En Passant

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton is Australia’s Donald Trump, I write in Independent Australia.

Pauline Hanson with Australia’s most well known Nazi.

As capitalism slides into deeper recession or depression, the ruling class may well need the fascists to smash the organised working class, which means smashing unions and the left, all the way from the revolutionary socialists to the Labor Party types. That is why the mainstream media don’t call out the wannabes Hitlers as the Nazis they really are.

The ruling class won’t crush right wing extremists because it thinks it may need these fascists and racists in the future to control a resurgent working class or to help them impose massive cuts on working class living standards. In the interim the racists and fascists help keep alive and reinforce the top down racism of Labor and Liberal governments and divide workers along race and other lines at the expense of uniting on class lines. We should have no illusions in governments and understand why they don’t smash right wing terrorists but rather turn a blind eye to them. It is up to ordinary workers, unionists, the left and others to build the mass campaign and movement needed to destroy the fascists and their useful idiot fellow travellers before they can become a mass movement themselves.

Just as the Reclaim White Australia racists and fascists plan to rally this Saturday and Sunday across the country, so we are building counter-protests to welcome and defend Muslims. I urge all anti-racists and anti-fascists to attend and spread a message of love against the purveyors of hate, and in doing that help to drive the fascists and their useful idiots back into their cesspits.

The possibility of a populist Hanson and a neo-Nazi right within Reclaim Australia finding common ground, as they appear to be doing, is frightening. It could herald the development of a proto-fascist organisation, based on the disaffected middle and lower classes and racist fear-mongering. We need to gather our forces and begin the fight against the racist Reclaim (White) Australia movement. It is better to remove the weeds before they destroy the garden than after they have. Apply the weedicide now, not when the weeds have overrun the garden and it is too late.

Operation Sovereign Borders stops innocent people who are fleeing war, murder and rape but Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison won’t stop fascists coming here. Says it all really.

At the end of May, the Front National results in the European elections sent a shock wave across France, John Mullen writes from Paris. Here we look at the causes of this disaster, and at what can be done

If the economy does decline where will this middle class anger then go? Without a left wing or socialist working class alternative it could go further and further to the right…The need right now is to build a socialist alternative.

Socialist Worker UK looks at how the growing threat of fascism across Europe can be challenged as Unite Against Fascism holds its annual conference in London