Hatred to Hope

Hatred to Hope

I wrote a book, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, on fascism after the official defeats of Fascism in Nazism in 1945. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can sample the Introduction here:

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9383&edition_id=10650

The thesis of Where Have All The Fascists Gone? is that fascists no longer openly wave the fascist banner, but increasingly dress their proto-fascist views in New Left, Left, and even ecological guises. Born in France at the time of the 1968 student and worker protests, the nouvelle droite (New Right) or European New Right (ENR) intellectuals led by Alain de Benoist sought to revitalise fascist ideology in the age after defeat. They distinguished themselves from the Anglo-American New Right (ANNR) by being anti-capitalist and obsessed with questions of identity, cultural preservation, and regional and national belonging along homogeneous lines. They also distance themselves from the Old Right, with its penchant for grabbing power through legal, parliamentary or violent, extraparliamentary terrorist tactics. Remember that the Fascists and Nazis utilized both legal and illegal techniques, the gun and the ballot box, to come to power.

Here comes de Benoist, a winner of France's top literary prize in 1977 for his Vu de droite (Seen from the Right), who argues that it is culture and civil society that will give the Right durable power. He borrows a page from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in a Fascist jail in 1937. De Benoist has been called a proponent of "right-wing Gramscianism." Nietzsche is another idol because the German philosopher saw culture and virulent elites as the saviours of Europe from a period of profound egalitarian "decadence" born of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In his youth, de Benoist was a supporter of French ultra-nationalism, colonialism in Algeria, and extolled the virtues of soldierly values from white settlers in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to the German Conservative Revolutionaries (CR) of the inter-war years such as Ernst Junger and Moeller van den Bruck. The CR thinkers had an undeniable influence on the Nazis, while seeking to distance themselves from mere Nazi "plebeianism" or populism.

By the 1970s de Benoist became more subtle. He understood that one could no longer be openly fascist or Nazi. Thus he based his new strategy on the "right to difference" of all cultures, regions, and nations against the "totalitarian" menaces of Washington and Moscow. He railed against both Marxist socialism and liberal capitalist democracies. When the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union fell officially in 1991, he turned his venom against liberalism and the United States (its main proponent worldwide) as the "primary enemies." He has sought to rally all those that reject liberalism from European nationalists, regionalists, and racists to Islamists, Traditionalists, and ecologists. His anti-Americanism rose to a fever pitch in the post-9-11 climate with US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He views the United States as an imperialist force, which is the most destructive in human history.

De Benoist is no isolated intellectual. Movements like his have spread throughout Europe. Moreover, extreme right-wing and neo-fascist political parties with an anti-immigrant agenda have made steady inroads in Western Europe since the 1980s. France's Front National (National Front) under the charismatic influence of Jean-Marie Le Pen is one example. The Front National gave France an international black eye when it reached the final round of the French Presidential elections with about 17 per cent of the popular vote in 2005, before Le Pen was trounced by Gaullist Jacques Chirac. Austria's anti-immigrant Freedom Party joined the national coalition government in 2000. In Italy, the neo-fascist National Alliance joined the national coalition government in 1994 and participated in several governing coalitions under Berlusconi in the new millennium. The National Alliance leader, Gianfranco Fini, became Italy's deputy prime minister in 2003. In 2008, Rome elected a National Alliance mayor, as Fascist era songs were sung in the city's public square. The National Alliance sits in the current government, although they have decided to merge with Berlusconi's broad conservative, right-wing coalition.

Without the intellectual ground prepared for by de Benoist and the European New Right, the extreme right-wing parties would not be flourishing. These parties respond to the decline of the hard communist left, the corruption of established parties, the loss of national sovereignty due to the European Union (EU), and increasing anguish about liberalism, democracy, capitalism, multiculturalism, and the loss of values associated with modernity. A Le Pen appeals to the native-born French man or woman who feels left out by a heartless global capitalism, EU distancing mechanisms vis-a-vis ordinary workers and farmers, and bureaucratic statism. He appeals to an older, mystical France based on biological rather than civic notions of belonging. He appeals to a "populist nativism," as Jens Rydgren points out, that says welfare benefits and citizenship belongs to those with a rootedness in the soil of France, its history, language, and civilizational greatness.

Yet, Le Pen, like de Benoist, says he is no racist or fascist. He is for the "right to difference" of all cultures to follow their own national paths free of US, EU, or corporate dictates. The upshot is that racism and hate come in older and newer guises: Open biological racism and anti-Semitism that justified colonialism and Nazism, as well as subtle forms that claim to uphold "our" "right to difference" so long as "we" can keep out "them" (immigrants, refugees, non-Christians, non-Europeans). In twisted logic, Le Pen and de Benoist say that the multicultural, anti-racists of France and Europe are the real racists! They deny the "French French" the right to determine their own, independent, homogeneous cultural and political paths.

Now Le Pen and de Benoist do not come from an explicit fascist tradition. They come from traditions that have sympathized with colonialism and Vichyism. De Benoist is particularly indebted to the inter-war Conservative Revolution that essentially provided intellectual whitewashing for Nazi crimes against humanity. Yet, the traditions are so close that they come from a common spiritual, political family. It is a political family that rejects the egalitarian impulses of the 1789 French Revolution. It wishes to turn citizenship into a biological construction. It hopes to overturn democracy, parliamentarism, and administrative, legal equality for all citizens of a given national territory. This is a dark and sinister project that harkens back to Nazi Nuremberg race laws and anti-Semitic legislation against Jews in Italy after 1938.

We should be under no illusions. Fascism, or an ideology that no longer calls itself that, can come back under the most innocent disguises. Both Holocaust survivor Primo Levi and his compatriot Umberto Eco have warned Europe about a fascism returning that will no longer "march on Rome" or openly call for the destruction of Jews or other cultural and political minorities. De Benoist is part of this clever project. It is winning adherents throughout Europe. The hope is to identify the danger in political projects that claim to be "new," yet smack of older formulations from a tragic period in European history. The hope is in saying that liberal democracy has serious problems, which gives these anti-immigrant parties appeal in the first place. The hope is in rising to a common humanity, while preserving our cultural distinctiveness. Immigrants cannot be our foes, if we ourselves have lost our own identities. The hope is that economic, environmental, and political crises will not seduce us with authoritarian, elitist ideologies that seek to divide people and nations.

De Benoist's hope is for a pagan, elitist, hierarchical, Europe. This hope will lead Europeans to more pain and misery, just as in the inter-war years. De Benoist also speaks of direct democracy, a direct democracy designed to make it acceptable in national or regional referenda to keep out non-European immigrants. Genuine direct democracy is for all the world to taste. It does not pick and choose based on common biological origins. It is the hope of an inclusive belonging to a political community that makes its own political decisions, free of dogmatic intellectual formulas, political parties, corporations, bureaucracies, mass media, or state-led engineering. It is the hope of relegating ideologies of hatred to the dustbin of history.

Tamir Bar-On