hotels would make sense for the environment, which flourishes where the hand of man is absent. A guaranteed “citizen’s income” for all whose earnings fall below a certain level is another longtime M5S proposal, warmly backed today by Turin’s Appendino.
According to the most recent national program, the M5S’s projects today are “state and citizen, energy, information, economy, transport, health, education.” A look at the specific policy promises turns up a hodgepodge of the petty and the grand, a long wish list that seems to have been compiled from the kind of web survey dear to party strategist Casaleggio (he died in April this year, aged 61, of a brain tumor). Thus under “economy” the program calls both for “vigorous debt reduction” and “ceilings on executive pay in publicly traded and state-controlled companies” and favors “local production” and “nonprofits” as well as guaranteed unemployment benefits. Alongside all these good intentions, however, there is no trace of the hard choices about how to stimulate a depressed economy that any governing party would have to make. No mention of employment, inequality, or EU-imposed austerity. Under “transport,” the program calls for more bike paths and an improved rail system to discourage automobile use, but there is no mention of spending on infrastructure under “economy,” or of how to accomplish all these good deeds and pay a minimum income while slashing the debt. Nor does the program have any indications on foreign policy. The M5S is anti-Europe, and its Euro MPs are aligned with the far-right xenophobes of Britain’s UKIP in the EU parliament, at least until Britain finally leaves the union. It’s a program rich in magical thinking, in short.
Like many a charismatic leader who rides the wave of public disgust with established politics today (Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi come to mind, and so does UKIP’s Nigel Farage, who claimed victory with Brexit), Casaleggio was a kind of businessman/aspiring wheeler-dealer. Grillo’s successful blog was one of his ventures, and Casaleggio expertly milked the advertising on it. And Grillo, a wealthy showman, shares much of his outlook. They are men who believe that politics is intrinsically silly and corrupt and that any entrepreneur can do it better. Their profound scorn for the political class springs from a personal dislike of government regulations and taxes they consider punishing, and not surprisingly, they are firmly pro-capital.
In recent years, prodded by Casaleggio, the M5S has embraced anti-immigrant and anti-regulatory positions dear to the small-business owners they hope to draw into the movement. When the government of Matteo Renzi was finally poised to pass a law on civil unions, giving gays long-needed rights (a measure hotly contested in a country occupied by the Vatican), the M5S suddenly withdrew support and members were told to vote their consciences, thus dooming the most controversial plank, the one allowing gay couples to adopt. The promised “direct democracy” of online voting—candidates and major M5S decisions are decided by a vote on the Grillo blog site—has time and again brought accusations of fraudulent vote-counting. By many accounts, the party is fragmented, held together by draconian measures from the top, like the penalty of 150,000 euros that local representatives, including Mayor Raggi, are contractually obliged to pay the party should they stray from the agreed-upon policy line. Neither of the two young MPs spoken of as successors to Grillo is anywhere near as prepossessing as the leader.
Accusations of fascism are quick to fly here, in the country that invented the phenomenon; Prime Minister Renzi is routinely called a fascist by the dissident left of his party. But in truth, if any party resembles the one Benito Mussolini was building with the support of bitter World War I veterans in 1919–20, it is the M5S. There is the same messianic theme of redemption for the betrayed—in today’s case, citizens betrayed by their corrupt and spendthrift governors. The same mixture of ideas hastily borrowed from right and left (lest we forget, Mussolini was a Socialist before he was a Fascist). The same dictatorial grip at the top, applied to keep a sprawling movement together.
For the only issue that really unites the M5S is scorn for politics and politicians. That wholesale “plague on all their houses” condemnation of the political class is rather difficult to reconcile with public office, as some M5S members elected to local government or to parliament in Rome have learned to their dismay. Several have been expelled from the party for making alliances or not obeying orders. Another became embroiled in an organized-crime scandal when a fellow M5S city councilor was investigated for connections with the Camorra, Campania’s local mafia.
The first moves of both newly elected mayors Raggi of Rome and Appendino of Turin have met with intense scrutiny and a barrage of criticism. Raggi, who is up against a hostile public bureaucracy in a city where basic services like garbage collection and bus and metro service are constantly on the verge of collapse, a city in which widespread corruption was unveiled in 2014–15 in the Mafia Capitale scandal, does seem to lack the needed political experience. Multiple urban brushfires burned across Rome this hot, dry August, and she seemed unable to react. The city utterly defeated her predecessor, Ignazio Marino, a surgeon who was elected with the PD but was eventually forced out by his own party. Raggi’s candidates to supervise the environment and sanitation have been hotly contested on the basis of their past experience, for if experience is necessary, it is also tainting in the mind of M5S purists. In Turin, opponents of a much-contested high-speed rail line through the Val di Susa to the west lashed out at Mayor Appendino for expressing her support for the police guarding the building site; the M5S has strongly defended the protesters.
Still, one doesn’t need to be a fan of the M5S to think two months in office is too little to evaluate the performance of their new mayors. In Raggi’s case, the attacks are constant. Beppe Grillo, who last year was reported to have drifted away from his creation, fatigued and bored, has apparently decided to occupy himself with making Raggi’s government a success as a showcase for the next elections.
…
Just what the Movimento 5 Stelle would do if elected to national government remains a mystery. The messianic “throw the bums out” rallying cry wins votes but offers no program. It’s been called populism, but it’s not even clear that Grillo is speaking to the “little man”; his is a howl of pure rage. We need to ask ourselves why it is so attractive today.
One reason is that the established parties are discredited everywhere. They are in Britain, which voted for Brexit despite Conservative and (weak) Labour support for EU membership. And in Spain, where two elections in a six-month period still have not produced a governing coalition. Not to mention France, where the Front National of Marine Le Pen threatens to overwhelm the Socialists and the right. The established parties struggle to convince national voters they are looking after their interests because the powers they need to do so are simply not available at the national level. Neoliberal capitalism, truly global in scope, can no longer be regulated by national governments; it can only be controlled at a supranational level. If Italy wants more jobs and growth, it can only get them through European economic policy, although certainly not the hegemonic policy of the moment, the austerity imposed by German financial authorities. Whatever Matteo Renzi’s defects, he has certainly tried to push Germany and France toward a more Keynesian European consensus.
Does the M5S understand these matters? Does Beppe Grillo, who has made no political alliances in Italy and no international alliances except with Nigel Farage, even care? Like Mussolini, he seems to believe Italy can live in autarky, by imposing national economic self-sufficiency. It’s not just a crazy idea (where will he get his new iPhone?) but reveals a profound naïveté about problems that don’t really interest him.
You would think that Italy, after almost twenty years of a soi-disant anti-establishment figure like Silvio Berlusconi, would have learned the lesson. In 1994 the rogue TV tycoon’s Forza Italia party was that era’s equivalent: an upstart “anti-political” political movement that swept away the ruling parties after the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) corruption investigations of 1992.
But perhaps cynicism breeds more of the same. It was the Berlusconi government’s hungry, light-fingered approach to public office that opened a space for Grillo and his Vaffa rallies in 2007. Now Grillo hopes that same anger will bring down a center-left only marginally implicated in corruption, but deeply divided and defeated.
…
5. In Slovakia, the heirs to fascist dictator and Nazi quisling Reverend Josef Tiso are coming back above ground.
Head bowed in reverence, Robert Svec gently placed a bouquet of blood-red flowers at the foot of the only known statue of Jozef Tiso, Slovakia’s wartime fascist leader, in a weedy monument park known as the Pantheon of Slovak Historical Figures.
For years, Mr. Svec’s neo-fascist cultural organization, the Slovak Revival Movement, was a tiny fringe group. But now his crowds are growing, as 200 people recently gathered with him to celebrate the country’s fascist past and call fascist-era greetings — “Na Straz!” or “On the guard!” Mr. Svec is so emboldened that he is transforming his movement into a political party, with plans to run for Parliament.
“You are ours, and we will forever be yours,” Mr. Svec said at the foot of the statue, having declared this as the Year of Jozef Tiso, dedicated to rehabilitating the image of the former priest and Nazi collaborator, who was hanged as a war criminal in 1947.
Once in the shadows, Europe’s neo-fascists are stepping back out, more than three-quarters of a century after Nazi boots stormed through Central Europe, and two decades since a neo-Nazi resurgence of skinheads and white supremacists unsettled the transition to democracy. In Slovakia, neo-fascists are winning regional offices and taking seats in the multiparty Parliament they hope to replace with strongman rule. . . .
. . . . “Before, pro-fascist sentiments were kept hidden,” said Gabriel Sipos, director of Transparency International Slovakia. “Parents would tell their children, ‘You cannot say this at school.’ Now, you can say things in the public space that you couldn’t say before.” . . . .
. . . . “Now, extremists and fascists are part of the system,” said Grigorij Meseznikov, president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a liberal research group. . . .
. . . . Mr. Kotleba, 39, who recently renamed his party Kotleba — People’s Party Our Slovakia, used to appear in uniforms reminiscent of those worn during the wartime Slovak State. Once he and his party got into Parliament, the uniforms disappeared and he shifted his attacks from Jews to immigrants and the country’s Roma minority.
. . . . But the underlying message of groups like Mr. Kotleba’s and Mr. Svec’s has not shifted — Slovakia was better off under a fascist government.
“Something very dark and very troubling from the past is coming back,” Mr. Havran said. “They feel they are fighting for something very pure, something very old and sacred. A few years ago, they were ashamed to talk about it. Now, they are proud.” . . .
. . . . Mr. Kotleba’s party has been especially effective on social media, with more than 140 interconnected Facebook pages. When a local retiree, Jan Bencik, 68, began blogging to expose the country’s neo-fascists, his name appeared on a list of “opponents of the state.”
“They called me a Jew, said that I should die, die, die,” Mr. Bencik said. “They said that people like me would be dealt with in the future.” . . .
6a. Trump backer and “Alt-Right” mainstay Richard Spencer has launched a new website with Daniel Friberg, part of the Swedish fascist milieu to which Carl Lundstrom belongs.
On Monday, Richard Spencer, New Jersey Institute of Technology lecturer Jason Jorjani, and Swedish New Right figure Daniel Friberg launched altright.com, a site aimed at bringing together “the best writers and analysts from Alt Right, in North America, Europe, and around the world.” . . .
. . . . As of now, most of the site’s content is recycled material from Friberg’s Arktos publishing house, Spencer’s other publication, Radix Journal, the alt-right online media network Red Ice, and Occidental Dissent, a white nationalist blog run by altright.com’s news editor Hunter Wallace. . . .
…. Still, Spencer’s intellectualism does little to hide the centrality of bigotry to his own worldview and the views of those he publishes. His previous site, Alternative Right, once ran an essay called, ‘Is Black Genocide Right?’” “Instead of asking how we can make reparations for slavery, colonialism, and Apartheid or how we can equalize academic scores and incomes,” Colin Liddell wrote, “we should instead be asking questions like, ‘Does human civilization actually need the Black race?’ ‘Is Black genocide right?’ and, if it is, ‘What would be the best and easiest way to dispose of them?’” It remains to be seen whether altright.com will employ similarly candid writers. . . .
6b. Pirate Bay sugar daddy Lundstrom has discussed his political sympathies. [The excerpt below is from Google translations. The Swedish sentence is followed by the English translation.] Note that he appears on the user/subscriber list for Nordic Publishers, the Nazi publishing outfit that handles the efforts produced by one of Jermas’s [aka “Shamir’s”] publishers.
“The Goal: Take over all Piracy” by Peter Karlsson; realtid.se; 3/10/2006.
. . . Lundström har inte gjort någon hemlighet av sina sympatier för främlingsfientliga grupper, och förra året fanns hans namn med på kundregistret hos det nazistiska bokförlaget Nordiska Förlaget. Lundstrom has made no secret of his sympathy for the xenophobic groups, and last year was his name with the customer code of the Nazi publishing house Nordic Publishers.
– Jag stöder dem genom att köpa böcker och musik. — I support them by buying books and music. Ni i media vill bara sprida missaktning om olika personer. You in the media just want to spread contempt for different people. Ni i media är fyllda av hat till Pirate Bay, avslutar en mycket upprörd Carl Lundström. You in the media is full of hatred to the Pirate Bay, finishing a very upset Carl Lundström.
Nordiska Förlaget säljer vit makt musik och böcker som hyllar rasistiska våldshandlingar. Nordic publishing company sells white power music and books that celebrates the racist violence. Förlaget stöder nazisternas demonstration i Salem och bjöd in Ku Klux Klan ledaren till en föredragturné i Sverige. Publisher supports the Nazi demonstration in Salem and invited the Ku Klux Klan leader [David Duke] for a lecture tour in Sweden. . . .
6c. Expo–founded by the late Stieg Larsson–revealed that Friberg’s Nordic Publishers has morphed into Arktos, one of the outfits associated with Spencer, et al.
“Right Wing Public Education” by Maria-Pia Cabero [Google Translation]; Expo; January of 2014.
. . . . When NF were discontinued in 2010 founded the publisher Arktos by basically the same people. Arktos publishes New Right-inspired literature and CEO Daniel Friberg, who was driving in the NF, has played a key role in the establishment of ideas. . . .
7. Turning our attention to Japan, we note the rise of fascism in a “process guided from above.”
“Partners at the Pacific;” german-foreign-policy.com; 3/20/2017.
“Right-Wing Populism from Above”
. . . . Japan, with which Germany is seeking closer economic and military cooperation, has taken a sharp nationalist course. This course is generally associated with Abe becoming Prime Minister. Abe, who arrived in Hanover yesterday, “is anticipating in Japan, (…) what right-wing populists dream of in Europe,”[6] a leading German daily recently noted. With his visit at the Yasakuni Shrine, which is also honoring some WW II war criminals, he is promoting a nationalist transformation of the state, he is permitting the growing falsification of history and he is responsible for the increased patronizing of the media. As a result, Japan slipped from 22nd down to 72nd on the world press freedom index issued by “Reporters Without Borders.” Observers note that with the Nippon Kaigi (“Japan Conference”), a nationalist lobby organization has gained significant influence. Of the 722 parliamentarians, 289 are members and 13 of the 19 ministers and the Prime Minster Abe are in close contact with Nippon Kaigi. Nippon Kaigi says of itself that it is striving to strengthen the empire, loosen the separation of state and religion, upgrade the traditional family and gender roles, promote the country’s militarization and end critical consideration of Japan’s crimes during WW II. “Right-Wing populism in Japan” is a “process guided from above,” particularly pushed by the country’s elite, according to Gabriele Vogt, japanologist at the Hamburg University.[7] The new nationalism is pushing the country ever deeper into a confrontation with China. . . .
8. Abe is turning back the Japanese historical and political clock. Japanese government officials are openly sanctioning anti-Korean racism and networking with organizations that promote that doctrine. Several members of Abe’s government network with Japanese neo-Nazis, some of whom advocate using the Nazi method for seizing power in Japan. Is Abe’s government doing just that?
“For Top Pols In Japan Crime Doesn’t Pay, But Hate Crime Does” by Jake Adelstein and Angela Erika Kubo; The Daily Beast; 9/26/2014.
. . . . According to the magazine Sunday Mainichi, Ms. Tomomi Inada, Minister Of The “Cool Japan” Strategy, also received donations from Masaki and other Zaitokukai associates.
Apparently, racism is cool in Japan.
Inada made news earlier this month after photos circulated of her and another female in the new cabinet posing with a neo-Nazi party leader. Both denied knowing the neo-Nazi well but later were revealed to have contributed blurbs for an advertisement praising the out-of-print book Hitler’s Election Strategy. Coincidentally, Vice-Prime Minister,Taro Aso, is also a long-time admirer of Nazi political strategy, and has suggested Japan follow the Nazi Party template to sneak constitutional change past the public. . . .
. . . In August, Japan’s ruling party, which put Abe into power organized a working group to discuss laws that would restrict hate-crime, although the new laws will probably also be used to clamp down on anti-nuclear protests outside the Diet building.
Of course, it is a little worrisome that Sanae Takaichi, who was supposed to oversee the project, is the other female minister who was photographed with a neo-Nazi leader and is a fan of Hitler. . .
9. Devotee of Hitler’s political strategy Tomomi Inada is now the defense minister of Japan.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appointed a conservative ally as defense minister in a cabinet reshuffle on Wednesday that left most key posts unchanged, and he promised to hasten the economy’s escape from deflation and boost regional ties.
New defense minister Tomomi Inada, previously the ruling party policy chief, shares Abe’s goal of revising the post-war, pacifist constitution, which some conservatives consider a humiliating symbol of Japan’s World War Two defeat.
She also regularly visits Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine for war dead, which China and South Korea see as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism. Japan’s ties with China and South Korea have been frayed by the legacy of its military aggression before and during World War Two. . . .
10. We have spoken of Narendra Modi’s BJP, a cat’s paw for the Hindu nationalist/fascist RSS. Modi’s anti-Muslim agenda is now coming into the open.
Steve Bannon is a fan of Modi and his BJP party.
“Mr. Modi’s Embrace of Hindu Extremists;” The New York Times; 3/23/2017.
Since he was elected in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has played a cagey game, appeasing his party’s hard-line Hindu base while promoting secular goals of development and economic growth. Despite worrying signs that he was willing to humor Hindu extremists, Mr. Modi refrained from overtly approving violence against the nation’s Muslim minority.
On Sunday, Mr. Modi revealed his hand. Emboldened by a landslide victory in recent elections in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, his party named a firebrand Hindu cleric, Yogi Adityanath, as the state’s leader. The move is a shocking rebuke to religious minorities, and a sign that cold political calculations ahead of national elections in 2019 have led Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to believe that nothing stands in the way of realizing its long-held dream of transforming a secular republic into a Hindu state.
Mr. Adityanath has made a political career of demonizing Muslims, thundering against such imaginary plots as “love jihad”: the notion that Muslim men connive to water down the overwhelming Hindu majority by seducing Hindu women. He defended a Hindu mob that murdered a Muslim man in 2015 on the suspicion that his family was eating beef, and said Muslims who balked at performing a yoga salutation to the sun should “drown themselves in the sea.”
Uttar Pradesh, home to more than 200 million people, badly needs development, not ideological showmanship. The state has the highest infant mortality rate in the country. Nearly half of its children are stunted. Educational outcomes are dismal. Youth unemployment is high. . . .
. . . . India needs to generate a million new jobs every month to meet employment demand. Should Mr. Adityanath fail to deliver, there is every fear that he — and Mr. Modi’s party — will resort to deadly Muslim-baiting to stay in power, turning Mr. Modi’s dreamland into a nightmare for India’s minorities . . . .
Ctrl-rigt, Alt-right, Del-right. I think “alt-nazis” is a much more adequate and politically correct term.
A new wave of sympathy towards the extreme right is surging throughout East-European countries such as Romania and Bulgaria. I leave in Romania for the time being, and I can sense a growing passion for fascism rising here and there. Mostly politically indifferent and economically poor people who are so easily manipulated towards the far right, even if only for certain moments and actions. They are not devout nationalists, they don’t care much for what is going on and are without a political opinion of their own most of the time. A lot of “opportunistic fascism” more than conviction. The national orthodox church has stepped in with its own agenda (power and money accumulation mainly), and without being openly for the nationalistic movements is using them and the passions they stir for its own purposes (one being the erection of the tallest, most expensive orthodox cathedral in the world). The (criminally convicted) leaders of the main socialist party went to the US to kiss the runes encrusted ring of Trump on his coronation day. No one left to blow the whistle.
Check out Nigel Farage’s latest ‘Exit’-ish project: It’s not quite ‘CalExit’. More like ‘CalDivorce’. And, or course, it’s being fincanced by a pair of Republican operatives:
“Banks told the paper the campaign would use the same impulse that propelled the Brexit campaign to victory: “It would be portrayed as the Hollywood elites versus the people, breaking up the bad government. Seventy-eight per cent of people in California are unhappy with their government. It’s the world’s sixth-largest economy and it’s very badly run.””
That certainly sounds like something Farage has experience with. And, again, note the financiers for this project:
You have to wonder if this is another Tim Draper project. If so, it’s not going to end with a single split.
So that’s kind of disturbing. But at least Farage isn’t getting hired to push a full on ‘Calexit’ campaign to get California to secede for the US entirely, although it seems like this campaign to split California could easily morph into an ‘Exit’ campaign. And if this does turn into a ‘Calexit’ movement it sounds like the movement could get some unexpected help from elsewhere in Europe: the EU Commission:
““The newly elected US president was happy that the Brexit was taking place and has asked other countries to do the same,” European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said. However, he warned, “if he goes on like that I am going to promote the independence of Ohio and Austin, Texas, in the United States of America.””
Is talk of the glories of the United State of Ohio going to start emanating from EU leaders? The Sovereign Weird State of Austin? And will the EU hire Farage to promote it? He’s apparently available for such projects so you never know.
Malvin- they say “alt-right” but I hear ALT-REICH.
Here’s a story about one of the underlying dynamics fuels the rise of Marine Le Pen and the National Front that doesn’t bode well for France. Both in the short-run since this dynamic could propel Le Pen to the presidency. But also in the long-run since that underlying dynamic is the shocking amount of National Front support from French youths:
“The National Front’s strength among millennials suggests the populist wave that’s unsettled the West may be more durable than many may assume. Far from the last gasp of closed-society older voters who are demographically destined to be outnumbered by a rising tide of cosmopolitan youth, the populist insurgency could continue to build over years and decades if enough disenchanted young voters can be lured by the promise of something new.”
Yep, as bad is the rise of the National Front seems now, it’s not inconceivable that this is merely the beginning of a decades-long French love affair with the far-right. Thanks in part to the effective scapegoating of immigrants as the primary source of France’s woes, but let’s not forget the years of austerity EU-imposed policies that predictably led to a sustained spike in youth unemployment and a sense of despair. And sure, given the real issue of extremist ideologies within Muslim immigrant communities it is likely that parties like the National Front even without a 25 percent youth unemployment rate. But when you consider this:
it’s pretty clear that the austerity-induced mass youth unemployment has played a significant role in these growing anti-immigrant attitudes. So it looks like we can add “the radicalization of France’s youth” to the list of austerity’s accomplishments. Thanks austerity.
But let’s also not forget that France’s austerity policies haven’t just contributed to the radicalization of France’s white Christian youths. Austerity has been playing a big role in the radicalization of France’s Muslim youth’s too. The de facto austerity that comes from growing up in a marginalized community with limited job prospects and a persistent social stigma simply from being part of that marginalized community:
“Older immigrants say they have witnessed a steady dwindling in young people’s prospects. “Things were not this way when I first came here 25 years ago,” Bennaceur says. “There were more opportunities to work and study. Since the financial crisis, that has changed and tensions have risen.””
While the radical strains of Islam exported from places like the Saudi Kingdom is obviously a major factor in the radicalization of France’s Muslim youths (and across the world), you clearly can’t separate that situation from the socioeconomic dislocation France’s Muslims experience on a daily basis. And it’s simply gotten much, much worse since the 2008 financial crisis and the EU’s tragic embrace of austerity economics.
So France’s non-Muslim youth who are flocking to Marine Le Pen are doing so over fears about the Muslim youths taking their jobs. And the Muslim youths flocking to radical Islam are doing so, in part, do to a lack a jobs and any meaningful prospects for economic security. With xenophobic ideologies fueling the fire on both side.
So, yeah, thanks austerity. And hate. Way to go.
Germany’s far-right AfD party just held elections and selected a new pair of co-leaders. And in what is seen as a major blow to Frauke Petry, who was apparently trying to push the party towards a more pragmatic political path (e.g. not defending the party’s open Holocaust deniers like Björn Höcke as much), one of the new co-leaders is a vocal defender Höcke. So, yeah, surprise, far-right AfD is now the even-further-to-the-right AfD:
“Ms Petry, 41, announced on Wednesday that she would no longer be her party’s top candidate. She also irked some rivals by leading an effort to expel Björn Höcke, AfD’s regional leader in the eastern Thuringia state, after he suggested that Germany stops acknowledging and atoning for its Nazi past. Mr Gauland has repeatedly protected Mr Höcke, even after his remarks created an outrage in Germany.”
Frauke Petry is the face of moderate far-right ethno-nationalism is seems. Moderate in the sense that she thought the party should hide its true stripes more effectively. So now we’ll get to see if taking a more openly Hitler-coddling public face helps or hurts the AfD in the upcoming elections. It seems like this is overall great news for Angela Merkel and the CDU, assuming going further-right ends up hurting the AfD at the ballot box. Of course, if this actually helps the AfD that’s clearly not good news for the AfD. Or anyone else. But odds are this is probably good news for the Germany’s conservative parties since it doesn’t sound like the AfD’s internal bickering over whether or not to clamp down on its Holocaust deniers was helping the party’s image. Yes, that bickering is resolved now, but in the worst way it could have been resolved.
At the same time, it’s worth noting one rather significant, and bizarre, new public face of moderation that emerged from the AfD’s election of these new co-leaders: Alice Weidel is an open lesbian. In a party that generally demonizes gays. So how does Ms Weidel explain her leadership post in a party that appears to hate people like her? She just responds that she keeps her personal life and her public life separate. As if that’s a coherent explanation.
So while Weidel may not be a strong public backer as her new co-leader Alexander Gauland is of Holocaust deniers like Björn Höcke, she’s still clearly a fan of absurdist public denials:
“When interviewers inevitably ask her how she could be part of a party that opposes same-sex marriage, compares LGBTQ people adopting to making a child a “plaything for the sexual inclinations of a loud minority,” opposes sex education in schools, and advocates for “traditional gender roles” for women, she just responds that she keeps her personal life and her public life separate.”
Yes, the anti-LGBTQ AfD party managed to score itself an openly gay co-leader. An openly gay co-leader who thinks “political correctness” is a big problem and who tries to resolve this contradiction by ‘keeping her personal life and public life separate.’ So she’s in ‘the closet’ and out of ‘the closet’. Simultaneously.
So that’s the new face of the AfD: a guy who thinks the party is too hard on its Holocaust deniers and an openly gay woman who has somehow achieved a state of quantum superposition with ‘the closet’, which is a pretty apt analogy for what the AfD in general: a party that’s in the ‘Nazi closet’ and out of the ‘Nazi closet’ simultaneously. At least, that’s what the party appeared to be trying to do before it elected its new leadership. It’s pretty clearly out of the ‘Nazi closet’ at this point.
Here’s the kind of story that must put a big smile on the face of Steve Bannon and other The Camp of the Saints/Charles Maurras fans: a group of “Identitarians” (basically the European version of the ‘Alt-Right’ neo-Nazis) has successfully crowd funded enough money to purchase a boat and crew. For what purpose? To stop search-and-rescue operations of NGOs looking for refugees heading towards Europe:
“The money was raised through an anonymous crowdfunding campaign with an initial goal of €50,000 (about £44,000) to pay for ships, travel costs and film equipment. On Saturday the group confirmed they had reached their target but were still accepting donations. A French far-right group hired a boat for a trial run last month, disrupting a search-and-rescue vessel as it left the Sicilian port of Catania. They claimed they had slowed the NGO ship until the Italian coastguard intervened.”
That’s the Identitarian movement for you: protecting far-right ‘us vs them’ totalitarian identities (that people with identity issues tend to gravitate towards) by doing things like disrupting search-and-rescue missions so more of ‘them’ drown at sea. Yes, Steve Bannon must be oh so pleased.
With Angela Merkel’s CDU on track to trounce the SPD in the upcoming German federal elections, it’s unfortunately important to note the other big winner as Germany continues its rightward shift: the AfD, set to be the third most popular party in Germany:
“Timo Lochocki, an expert on right-wing populism at the German Marshall Fund, a Berlin-based think tank, believes those concerns are justified. Winning seats in Parliament will give the AfD an enormous platform to promote and normalize its message, along with access to massive new resources and staff, which should help beef up its organization.”
But note how it’s not simply seats in the Parliament that the AfD might win. If the CDU and SPD form a coalition government that would make the AfD the leading opposition party, with all sorts of perks:
And that’s not all. Thanks to a Parliamentary tradition that grants the body’s oldest member the right to give the first speech of a new session, that honor could go to a 77-year-old AfD candidate.
And keep in mind that when AfD co-founder Alexander Gauland denounced the Parliamentary move to deny 77-year old AfD candidate Wilhelm von Gottberg his right to the first speech, Gauland, at 76 years old, is pretty close to earning that prize too. So Gauland is probably extra sensitive about the matter. If von Gottberg doesn’t win it’ll be Gouland the Parliament refuses to allow to speak first, thanks to Gauland publicly saying things like how Germany should stop being ashamed of WWII and instead be proud of the Nazis’ military accomplishments:
“Gauland provoked outrage for saying at another event that Germans should no longer be reproached with the Nazi past and they should take pride in what their soldiers achieved during World War One and Two.”
Less shame and more pride in the Nazi war machine and its military conquests. Those are the views of the 76 year old AfD co-founder Alexander Gauland who denounced the move to prevent 77 year old AfD candidate, Wilhelm von Gottberg, from giving the honorary first speech. So it’s looking like those honorary first speeches are going to be an issue in the Bundestag for the forseeable future.
But that doesn’t mean the tensions won’t eventually recede, according to AfD executive board member Georg Pazderski. Just look as Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD and CDU found some common ground: investigating left-wing extremism:
So there we go: investigating mutual political enemies. That can be the common ground that unites Germany...or at least unites the right. Although there’s at least one investigation the CDU isn’t going to be very interested in
Yep, the AfD wants to investigate and “severely punish” Angela Merkel for letting the Syrian refugees in. Because diluting the percentage of ethnic Germans a bit in response to a humanitarian emergency is the worst thing that you could do in the views of the AfD and irreversibly dooms Germany to ‘white genocide’ or something. But don’t call them Nazis. Even if one of their leaders referred to the government as “pigs” who are “nothing other than marionettes of the victorious powers of the second world war, whose task it is to keep down the German people”:
“A leaked email written by AfD’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, meanwhile, echoed the rhetoric of the rightwing extremist Reichsbürger movement, describing the current government as “pigs” who are “nothing other than marionettes of the victorious powers of the second world war, whose task it is to keep down the German people”. Initially dismissed as a fake by the AfD press team, Weidel’s lawyer no longer rejects the authorship of the email.”
And the party led by someone who views the German government as marionettes of the victorious powers of the second world war is poised to become the leading opposition party in Germany.
Interesting, although not unpredictable:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/09/20/meddling-germany-election-not-russia-but-u-s-right-wing/676142001/
Less than a week before Sunday’s vote that is likely to hand German Chancellor Angela Merkel a fourth term, evidence of anticipated Russian meddling has yet to materialize, but U.S. right-wing groups have interfered, according to German researchers.
Following the AfD’s capture of 13 percent of the vote in Germany’s federal elections on Sunday (enough to get 93 seats in the Bundestag), Alexander Gauland, the AfD leader who recently provoked outrage after suggesting that Germans should no longer be reproached with the Nazi past and instead should take pride in what German soldiers achieved during World War One and Two, apparently decided to troll Germany’s Jewish community: Germany’s Jewish community has nothing to fear, Gauland trollishly reassured the public the day after the AfD’s shock showing. It’s the kind of cruel trolling one should expect from the far-right, both in terms of content and messenger.
It was also the kind of trolling made more cruel by the fact that AfD leader Frauke Petry left the AfD just hours after the election over its extremism. Yep, the AfD is too extreme for one of its main public leaders, Frauke Petry (who is pretty damn extreme), after the party refused to heed her calls for the AfD to reject the extremist voices that created one “OMG, these guys are actual Nazis” controversy after another for the party in recent months. And right after the vote, when the AfD did far better than initially expected, Petry announced that she would not be joining parliament as an AfD member. This was a day before Alexander “let’s be proud of the Nazis’ accomplishments” Gauland told Germany’s Jews there was nothing to worry about:
“Petry, who for some has been acceptable face of xenophobia, has been critical of radical statements made by others in the party as she believed it made it less attractive to moderate voters as well as for potential coalition partners when it would enter the Bundestag for the first time.”
Too extreme for its former extremist leader. That’s the latest twist to the AfDs rise. It’s also worth noting that the seat in the Bundestag that Petry is giving up is in Saxony where the AfD won the vote with 27 percent.
But it’s also worth noting that Petry had been falling out with the rest of her party for much of this year so this resignation is to be expected to a large extent: She was hinting at resigning at the end March after the AfD dipped in the polls. Then she stepped aside as the AfD’s top candidate a few weeks later after expressing frustration with a lack of coherent strategy and the party’s further lurching to the right. Alex Gauland got that slot instead. Petry survived an coup attempt to kick her off the ballot in Saxony in July by AfD members accusing her of splitting party ranks (At the same conference, the AfD’s leader in the eastern German state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, called for an end to Germany’s national Holocaust memorial and the country’s devotion to teaching its citizens about Nazi genocide). And to add insult to injury, back in August the Saxony branch of the AfD didn’t even officially complain when Petry’s immunity was lifted over charges she lied under oath about the AfD’s campaign financing.
So as we can see, the AfD grew too extremist for Frauke Petry. The party she used to lead ignored her warnings about turning off moderate voters and getting too extremist, it sidelined her, and then the AfD exceeded expectations with 13 percent of the in the final vote and winning Saxony outright with 27 percent. It’s a rather worrisome outcome.
But don’t worry. Alexander “Be proud of the Nazis accomplishments” Gauland says there’s nothing to worry about.
Kotleba is head of a Slovakian Nazi Party that is campaigning by tapping into the public anger. Although, not stated in this story, the anger is fueled by right wing media outlets spurring the anger with fascist propaganda. The best quote from the article is:
“The parties like that are not looking for solutions, it’s all about protests,” Chmelar said. “You can see it globally. It’s the same with Donald Trump, it’s the same with (Marine) Le Pen in France. What’s important is to be against the system. They’re all riding on a wave of public dissatisfaction that has been growing.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/slovakia-far-right-peoples-party-embraces-nazi-past/
AP November 18, 2016, 9:52 AM
Rise of proudly-neo-Nazi party unnerves a European nation
The leader of the right wing LS-Nase Slovensko (Our Slovakia) party Marian Kotleba takes the oath of office on the Slovak Constitution on March 23, 2016 in Bratislava during the first session of the parliament since the March 5 elections.
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BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — The wave of far-right parties across Europe has been gathering steam from Greece to France, Austria and Germany. While most of the continent’s extreme forces have taken pains to steer clear of Nazi imagery, Slovakia’s answer to the trend celebrates it.
Kotleba — The People’s Party Our Slovakia — won almost 10 percent of the seats in Parliament in March. It openly admires the Nazi puppet state which the country was during the World War II.
Party members use Nazi salutes, blame Roma for crime in deprived areas, consider NATO a terror group and want the country out of the alliance and the European Union.
European nations that could follow U.S. swing to the right
The party takes its name from its leader, Marian Kotleba, previously chairman of the banned neo-Nazi Slovak Togetherness-National Party, which organized anti-Roma rallies and admired Nazi rule in Slovakia.
Thousands have signed a petition demanding that the party be banned. Analysts say the party’s popularity could grow even further.
Its simple slogan — “With courage against the system!” — attracts young people fed up with corruption and the inability of mainstream parties to deal effectively with the post-communist country’s problems.
In contrast to most of Europe’s far-right groups, “it’s truly neo-Nazi, it advocates the legacy of the Nazi war state,” says Eduard Chmelar, a Slovak political analyst.
Miroslav Mares, an expert on extremism from the Masaryk University in the Czech city of Brno, said the party belongs to the “hard core of right-wing extremism” in Europe. He said it has only some features similar to Greece’s Golden Dawn party and to Hungary’s Jobbik at its beginning.
What they have in common is targeting the mainstream politics.
“The parties like that are not looking for solutions, it’s all about protests,” Chmelar said. “You can see it globally. It’s the same with Donald Trump, it’s the same with (Marine) Le Pen in France. What’s important is to be against the system. They’re all riding on a wave of public dissatisfaction that has been growing.”
These parties “communicate and cooperate with each other, and that dramatically changes the situation in Europe, and that’s dangerous,” Chmelar said. “So far, there’s no recipe to stop them.”
Kotleba’s new party made news by launching patrols on trains in April in a reaction to a robbery blamed on a member of the Roma minority. Parliament banned such activities in October.
The party has proposed legislation to label non-governmental organizations that receive funding from abroad as foreign agents, and is trying to get the 350,000 signatures needed to force nationwide referendums on the country’s membership in NATO and the European Union.
“Among our major goals is above all a creation of an independent and self-sufficient Slovakia, that is Slovakia which has an autonomous foreign policy that is not dictated by any foreign structure, such as the European Union,” Milan Uhrik, a deputy chairman of the party, told The Associated Press in a rare interview. Kotleba refuses to talk to foreign media, The AP was told.
Speaking in the Parliament building, Uhrik said the EU has been turning into a super state with Brussels in power. “What’s the worst is that EU legislation is above Slovak law,” he said.
NATO is another target.
“It’s important for Slovakia to leave NATO because we consider NATO a terrorist organization. It doesn’t bring peace to the world, quite the contrary,” Uhrik said.
“NATO is in fact a military organization of the United States and we are militarily subordinated to the United States.”
A celebration of wartime Slovakia remains particularly controversial, but Uhrik says it is not about fascism.
“As nationalists, we cannot reject the first independent Slovak state,” he argued. “We recognize the Slovak (war) state because it was the first Slovak state, not because it was a fascist state.”
On Oct. 13, party members celebrated the 129th anniversary of the birth of Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and politician who was Slovakia’s war president. During his rule, some 60,000 Slovak Jews were transported to Nazi death camps. He was sentenced to death and hanged in 1947.
Rights activists have submitted a petition with 20,000 signatures calling for the party to be banned. Prosecutors are reviewing that request.
“Racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denials and other such things have no place in democracy,” said Peter Weisenbacher from Bratislava’s Human Rights Institute.
Kotleba is not a newcomer on Slovakia’s political scene.
In 2013, he was elected the head of a regional government, campaigning on a strong anti-Roma ticket. He promised to have a recipe to solve problems with the embattled minority, calling its members “Gypsy parasites.”
He defeated a candidate of the ruling leftist Smer-Social Democracy party in a runoff vote despite that party’s chairman, Prime Minister Robert Fico, claiming that “a bag of potatoes” would beat Kotleba.
“It was a shock for me when (Kotleba) won the regional election,” said Ingrid Kosova, a Roma activist. “I remember people were calling me every day saying that they were ridiculed on the streets, they were not allowed to board buses, they were really afraid. Later on the situation calmed down but until now they live with worries and fears.”
In a region hit by unemployment around 15 percent, and over 25 percent in one county, Kosova said Kotleba succeeded in poor areas where the problems with the Roma minority are felt, and “which he misused to get to power.”
When the party won seats in Parliament, “I was abroad in the Czech Republic and I was considering staying there for good,” Kosova said.
During the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising against the Nazi rule in 2014, with foreign presidents and other dignitaries in the central city of Banska Bystrica, the seat of Kotleba’s region, Kotleba was flying a black flag from his office and unveiled banners saying “Yankees go home!” and “Stop NATO!”
The Uprising is considered a defining moment of the Slovak history, and for most Slovaks a source of national pride because they stood against the Nazi rule.
Peter Gogola was mayor there at the time.
“I can’t forgive him that,” Gogola said. “My grandpa was forced to fight in the Hungarian fascist army and died at Stalingrad. I can’t stand fascism.”
Martin Slosiarik, the head of Bratislava-based pollster Focus, said 70 percent of those who voted for Kotleba are under 40. He said most of them voted for him not because they would share his extremist views but because he promised “to deal with the Roma and get rid of corruption.”
“They’ve learned how to work with the public opinion to create a picture that they’re the only force ready to challenge the current corrupt system,” Chmelar said. He predicted the party could reach more than 10 percent of the popular vote at the next election.
Well this should be interesting: the winners of Italy’s parliamentary elections in March have had a hard time forming a coalition government. So hard that Italy’s president was planning on appointing a temporary neutral government and reholding elections later this year. But it sounds like the top two parties in parliament might be on the verge of forming a government.
And while the potential end to this kind of deadlock might normally sound like relatively good news for Italy, it becomes far less positive when you learn which two parties are about to form Italy’s next government: the ‘populist’-leaning, but still proto-fascist, 5‑Star Movement and the intensely xenophobic proto-fascist Northern League (which now simply goes by the “League”):
“A March 4 vote ended in a hung parliament and repeated efforts to end the impasse have failed. Frustrated by the stalemate, Mattarella was set to nominate someone from outside the world of politics to head a “neutral government” and prepare the country for early elections, perhaps as soon as July.”
A temporary “neutral government” appeared to be what was in store for Italy due to the fact that the two largest groups in parliament — 5‑Star and the Northern League — couldn’t come to an agreement on the terms of forming a new government. It sounds like the inclusion of Silvio Belusconi’s party was the main sticking point. But then progress was unexpectedly made, at least according to recent announcements:
So what should we expect if they do succeed in forming a government? Well, both parties want to renegotiate the EU’s fiscal rules, which would actually be a great thing for the EU in general if they succeeded. And both parties have expressed interest in pulling Italy out of the eurozone, which is unlikely to happen but certainly an understandable sentiment given the deep flaws in how the eurozone is designed (a shared currency without a sharing of the burdens that come with sharing a currency and seemingly design to benefit the export-oriented economies). And both parties have embrace the anti-immigrant sentiments that have gripped Italy’s electorate, so we should probably expect a number of laws targeting immigrants.
But beyond that, it sounds like 5‑Star and the Norther League have deeply conflicted policy agendas. Where 5‑Star wants universal income support for the poor, the Norther League wants a flat tax:
We’ll see if they do indeed succeed in forming a government over the next few days. But if they do, keep in mind that, of all the areas where 5 Star and the Northern League agree (on the EU policies, the eurozone, and anti-immigration), the anti-immigrant policies will probably be the easiest for them to implement since that’s something Italy can potentially do on its own. In other words, if they do form this government, it’s going to be a dark time for Italy’s immigrants. Or, rather, a darker time for Italy’s immigrants.