Ireland's OWN: History

 

December 2000 Fascism at the end of the Twentieth Century —by David Lethbridge* The resurgence of fascism in the last years of the twentieth century is a central factor in the balance of political forces operating in the contemporary world. There is no capitalist nation — especially in Europe or the Americas — that has not witnessed a significant rise in ultra-right organizing during the last ten years. With the collapse of the socialist republics in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1990s, members of fascist parties living in exile in Canada, the USA, and South America, began to return to their homelands. This was especially true of members of the notorious and bloodthirsty Romanian Iron Guard. During a 36 hour incident in 1941, the Iron Guard burned eight synagogues, took 400 Jews into the center of town and burned them alive, and hung a further 50 Jews on meat hooks and butchered them. One of the Guardists responsible for this massacre, Valerian Trifa, was invited by Richard Nixon to give the opening prayer at the US Senate convocation in 1955. By 1992, the Iron Guard had re-established themselves in Romania. In 1993, the fascist Party of the National Right was proclaimed. At the end of November 2000, the racist, antisemitic, and neo-fascist Greater Romania Party obtained 28% of the vote in the presidential elections. In Croatia, the Ustasha Nazi regime of the 1940s led by Anton Pavelic ran death camps where thousands of Jews and non-Jews were brutally murdered. Tens of thousands more were shipped to Nazi Germany for extermination. Catholic Cardinal Stepanic was the religious leader of the Ustasha. After the war, the Vatican helped fund the relocation of the Croation Nazi movement to South America. Croation Nazi money, combined with other sources, led to the rise of the pro-fascist Tudjman regime in Croatia and the round of ethnic slaughter in Bosnia during the 1990s. In 1998, Pope John Paul II announced the beatification of Stepanic, opening the way to declaring full sainthood for the genocidal criminal, and declaring him "a hero for his resistance to Communism." Later in the year, Chicago Mayor Daley declared May 8 as "Cardinal Stepanic Day." In Germany, neo-Nazi activity, including recruitment, marches, assaults and murders have reached a decade long high point. In August 2000 alone there were a reported 1,112 racist, antisemitic and anti-immigrant crimes, and such crimes in 2000 as a whole were 20% higher than in 1999. In Belgium, the neo-fascist Vlaams Blok made substantial electoral gains in 2000, gaining 20 of the 55 seats in the Antwerp city council, and doing well in other major cities such as Ghent. VB leader Dewinter praised Austria's Joerg Haider, recommending the successful tactic of the alliance between nationalist and conservative forces in that country. This year in Norway, the far-right Progress Party surged ahead of all other parties winning an approval rating of 35% in polls. Neo-Nazi recruitment and violence has become common in all the Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, over the last few years. Similarly, anti-immigrant violence, and a parallel rise in far-right parties and organizations has been increasingly notable especially in France, England, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Russia, India, and Australia. The military-backed global domination program of the USA, combined with an all time record number of African-Americans and other people of color in prison, the on-going death machine of judicial executions, and the consolidation of neo-fascist organizations, all so prominent in the last decade, shows every indication of increasing into the new century. In Canada itself, neo-fascist groups continue to organize. Over the past few months, in southern Ontario, the Canadian Heritage Alliance has developed as a youth organization with links both to former Heritage Front members and to long-time far-rightists, Paul Fromm and Marc Lemire. At the same time, a new group associated with White Power Skinheads, the Canadian Ethnic Cleansing Team, has emerged in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. In Calgary, there is a new presence of the National Alliance, a US-based international neo-Nazi organization; in Ontario and in BC, the white racist World Church of the Creator is showing renewed strength, while in Quebec, the Vinland Skinheads are organizing in both the Anglophone and Francophone communities. But perhaps of most significance is the increasingly far-right stance of the official opposition, the Alliance party. During the recent federal elections, there were frequent verbal or physical attacks on people of color and First Nations members. The demagogic use of law-and-order issues and the whipping up of public hysteria over the rights of gays and lesbians, and of women's reproductive rights, especially in rural areas, lends credence to the possibility that a mass base for a new form of fascism is germinating within Alliance ranks. As the twentieth-first century begins, there are an estimated 5000 neo-fascist groups organizing around the world, while the capitalist "mainstream" parties lurch ever further to the right. It is important to emphasize that only ten years ago, fascist organizing, attacks, and electoral successes were negligible, and their rise largely unpredicted. Communist and progressive forces should prepare themselves for a long and difficult struggle. *Copyright 2000 The Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies. All rights reserved. http://bethuneinstitute.org Reprinted at Ireland's OWN with permission of the author.   Page updated 30 Mar 2008 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Celtic Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2008 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.