Strange times. What now appears to be the lone actions of one demented
bastard gets turned into a re-run of the rise of fascism in Europe. But,
there ain't no fascist threat in contemporary Britain, in fact I 'd go so
far as to say that there never has been. Moseley's pathetic Blackshirts
were little more than a pale shadow of what had happened in Spain, Italy
and Germany, and they were easily dismantled by the British ruling class.
They failed in that there was no need for a fascist repression of the
working class and they were side-lined because they were so 'un-British'. A
similar scenario befell the British National Front. After gaining some
significant political support in the polls, they had the rug pulled under
them when Margaret Thatcher made her 'swamped by an alien culture' speech
which was then swiftly followed through by another wave of anti-immigration
laws. The race card that gets played every time is that of the British as a
decent, peaceful, honest, tolerant and civilised people who occasionally
get threatened by alien cultures.
The alien culture today is Nazism. It's so thoroughly un-British- the
salutes, the aggressive marching, the uniforms...dash it old boy, it's all
so Johnny Foreigner. That it doesn't exist is by the by. As James points
out is serves one hell of a useful purpose for the British ruling class. At
the one point it counterposes the British as such decent chaps to the Nazi
barbarians and their hideous foreign ideas and at the other it provides the
means for yet more laws to control an repress the population as a whole.
After the bombing of a gay pub in Soho, the gay activist Peter Tatchell
calls for the incitement to hatred act to extend to gays. A reasonable
enough request one might say until one realises that such an act would be
enacted by the British police, who are of course a bastion of freedom and
had absolutley nothing to do with Operation Snapper and the imprisonment of
a dozen or so gay men for consenting acts in private.
Now before Bob points out that racist and anti-gay attacks are all too
common, this I do not deny. What they are not indicative of is a resurgence
of fascism, at least not in the UK, and I very much doubt elsewhere for
that matter. However, by continually pointing at a fascist threat takes the
heat off the real source of racism here- the British state. I don't know
whether the stat' still holds but it used to be pointed out that more black
people die in police cells than at the hands of less professional racist
thugs.
As to Hugh's argument that we'd have bands of fascist thugs wandering the
streets if it weren't for the superior organisation of the working class,
well this is nonsense. Hugh argues that:
>Let's be even more explicit. Fascism (ie an armed, ruthless militarized
>terror regime) is an essential part of the armoury of the bourgeois state.
>If the regime of bourgeois democracy fails to keep control (as Bob notes),
>the Bonapartist thugs are rolled out. The capitalists hold their noses
>while the workers' organizations are being liquidated along with workers,
>oppositionists and other rational or irrational scapegoats, and the profits
>keep rolling in.
Well Hugh the profits are rolling in and bourgeois democracy is firmly in
control. Why unleash the thugs in times like these? Facsism is a reponse to
crisis, it's the last resort of a bourgeoisie that menas to keep control no
matter what. Yes it must therefore be a threat in that we all still have
bourgeoisies that will resort to terror in the last resort but that's
capitalism for you.
As Brecht says at the end of The resistable rise of Arturo Ui 'the bitch
that spawned this monster's still on heat' but who needs the monstrous when
that nice Prince Charles is around?:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/special_report/1999/05/99/the_nail_bomb_terror/
newsid_334000/334327.stm
As Charles points out with shades of the Blitz and the Dunkirk Spirit, "The
British never get put down by these things."
Russ
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