If fascism arose again in Europe, what would the British response be?

[LLETSA]

Let's not kid ourselves that our society doesn't harbour an awful lot of atavistic inter communal hatreds just beneath the surface, not likely to break surface in conditions of reasonable social peace ... BUT get an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression and all bets are off - communal tensions could well take on very alarming forms. I'm not for a moment suggesting this is imminant - but we all have to remain vigilant. Remember that in the catastrophe in Yugoslavia some of the worst mass murderers had previously led blameless lives as things like icecream sellers or sports coaches.

As I pointed out above, though, Yugoslavia shows us that its possible to have ethnic bloodshed on a mass scale without anything resembling fascism gaining control of society. Despite all that went on, and despite the resulting rise of some politically dubious bastards, the territories of the former Yugoslavia resemble a society just like this one-just as it did, despite one-party rule, before it descended into madness.

 

[ayatollah]

I think your complacency is seriously misplaced LLETSA. Marx was , as often, quite insightful when he said something to the effect that "Any civilisation is only two good meals away from barbarism". History shows again and again and again that economic collapse can turn the meak librarian into a Brownshirt fighter , and equally the previously passive, unpolitical, worker into a rioting street fighter againsty capitalism. I don't know if you've seen the extraordinary U Tube video showing a couple of extraordinarily conservatively dressed , blue rinsed, middle aged ladies, helping young rioters in Greece to lob bricks at the riot police last week - but that is the transformation which is effecting masses of people in Greece , NOW, facing massive hardship.

The Yugoslav tragedy occurred during a time of general European PROSPERITY - and each new state was able quickly to feed off the EU market and achieve reasonable economic stability. That is NOT the case in Europe today I'm afraid.

Forget all your assumptions about how people have behaved during the years of prosperity - it'll be a whole new ball game if the world tumbles into a new Great Depression --- and make no mistake we are getting perilously close to that NOW.

 

[LLETSA]

I think your complacency is seriously misplaced LLETSA. Marx was , as often, quite insightful when he said something to the effect that "Any civilisation is only two good meals away from barbarism". History shows again and again and again that economic collapse can turn the meak librarian into a Brownshirt fighter , and equally the previously passive, unpolitical, worker into a rioting street fighter againsty capitalism. I don't know if you've seen the extraordinary U Tube video showing a couple of extraordinarily conservatively dressed , blue rinsed, middle aged ladies, helping young rioters in Greece to lob bricks at the riot police last week - but that is the transformation which is effecting masses of people in Greece , NOW, facing massive hardship.

Forget all your assumptions about how peole have behaved during the years of prosperity -0 it'll be a whole new ball game if the world tumbles into a new Great Depression --- and make no mistake we are getting perilously close to that NOW.

I agree entirely. However, I don't believe there's any prospect of the outcome being fascism or 'socialism' in Greece or any other society that may descend into chaos. Barbarism doesn't have to mean fascism and probably won't in the future. For clues as to what form it would probably take we only have to look at what happens now on the fringes of society.

Future historians will probably link the coming collapse with the demise of strong political belief (or the loss of the ability of politicos to articulate their aims) in whole populations.

 

[ayatollah]

No I don't think it'll be fascism or socialism in Greece either - it will be yet another Military Junta. The "Man on Horseback" won't let Greece decend into a sort of "Mad Max " post apopalyptic , "Somalian" non-state. Military Juntas are VERY NASTY for the majority of people though - not that far from a fascist state.

 

[LLETSA]

I
The Yugoslav tragedy occurred during a time of general European PROSPERITY - and each new state was able quickly to feed off the EU market and achieve reasonable economic stability. That is NOT the case in Europe today I'm afraid.

Why do you think that an unstable, traumatised society will turn to those who either can't articulate their aims properly ('the left') or people whose solutions can quite clearly only make a bad situation worse with their mad, impossible schemes for mass deportations and so on?

 

[LLETSA]

No I don't think it'll be fascism or socialism in Greece either - it will be yet another Military Junta. The "Man on Horseback" won't let Greece decend into a sort of "Mad Max " post apopalyptic , "Somalian" non-state. Military Juntas are VERY NASTY for the majority of people though - not that far from a fascist state.

The aim of any such junta would be to try, possibly in vain, to get the whole liberal democracy, free market show on the road again. While this would involve repression of the workers' movement, it would no more result in a fascist state than it did in Argentina or Chile.

 

[JimW]

that fire was dodgy as fuck too-blamed on the commies as per.

Happened to have read Pannekoek's Individual Acts the other day (as you do), and he seems in no doubt Van Der Lubbe did it: http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1933/individual.htm Thought it was the generally-held view now, just arguments over whether it was bold but misguided, counter-productive as Pannekoek thinks or so on.

 

[butchersapron]

He did it, and he wasn't what people think of as a a Communist either, which is part of why the kpd practically threw him to the wolves.

 

[JimW]

Wasn't there some suggestion he had what we'd call 'learning difficulties' these days, or was that part of someone's spin on it?

 

[butchersapron]

Often been suggested, partly because of his physical bad health partly as defence strategy...

 

[ViolentPanda]

Red Squirrel - how old are you?

I hope, given some of the howlers you've posted, you're not going to claim that with age comes wisdom.

Who agrees that Germany 'had to be expansionistic' and from which sources do you glean your misinformation?

I commend to you the following tomes:

Richard Griffiths - "Fascism".
Karl Dietrich Bracher - "The German Dictatorship"
Adam Tooze - "The Wages of Destruction"
Ian Kershaw - "The Nazi Dictatorship" and "Weimar: Why Did Democracy Fail?"

Five books off the top of my head, spanning 50 years of academic endeavour, all of whose authors agree on the premise that Hitler's state was constructed around a premise of expansionism, and all of whom provide ample evidence.

And your desecration of the English language makes me puke.

To be fair, your bursts of self-righteousness make me puke.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I was asking Phil (and the board in general) a question, because I was surprised when he called Mason's argument mad. I thought that the idea that Germany was forced to be expansionistic was quite widely accepted nowadays, but I'm not claiming to be an expert in the area.

As for sources, I've got most of my knowledge of subject from the work of Ian Kershaw, and I've read a little bit of Tim Mason.

Unfortunately, mason didn't produce much more than a little bit of work.

 

[butchersapron]

He did a fair bit mind VP - two large books and a load of really influential articles that really set the terms for debate from the 70s up until the 90s and still do in some ways through Ian Kerhsaw and people like that (Tooze included). Plus, those two books have loads of material in the German editions still not translated - almost doubling them in size.

 

[ViolentPanda]

The posters who point to the extremely unstable nature of the Hitler regime are quite correct. Fascism , in Germany, Italy, and everywhere else, has always been VERY unstable - certainly in the early years in power - as the aspirations of the working class and lower middle class "brownshirt" supporters who supported the fascist cause because of its very significant pre assumption of power pseudo anti capitalist rhetoric have to be "dealt with" - usually physically. Remember that the very sizeable Brownshirt fighters expected there to be a "Second (anti-capitalist) Revolution" after the Left had been suppressed. Mussolini had similar problems with the more anti capitalist of his supporters. Fascist regimes do come to power in states riven with class warfare after all.

Also the very "New Dealish" public works programme (and rearmament of course) of the Nazis was rapidly bankrupting Germany, so they literally had to overrun Europe to get hold of these countries gold reserves and resources before they ran out of cash.

And over everything else the only things that welded the disparate social groups together in Germany, Italy, etc , was expansionist nationalism, anti communism, (and in the German case) rabid anti semitism. This violent ideological predisposition to expand and conquer is part and parcel of fascism , and these regimes are like trick cyclists on a high wire .... to keep restive, deeply divided internal populations in check, they HAVE to pursue wars against perceived internal and external foes.

It should be borne in mind that Hitlerian anti-Semitism was a massive ratcheting-upward of "traditional" German anti-Semitism, which until Hitler was nowhere near as oppressive or murderous as Russian anti-Semitism.
Bracher speculated that if more of the early NSDAP's members had been from the eastern part of Germany or from ethnic German enclaves in the east, the primary scapegoat could easily have been "the Slav" as opposed to "the Jew".

That is Fascism - the Hitler regime was driven by poisonous internal ideological, political, and economic dynamics to do precisely what it did. It could have been no other way, once Big Business decided to try and ride the fascist tiger in the face of the threat from the Left.

Tooze makes the very good point that even with synthetic petroleum and access to Romania's oilfields, taking the Caucasus oilfields was essential, and that without them the Nazi war machine never had more than a fortnight's fuel in reserve (obviously with logistics meaning that the parts of the war machine at the end of the supply line had significantly smaller reserves and attenuated access to re-supply).

 

[ayatollah]

The aim of any such junta would be to try, possibly in vain, to get the whole liberal democracy, free market show on the road again. While this would involve repression of the workers' movement, it would no more result in a fascist state than it did in Argentina or Chile.

No the aim of a (possible) military junta , should the democratic Greek polity fall apart under the pressure of popular resistance to the cuts policy, would not be to get the "liberal democracy" bit of the free market show back on the road... it would simply to be to ensure that international capitalism got its loans back at the expense of the general population. I've no doubt that the CIA is CURRENTLY talking to the Greek Military about contingencies to implement the standard NATO (Plan X) for military intervention in the case of a "breakdown in social order" , that every NATO country has in its strategic plans stock.

No a military Junta aint fascism, but given their universal usage of mass arrests, "disappearances" and torture and repression of all popular dissent , you seem remarkably sanguine about such a regime LLETSA ? Or is it just a debating point that, "no it wouldn't be formal fascism as per Nazi Germany ?" Well, OK it wouldn't be, but so what ?

 

[ViolentPanda]

He did a fair bit mind VP - two large books and a load of really influential articles that really set the terms for debate from the 70s up until the 90s and still do in some ways through Ian Kerhsaw and people like that (Tooze included).

I know, I'm just lamenting the fact that someone with the potential to have done so much more is lost to us.

Plus, those two books have loads of material in the German editions still not translated - almost doubling them in size.

I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and buy the German editions, however headache-inducing and slow reading them will be.

 

[ViolentPanda]

"Lebensraum" I belive was a key key world in Germany at the time.

From Mien Kampf (pretty evident the direction he'd take Germany as far back as 1925)

Without consideration of "traditions" and prejudices, it [Germany] must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.​

Of course, his thesis was hardly original. The whole expansionist "blut und boden" bollocks was implicit in much of the late 19th and early 20th century volkische nationalist rhetoric that Hitler would have been exposed to. The whole "German mission" schtick was prevalent throughout the upper and middle classes.

 

[LLETSA]

No the aim of a (possible) military junta , should the democratic Greek polity fall apart under the pressure of popular resistance to the cuts policy, would not be to get the "liberal democracy" bit of the free market show back on the road... it would simply to be to ensure that international capitalism got its loans back at the expense of the general population. I've no doubt that the CIA is CURRENTLY talking to the Greek Military about contingencies to implement the standard NATO (Plan X) for military intervention in the case of a "breakdown in social order" , that every NATO country has in its strategic plans stock.

No a military Junta aint fascism, but given their universal usage of mass arrests, "disappearances" and torture and repression of all popular dissent , you seem remarkably sanguine about such a regime LLETSA ? Or is it just a debating point that, "no it wouldn't be formal fascism as per Nazi Germany ?" Well, OK it wouldn't be, but so what ?

I'm not being remarkably sanguine about anything. I'm simply pointing out that in Chile and Argentina, murderous military regimes did not manage to create fascist states nor bring about a revolution in society as per the stated aims of fascism. That's because they were bloodthirsty tyrants but not fascists.

Assuming that the various components of the Western political and economic system remain intact, I doubt if the Greek military would want to stay in power long-term. They would come under pressure from the outside world to restore liberal democracy as soon as was feasible. The EU doesn't want an authoritarian dictatorship as a member state, as it doesn't look all that good for the EU. There's no contradiction between this and the primary aim being to get the debts paid.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I think it's hard for (most of) us today to quite grasp how "conventional" the, what now seem unbelievably barbaric , ideas which underpinned Nazism were at the time. Remember "Eugenics" as a poisonous belief system had pretty general hegemony in Europe and the USA - so the Eugenics Institute which carried out the mass murder of the handicapped in Germany from 1934 onwards was a transplant from the USA, and funded by many big US corporations.

Hmmm, not really a transplant, as Germany had it's own tradition of eugenics-as-science near-contemporaneous with Galton's enunciation of it. It's more that the ideas flowed around and each state constructed their own "take" on it. Aktion T4 (the "euthanasia" programme) didn't start until 1939, although the legalised sterilisation of those with "hereditary illnesses" started in 1934.

I'm not sure either that I agree that "we" are at such a great remove from such vileness that we'd perceive it as "unbelievably barbaric", especially if it followed the gradient of the Nazi programme.

Similarly anti semitism was incredibly widespread - and the belief that the Jews and Finance Capital were one and the same allowed the Radical Right to neatly divide off "healthy" productive capitalism from "Jewish parasitic" finance capitalism. Also remember Imperialism/colonialism with both its contempt for "Lesser subject races" , and the idea that every Great Power had to carve up its share of the world as a captive market and raw material supply, was accepted as quite normal by the rulers in every state, and hence most of their citizenry too. Hitler deeply admired British India as a model of "White Race" domination - and he saw the conquest of Russia in terms of creating a German version of British India.

So OK the exact ideological superstructure of the early 20th century is mainly gone on a mass level now, but I'm afraid that I DONT share the belief of some posters that some of the worst pogromist, genocidal, aspects of fascism..

Nazism, surely?

...couldn't arise in Europe again IF the economic and political situation became unstable enough. Just think what happened in the states of the old Yugoslavia just a few years ago - truly chilling stuff - neighbour murdering neighbour on a mass scale.

Let's not kid ourselves that our society doesn't harbour an awful lot of atavistic inter communal hatreds just beneath the surface, not likely to break surface in conditions of reasonable social peace ... BUT get an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression and all bets are off - communal tensions could well take on very alarming forms. I'm not for a moment suggesting this is imminant - but we all have to remain vigilant. Remember that in the catastrophe in Yugoslavia some of the worst mass murderers had previously led blameless lives as things like icecream sellers or sports coaches.

There are intra-communal hatreds/prejudices to worry about too.

 

[Random]

The EU would rather have a bureaucratic capitalist dictatorship, with elections of some sort. Doubt the US is talking to the Greek military at all. This isn't the 1960s, where anticommunism could be used to guarantee a measure of domestic and international support for such a coup.

Plus the Papandreous, whatever their faults as a political dynasty, know full well the danger from the Greek military and iirc have already fired a bunch of generals to make sure only loyalists remain.

 

[ayatollah]

The EU would rather have a bureaucratic capitalist dictatorship, with elections of some sort. Doubt the US is talking to the Greek military at all. This isn't the 1960s, where anticommunism could be used to guarantee a measure of domestic and international support for such a coup.

Plus the Papandreous, whatever their faults as a political dynasty, know full well the danger from the Greek military and iirc have already fired a bunch of generals to make sure only loyalists remain.

Whats a "bureaucratic capitalist dictatorship" . I don't think the "technocratic government" being mooted will do the trick to enforce the full extent of the required austerity measures ... not in the face of the ever rising level of Greek popular resistance at all levels which is emerging all over the country. No, I'm afraid that "boots on the streets" will be required if the democratic (well OK, very corrupt , dynastic, bourgeois democratic) parties can't hack it for the IMF.

You doubt that the US is having discussions with the Greek Military. " not the 1960's" "they've fired a bunch of generals" ......Bless you.

I Betcha they are ! The USA wants these Zorba the street rioter guys kicked into line pronto .. Big Dollars will be being handed over to selected Colonels as we speak.

 

[LLETSA]

Whats a "bureaucratic capitalist dictatorship" . I don't think the "technocratic government" being mooted will do the trick to enforce the full extent of the required austerity measures ... not in the face of the ever rising level of Greek popular resistance at all levels which is emerging all over the country. No, I'm afraid that "boots on the streets" will be required if the democratic (well OK, very corrupt , dynastic, bourgeois democratic) parties can't hack it for the IMF.

You doubt that the US is having discussions with the Greek Military. " not the 1960's" "they've fired a bunch of generals" ......Bless you.

I Betcha they are ! The USA wants these Zorba the street rioter guys kicked into line pronto .. Big Dollars will be being handed over to selected Colonels as we speak.

It's more likely that the Greek ruling class will wait for the rioters and demonstrators to be worn down, which is likely to happen when it becomes clear that all the parties that could conceivably form a government accept austerity. As somebody points out in one of the other Greece threads, when even the KKE are pro-austerity where do the working class turn (not that the KKE could form a government)?

 

[ayatollah]

Yes I see can an unending wearing down process as a viable strategy for the state.

Fortunately there seems , from the considerable spread of news items I have seen anyway, to be a quite extraordinary spread of spontaneous popular resistance/disobediance activities against the austerity measures happening across Greece , which are circumventing the totally redundant and impotent and corrupt structures of the established Greek formal party structures ... KKE included. How organised this popular, grass roots resistance can become and how long it can withstand the constant blows of the state machine, only time will tell. I don't think the battle by the Greek people is a long way from being lost yet however - and the ever greater impoverishment of the austerity package will, I hope, draw ever more people into resistance activities (reconnecting those cut off from electricity for instance). I think there is a long way to go in this story yet.

And soon the Italian population will be facing very similar measures - and they also have a long history of popular resistance to oppression.

Resistance breeds new organisational forms by masses of ordinary people, who, as recently seen in the "Arab Spring", can astonish us with their inventiveness and courage, after decades of passivity. I think we shouldn't assume a guaranteed win for Finance Capital in this crisis quite yet.

 

[Dhimmi]

Prior to WW2 the far right had a prominent presence in the form of the BUF, but eventually we fell on the side of liberal democracy. Would the same happen again?

Also the British Fascisti, and the Empire League and a few other mad bastids. The BUF wasn't as much a threat as might be thought despite the funding from Mussolini. Both the Italian ambassador of the time and the Special Branch investigation marked them down as more cranks than threat and Moseley was a very vain opportunist desperate for power.

Nowadays I'm not sure the fascist threat is quite so laughable, and not least because it lacks the orges-over-there factor. There's no Hitler, Mussolini nor Franco around to deliver even anecdotal evidence of the horrors of their rule.

Plus all parlimentary parties are centralist, barely a party conference pass between them, and the radical left has over developed much of their ideology while abandoning the parts made inconvenient by the very same over development.

I think the right will continue to go from strength to strength across Europe, although here it will be slightly different. Fortunately we lack a truly serious far-right party, the BNP is close to bust and loathed, the EDL is just single issue and lacks anything beyond chants of the terraces. But if something else turns up we could be a fair amount of trouble.

 

[butchersapron]

I think the right will continue to go from strength to strength across Europe, although here it will be slightly different. Fortunately we lack a truly serious far-right party, the BNP is close to bust and loathed, the EDL is just single issue and lacks anything beyond chants of the terraces. But if something else turns up we could be a fair amount of trouble.

Is the right currently going from strength to strength in europe? If so, is it the far right?

 

[elbows]

I'm not sure how useful predictions would be at this stage, we probably have to wait until conditions of woe happen, and then take a look at who has the momentum. As for whether the Uk would deal with fascist regimes, it depends what interests of ours are served by having them as friends, and the detail of how the fascists present themselves. We are perhaps more likely to be rivals than buddies, depending on which country is in question.

 

[LLETSA]

Yes I see can an unending wearing down process as a viable strategy for the state.

Fortunately there seems , from the considerable spread of news items I have seen anyway, to be a quite extraordinary spread of spontaneous popular resistance/disobediance activities against the austerity measures happening across Greece , which are circumventing the totally redundant and impotent and corrupt structures of the established Greek formal party structures ... KKE included. How organised this popular, grass roots resistance can become and how long it can withstand the constant blows of the state machine, only time will tell. I don't think the battle by the Greek people is a long way from being lost yet however - and the ever greater impoverishment of the austerity package will, I hope, draw ever more people into resistance activities (reconnecting those cut off from electricity for instance). I think there is a long way to go in this story yet.

And soon the Italian population will be facing very similar measures - and they also have a long history of popular resistance to oppression.

Resistance breeds new organisational forms by masses of ordinary people, who, as recently seen in the "Arab Spring", can astonish us with their inventiveness and courage, after decades of passivity. I think we shouldn't assume a guaranteed win for Finance Capital in this crisis quite yet.

This is just the thing, however. They are movements by which people try to defend themselves from the effects of the crisis, but without a political solution the crisis remains.

 

[Dhimmi]

Is the right currently going from strength to strength in europe? If so, is it the far right?

I believe so, not least in the overall shift to the German style "Christian Democracy" in the mainstream but also with more radical parties, and a growing undercurrent of anti-immigration and anti-muslim popular sentiment - although neither of those are unique to the right wing.

How right wing does a party have to be to be to earn the far suffix though? Does their location change that tag? Austria's FPO hold cabinet posts and enjoy a quarter of the electorate, but for Austria aren't as far-right as parties there have been before, but to us they're beyond the pale. The Swiss SVP enjoy a similar level of support and have some very extreme right wingers in their ranks, Denmark, Portugal and Norway's rightist parties gather around 10% of votes, while the German, Dutch, and Italian ones have a good day if they get half that. The UK and Greece seem to be the two who remain solidly unelectable. However ex-Warsaw Pact states have an incredible taste for the right as a quite natural reaction against years of mock-communist repression. Poland is a good example with Hitler's occupation of just shy of six years pales in significance to the decades of Stalinist occupation. Kamiński is a good example, a repackaged extremist sitting in the EP.

The most electable, but not very, extreme right-wingers we have are probably UKIP - IME I've found them more bigotted than the BNP but they keep it off the page, two elections ago they stood a chance of ousting Ladyman in Thanet South and concentrated their efforts there, they were quite happy to mention Darkies in their door to door travels.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Poland is a good example with Hitler's occupation of just shy of six years pales in significance to the decades of Stalinist occupation.

That seems a questionable judgement. Millions of Poles died during Hitler's occupation. The decades of communist rule really weren't comparable at all. And after about the mid-1950s, it makes no sense to call it a Stalinist regime.

The fact that resistance in the form of Solidarity eventually rose up in Poland if anything is an indicator that it wasn't such a totalitarian regime by then.

 

[frogwoman]

Anti-semitism was used as a propaganda tool by the communist regime though - the "anti-zionist" repression after the protests in the 60s etc. Given that the pro-moscow regime were not averse to using anti-semitism and other forms of ethnic divisions when it suited them i'm not sure that the current use of it by polish politicians today is exactly a reaction against it ...