eurofascism.info

Comrades, the voices of the dead battalions,
Of those who fell that Britain might be great,
Join in our song, for they still march in spirit with us,
And urge us on to gain the fascist state!
We’re of their blood, and spirit of their spirit,
Sprung from that soil for whose dear sake they bled,
Against vested powers, Red Front,
and massed ranks of reaction,
We lead the fight for freedom and for bread!
The streets are still, the final struggle’s ended;
Flushed with the fight we proudly hail the dawn!
See, over all the streets the fascist banners waving,
Triumphant standards of our race reborn!

(British Union of Fascists anthem *)

As I enter the website the word «Hail» shines up on the screen, flashes of animated lightning surrounding it. The music played over my speakers is like taken from a dramatic battle scene in the Lord of the Rings. Then a red circle with a red flash is shown, and the word: IMPERIVM.

This is the website of the Maltese political party ‘Imperium Europa’, described by its leader Norman Lowell as «a Europid bond forged through Spirituality closely followed by Race, nurturded through High culture, protected by High Politics, enforced by the Elite». The circle and flash, or «the lightning and the sun» as the website describes it as, is quite recognisable. It is the very same symbol that was used by the pre-WWII group of British fascists led by Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists.

Lowell contested the first European Parliament elections that were held in Malta, on June 12, 2004, his «Imperium Europa» obtained 1,603 votes, 0.64% of the total votes. Lowell is too obvious in his fascism to gain much popular support. And yet, what was described as «a handful of disciples» in MaltaToday that year had grown into something more only two years later, when the same newspaper reported that «4.8 per cent of respondents would seriously consider voting for Norman Lowell’s movement». A quarter of the respondents in the June 2006 survey of the newspaper expressed some agreement with Lowell’s credo.

Lowell’s credo is made up of extreme nationalism, combined with opposition to immigration, but also with anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, pro-Nazism and pro-Hitlerism. As an example, Lowell has referred to Hitler as “The Hero” and to “Mein Kampf” as simply “The Book”. At the same time, Lowell denies being a fascist at all, and claims to be presenting a Third Way “beyond capitalism and communism, beyond fascism and the parliamentary communism of pseudo-democracy”.

Lowell also repeats one other dogma of European neo-fascists, namely that they are not racists. In an interview with Malta Independent (Google cache link to a copy posted at Stormfront, a Nazi web site) he states:

Unfortunately, yes, the Maltese are racist – and this should not be. You see, we of Imperium Europa are racialists [...] There is a huge difference between the two.

The former implies hatred towards other races and the belief that one’s race is superior to all others. On the other hand, the racialist discerns a difference between the various races. Therefore, a racialist wants to preserve that difference, his genetic patrimony, his ethnic consciousness. A racialist strives to protect his race; it is genetic difference that, we believe, determines all other differences.

Lowell firmly believes in the importance of an upcoming European Empire, Imperium Europa, which, according to him will be in place by the year 2012, which he refers to as Anno Zero. Interestingly, Lowell is also an artist in an abstract style he calls Dionysian Action Painting, as well as an advocate of the Ch’uan Shu martial art in Malta.

In other words, he is a true eccentric; and like many of the other eccentrics of the socalled far right (**) across the world he is not very likely to get elected to any political position. And yet, at the same time, he is a crude example of the resurgence of fascism in Europe; a movement sharing beliefs with the fascists of the thirties, having historical ties to these movements, sometimes portraying anti-parliamentarian attitudes and always xenophobic in nature, and yet claiming to be «not racist», merely «nationalist» or «national democratic».

The fact that close to one in twenty Maltese voters would seriously consider voting for this man, and that one in four agree with «some» of his credo, is an indication of a Europe heading for trouble.

-

In his December 2006 departing speech the Republican Senator Rick Santorum also warns of upcoming trouble, and of the growing threat of fascism. However, Santorum does not mention European fascism. Like many other politicians and considerable parts of the media he is obsessing with the threat of what is increasingly – sometimes correctly, sometimes not – referred to as «Islamic fascism»:

I defined the enemy back at the National Press Club speeches as Islamic fascism. I said that is the biggest issue of our time, this relentless and determined radical enemy that is not just a group of rag-tag people living in caves but, in fact, people with an ideology, a plan, and increasingly the resources to carry out that plan, as well as, increasingly, a bigger and larger presence throughout the Islamic world, these radical Islamic fascists.

Santorum is of course quite right about the fact that Islamic fascism exists. Fascism did not start with Hitler. It did not end with him either.

Also, fascism never stopped at the borders of Europe, the ideology spread further than that, for instance to the Egyptian Green Shirts, who idolised Hitler. In addition, a number of prominent Nazis found refugee in Latin America, like Eichmann, and in the Middle East, like Alois Brunner.

However, Santorum was wrong to see Islamic fascism – even if you make the term meaningless by including every non-democratic government or grouping in predominantly Muslim societies – as «the biggest issue», i.e. the largest threat, of our time. In reality, the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East are weak, and terrorist movements following or approaching the ideology of al Qa’eda or of electrician-turned-ideologist Muhammad abd al-Salam Faraj are even weaker.

Nazi Germany was dangerous because of its strenght and efficiency in warfare and genocide alike. Islamist terrorists are dangerous in spite of their weakness. Since 2001, they have not been capable of committing a single major act of terror on American soil, and terror attacks in Europe have been few. In fact, Islamist terrorists are first and foremost a danger towards people living in Muslim countries. In 2005, 83% of all fatal terrorist attacks around the world took place in Iraq. While a large number of the terrorist attacks of the last few years have been conducted by Muslims, Muslims have also been over-represented as victims of terrorism.

It is obviously possible for Islamist extremists to come to power in a Muslim country, and a situation where this power is even more unchecked than in Iran is no impossibility. Towards the end of 2006, for instance, it did not seem unlikely that radical Islamist forces would take control of the entirety of Somalia. As the online version of this book is edited this possibility still exists.

If radical Islamists were to succeed in gaining power in Somalia, it would be no surprise if these Somali islamists gave refugee to terrorists. A government based on their political platform would have been likely to be brutal and totalitarian enough to be called fascist, at least if you keep to a broad understanding of the word. But even a pseudofascist Somalia harbouring terrorists would not pose a threat of significance for the United States or for European countries. Such a country would be no worse to us than many other authoritarian regimes around Africa.

Unlike pre-WWII Germany, Somalia is not one of the leading industrial powers of the world.

Then what about Europe? There is little doubt that important battles on the future of Islam will take place here, as the researcher and analyst Gilles Kepel points out in his excellent book “The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West“. There is also little doubt that young and radicalised Muslims pose a potential threat, or that a growing group of people that are often treated as second-class citizens can be a cause for grave political turmoil.

But even when attracted to murderous terrorist groups, the kids of the Fallujah-sur-Seines will have little chance at destroying the democratic fabric of Europe.

In addition to worrying about Islamofascism, Santorum and the rest of us should worry about a more distinctly European fascism, which  increasingly makes its presence known in a number of countries. Groups on the so-called far right use the media’s somewhat one-eyed focus to their advantage, and they are gaining a momentum. The spokesmen and -women of fascism are listened to, and referred to as wise and brave people speaking out against the alleged foreign occupation of Europe.

These modern-day fascists dress in various robes. Some of them call themselves liberals, some of them refer to themselves as conservatives.

Most modern-day fascists, though not all of them, will deny being so, and will instead claim that they are fighting against fascism.

This is the demon Santorum is feeding when he portrays Islamic fascists as the great threat of our times, but while the monster doubtlessly will accept this claim, it will refuse to dine on the Republican senator’s wiser words. For them the enemy is not simply a group of political extremists, it is Islam itself, or even immigrants as such. These are the invaders, and those who do not oppose immigration are quite simply traitors.

Basil Harrington, who belongs to a group of self-declared American conservatives who in 2007 were threathening not to vote for Santorum’s party puts it this way:

Failure to address this invasion not only is a dereliction of duty, but it is a form of treason. And many of the presidential candidates are guilty of treason: Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Sam Brownback, Tommy Thompson, Mike Huckabee – and let’s not forget Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. Traitors, every last one of them.

Harrington demands that all Muslims should be deported from the West, and that all immigration from «the third world» should be ended. In another article he expresses his support of three specific political parties in Europe, noting that they should be seen as “models” for the Republicans: the British National Party, the French Front National and the Flemish (Belgian) Vlaams Belang.

«Unlike the phony neocon GOP in the U.S, these parties are conservative in the true sense», Harrington notes, «they want to conserve Western man and his ancestral traditions».

The subject of this book is an ideological trend found within these and allied European political parties, a modern-day variant of fascism.

Although not always representative of the party as a whole, this ideological thinking is found in anti-immigrationist parties throughout Western Europe and in several countries in the former Eastern bloc.

These ideas can best be described as Eurofascism, and they even appeal to people who are not fascists at all. You will find misguided conservatives and confused liberals joining forces with the descendants of brownshirts, and you will find brownshirts wearing the suit and tie of a businessman.

There are those who will criticise this book for even mentioning the word «fascism» in a European context, because – as Noel Ignatin once wrote – «where is the measure taken by the party in power that is not branded as fascist? Welfare cutbacks, legislation to abolish compulsory union membership, the passage of a bill curtailing, the legal right of dissidents to organize, efforts to ferret out and suppress those responsible for the bombing of public buildings in the center of large cities, the establishment of a professional army, moves to coordinate autonomous local police departments – all these measures and others which represent the ordinary functioning of government in a society dominated by bourgeois social relations are described as “fascist,” or at the very least as steps toward fascism, by many left-wing organizations».

Some will understand anyone confronting European fascism as part of their own construction, an axis of evil not including Iraq, Iran and North Korea, but rather leftist media, Marxist scholars, «political correctness», «the established parties», multiculturalism, Muslim immigrants in general and Islamic radicalism in particular.

There is little doubt that «fascism» is a political label that has been misused; perhaps even as often as «democracy». And yet, it is both necessary and revealing to study the past of a number of the anti-immigrationist parties winning forth throughout Europe these days.

The past reveals obvious ties – ideological, historical and individual – between earlier fascist parties and today’s Eurofascists. In some cases, there are even ties going back to Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP itself.

This sounds almost unimaginable. However, I believe that his book will clearly demonstrate the ties between a number of populist far right movements and anti-democratic, anti-Semitic and anti-liberal (in both the American and the European sense of the word) madness.

There are reasons to take the Eurofascist threat seriously. Firstly, many of the smaller groups that exist in the wake of the neo-fascist wave in modern-day Europe are perfectly capable of both violence and terrorism.

It might not get the same attention as Islamist terrorism, but the terror of the socalled far right is already killing people.

In August 2006, for example, a bomb blast killed eleven people at a multi-ethnic market in Moscow. Two young Russians were arrested, and admitted to targeting the market because of its largely Asian workforce.

“The explosion at Cherkizovo is the start of a campaign of street terrorism”, Dmitry Demushkin of the group Slavjanskiy Sojuz (Slavic Union) told the newspaper Kommersant. There are many other examples of planned or perpertrated violent attacks and terrorism, some of which I will discuss in «White Terror», a later chapter of the book.

A second, and more important, reason to be worried is the increased political importance of neo-fascist political parties. In Flanders, Vlaams Belang have gained a quarter of the votes. In France, Front National’s Jean Marie Le-Pen qualified for the second round in presidential elections, and will try doing that again. In Bulgaria, Volen Siderov of Ataka also qualified for the presidential election runoffs. Both the British BNP and the German NPD are gaining support.

Some of these parties are decidely more mainstream than others, and few of them are as obviously and openly fascist as for instance Imperium Europa or the Polish Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski.

In spite of having had limited success in their direct grasp for power, several of the above parties have had some political success. Because of this, they have managed to change European politics in a more intolerant and more xenophobic direction. That xenophobia even targets other Europeans, like the Bulgarian and Romanian workers that are wanted as cheap labour in their homecountries, but not as a new face in the apartment building around the corner in Luton.

In predominantly Muslim countries, Islamofascism is definitely capable of creating mayhem and might potentially topple governments. While only ripples are likely to be felt in Europe, even the ripples of the large-scale political violence of today’s Iraq can be very bloody.

Eurofascism is different. The chapter «Eurofascism in Power» details some actual political steps taken by Eurofascists who have been in a political position to do so. Given the right political, social and economical conditions Eurofascism might change Europe fundamentally.

Footnotes:

* This British fascist anthem closely resembles the Horst-Wessel-Lied of Hitler’s Nazi party NSDAP, and was written on the same tune. The tune was also used by the Spanish Falange movement and by the Milice Francaise.

** While I will occasionally use the term «far right» or «extreme right» in this book, it is not entirely correct. Historically, fascism has been anything but market liberalist, and some of the political parties I have identified as Eurofascist have a decidedly socialist approach to the economy.