Sep30

Looking in the rear view mirror: the conflicts of the 1970s seen from the perspective of 2017

Posted on by
Standard
Looking in the rear view mirror: the conflicts of the 1970s seen from the perspective of 2017

The two dynamics I want to focus on today are the questions, first, of whether the National Front was in fact a fascist party, and second, whether it was undermined by anti-fascist opposition. Both of these questions require, I believe, more nuanced answers than might have been sufficient, say, ten or even five years ago.

During the recent French presidential elections, Douglas Murray, a centre-right author whose books warns of the danger posed to Europe by Muslim immigration, complained in the Spectator of the tendency of Le Pen and Trump’s critics to describe people holding many varieties of right-wing positions as far right whether they were in fact anti-Islamic, anti-EU, or those he termed ‘actual fascists and Nazis’. Murray suggested that the term far-right had become incoherent. He focussed in particular on the tendency of critics to say that because the Front National had been founded by a generation that included fascists therefore it was by definition always a fascist party. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘we allow movement on the political left, surely we must allow it on the political right?’

Indeed, looking at the far right today what is striking is its ideological mobility. You can find examples of post-9/11 parties with no discernible debt to fascism, there are also mimetic fascist organisations which insist on copying even the images of the 1930s. Some are becoming more extreme, others (this is a relative term) more moderate.

When I began writing about fascism, journalists and to a lesser extent academics used the term ‘far-right’ principally to refer to what you might term ‘Euro-fascist’ parties, of which the paradigm cases were the FN in France and the MSI in Italy. The latter emerged from the Italian Social Republic (RSI) founded by Mussolini in 1943. The party’s first three leaders all served under Mussolini. From the early 1990s, however, the MSI’s new leader Gianfranco Fini excluded its most aggressive fascists. The party was renamed the National Alliance and in 1994 it entered government as a junior party in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition. Here was a shocking moment, a minority-fascist government for the first time in Europe since 1945. Yet Berlusconi’s government is not remembered today for prison camps but for the corruption of Berlusconi himself. The AN participated in two Berlusconi governments, losing votes to his party. The AN suffered electoral annihilation in 2014, and was dissolved.

Not all far right parties turn in the direction of conservatism. But some do. Of the three parties which came together to form the National Front in 1967 the largest the British National Party (not to be confused with the more recent party of the same name) was originally a neo-Nazi party of Hitler revivalists, including in its membership the widow of arch anti-semite Arnold Leese. The BNP had, however, recently been considering a turn towards electoralism, justified by the 9 percent of the vote the party won at Southall in the 1964 general election. It was this success which drove the merger talks which led to the NF.

One way of thinking about the Front might therefore be as a modernisation project akin to recent Euro-fascism, that is, as a party which was moving in the direction of electoralism, albeit slowly. How far was this transformation complete by, say, 1978?

The classic analysis of the Front’s ideology is Stan Taylor’s book, The National Front in English Politics. Taylor argues that outrider parties distinguish between their esoteric and exoteric ideologies. The exoteric is the public face, the message you might put in a leaflet or a public broadcast, to win new converts. The esoteric is the insider ideology, deployed only with trusted members. This distinction points towards a dynamic in which the NF’s leaders felt obliged to camouflage their message. Even in internal publications, there was a pressure against speaking openly. Through the 1970s, the leader of the National Front John Tyndall was under attack from two sources – his rivals within the NF who in 1974-5 were even briefly able to topple him – and from external critics. His magazine Spearhead was obtained by opponents who did not hesitate to publish extracts from it. Even in Spearhead, Tyndall had good reasons for being less than candid.

Before Tyndall joined the National Front, Spearhead featured openly neo-Nazi messages, there were cartoons of the right’s Jewish opponents, and demands to make every man ‘Jew-wise’ and Britain ‘Jew-clean’. There were repeated Germanisms: Britain was urged to become a ‘volks-gemeinschaft of the Anglo-Saxons – within an Anglo-Saxon Reich’. Spearhead ran advertisements for Hitler portraits and swastika badges. Whole articles were composed simply of long quotes from Mein Kampf. After 1967 and the Front’s formation, Spearhead’s racism remained express. But its fascism became muted.

Issue 100 of Spearhead contained a long article defending Tyndall from accusations that he was a Hitler supporter. This allegation was characterised as ‘the lowest depths of gutter journalism’ and Tyndall was said to be ‘critical of certain of Hitler’s policies, particularly his foreign policy.’ No detail of his supposed criticisms was given.

A follow-up article in October 1978 seemed to go further. Here, Tyndall identified the NF with Hitler’s economic and social policies and with territorial expansion. Unlike in Germany, he insisted, the NF could achieve the same goals peacefully, without needing dictatorship or racial war. Britain could rebuild her African empire by negotiation.

Spearhead told the NF’s members to modernise. Yet this modernisation was posed as a question of presentation rather than belief. In a ‘Message from the Chairman of the National Front’, in issue 94, for example, Tyndall warned the Front’s members against ‘surround[ing] themselves with obscurantist regalia, tap[ping] the sides of their armchairs to martial music and defer[ring] to political leaders of a bygone age.’ In the place of such old-style politics, members were invited to engage in ‘practical, business-like political activity’ while ‘not sacrificing the strength of their inner convictions.’ The Front’s ‘convictions’, the Chairman seemed to accept, were the same as they had always been.

Turning now to the effects of anti-fascism: this August, at Charlottesville, American anti-fascists were confronted with the spectre of between 500 and 1000 alt-rightists, chanting Heil Trump and ‘Jews will not replace us’. For the first time in the recent history of the US the right had control over the streets, significantly outnumbering its opponents. The clashes between the right and its opponents culminated in the attack by James Fields Jr., of American Vanguard, who drove his car into anti-fascist protesters, killing Heather Heyer. Asked about the events, President Trump declined to criticise the white supremacists, saying there was ‘blame on both sides’. In the days that followed Trump was criticised by Republicans and, in an attempt to deflect the criticisms, dismissed his Chief Strategist Steve Bannon the man who embodied the link between Trump and the alt-right. If you were to stop the clock at, say, the end of August 2017 then the judgment would be that the US far-right had overreached itself at Charlottesvile, giving the mainstream right no option but to break all ties with it. Not for the first time in the history of the conflict between fascists and anti-fascists, the left were a minority but by exposing the violence of the fascists succeeded in driving a wedge between the mainstream and the extreme right.

Charlottesville reminds us that the physical battle between left and right and the political battle for the interpretations of the clashes are capable of different outcomes. This insight helps to make sense of the confrontations in Britain in the 1970s. One is the Battle of Red Lion Square on 15 June 1974 when a National Front march to Conway Hall was met with counter-demonstrations and fighting between police and anti-fascists resulting in the death of one protester Kevin Gateley.

There was a public inquiry into the events at Red Lion Square and the NF’s Martin Webster was cross-examined by Stephen Sedley on behalf of the National Union of Students. Under questioning, Webster admitted that he and John Tyndall had a history of anti-Semitism. He recalled the chants used by the Front, ‘The Reds, the Reds, we’ve got to get rid of the Reds,’ and admitted that Front expected their opponents to respond angrily to them. He was asked to describe the Front’s preferred banner poles and accepted Sedley’s description of them as wooden flag poles with pointed aluminium tops (i.e. as weapons).

However Lord Scarman’s conclusions gave to succour to fascists, absolving both the police and the NF of any contribution to his death and concluding that ‘those who started the riot’ [i.e. the IMG] ‘carry a measure of moral responsibility for his death’. This also appears to have been the popular understanding of the events: the NF had accepted police instructions and were standing still even as the IMG and the police fought.

There are also times when the right used the possibility of conflict to demand greater activity from its own supporters. In the archives there is a 1974 circular from the Front’s Birmingham branch. It began with what sounded like a note of complaint, ‘It is doubtful if many members are aware of the intense hostility which our campaign in Birmingham has engendered.’ From there, the tone shifted rapidly to crowing, ‘On Thursday … [the] I[nternational] S[socialists] and I[nternational] M[arxist] G[roup] failed dismally to break up a public meeting in Handsworth … After the left-wing trash was thoroughly trounced by our stewards … we enjoyed a most stimulating meeting.’ The conclusion shifted again to warning, ‘We have received information that another public meeting, to be held on Tuesday 8 October at 8pm, is most certainly going to be subjected to the same treatment by the opposition who are determined to try and “Smash the National Front in Birmingham” … All activists are urged in the strongest possible terms to attend.’

For the left, the most straight-forward examples of victory have come when anti-fascist majorities have been able to take and hold the streets, driving away fascist minorities. The best example of this, in the 1970s, was the Battle of Lewisham in August 1977 when some eight hundred supporters of the National Front attempted to hold an anti-mugging march through Lewisham, but were met by groups of anti-fascists who fought them at their assembly point at Clifton Rise, threw rocks, wood and bricks at their opponents and repeatedly charged the National Front. When the remnants of the Front eventually reached central Lewisham they found it occupied by larger numbers of anti-fascists and were led away by the police, abandoning the streets to the left.

While the Anti-Nazi League presented itself as the party of street resistance to fascism, Lewisham preceded the League’s formation. Indeed the reason the League was formed was that in the immediate aftermath of the events at Lewisham, the 1970s left received almost as much press hostility as today’s right did after Charlottesville.

The Sunday People’s headline was, ‘Bobbies pay the price of freedom’. A leader in The Times blamed the Socialist Workers’ Party, ‘whose members and adherents, some of them armed with vicious weapons, came prepared to fight.’ The Daily Mail used a front-page picture of a policeman holding a studded club and a knife, weapons supposedly found at Lewisham, and beside him was the headline, ‘After the Battle of Lewisham, a question of vital importance, now who will defend him?’ While the usual approach is to see the League as being launched on a high – in the aftermath of a physical victory – it was in reality a defensive manoeuvre, an attempt to bring together all those who were glad to see the Front’s defeat (i.e. to broaden the left and neutralise the political attacks), and to move the discussion on from the press attacks.

So while Lewisham could have weakened the left, the press hostility was neutralised by the formation of the ANL, which seemed to mark a compromise between moderate and militant anti-fascism. The right had to face both the legacy of physical defeat and a popular perception that, in the words of the Front’s John Bean, ‘the NF had marched through an immigrant area deliberately to stir up trouble’. Both sides faced hostile public scrutiny. Unlike the left, the NF failed to evolve to meet it.

Joe Pearce was sixteen at the time of Lewisham. A recent recruit to the NF, his recollection was of feelings of exhilaration in the aftermath of the fighting, mixed with pride in that he had been physically tested but not afraid. A month later, Pearce would bring out the first edition of an NF youth paper, Bulldog. Yet even in Pearce’s upbeat memories, there is a passing acknowledgment of the Front’s future difficulties. He notes that prior to Lewisham, the NF had been capable of pulling together crowds of several thousand supporters. The crowd at Lewisham was younger and smaller. ‘In the future,’ he writes, ‘the older, respectable NF supporters, including the old soldiers, would stay away.’

Martin Webster tried to explain Lewisham to readers of Spearhead. ‘I cannot discuss these matters as Court cases are pending,’ Webster wrote, ‘But it is obvious that the Police were used by the Political Authorities of the State to suppress the right of National Front members to counter-demonstrate.’ He hinted without conviction at the possibility of using overwhelming violence to defeat the Front’s opponents.

Some three-quarters of Webster’s article was given over not to the events at Lewisham or his plans for what would follow but a retrospective justification for calling the march. ‘The Activists’ he wrote, [i.e. the members of the Front who planned the event] ‘felt that as, over years, the Police had always allowed SWP/IS embers, International Marxists and Reds of various other stripes to “militantly demonstrate” against [the Front’s] marches … the Police would give equal counter-demonstration rights to the National Front.’ Incoherent and inadequate, this was Webster best answer to Bean’s criticism that by marching several hundred NF supporters into a black district, the NF had ceded the morality of self-defence, handing the political victory to their opponents.

Through 1978 and early 1979, the balance between left and right shifted in the left’s favour. Under the pressure of repeated opposition, the tone of NF speeches changed from bravado to weary frustration. Here is Martin Webster, again, speaking at a school in Leeds in April 1978 after protests, ‘We have been put on the defensive today by raucous beer can throwing stinking animals. They are in fact an insult to the animal kingdom. Coming to this meeting we had to go through spit, shouts of abuse, kicks, obscenities and filth … They are deluging the public with the impression that the National Front is a jack booted short-moustached organisation.’

By the time of the events at Southall, the thousands who had marched with the Front after Red Lion Square and the hundreds at Lewisham had reduced in number to a single coach carrying just 20 NF supporters to an election meeting. The anti-fascists had also grown in number, with around ten thousand people – the large majority of them from Southall’s Sikh population – coming onto the streets in order to oppose the Front. In order to keep a balance between the two sides a total of 2875 police officers (including 94 on horseback) were required.

It is worth remembering that this very area of West London had been the justification for the right’s previous electoralism. In fifteen years, Southall had moved from being a place of opportunity for the right to somewhere it could no longer organise.

Southall has lived longest in the memory of all the confrontations of the 1970s. Some of this may be down to the intense local support that anti-fascists were able to generate for their mobilisation. Unlike, Red Lion Square Southall was the centre of a politicised black community. After his death, Peach’s body was left in a Southall cinema were it received thousands of visitors. Fifteen thousand people, including former Cabinet Minister Tony Benn, joined his funeral procession. Peach continues to be memorialised to this day, in an annual award presented by the National Union of Teachers and in the name of an Ealing school.

Another reason for Southall’s legacy is that after Blair Peach’s death, unlike the killing of Kevin Gateley, there was a campaign to bring Peach’s killer to justice. While the inquest verdict was death by misadventure, which seemed to exculpate the police from any responsibility, this was an outcome which has failed to stick in collective memory. The police had investigated the killing and identified Blair Peach’s murder; the coroner held back their report and refused to disclose it to the inquest jury.

Re-reading the fascists, it is striking how rarely they describe, even in later memoirs, being cowed or broken by physical confrontation. Of course, the people who publish their memoirs are the movement’s former leaders and they have no reason to give retrospective validation to their former opponents. That said, there are other points at which the fascists seem to acknowledge that their opponents had the better of them.

One is in terms of the Holocaust and its legacy.

John Bean was active on the far right for 25 years between 1952 and 1977 and latterly the Deputy Chair of the Front’s Executive Directorate. Near the end of his memoir and looking back on his political career, he recalled one incident with real regret: campaigning with other fascists in 1961 for the release of Adolf Eichmann. By this point retired from the struggle, Bean admitted that of course Hitler had practised genocide and he spoke of his private ‘shame’: a humiliation which, he admitted, had caused him a recurring nightmare in which he seemed to see the emaciated victims of the Holocaust. He should never have taken part in this action and he criticised himself for having allowed the ‘emotion of a bad taste, sickening, sixth form prank … to dominate the intellect.’

The intriguing word here in Bean’s account is ‘shame’.

The one action which anti-fascists took in the 1970s which seems to have generated a similar reaction was to reproduce photographs of Front Chairman John Tyndall from his Greater Britain Movement days in the early 1960s and in Nazi-style uniforms. The use of this image was a repeated complaint of the right. As early as June 1974, Spearhead complained about the ‘printing and distribution of the criminally libellous “smear” leaflets attacking the National Front which appeared in their hundreds of thousands during the last General Election in constituencies where the NF had candidates,’ and warning that if the police failed to prosecute the individuals responsible for them ‘the National Front will make such arrangements as circumstances indicate are necessary to secure its survival in what will have proved to be an unfree, undemocratic, unfair and violent society provided over by cowardly  or corrupt men.’ If the threat seems hollow, the tone of hurt and anger is unmistakeable.

An anonymous Front defector explained to the East End local journalists in August 1977 that the first time she had questioned consider her membership was ‘when she saw a picture of the NF’s leader John Tyndall wearing jackboots and sporting a swastika. “I won’t stand for any of this ‘Zieg Heil’ nonsense,” she said.’

During the Front’s 1979-1980 faction fight the vulnerability of Tyndall and his ally Martin Webster was a theme of his inner-party critics. They argued that Tyndall and Webster ‘play[ed] the fool in the days when they should have been taking their British nationalist politics seriously – and neither they, nor anyone else for that matter, can sue matter sue anyone or any institution if what is said or written is literally true’.

The problem with the accusation of Nazism was not that it challenged the NF’s patriotism but that it associated the Front with the Holocaust and with a genocide that even the fascists had to admit (albeit only to themselves) was unjustifiable.

It is possible to imagine a far-right party whose members and voters are proud and loyal fascists (think of the Italian fascists in the early 1920s). To say to members of such a group. ‘But you are all fascists,’ would be a pointless tactic. Of course we are, they would say. That’s how we see ourselves. It is also possible to conceive of a far-right party whose members all see themselves as non- or anti-fascist (think a pub of EDL members singing the Dam Busters theme tune). To say to members of such a group ‘But you are all fascists,’ would be equally pointless. They would laugh off the accusation.

The Front was at a particular stage in the history of the post-war right, when (to a much greater extent than today) its most violent militants were unable to think of any coherent basis for a far-right party except in the emulation of the past.

The Front’s members were neither secure in their fascism, nor were they beyond it. They behaved as if it was a private humiliation.

It was their incomplete disavowal of fascism, their shame, which rendered the Front’s supporters vulnerable to their opponent’s reproduction of Tyndall’s photograph and the accusation which lay behind it that the NF were still a party of Nazis.

Judging by what can be found in the memoirs of the Front’s former supporters, it seems that this repeated attack on the NF at its weak point did more to damage its member’s morale than anything else.

The challenge for anti-fascists since has been to find a tactic that might be equally successful in our own – very different – times.

Advertisements
Aug26

Links, round-up

Posted on by
Standard

Back in May, I gave a talk at a London RS21 meeting with Jairus Banaji on the far-right. There’s a video of that meeting at that meeting here  and the text of the talk is on the Socialist Worker (US) site. I spoke to Quartz magazine post-Charlottesville, and some of my comments made it into the article here.

The big news for lawyers in the UK over the next few years will be the shift to an online court system. I’ve posted some early comments about it here, and was interviewed as part of a BBC programme about online courts here.

Aug26

Fascism and the far right; twenty years on

Posted on by
Standard

“Saranson [had] thin flaxen hair … His eyes were sparks at the bottom of two dark wells”

Let me start with the origins of my book Fascism: Theory and Practice. I will then set out – using a deliberately old-fashioned, Marxist term – what my perspective would be if I was to think today about the same questions now.

When I wrote the book, I had gone straight from undergraduate work to a PhD and the book originated as a literature review to accompany a project of mapping out the relationship between fascism and anti-fascism in Britain in the three key periods of 1936-9, 1941-1951 and 1972-1979.

My PhD looked, in a very British History purely empirical fashion, at the second of these periods. I later published a further monograph looking at the 1970s. Whatever the merits or otherwise of my two books on the 1940s and 1970s, they were animated by a key insight, namely that the right has always had to deal with the problem of hostility from the left and that its strategies for dealing with opposition have at certain key moments been central to what the right has been.

Whether that’s Mosley’s turn to National Socialism in 1934, or his Hegelianism in the 1940s and 1950s or the BNP’s electoral strategy in the 1990s – every one of these moves, it can sensibly be argued, did not rise “from within” but principally to address the problems caused by determined opposition.

Similar thinking, of course, informs my book on fascism. Although the focus there is not on British but on generic (Italian, German and post-war) fascism.

A further idea in the book was that if war or genocide were ever to return to the most wealthiest countries of the world this could come about only through fascism. Here, I want to explore today some of the unspoken assumptions that underpinned this belief. One was an unspoken idea that countries such as the United States or Britain had made a long-term shift towards both political and social democracy. For someone who grew up, as I did, in the 1970s it was easy to tell yourself that a society which prioritised health care, pensions, etc, would never except in the very most extreme circumstances adopt a policy of inter-power war or domestic genocide. Of course, even I was a younger I was well aware that there were still wars, but these were exported to what we used to call the Third World.

That could change, I assumed, but only as a result of the emergence of political forces which called publicly for return to genocide and war. And the only political movement which had advocated these as options at any time since 1914 were fascists.

Another idea which lay behind the book was that there were structural limits to the number of political forms which were capable of becoming majority movements. In other words, capitalism gave rise to conservatism, socialism, liberalism, communism and fascism. And there the list ended.

Fascism was a recurring presence in the 1970s, in memory of the 1920s and 1930s when it had taken the feelings of bewilderment and alienation that arose in an epoch of reformist modernisation, and the perceived threat of the far-left, and sought to build against them both a counter-revolutionary alternative. But because the post-war period was an epoch of polarised near-majorities, there was a limited space for ideological diversity.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was common for commentators to use the term “far right” as a short-hand for mimetic fascist parties formed in conscious emulation of the 1930s. In my book, I am very critical of that language.

One possibility I excluded, however, was a genuine “far right” – i.e. a series of parties, in several countries, working in more or less alliance, who were permanently at ease in a political space which was different both from traditional conservatism and fascism. A party like UKIP, in Britain. Or the victory of Donald Trump.

When I wrote Fascism: Theory and Practice I was interested in how fascist parties had been radicalised to the right. This was a phenomenon which had no other sustained counterpart at any time since the adoption of democracy. We are more than familiar with the process by which legality had tamed outsider movements of the left. IE presented with a dominant politics which was close enough to their own, the socialists had reached a rapprochement existing capitalist elites. And in the 1960s and 1970s something similar happened to the European Communist Parties, most coherently in Italy. And of course there have been several outsider movements of the right which crashed and burned and left no legacy.

Through the early post-war years fascism, irrespective of its different goals and origins, maintained a fascination partly because it had not gone through a similar process of self-domestication but had in fact radicalised in office.

The reasons for fascism’s radicalisation were in part internal, there was a tension between fascism’s popular base and its reactionary politics and in order to resolve this tension fascism had to promise ever more things to its supporters, i.e. because it couldn’t offer them social utopia it had to give them genocide and war. This was the core argument of Fascism: Theory and Practice, that a contradictory political formation might in fact draw energy precisely from its unsustainable, broken nature.

This dynamic was also in part external (and in my book I underestimate the way in which fascism was the product of relationships between rival international parties), i.e. that there was an epoch of emulation and competition in which Hitler copied Mussolini’s march on Rome, his influence over other right-wing states in Austria and Spain, etc. He took Mussolini’s victories, drew on, and overreached them.

Fascism’s energy is why its definition of fascism mattered – because if fascism could be identified, the threat of war and genocide would be averted.

Where I think the anti-fascism I argued in the 1990s was principally wrong is that I failed to see that the historical context had changed. While I borrowed from the left of which I was part the phrase that the 1990s was like the 1930s in a slow motion, there was no analysis behind that phrase, no real sense that for twenty years we had been living in a world characterised not by reforms but by their opposite.

If I was going to begin defining fascism today my starting point would be this: that the age of social reform is over. Whether it ended in 1973 (Chile) or 1979 or 1980, it has been over for an entire historical epoch.

In addition, outside an epoch of social reform, there is no structural limit to the forms of politics which are capable of winning majorities

In an age of social reform, it was possible for reformist parties to bind workers to them by passing laws to increase trade union rights or build social housing, these benefitted specific voters, who would in turn vote for that party. There was a consensus that reforms were desirable and politics was in many countries a contest between two managerial parties who converged on the aim of politics and challenged each other in the realism of competence. This meant that many political systems were in essence two-party competitions between one main social democratic and a conservative party. These was a limited space at each fringe for fascists and Communists, and no-one else.

In an epoch where reforms are being destroyed, the dominant form of voting is negative, people vote against neo-liberal parties which destroy industry, against social democracy which no longer delivers, against incumbent parties. We are no longer in a moment where the forms of politics are limited to a few main options which are reproduced internationally. Instead political forms are splintering. Indeed new forms emerge, of course, on the left as well as on the right.

In addition, the stigma against war and genocide has been radically diminished. We have had wars, Vietnam, Iraq, the constant ongoing war since 9/11. Meanwhile, although no developed country is formally at war some live under emergency regimes in response to the threat of terrorism and in others the threat of Islamism is used to justify the extension of the authoritarian state e.g. deportation regimes that would normally be sustainable only in wartime.

The monopoly of military technology by 5-6 of the richest states means that their inhabitants are never casualties of war, never saw death, and become glib about the consequence of war returning even between major states.

For all these reasons, we are seeing increasing numbers of states – not just in the periphery but also in the global core – whose political instincts are military and authoritarian. Attacks on migrants, refugees, travel bans are the new normal.

The utility of the equation “fascism = war and genocide” was that it was reversible (i.e. only fascism could returns us to an age of horrors). Outside an epoch of social reform, the equation has less use. War may come from other sources.

Fascism was only ever one form of mass, reactionary politics. And there is no particular reason why the reactionary mass movements of the future might not share some but not all of fascism’s external forms.

Moreover, because fascism’s name still has an overwhelming stigma, a future “fascism” would be far more effective if it emerged on a seemingly brand new basis, with the minimum copying in relation to the past. In consequence, the post-war history of the far right is of a series of attempts to reproduce the dynamic of fascism without needing fascism’s surface forms.

Yet, precisely because the right feels that it has escaped the past and is not vulnerable to the criticism “but you are just fascists”, you are starting to see a re-convergence between various aspects of interwar fascism and today’s non-fascist right.

Unlike the short twentieth century when the structure of the political system itself put real limits on what forms of politics were achievable, the structural limits of the present against authoritarianism are much less than they were.

The leading figures of the far right are well aware that fascism retains a considerable historical stigma and the further they distance themselves from fascism the more successful they are likely to be. Yet at the same time, they are aware that fascism was a complex and sophisticated reaction to historical opportunities. And that in so far as they want to emulate the rapid, dramatic changes that fascism once enacted, they have a motive for reassembling parts of fascist organisation and ideology.

So we see a return to executive rather than parliamentary rule, to anti-semitism, not from mere nostalgia or mimicry but because these behaviours help the non-fascist right achieve goals which are harder to win if the entire past has to be rejected.

The relationship of the non-fascist authoritarian right to inter-war fascism is therefore always of a dual character, with elements of both disavowal and re-adoption and indeed a constant shuffling between rejection and return.

The theory I am aiming towards is an “anti-fascist” theory of the far-right but I mean by that something very specific.

In the 1970s it was possible to shame a member of the National Front by calling them a fascist, by saying that they were the slaves of a leadership which was both indebted to its past and embarrassed by it. The same approach still worked, to some extent, as recently as the early 2000s. The extent of the contemporary far-right’s distancing from fascism means that this approach has lost its edge.

What is needed is a theoretical counterpart to the activist realisation that the crimes of Steve Bannon or Marine Le Pen are not the things that a different generation did before them, but what they will do in future, if only we let them.

Jun10

The leader whose time has come

Posted on by
Standard

… The closer Brexit comes to reality, the more that centrist voters have rebelled against the idea that last year’s 52-48 majority for exit justifies a complete break from Europe and its model of social liberalism.

Brexit is *not* the principal reason for Corbyn’s success. He has done well because of a manifesto which promised redistribution and renationalisation, and because of a turnout by young voters engaged by Corbyn’s record and his relaxed, personal style.

But it has helped to neutralise the attacks against him. Brexit’s irrationality, its unpopularity with young voters, and its premise that what the country needs is to restrict the migration of foreigners: these have helped Corbyn – in contrast to the autocratic-seeming Theresa May – to look like the leader whose time has come…

Me for Africa is a Country

Dec5

After fascism, what?

Posted on by
Standard
After fascism, what?

The question of whether Donald’s Trump victory marks a triumph for fascism in the US depends, as always, on which definition of fascism you use.

For most of the past fifty years, the principal way in which theorists of fascism have defined it is by drawing up a list of surface phenomena which were shared by the Italian and German fascisms of the 1920s and 1930s: a belief in a strong party, a style of authoritarian leadership, an ideology which positioned itself as neither right nor left, racism, a belief in a new fascist man, etc.

Under the list method, Trump or Trumpism looks more unlike than like fascism: there isn’t a Trump “party”, Trump doesn’t demand the same sort of loyalty that Hitler or Mussolini expected, he is not offering a universal alternative to liberalism, socialism, etc.

Within liberal definitions of fascism, political scientists have long been aware that there is a problem. Around Italian and German fascism there were a series of other fascist parties some of which were more similar than not to them (eg the British Union of Fascists) some of which shared some but not all of these external forms (eg Francoism). How much would a “mimetic” (i.e. copying) semi-fascist movement need to share with fascism in order to qualify as fascist? There is no agreed answer.

The trend in liberal scholarship has been to replace the list method with an emphasis on one single factor which is said to define the essence of fascism, namely an ideology of national rebirth (“palingenesis”). The problem, as I argued in my book Fascism: Theory and Practice twenty years ago is that even national rebirth turns out to be a slippery place from which to view and understand fascism.

Almost every centre or right-wing politician of the past 100 years has said that their election will result in an improvement of the nation and more than a few have promised its transformation on their watch.

Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” undoubtedly looks like a promise of national palingenesis, but Ronald Reagan used exactly the same slogan, as did Margaret Thatcher. Silvio Berlusconi’s “Forza Italia” was barely different.

Compare for example this speech from a British political leader in 1996:

“Just think of it – Britain, the skills superpower of the world. Why not? Why can’t we do it? Achievement, aspiration fulfilled for all our people. Because a great people equals a Great Britain…”

“This is our mission for Britain today. We knew we could do better. And we did. We knew we could be better, we the Labour Party. And we are. Britain, too, can do better. Britain can be better than this. A thousand days to prepare for a thousand years – not just turning a page in history but writing a new book, building the greatness of our nation through the greatness of its people.”

And this from Trump on the campaign trail:

“Our failed establishment has brought us nothing but poverty at home, and disaster overseas. We are tired of economic and foreign policies that have bled this country dry. It is time for real change that puts the people back in charge. This election will decide who runs this country: the Corrupt Political Class – or you, the American People. That’s the choice. She’s with them – I’m with you. This is our last chance.”

Trump’s has an urgency which Tony Blair’s speech lacks, Tony Blair’s conversely has an idea of the nation as an organic being with its own history of decline or advance which is in these respects closer to the way in which the politicians of the 1920s and 1930s thought.

In case anyone misunderstands me, I am not saying that Tony Blair was a fascist; I am saying only that we live in a political culture where politicians are competing for the right to govern nation states and in that context national palingenesis is not a rare and unusual message limited only to the fringes of the extreme right, actually it is a near universal message of politicians of the parliamentary centre and right.

In Fascism: Theory and Practice, I argued that fascism was best understood as a specific form of reactionary mass politics.

The least important part of this definition was the phrase “specific form,” which was a partial nod to the list-definitions I have referred to already.

More important was the notion of “reactionary mass politics”. Here I was saying that the goal which fascists set themselves was to abolish social democracy (note, not revolutionary socialism but social democracy) and that the means the fascists chose to do so was a popular mobilisation (i.e. an organisation of people, whether small owners or white-collar or unemployed workers) to destroy the buildings, organisations and people of the trade unions and the parliamentary left. The paradox or if you like the motor of fascism was precisely the mobilisation of a group of people (workers) against the very organisations which were conventionally assumed to represent them.

Looking at Trump through this model it is plain that Trump is not a fascist and in fact bears very few points of comparison with the politics of the 1930s.

He isn’t waging a war against conventional democracy and neither does he possess a private army to achieve this victory.

He does have a counter-revolutionary ambition, as (of all people) Nigel Farage rightly remarked as he stood waiting to ascend in Trump’s golden elevator, but the focus of Trump’s ambition is not against social democracy but against the social victories that have been made after 1945 and belong to a different epoch from it – reformist feminism, LGBT rights, today’s (minimal) toleration of migrants rights etc.

Nor does a consciousness of social democracy play any recognisable part in his philosophy.

He is socially illiberal, and the way he used rust-belt voters against the Democrats shares a certain resemblance with the way in which Hitler and Mussolini turned unemployed workers against the organised working class (with the important caveat that of the course the Democrats never had been a workers’ party in the way that the SPD, for example, still was in Germany prior to 1933). But Trump’s victory was a battle of votes, not guns. The Democratic Party is not about to be banned by law. The NAACP has not had its offices occupied by militia nor were its leading members killed before Trump had even been elected in a violent civil war.

The people who vote for Trump are, for the moment, just that: voters rather than political soldiers in training.

To my mind, the search for comparisons with the 1930s is a mistake. We do it, because in every political moment we take our images of evil from the experiences of the past.

Between 1945 and 1989, we lived in a world that was recognisably post-fascist. Politics was divided, in every country, between blocks of opinion that allied with either of the two main powers that did most to defeated Nazi Germany. You could be (in British terms) pale pink or deepest red, or on the other side of the political spectrum yellow or Royal Blue. The side you chose owed its politics to large blocks which had coalesced as far back as the 1940s.

Social liberalism, in so far as it retained a distinct project, gave itself the task of completing a liberal agenda still set by the events of 1945: such demands as refugee rights, prohibitions on torture, universal declarations against racism, all made sense because they were an attempt (admittedly through the state) to prohibit a return to 1933 for ever.

Conservatism was credible only if it nodded back to Churchill (and not to the appeasers).

Conversely, when ultra-right parties emerged they did so led and funded by people who had been participants in 1939-45, or defined themselves by that moment.

In Britain, the memory of anti-fascist resistance was weaker than in almost any other country in Western Europe, but even here it left behind a certain moral calculus which was well established on activists on the far-left and which went something like the following.

1. Fascism is different from any other political philosophy under capitalism era. 2. It is different because if it triumphs it would abolish not merely revolutionary socialism but parliamentary socialism and in fact democracy itself. 3. Fascism is in addition the only political force which has enacted genocide against a domestic racialised other (plenty of European parties enacted racial wars against people in other countries, what was different about fascism was that it constructed death camps at home). 4. Because of 2) and 3) fascism is a repugnant enemy of all social progress. 5. Therefore it is appropriate to conduct a war against fascism, to fight it with violence if need be because the alternative is that fascism will defeat – and perhaps kill – everyone on the soft and hard left.

This theory was summed up in the phrase “no platform”, where the important word was not the second: we should try to prevent fascists speaking. The important word was the first: if fascism was to be stopped, it had to be stopped everywhere. 

The problem with anti-fascism as an approach to politics is that Europe and the world ceased to be recognisably post-fascist at some point in our recent past. Either in 1989, where Communism vs anti-Communism ceased to be the main fault line in politics. Or on 9/11 when the right acquired a “big story” which was no longer about 1939-45 but Muslims. On in 2008 when a series of ostensibly liberal or social democratic governments wagered the future of the welfare state on protecting the banks.

However it has happened, we have acquired a new and successful far-right which isn’t constantly replaying in its mind the battles of 1933-45.

In British terms, we saw this shift with the decline of the British National Party and its replacement by the EDL and UKIP. To say to an activist from the BNP, “You are a Hitler supporter,” was to call their politics bogus, was to point out the flawed, apologetic nature of their party’s relationship to the past. Supporter of the EDL, however, a party whose members met in pubs and sang themselves the Dambuster theme tune had less difficulty laughing off the same insult. And to be an anti-fascist against UKIP is, once again, to look for a secret point of shame among people who don’t see themselves as Hitler’s descendants and find the comparison not upsetting but bemusing and laughable.

This process, whereby the far right slowly frees itself from its historic fidelity to the politics of the 1933 is much further gone in the United States where the most successful advocates of proto-fascism were radio celebrities (Father Coughlin) and not party-builders.

A problem with the “no platform” politics of the 1970s was the idea that under developed capitalism you could have liberal democracy or you could have fascism and there was no space for anything in between. What we find today, instead, is that increasing number of states combine the forms of democracy (i.e. periodic elections) with style of politically authoritarian and nationalist leaderships in which large parts of civil society serve not check the state, but (just as under any dictatorship) choose rather to serve it. In what meaningful sense could Russia be called a democracy, or Hungary? How much democracy is left in India? Who will win the next elections in Austria or Italy or France?

Trump represents a new kind of politics. One enabled by conventional right-wing Republicans (think of all the old-school plutocrats who had to rally behind him in order to sell his candidacy to a sceptical Republican electorate, 90% of which ended up voting for him) but a regime in which the most extreme figures have all the advantages (powers of patronage, the legitimacy of a mandate) over the old guard. He brings to the White House narcissism and paranoia. His programme is to use the state to smash the few welfare reforms which still protect the most vulnerable, while reducing taxes on the rich as close to zero as can be reached while still paying for an expanded army and police force. He will ally with every nationalistic, militaristic leader he can find whether actual fascist (Assad), of fascist origin (Le Pen) or on some other trajectory (Putin, Farage) and they, along with the likes of Steve Bannon and the alt-right, will be invigorated by him.

The movement against Trump needs to find its own language, to sound through the world as “They shall not pass” once did. But it must be slogans for our times not for the past.

Nov28

My student; the anti-Semite

Posted on by
Standard
Later today, Paul Nuttall is going to replace Nigel Farage as leader of the UK Independence Party. This will be a strange experience for me. You will see in the coverage of his past career that Nuttall was once, briefly, a history lecturer. Before that he was a student, and in 1999-2000, I taught Paul Nuttall for a year. A year was long enough to get a good sense of a man who is going to be part of our lives rather more in future.
Nuttall was then studying at Edge Hill College on a History BA. I taught in the history department, where I was responsible for various courses including a one-year course teaching the history of fascism in Italy and Germany, for which he signed up. Nuttall struck me as bright and cynical. He was 23 years old – as old as the graduate students we taught, not our undergraduates, almost all of whom were straight out of A-levels. He seemed to have a stronger personality than any of his peers. While most of the students knew only what it said in the various course books, he had read more widely, in books and on the internet. He didn’t express his views openly but from time to time you felt he was testing the water to see what he could get away with.
In early December 1999, Nuttall’s cohort were set a standard essay on the causes of the Holocaust. I forget the exact title, but the question was something like whether the Final Solution was principally caused by Hitler’s anti-Semitism or by other factors related to the German economy or state. To my surprise, Nuttall’s answer worked in two footnotes to different books by David Irving. I wasn’t expecting this, because Irving wasn’t on the course reading list: this was after his libel trial and historians regarded Irving as an unpleasant, racist crank who was beyond the pale.
Moreover the references did not engage with the subject that Nuttall had actually been set: it felt rather as if he had written them in to see whether he could shoe-horn these views into an academic context and “get away” with them.
One of the quotes (for an essay about the Holocaust…) was from a book David Irving had written about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The message of the other Irving quote was that that anti-Semitism had been popular in Weimar Germany: the quote exaggerated the extent of anti-semtiism and carried the implication that it had been popular because it was deserved.
The incident was one of the oddest and most unwanted experiences I’d had as a teacher. I had taught fascism courses in different institutions over the previous three years including to A-levels students at Tower Hamlets college. Those students were under enormous and sometime contradictory pressures from their family, the mosque and the big trends in global politics that were heading in the direction of 9/11. But nothing they had ever written compared to this. I had never seen a student argue anything that could even remotely be characterised as “the Jews deserved it”. While Nuttall’s piece as a whole did not go that far, that seemed to be the message of the quotation he had used
I met Nuttall to discuss what he had written and he gave a tearful denial, saying that his girlfriend had downloaded the references to Irving’s book from the internet, blaming her rather than his own judgment. He accepted that the words could be construed as having an unpleasant, even racist meaning. But he denied that this had been his intention. He seemed shocked to be challenged about anything – like smug, arrogant, people everywhere he was most comfortable in a small bubble where no-one could disagree with him.
Nov12

Peter Picton (1934-2016)

Posted on by
Standard
pete

 

My uncle Peter, who died on Thursday, was many things: an entertainer, a proud trade unionist, an author. As Pierre the Clown he was a fixture on children’s TV in the 1960s and 1970s. As the owner of the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car from the film, he performed in the 1980s and 1990s at hundreds perhaps thousands of Christmas events, weddings and local shows. He would drive Chitty through crowds in their thousands, waving back as the children in his audience waved at him. He became an honourary, working-class, Royal.

 

Pete never talked about his childhood. As he told it, his life’s story began in his teens when he went to stage school. In his holidays, he worked as a chef’s assistant. In time, he began a new career as the apprentice to Coco, the head clown at Bertram Mills circus. “Coco had a marvellous act, pies and custard, pasting up rolls of paper, rolling them up, rolling them down, so that the paste went everywhere. The humour,” he used to say. “It was all timing, you know.”

 

By 1954 Pete had adopted his stage name of Pierre the Clown. In 1956-7, weeks after the Soviet tanks had put down the workers’ uprising in Hungary, Pete was one of the first western acts to be allowed into Budapest. He worked there with another friend, an Italian clown called Cavalini, “Huge numbers came,” he said. “They love their circus in Eastern Europe, it was their main source of entertainment. For me, they were wonderful days, but the atmosphere was strained, you knew something was wrong.”

 

He had a favourite prop, a black Model T-Ford. Pierre would try to open one door but it wouldn’t and another swung open in its place. Then the doors would open, but they fell off. Miming between each setback incredulity, defeat, renewed hope, Peter attempted to drive the car from its back seat. The car would start before finally spilling him onto the floor.

 

The chef Robert Carrier worked with Pete, and sent him touring around schools talking about dental health. A special poster was commissioned, in typically sixties lurid blues, reds and yellows, “Pierre the Clown says End you meal with an apple. It’s nature’s toothbrush.” Pete was the clown handing John Lennon an apple at the opening of the Beatle’s Apple Boutique.

 

In 1967-8 Pete was now at the height of his celebrity. In 1967, by which time he was the father of a young son Jon, he released a pair of singles, Pierre the Clown in Nursery Rhyme Town and Pierre the Clown in Space Rhyme Town. They start with familiar rhymes, but the rhymes take detours. They become something new and wonderful and strange. He wrote The Gourmet’s Guide to Fish and Chips; and a children’s guide to Hastings.

 

He worked for the Rolling Stone on their circus tour. He was also at his most active within Equity, negotiating the clowns’ pay rates with the major circuses.

 

In 1968, Pete worked as a driver on the film ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’. At the end of the film the props were auctioned off and Pete was able to buy the working car complete with its Gen 11 numberplate. The car was to become the mainstay of Pete’s working life, and for the next forty years he performed at countless shows acting Pete’s own creation, a mixture of Dick van Dyke dashing inventor Caractacus Potts and Lionel Jeffries’ eccentric Granda Potts.

 

In the early 70s, Pete met Susie and they were to live together more 42 years, in Belgravia, then in Shipston and for thirty years in Stratford. They married in 1988.

 

In 2013, Susie and Pete sold Chitty. It was an inevitable and a right decision. Pete  suffered intense arthritis in his hands and knees and found the work hard. But he fought retirement for many years. Even without Chitty, he was still a local celebrity: he couldn’t go to the bank or a shop without meeting or making a friend.

 

Pete was one of those rare adults who believe in children, who are aware of the powerlessness that the young can feel. A stream of youngsters came to Susie and Pete’s house, were given presents of sweets, make-your-own models of Chitty or Smurf stickers. “Here’s something,” Pete would say and they would leave with a five or ten pound note. 

 

Pete was one of those big, bold people whose lives evade categories. Someone who hated racism and homophobia and who paid his union subs years into retirement. But the newspaper he read, even in hospital, was the Daily Mail.

 

I visited him two days before he died, his face covered in an oxygen mask. He could communicate only in sign language and whispers. But he wanted to know how I’d travelled there, how my children were. His face creased in a broad smile when he heard that they were acting and dancing. All of sudden he waved, he pointed. I was wearing trainers, bright red running shoes beneath my grey trousers, my grey top. He pointed to them and he laughed. “I like them,” my uncle the clown said. Even in hospital, Pete was still thinking of other people rather than himself. Fighting for his life, he cheered us up by making a joke.