A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 24, 2015 12:16 pm

Three Monsters

By KATHRYN HAMILTON

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Yassin al-Haj Saleh

An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh on the role of culture in Syria’s struggle


I want to go back to this idea of culture as a strategic field for struggle for freedom against fascism, both the Assad-ist and Islamic version. What is its role in the struggle against each of them?

One reason why culture is such an important strategy for our struggle is that we have a religious problem. We have a big problem related to Islam. Some people, and I am one of them, talk about religious reformation in Islam. The problem is very complicated. Now Islam, in our modern experiences, has been in many instances a tool of resistance against colonialism, against Western hegemony, and this prevented many of us from fighting against the problems within Islam, things related to the inequalities between men and women, for instances, between Muslims and non-Muslims, and things related to legitimizing absolute power and tyranny. My work, for instance in my book about Islam (The Myths of the Latters: A Critique of Contemporary Islam and a Critique of its Critique) is about how to develop a radical criticism of Islam, while doing radical criticism of the injustices in the modern world. To racism in the world. While I am criticizing Islam I have to criticize some other criticisms of Islam. Many Muslims, many Islamists, are essentialist. But many critics of Islam are essentialist in their own way. Even though some of them are thinking about Islam on the basis of modernity or secularism, there is nothing radical about their critiques — they are not interested in human dignity, equality, freedom, or justice. Islam is not only interesting because of questions of values, it is important also because of its relation to identity in our society. So you have to deconstruct this, and to rethink it, to open this identity to criticism and ethical thought. This is what I am trying to do.

Culture is also an important strategy against the Assad regime, because this is a regime that has suppressed intellectuals, suppressed critical thinking, has not allowed people in the universities or the media to discuss issues of religion, sectarianism, of tyranny. Though the regime is modernist in a way, and Assad is the fascist with a neck-tie, it is against culture, no less than the Islamists of Da’esh. Actually we have three monsters in Syria, three inhuman creatures. One, the Islamic monster, second, the monster of Tyranny. And third, the Western Imperialist monster. And culture can be our weapon to remake these monsters into human energies, human politics, human actors. Culture is a humanizing field to transform these monsters to human-scale powers.


http://thenewinquiry.com/features/three-monsters/
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Sat Nov 28, 2015 3:20 pm

http://roarmag.org/2015/11/sweden-democ ... e-attacks/

Swedish fascists burn homes, blame crisis on refugees

By Rory Smith On November 28, 2015

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Refugees flee their homes destroyed by a neoliberal thirst for cheap oil, while in the recipient countries the same forces have ruined many lives.


“Burn all of them down, but first nail the doors and windows shut.”

”If you want to achieve the full effect, wait until the house is full of people.”


These are just two examples of the several thousand remarks left by Sweden Democrats’ online following the most recent case of arson; an incident that left a home sheltering 14 refugees destroyed. One Internet thread detailed the various recipes and necessary ingredients to make napalm.

The formerly obscure and enfeebled Sweden Democrats (SD) – a far right, anti-immigrant, nationalist party whose roots are in neo-Nazism – has been transformed into one of the most potent political forces in Sweden. By transmogrifying immigrants into villains – enemies of both the welfare state and Swedish values – the party has gleaned over 25 percent of the popular vote.

The most recent refugee-home torching came after SD political leaders announced that the immigrant issue should be taken to the streets, outside the ambit of parliament. The intentional ambiguity of the statement galvanized more than a few zealous of their supporters to action, resulting in a spike of refugee-home burnings, a trend that was only recently – after the 17th fire – condemned by SD officials.

While the world might have united for a few ephemeral seconds around the image of Aylan – the Syrian boy who drowned alongside his brother in the Mediterranean – in the end the refugee crisis only seems to have bolstered the xenophobia, nationalism, and violence sweeping across Europe. In Germany alone, there have been over 505 attacks against refugees and refugee-homes this year. It is a trend that seems, at first glance, to challenge our approximation to what Jeremy Rifkin coined The Empathetic Civilization.

And though all this might come as a surprise, there is nothing surprising about prejudice and intolerance in Europe. What is surprising, is how the current right-wing political trend as well as the refugee crisis find their origins in the same systemic illness.

European intolerance and Swedish neo-Nazism

While you might think that the experiences of World War II and the Bosnian War would be sufficient deterrents against pursuing anything remotely nationalistic or ethnically intolerant, history invariably reveals our collective short-term memory. The current anti-immigrant demagoguery and the consequent resurgence of nationalist parties across Europe, many of whom have their origins in neo-Nazism, seems to testify to this.

Kenan Malik reminds us in a recent article that Europe has never been a homogenous place – even when its citizens shared the same skin color and religion – and that intolerance has always had its place in European society. The former urban and rural poor were often treated and referred to as “inferior savage races”.

Sweden’s history is no different. Its romance with Nazism precedes World War II, and while it might have dematerialized for a little bit, this uncompromising current never altogether vanished.

The country’s economic crisis in the 1990s, coupled with an immigration policy that provided asylum for around 85,000 war refugees from the former Yugoslavia, led to emergence of various neo-Nazi movements. As immigration slowed so did these sentiments. However once again, the kind of cultural prejudice and intolerance that wouldn’t have been out of place in 18th century France, Victorian England, Nazi Germany, or 1990s Sweden is on the rise.

Bushisms and republican machinations in Europe

The spate of burnings represents a recent and more outwardly aggressive trend against immigrants. It has been fueled in part by Europe’s latest generation of nationalist demagogues, whose irresponsible rhetoric – and subtle complicity, at least in Sweden, by not denouncing these burnings until recently – is partially responsible for the proliferation of this violence.

While it is hard to imagine Europe becoming as politically intransigent as the US, its ultra-right parties are well on their way to sounding as fear-mongering as American Republicans. Jimmie Åkesson, the current leader of SD, ran his last, and very successful, campaign on a platform of fear-inducing casuistry, proclaiming: “The election is a choice between mass immigration and welfare. You choose.”

Nothing is that cut and dry in Sweden or Europe. These are parliaments with an array of eclectic political parties; negotiations, pacts, and compromise are an immutable part of the political machine. Furthermore there isn’t any reliable evidence demonstrating the incompatibility of immigration and a healthy welfare state; as we will see, studies show just the opposite.

But by drawing such a stark line – rendering immigration and the welfare state seemingly irreconcilable – Mr. Åkesson, just like other right-wing politicians in Europe, has polarized the argument. He has pitted immigration directly against the welfare state – a sacrosanct entity in Sweden and Europe.

You almost begin to wonder if Europe’s ultra-right are emulating the rhetorical stratagems of Bush and Rumsfeldt. Mr. Åkesson’s ultimatum had a similar ring to the infamous, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Fear corrodes rationality and reason, and such polarizing and fear-mongering rhetoric in the post-9/11 era allowed Bush and Co. to manipulate the American public with the precision of Butcher Ding. In this post-Paris epoch such tactics will be especially potent.

Indulging the particular fears of Swedes, whose long history with the welfare state is an indelible part of the national ethos, is a particularly effective way of gaining support, especially from a demographic whose tenuous position in society renders them especially susceptible to such sophistry.

There are few general demographic features that are characteristic of not only SD supporters, but also ultra-right adherents across Europe. On the whole they are young, male, under-educated, and under-employed. In Sweden their main interests are cars, motorcycles, TV, video games, and sport fishing.

Though it would undoubtedly be much easier to just shake our fists and rebuke the throngs of right-wing voters as racists, Euro-trash, or bigoted nationalists, in the end we would only be playing the same superficial and spurious blame game as their demagogue leaders. Furthermore, this would only give us a very superficial understanding of a population that has been shaped by a much more complicated process.

Neoliberalism – the real enemy

Historically Sweden was one of the strongest and most equitable welfare states in the world. However, in the early ’90s Sweden endured a financial crisis and things began to change. As a stopgap measure to parry the crisis, and the resultant hyperinflation, Sweden instituted a series of austerity measures and reforms that cut social benefits, curtailed union power, reduced the size of the public sector, and initiated a process of privatization that continues today.

If this sounds familiar, it is because it is the same process that has been replicated almost universally since the 1980s around the world. From the US to Latin America, to Africa, to Asia, to Russia, and most recently Greece, IMF and World Bank economists as well as technocrats from these same regions, have been imposing this same package – often coercively or with the support of autocrats propped up by the West.

These reforms reflect a mode of economic thinking known as neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism the individual and the market are supreme entities to which modern nation-states genuflect, serve, and remain subservient. As Margaret Thatcher, one of neoliberalism’s greatest champions said: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women…People look to themselves first.”

Whereas it was previously the state’s responsibility to provide employment to its citizens, according to neoliberalism it is the individual’s responsibility. If you are unsuccessful, it isn’t the state, economy, or any of the distortions and inequalities therein entrenched that are accountable; it is your own failure as a human.

SD’s unfortunate relationship with Neoliberalism

So how does this relate to ultra-right in Sweden and Europe, you might be asking. The shrinking of the public sector, and the curtailment of unions meant the weakening of union and labor power, and as a consequence, also a loss of solidarity and identity. The Swedish welfare state, which had previously unified different sectors of Swedish society through its collectivism, was slowly dismembered.

Moreover, by dissolving the public sector as well as union power, many Swedes were left without jobs or the social benefits that would’ve previously buffered the unemployed. With fewer jobs, a greater burden and pressure on the individual to find work – meaningful or not – and no social safeguards to mitigate the precariousness of being unemployment, many Swedes were left behind. One universal legacy of neoliberalism is inequality. Today, among all 34 OECD countries today, inequality is growing fastest in Sweden.

Rising levels of inequality, economic marginalization, and social isolation have limited participation in mainstream Swedish society and the economy. The result has been the disenfranchisement of many Swedes. Today, out of a population of 9 million, 618,000 Swedes are working temporary jobs with little security.

The economic vulnerability and peripheral social status of this vast population renders them susceptible to the populist rhetoric of right-wing politicians, who pander directly to their deepest fears and insecurities. Not only have these leaders created a tangible, albeit specious, enemy and source to their woes, immigrants, but they have also forged a collective sense of identity – through their struggle against both immigration and the neoliberal technocrats in the EU – under which they can unite.

The discourse around immigration has invariably been fueled by misperceptions and xenophobia. You don’t have to dig all that deeply to see the benefits of migration, something that has been for too long severely and irresponsibly misrepresented.

Immigrants are generally entrepreneurial, they fill various labor niches of the economy – especially in Europe where the aging population necessitates more working-age laborers – generally contribute more to the welfare state than they take in benefits, and are highly motivated to contribute and create a better society. Furthermore, over 50 percent of immigration to Europe in 2015 will come from Syria, a population whose highly-skilled workforce sets them apart from immigrants emanating from other countries.

Refugees, Neoliberalism’s collateral damage

Ironically and sadly, neoliberalism – and the associated economic and geopolitical machinations that have swept through the Middle East and Africa over the last 30 years – is also largely responsible for the current refugee crisis.

The imperative of neoliberalism is to open new markets through liberalization and increase global demand by creating new consumer bases. Where certain powers like the US, China, or the EU, see themselves as guardians of the market, and where they have certain market interests, such as mineral extraction in Africa and oil, there are inevitably transgressions, especially where regulations and law are ineffective and corruption is commonplace. Unfortunately this is ubiquitous in most of the developing world.

Neoliberalism might have opened the economies of Africa up for direct foreign investment, but the price has been the disruption and reshuffling of economies, labor markets, and public sectors, such as education, health care, and sanitation, according to Western paradigms and interests. There have been a few winners, but mostly there have been losers. Many immigrants are economic refugees whose livelihoods have been crushed by global capital, corporate interests, the commodification of local agriculture, and the downsizing of the state.

Those refugees fleeing failed-states, where violence, human rights’ abuses, and insecurity prevail, such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya, are the collateral damage of neoliberal geopolitics.

In these areas oil, finance, business, autocracy, democracy, and national economic interests all mix, mingle, and blur into something that may appear opaque but is pretty straightforward. Like an addict, neoliberalism depends on a constant and dependable source of cheap oil. Cheap oil means more pocket money for consumers, and generally, global economic growth. The neoliberal paradigm requires constant growth to continue functioning. Cheap oil is an expedient but very short-term and costly way of achieving this.

While we would all like to believe that the refugee crisis inspired the latest international interventions in Syria, it seems more likely that it is just one more geopolitical power play as Europe tries to wean itself from Russian gas, and Russia tries to protect the several billions it has already invested in oil investments in Syria. And let’s not forget that war has become an economy and market unto itself, with US defense firms making a killing on weapons sales to Iraq and Syria.

We are all burning

There are boons to crises. They bring us face to face with certain paradigmatic insufficiencies and by doing so they encourage us to engage in a kind of collective introspection. While “Generation Me” signals the fruition of Thatcher’s dream, we are beginning to see that a life of me is not only narcissistic and vacuous, but also noxious to the common good.

Neoliberalism, according to former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica, has created, “…a civilization against simplicity, against sobriety, against all natural cycles, and against the most important things: Adventure. Solidarity. Family. Friendship. Love.”

Ironically it isn’t “rational” self-interest, but giving, kindness, and cooperation that guarantee our own longevity and that of our species. If anything is going to change, it will require a collective effort of disengaging ourselves from the current mythology of individualism; of sublimating the self to the whole, taking to giving, and engaging not in the myopic trappings of the hedonic treadmill but in a politics of compassion and empathy.

In the end aren’t we all refugees – a great diaspora of randomness sheltered under the thin blue atmospheric line of the planet? By leaving the roots of neoliberalism in tact and unattended we are only stoking the existential and economic flames that will, at some point, engulf all of us.


Rory Smith is a freelance writer with a masters in International Development and Management and founder of Escalando Fronteras, a non-profit in Mexico that uses climbing as a way of getting at-risk youth away from gangs and organized crime in Monterrey.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 30, 2015 9:38 am

Žižek: Fortress Europe’s staunch defender on the left

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Žižek’s thoughts on the refugee crisis are useless, even harmful, for creating a pan-European leftist movement capable of challenging the far-right.

Žižek’s sentiments are remarkably similar to the rhetoric of the European far-right. Representatives of Front National, the Danish Peoples Party or UKIP couldn’t have been more precise on the fundamental views of nationalism within Europe today. Žižek completely capitulates to this nationalism, showing the dangers of utilizing the language of your enemy.

Essentially, Žižek accepts the dominant idea — shared by institutional Europe and the extreme right — that refugees and migrants pose a problem, threat, or some kind of crisis for “us” and “our egalitarianism and personal freedoms.” In doing so he reiterates a common nationalist argument, which can be found both in an institutional form promoted by national governments and in a radical right form: they and their way of life are incompatible with “us” and “our way of life.”

The problem here is not the degree of tolerance or exclusion as Žižek suggests, but rather the opposition itself, which is intrinsically false. In his critique of the (mis)figure of the humanist “left-liberal,” Žižek falls back on the illusion of a totalizing European or Western “we.” A “we” that is superior to the “way of life” of refugees and migrants, because “our” values are universal.

Naturally, this poses a problem, or rather a “refugee crisis” that “we” need to solve. Instead of criticizing this “we,” Žižek reproduces the mainstream media’s image of refugees as a kind of impersonal stream of humans posing nothing but a problem or even a crisis. This, Žižek says, calls for “militarization,” a topic he (fortunately?) doesn’t elaborate on any further.

In the text, all refugees and migrants are defined by the same way of life. However — in risk of stating the obvious — the refugees and migrants come from very different geographical areas and very different cultures. The homogeneity suggested by Žižek clearly draws on an old orientalist trope, where different non-homogenous cultures are categorized within the one culture with opposite and conflicting values to Europe and the West. Gone are not only different cultures, traditions etc., but also variations within these, as well as the myriad forms of secular, liberal, and socialist traditions that have also existed in parts of the vast geographical area that Žižek simply subsumes under a single way of life, sure to create a “crisis” when coming to Europe.

The European figure of the “we” that must solve the “crisis” created by the refugees is of course problematic, but even more problematic is Žižek’s proposed solution to this supposed crisis.

His proposed starting point of action is not, for example, a movement that brings together both migrants and different sectors of European proletarians like precarious workers, the unemployed, students etc., but rather the European nation-states and their political elites.

Rather than fighting together for freedom of movement for all, Žižek thinks the national and supranational elites should curb this right. Rather than fighting for open borders and against the nation-states and their political elites, he supports a centralized distribution of refugees by the nation-states. Rather than analyzing the current conjuncture and the possibilities for contesting the institutions of European political and economic elites — Fortress Europe — Žižek falls back on the same institutional solutions and becomes the “left defender” of Fortress Europe.

Moreover, instead of situating the struggles of refugees and migrants within an analysis of capitalism, Žižek refers abstractly to the problems caused by “the integration of local agriculture into global economy.” Žižek’s avoidance of political economy is not new, but it becomes particularly problematic in this case because it’s not coupled with an analysis of the current social struggles throughout Europe and beyond, resulting in a strange opposition between abstract “class struggle” and the struggles of refugees and migrants.

There is no serious attempt to analyze the potentialities of these struggles and how their articulation to other social struggles could potentially challenge the extreme right.

Rather than try to answer such questions, Žižek suggests that the “left must embrace its radical Western roots.” Unfortunately, Žižek uncritically adopts the concept of “Western values” which seem to imply “universal values.”

But what are “western values” and the European cultural heritage if not a deeply bourgeois heritage? A heritage with a history full of mass killings, mass extermination, war, colonialism, and imperialism etc.? This history of western values is not just the past but also the present. The so-called war on terror has cost 1.3 million civilian lives...


http://roarmag.org/2015/11/zizek-refuge ... -critique/
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby solace » Tue Dec 01, 2015 6:38 pm

Neo-Nazis threaten antifascists with fake obituaries

Anti-Nazi activists based around Nuremberg in Germany receive death threats in the form of their own obituaries from neo-Nazi email

Anna Kohn
Published: 12.01.15, 20:07 / Israel News


“He will only be missed by the antifascists and the Jewish Union,” a fake obituary reads in stark black letters. It was sent by neo-Nazis to Ulrich Schneeweiss, a secretary for the German trade union Verdi, by mail. The sender: nationalsozialisten-franken@mivu.in.

Apart from Schneeweiss, three other anti-Nazi activists have received similar emails with their personal obituary – the social scientist Birgit Mair; freelancer journalist Jonas Miller, who works for weekly newspaper Die ZEIT and public broadcast Bayerischer Rundfunk; and the director of the Social Democrats in Nuremberg, Rüdiger Löster. Löster used to be the director of EndstationRechts.Bayern, an online portal that provides information on right-wing extremists in Bavaria and which is run by the Social Democrats.


'An assault on everybody who fights Nazis'

All of the above are based in the area of Nuremberg in Bavaria, in the south of Germany. Over the weekend, they have gone public with the death threats, publishing them online and releasing a collective statement. The four have also reported it to the police.

“The current attack will be seen as what it is,” the statement reads. “An assault on scientists, unionists and journalists that fight for a free, tolerant and just society, and at the same time an assault on everybody who is involved in fighting Nazis.” All of the four antifascists have announced that they will continue their fight against neo-Nazis despite the threats.

Schneeweiss, Miller and co. think of the fake obituaries as a typical example of neo-Nazi tactics. Social scientist Miller says in the statement that mass threats towards opponents is a classic move of neo-Nazis, who rely on intimidation and violence. She says it is a specific expression of their inhuman ideology – and it’s not new.

The Third Way and The Right

Endstation Rechts writes that the four activists attribute the threats to people affiliated with German neo-Nazi parties “Der Dritte Weg” (The Third Way) or “Die Rechte” (The Right). Members of “Die Rechte” in Bavaria were taken into custody in October after police raided their homes. They were accused of having planned attacks on two refugee homes in Bavaria.

In Nuremberg and elsewhere, Die Rechte and Der Dritte Weg are also interwoven with Pegida, the right wing movement that has since last year been staging weekly marches in several German cities.

Unionist Schneeweiss is quoted as saying that the neo-Nazis in Nuremberg had become frustrated because their parades and marches didn’t gain them any new members and the public was still protesting against them

The Nuremberg obituary incident might be the first for Bavaria, but it is not the first one in Germany. In February, similar death threats with fake obituaries were sent out to journalists in the city of Dortmund in Nordrhine-Westfalia, in the west of Germany. All of the journalists threatened were experienced reporters who had been covering the neo-Nazi scene in Nordrhine-Westfalia for a long time. At the time, they reported an offense to the police because of the incident.

Dortmund in particular is a center for Neo-Nazis with a very active scene. In 2012, the group “Nationaler Widerstand” (National Resistance) was forbidden. In the same year neo-Nazi party “Die Rechte” was founded and several former members of Nationaler Widerstand joined the party.

Die Rechte even holds one seat in the Dortmund city council, which used to be held by Siegfried Borchardt, known as “SS-Siggi.” His successor, Dennis Giemsch, became (in)famous when he asked the local authorities how many Jewish people lived in Dortmund and in which neighbourhoods they were registered.


http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340 ... 98,00.html
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 02, 2015 1:51 pm

Austria’s New Right

Austria’s far-right Freedom Party has deployed populist rhetoric to swell its base. Now the party is eyeing state power.
by Benjamin Opratko

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Heinz-Christian Strache, chairman of the far-right Freedom Party, speaks at a rally in October 2015


The dominant narrative attributes the far right’s rise to one factor: the so-called refugee crisis. Since the beginning of summer, the issue has dominated public discourse like no other, and the far right has been quick to exploit it.

While the government sent conflicting signals, oscillating between toughness and compassion, the FPÖ’s position was as clear as it was uncompromising: the purported wave of immigration needed to be stopped and Austrian borders protected.

The FPÖ deployed a massive propaganda campaign against migrants and asylum seekers, spreading false rumors that refugees were really Islamist infiltrators, cowards, criminals, sex offenders, or just economic migrants (rather than political refugees) stealing Austrian jobs.

This clearly helped the FPÖ in the most recent elections. But to blame the FPÖ’s success on migrants and refugees — as representatives of both SPÖ and ÖVP did after the far right’s triumph in Upper Austria — is not just short sighted. It is also an exercise in avoiding blame.

A year ago — well before most of the current refugees arrived in Austria — polls in Upper Austria estimated the FPÖ’s support at around 30 percent. Earlier this year, before the refugee situation dominated headlines, elections in the southern province of Styria saw the FPÖ skyrocket from 10.7 to 28.8 percent, finishing just 2.5 percent behind the Social Democrats.

And perhaps most importantly, at the federal level the FPÖ has led comfortably in every poll since April; the most recent surveys put them at 33 percent — a “comfortable ten point lead” over both the SPÖ and the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP).

The idea that the FPÖ is merely profiting from anxiety about migration therefore conveniently overlooks the far right’s strength before the refugee crisis.

Little wonder then that Strache already publicly pictures himself as the next Austrian head of government, or Bundeskanzler. His party is the driving force in Austrian politics, setting the political agenda, dominating media coverage, and spinning its stories through the tabloid press and social media.

In fact, the FPÖ is Western Europe’s most successful far-right party today and could become the first to lead a government on this side of the former Iron Curtain — which would cause reverberations well beyond the country’s borders.

A number of other far-right parties — such as France’s National Front, the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom (PVV), Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, and Italy’s Lega Nord — are looking at Austria as a potential beachhead for a European right-wing reconquista, building alliances for a new authoritarian bloc in the European Union that would also include Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and the new right-wing government in Poland.

In the international media, the growth of the FPÖ is frequently portrayed as the return of Austria’s dark past. The New York Times, for instance, has written that the FPÖ’s ascent “lengthens the shadow of the Nazi era.” This may seem appropriate considering the country that gave the world Adolf Hitler was part of the Third Reich from 1938 to 1945 (yet claimed, after its liberation by the Allied Forces, that it had been the first victim of the Nazis’ aggression).

But while such framing might make sense for journalists leveraging Godwin’s law for clicks and shares — and for many others who continue to analyze fascism and right-wing populism according to the rubrics of the first half of the twentieth century — thinking about the FPÖ in these terms tends to obscure rather than illuminate the dynamics at work.

Although the FPÖ has always been a focal point for post-1945 neofascist milieus and has political and organizational roots in the Nazi project, it isn’t a remake of 1930s fascism. Its success today is based on the adoption of new strategies suited for the peculiarities of contemporary European capitalism.

Portraying the far right, as some liberals in Austria like to do, as hopelessly hidebound underestimates its ability to (post)modernize, and tends to culturalize the Austrian far right as exceptional instead of recognizing its paradigmatic role in today’s Europe.

For many Austrians, the present does have a déjà vu quality to it, but one that recalls a moment much more recent than the 1930s: the late 1990s, when the FPÖ enjoyed victory after victory under its current leader’s predecessor, Jörg Haider. In 2000, this winning streak led the Freedom Party into government, where they formed a right-wing coalition with the People’s Party that would last for seven years.

So while we are quite clearly not back in the 1930s, are we perhaps witnessing a gruesome nineties revival, with the far right on the cusp of returning to government office? Yes and no.

The mushrooming influence of the FPÖ should indeed be understood as the comeback of a political project that Haider pioneered and perfected in the 1990s. But this is not just tragedy returning as farce. The rise of the far right today is taking place under vastly different circumstances, domestically and globally, which makes the situation potentially more dangerous than at the turn of the millennium.
The FPÖ’s Rise

In 1986, Jörg Haider took over the FPÖ in a party coup. Within a decade, he had installed a new generation of loyal party cadre, introduced a new style of right-wing politics in Austria, transformed its social base and political profile, and led it to unforeseeable success.

Before Haider, the FPÖ was a minor if not insignificant parliamentary player, representing aging, pan-Germanist, nationalist, and often Nazi-nostalgic segments of the Austrian bourgeoisie.

But by the 1980s, with demography and the zeitgeist taking their toll on the party of old-school pan-Germanism, the party was quickly losing voters and was riven by factional disputes between the old guard of pan-Germanist Herrenmenschen and a more youthful, nationalist, pro-business faction called the “national-liberals” looking to break with the party’s Nazi past.

Haider, a young hopeful in the party’s parliamentary group, made use of these turbulences and managed to win a crucial vote for the party chairmanship against his “national-liberal” adversary. Possessing charisma and dynamism, he represented a new start for many party members — without having to openly break with their ideological principles.

Haider came from an old Nazi family (both his parents were early members of the National Socialist Party), had been involved with right-wing Burschenschaften (student fraternities), and was known for his staunch far-right positions as the FPÖ youth organization’s leader. But he knew that for the party’s positions to become relevant in the Austrian political system, it would need to shake off its image as old-fashioned and nostalgic for the Nazi era.

This reorientation coincided with a crisis of Austria’s postwar economic model. Similar to developments elsewhere, masses of Austrian workers and members of the middle classes were confronted with the grim fact that the promises of the so-called postwar economic miracle — growing affluence and lasting economic prosperity for future generations — were no longer credible.

And the traditional representatives of their political and economic interests — the Social Democrats and the Trade Union Federation (ÖGB) — were not only incapable of bringing such conditions back, but were actively involved in their destruction. After all, the SPÖ had been leading the federal government since 1970.

Under Haider, the new FPÖ responded to the economic malaise by repositioning itself as the party of the man on the street, promising to restore both prosperity and traditional values — family, work, and national pride. Increasingly focused on a genuinely Austrian, as opposed to German, identity, the party that had denied the existence of such a thing a couple of years prior was now proclaiming itself the true representative of “real Austrians.”

The FPÖ’s 1990s rise is often framed as the emergence of a new worker’s party, eating away the SPÖ’s social base and articulating the interests of those sections of society most hurt by globalizing neoliberal capitalism.

However, this is only one side of the story. Between 1983 and 1999, the FPÖ did acquire 507,000 votes from the Social Democrats. But it also wrested 527,000 from the Conservatives, the traditional representatives of the Austrian bourgeoisie and rural populations in the Alpine regions.

In other words, Haider’s FPÖ constructed a genuine cross-class alliance, articulating the interests of various social groups that often shared just one thing: a deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo.

Naturally, the party’s program was deeply contradictory. The FPÖ cast itself as the party of the common people, yet was fiercely hostile to trade unions, public spending, and the welfare state. It increasingly enjoyed the support of significant sections of Austrian capital, including corporations dependent on the world market, but opposed on national sovereignty grounds the European economic integration that would benefit these capitalists.

What held the competing interests together was a textbook populist strategy. Haider’s party constructed a vertical antagonism: we, the people, versus the old elites, represented by the eternal coalition of “red” (SPÖ) and “black” (ÖVP); second, it set “the people” against “welfare scroungers,” foreigners, asylum seekers, and other figures.

Racism, often directed against the so-called Gastarbeiter and their families — guest workers recruited mainly from Turkey and Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s — played a key role in the FPÖ’s mobilizations. Mostly concentrated in poor urban areas, competing for jobs in low or unskilled industries and services, and often deprived of basic political rights because of restrictive citizenship laws, guest workers became the perfect scapegoat.

In defining populist antagonism in a cultural, or moral, register, the FPÖ was able to restructure the political terrain in ways favoring strong-arm, authoritarian solutions over democratic deliberation. FPÖ campaigns did not focus on concrete policies, programs, or demands, but on portraying an Austria in decay — a country endangered by culturally incompatible migrants, decadent political elites, and out-of-touch EU bureaucrats governing from far-away Brussels.

The country needed salvation; the party offered a savior.


More at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/aust ... ight-wing/
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 02, 2015 2:21 pm

I'll see your right and raise you

Everyday, four hundred tons of highly radioactive water pours into the Pacific and heads towards the U.S.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 11, 2015 2:17 pm

https://medium.com/@VulgarEconomics/hat ... 2d22ab86d/

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Hate Unchecked

A little background on political Islamophobia. Many folks have a mistaken perception that the growth of Islamophobia is the happenstance result of 9/11 & the London train bombings, the rise of IS, the refugee crisis, and electoral sensationalism. While these are certainly contributing factors, they do not come remotely close to the full picture.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 there was only one public protest of a mosque which became that accidentally. In Chicago, there was a “patriotism” protest on 9/13 that ended up going past a mosque, and the crowd stopped there and rallied outside the mosque. Since then, there were incidents of vandalism of mosques and hate crimes against Muslims (and other brown people), but no organized protests explicitly against Islam until 2010. In the intervening years, two major things happened.

One was Pamela Geller founding her right wing blog “Atlas Shrugs” in 2006 which attracted libertarians to nationalist Islamophobia. Geller would later team up with Robert Spencer (who runs the Islamophobic blog “Jihad Watch” — not accidentally a play on the SPLC’s “Hate Watch” and the ADL’s “Right Wing Watch”) to found SION (Stop Islamization of Nations — not accidentally an alternative transliteration of “Zion,” a biblical name for Jerusalem) and AFDI (the American Freedom Defense Initiative). These organizations built coalitions with European nationalist movements such as the EDL (English Defence League) and other white nationalist organizations that were not outwardly antisemitic.

The other thing that happened was an incident at the US-based white nationalist American Renaissance conference in 2006 (warning: hate video). Guillaume Faye, a prominent figure of the French New Right and Identitarian movements (both explicitly white nationalist movements). Faye gave a lecture outlining the “danger” of Muslim “invasion” of Europe and North America. He explained how immigration, by changing religious and ethnic demographics, served to undermine the sovereignty of European and North American countries and that this was enabled by what he called “xenophilia” — the love of foreign culture.

During the Q&A session Faye was asked a long-winded question by former Klansman and Louisiana state representative David Duke that boiled down to “What about the Jews?” Michael Hart — a Jewish white nationalist who apparently didn’t know who his friends actually are — stormed out calling Duke a fucking Nazi and as he left was chided with statements from the crowd expressing the sentiment “good riddance.”

Faye explained what would soon become the most effective praxis of the white hate movement since then. He said that, although he thought that Jews themselves could be redeemed as white people, European peoples suffered from being “Jews in the mind” — a mentality of openness, acceptance, and generally being a decent fucking human being. He further launched into a racial slur laden tirade explaining that he would talk about Black and Arab folks, but that European hate speech laws prevent him from doing so. “Criticizing” religion, however, is fair game under these laws.

Since that time, the white nationalist movement has used Islamophobia as a means of galvanizing the radical right and organizing internationally. Further, they have used it to reach out to more mainstream conservatives who, while not explicitly white nationalist themselves, believe the fear mongering about Islam being a violent religion or at least that “Islamo-fascism” posed a threat to the West.

In 2010, Geller and Spencer, having taken advantage of colorblind advertising policies of municipal public transportation administrations (enforced by the courts) to plaster city buses and subway walls with their anti-Muslim hate speech, organized a protest against the opening of an Islamic Community Center on Park Place, labeling it the “ground zero mosque” despite it not being a mosque and the plot of land being a good two blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center.

In 2011, the National Policy Institute — an explicitly white nationalist and antisemitic non-profit — organized their first conference that united nationalists and reactionaries of all stripes from around the world. Unlike in Europe and Canada, the United States has no hate speech laws, and has been able to serve as a hub of the international white hate movement. Since that time, NPI has put on four conferences in the US (two in conjunction/opposition to CPAC) and attempted an illegal conference in Hungary with an additional conference coming up this month in DC.

These organizations have actively been outreaching to unsuspecting conservative organizations to push their message of hate — often veiled as protecting domestic jobs and safety. The recent wave of mosque protests which now encourages attendees to be armed — likely contravening the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act which prohibits threats of physical violence against places of religious worship — have been organized by white nationalist and military veteran Jon Ritzheimer.

Media accounts and attendees often portray neo-Nazis who show up in SS shirts and with Klan and Confederate flags as uninvited. The reality is that these are in fact the very people who are sending the invitations. Resisting Islamophobia is not only the right thing to do, it is crucial to resisting a movement that has a strategy in mind to push an agenda of ethnic cleansing, homophobia, and misogyny.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 14, 2015 10:45 pm

The Polish Right Can Be Defeated
The success of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party is alarming, but there is room for left alternatives to grow.

Poland’s new leaders certainly are nasty bigots. Their election rhetoric included accusing migrants of carrying diseases, and PiS benefitted from growing anti-migrant sentiments in Poland enflamed by spectacles like a viral Facebook post that claimed to show a video of “5 Muslims raping a Polish girl, and the Polish government can do nothing about it!”

The Polish right also drew heavily on the country’s culture wars, where abortion, in vitro fertilization, and the teaching of “gender” (a word which in Poland has come to cover everything from Judith Butler to sex education) in schools are hot button issues. Part of Law and Justice’s manifesto included a total ban on abortion (it is legal in cases of rape or when the woman’s health is endangered).

Still, it’s far from clear whether PiS has either the political will or the political capital to enact much of what they’ve promised — they have a history of failing to follow through. Kaczynski may dream about making Warsaw into Budapest, but he’s a long way from making it so. Nor could he ape Orban in achieving rapprochement with Putin’s Russia — and not just because Polish public opinion remains staunchly anti-Russia. Kaczynski harbors a personal hatred following his brother (and former President) Lech’s death in the 2010 Smolensk air crash, which is widely believed in Poland to be the work of the Russians.



https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/law- ... kaczynski/
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Sun Dec 27, 2015 12:37 pm

Police Beat up Anti-Fascists Protesting Neo-Nazi March in Germany


Between 150-200 neo-Nazis held an anti-immigration march in southern Leipzig, Germany on December 12. In response, about a dozen counter-protests were set up with more than a thousand anti-fascists participating. Police deployed an estimated 800 officers to try to keep the Nazis separated from the anti-fascist counter-protesters. The anti-fascists attempted to stop the Nazi march, lighting wooden barricades and trash cans on fire throughout the city. The cops then responded by beating counter-protesters and journalists along with spraying tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannons at them. A riot then ensued with anti-fascists fighting back against police for hours, continuing even after the Nazis stopped marching. The anti-fascists threw rocks and bottles at police, set the roof of a warehouse on fire, smashed shop windows, destroyed a bus stop, damaged at least 50 police vehicles, and injured 69 cops. Several counter-protesters were injured, and 23 were arrested by the end of the day, including a 61-year-old pastor.




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More at: http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-its-ove ... in-germany
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 30, 2015 11:51 pm

Doublespeak: Radical Right Rhetoric Today

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BY MATTHEW FELDMAN • AUGUST 9, 2015


How do radical political movements mask their racist rhetoric?

Let us depart from a truism: Modern politics relies enormously upon shaping “the message” toward targeted groups and constituencies. Whether it’s the Labour Party’s “Controls on Immigration” or the Tories’ “blue collar cabinet,” on either side of the recent 2015 General Election in Britain, reaching beyond a core “base” of activists is now widely recognized as the key ingredient to political success. This is no less true of the radical right in Europe and the United States since 1945, albeit manifested in a much different way.

The issue is ultimately a simple one. Radical right activists have long tended to be racist or xenophobic, sympathetic to fascism and anti-Semitic deceptions like Holocaust denial. In post-war Europe and the US, these are scarcely vote-winners, meaning that the transnational radical right has had to go much further in manipulating “the message” than mere political triangulation—something perhaps better described as “fifth column discourse,” a radical right rhetoric that is sanitized in order to challenge liberal democracy from within.

VERBAL JUDO

Exemplifying this is the one-time openly neo-Nazi Nick Griffin, the recently-deposed leader of the British National Party (BNP)—to date the United Kingdom’s most electorally successful far-right party. He called this embrace of euphemistic language “verbal judo” in April 1999, shortly before taking over leadership of the neo-fascist party: “Of course, we must teach the truth to the hardcore … when it comes to influencing the public, forget about racial differences, genetics, Zionism, historical revisionism and so on … It’s time to use the weight of democracy’s own myths and expectations against it by side-stepping and using verbal judo techniques.”

This separation between “hardcore” fascists and “the public” was influentially posited in Cas Mudde’s landmark study from 2000, The Ideology of the Extreme Right, claiming that such groups typically have a more “moderate ‘frontstage’” intended for public consumption and “a radical ‘back-stage’” targeted at neo-fascist activists.

Applying this formula to the BNP as a whole under his so-called modernizing leadership, Griffin’s understanding of “verbal judo” was made abundantly clear exactly a decade later. In April 2009, a leaked internal document in the lead-up to the European elections in May was circulated, using the perfectly Orwellian title “BNP Language and Concepts Discipline Manual.”

Quite simply, when the first of your 13 rules is we are “not a ‘racist’ or ‘racial’ party,” it probably means that you are. Some of the other “rules” are equally telling in terms of this turn toward a euphemism, one that is seductive in deploying the language of inclusion and democracy for exclusionary and illiberal ends. For these radical right ideologues and movements, in short, leopards have not changed their spots so much as finding better cover in the post-war era.


Continues at: http://www.fairobserver.com/region/nort ... day-78554/
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 06, 2016 10:34 am

Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Pegida UK, UKIP and the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim bigotry

These are complicated and scary times. After fifteen years of murderous terrorist attacks by jihadis in the name of Islam coinciding with a period of unprecedented international migration, including the spectacle and tragedy of the current refugee crisis, the challenge of how we can live together in our communities is more and more urgent.

In this context, we should all be disturbed by the slow march toward the mainstream of the entrepreneurs of panic who stoke the fires of hatred towards Muslims. Often claiming to be merely critics of Islamism, a growing number of pundits deliberately blur the line between Islamism and Islam and the line between Islam and Muslims, often circulating falsehoods or amplifying negative anecdotes that confirm their toxic ideology. At the heart of this ideology is a paranoid vision of Islam as a supremacist religion using mass migration to destroy "Judeo-Christian" Western civilisation.

Meanwhile, as Tell MAMA document, violent incidents against Muslims are on the increase in Britain. Hammer attacks on Muslim-owned shops in Birmingham, arson attacks in Oldham, a bottling of a Muslim man in Caerphilly, a machete attack in Welsh supermarkets, and many, many other unreported incidents.

Most adherents of the counter-jihadi ideology aren't violent, and most perpetrators of hate crimes against Muslims aren't ideologically committed counter-jihadis. Most hate crime is opportunistic, spontaneous, un-premeditated. As with non-violent and violent forms of Islamism, there is no conveyor belt from the ideology to the violence. But, as Quilliam put it when talking about Islamism, the ideologues provide the "mood music" for hate crimes. They provide justifications, narratives and targets for acts of violent hate. And in turn, the anti-Muslim mood music and the rational fear generated by anti-Muslim attacks feed narratives of grievance that jihadis both feed and feed off in recruiting British Muslims. In this way, jihadis and counter-jihadis come to seem more like best friends than actual enemies.

For a few years after 2009, the boozed up street theatre of the English Defence League showed how counter-jihadi ideology can provide a shape and a focus for half-articulated bigotry, resentment and grievance.

But the EDL's reach was also limited by its association with violence. It became a toxic brand. Since 2013, its founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as "Tommy Robinson") has been trying - with a bit of help from Quilliam - to launder his brand and break out of the association with hooliganism.

Tommy's attempted rehabilitation, though, kept hitting obstacles: racist tweets, continued associations with neo-Nazis, a string of criminal convictions for everything from drugs to mortgage fraud.

At the end of 2014, events in Germany gave him a new idea. There'd been HoGeSa (Hooligans against Salafists), a short-lived EDL-inspired bunch of racist football ultras, which had the same image problems as the EDL. But then came Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident), which for a while mobilised a more mainstream crowd: "a mixed group—known figures from the National Democratic Party of Germany, soccer hooligans, but also a sizable number of ordinary citizens", including educated middle-class people. Could this provide a model for breaking out of the hooligan ghetto and reaching the mainstream?


Tommy and his pals have made a number of failed attempts at launching a UK franchise of Pegida. Known far right activists were among its early organisers; they invited American neo-Nazis to their events; and they found it hard to recruit spokespeople who could string a sentence together.

The news this week is that Yaxley-Lennon has anointed the double act of Paul Weston and Anne-Marie Waters to relaunch his pet Pegida UK. Both posh-voiced, and her having a left-liberal feminist background, the choice might be designed to speed the rebranding of the Tommy Robinson project away from its association with street thuggery and petty crime.



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Continues at: http://brockley.blogspot.com/2016/01/pe ... ng-of.html
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Wed Jan 06, 2016 10:50 am

What's missing in the above is any framework that gives perspective on these groups and what to do about them.

We get a list of who is setting up what now, what they formed in the past, their successes and failures (or rather, someone's impression of these). These people are around, have always been around, and are occasionally going to set up groups... it's not really 'news', the rise and fall of the BNP (for instance), which I've semi-briefly described here can actually give us an idea of the trajectory and present capabilities of these groups, something that the above article fails to do, leading to inaccurate ideas about the scale of things.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby tapitsbo » Wed Jan 06, 2016 11:23 am

I think at this point we can safely say the decisive factor in whether a group gets the "fascist" tag is ethnicity.

These groups are kept on a short leash by security services, it seems. While they do murder from time to time as was pointed out in the other thread, they commit a vanishingly small fraction of such crimes, overall.

These wrongdoings are interpreted as a threat to the "common good", and therefore much more deserving of concern than most, which is interesting since these groups are so often state-sponsored (much like radical Islamism).

I find the thesis convincing that there is a taboo on organization among European ethnic groups because these peoples are supposed to be "guardians" of a (now crumbling) world order (this is an actual form of white supremacy which is maintained in part by the close watch kept on any possible autonomous groups forming among these folk.)

Part of the threat posed by these organizations is that they suggest Europeans are like any other groups.

Of course there is no plan to "do anything" about these groups as jakell suggests - they are used as necessary containment vessels by the state/establishment.

In coming years they will likely be granted increased power in Europe, but will always be tightly controlled as seems to be the case in places like the Ukraine and Syria...
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 06, 2016 11:32 am

That's mighty white of y'all to say so!
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Wed Jan 06, 2016 11:59 am

tapitsbo » Wed Jan 06, 2016 3:23 pm wrote:I think at this point we can safely say the decisive factor in whether a group gets the "fascist" tag is ethnicity.

These groups are kept on a short leash by security services, it seems. While they do murder from time to time as was pointed out in the other thread, they commit a vanishingly small fraction of such crimes, overall.

These wrongdoings are interpreted as a threat to the "common good", and therefore much more deserving of concern than most, which is interesting since these groups are so often state-sponsored (much like radical Islamism).

I find the thesis convincing that there is a taboo on organization among European ethnic groups because these peoples are supposed to be "guardians" of a (now crumbling) world order (this is an actual form of white supremacy which is maintained in part by the close watch kept on any possible autonomous groups forming among these folk.)

Part of the threat posed by these organizations is that they suggest Europeans are like any other groups.

Of course there is no plan to "do anything" about these groups as jakell suggests - they are used as necessary containment vessels by the state/establishment.

In coming years they will likely be granted increased power in Europe, but will always be tightly controlled as seems to be the case in places like the Ukraine and Syria...


I've only really properly spoken up here when an article on the UK (there have been a lot of these though) is posted as I'm pretty familiar with the far right here and, more importantly, it's trajectory.

I can't speak for the rest of Europe**, but I think a mistaken impression is given that there is strong parity with this and the UK (for dramatic effect maybe?), whereas in fact the far right never really regrouped after the failure of the BNP and are still pretty well scattered and non-functional, the attempt to replace British Nationalism with White Nationalism, although the obvious next step, is pretty flimsy.

**and especially Eastern Europe.
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