This is Our Time- Or Theirs

It’s been a few weeks now, since 2 neo-Nazi BNP members were elected to the European parliament, and there’s a phrase been on the tip of my tongue virtually the whole of the time.

It comes up every time someone tells me we have to put up with seeing the Nazis interviewed on the TV every two seconds, because they’re a political party and have a right to a soapbox paid for with my licence fee. I’m a member of a political party myself, and when I catch of a glimpse of myself in crowd shots on the news I go almost dizzy with the novelty of it all. My statutory invitations to panel show after panel show must have got lost in the post.

It comes up again when they try to reassure me that left to their own devices, the Nazi “knuckledraggers” will only “expose themselves” – although my irritation there is somewhat tempered by the mental image it conjures up. A gorilla with a Hitler moustache and a trenchcoat looking around shiftily before flashing his meat and two one veg at six million Jews and a similar number of trade unionists, gypsies and homosexuals and then running away. Lovely.

But most of all it comes up whenever someone wags a finger at the cheeky anti-fascist scamps who egged Nick Griffin outside Parliament. When a man who has dedicated his life to bringing back the ideology of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and whose bodyguards had just beaten an 8-stone woman to the ground, gets a bit of breakfast on his suit, it doesn’t do to condemn the egg-chucker as “the real fascist”. (The correct response, for what it’s worth, is to crack a lame joke about “not seperating the whites”).

The phrase I’m constantly, and apoplectically, reminded of is this: Nach Hitler wir kommen. After Hitler, us. It was the response of the German Communist Party to the 1930 elections. The spectacular increase in the Nazis’ vote was a blip in the otherwise extremely encouraging political landscape – and, whatever the Nazis tried to do, it would “wake up” the people and thus make the world a better place. Bet they looked back on that with a chuckle from inside the death camps.

In truth, we’re still a long way from 1930. The BNP vote stayed about constant from 2004, with their election only made possible by the collapse of New Labour. Only 2% of the electorate voted for them, mostly without a full understanding of just what Nazis they are. Their activist base is much too small to unleash a pogrom on Southall or Rusholme, and it’s difficult for them to build it up without undermining the pretence of respectability that gets them elected. The master race isn’t so much marching on as walking on eggshells.

But still. Even Hitler and Mussolini had to start somewhere. The circumstances in which they were able to grow – crisis in capitalism, paralysis in politics – aren’t exactly a million miles away from the here and now. In Hungary and Italy mass fascist parties participate in governments and openly organize violent attacks on gypsies and immigrants. In May a hundred balaclavaed thugs ran riot in Luton, smashing up an Asian business, and just last week a hundred Romanians were driven from their homes in Belfast by a campaign of violent intimidation.

Now I enjoy a political debate as much as the next man (if anything, even slightly more), but I’d warn those liberal anti-anti-fascists who’d would rather outmanoeuvre the BNP on the Question Time panel than go near anything that resembles a protest that it’s easy to drown out their witty and articulate bons mots with the rumble of boots. Inviting the BNP into a political conversation is like inviting Harold Shipman to a discussion on the provision of healthcare to the elderly – and if someone said that Hitler could have been stopped if only the BBC had been around to invite him onto Question Time, they’d rightly be laughed out of town.

That’s not to say Hitler couldn’t have been stopped. We could do worse than taking inspiration from our friends in Iran – taking to their streets in their millions, despite the violence of police and militia, and now even starting to organize strikes and sit-ins at their workplaces. It would be hard to stir up much bigotry over there right now, as Persians join up with Azeris and other minorities to keep the barricades going. The fear and bitterness that comes out of capitalism’s crisis becomes something of a non-issue when the workers have taken over the factories.

The old rulers of Germany were always a bit scared of Hitler – but nothing like as much as they were scared of the German working class. Business as usual would have been nice, but if there had to be anger against the crisis, better to have it pointed at the Jews than at the bosses. No-one was entirely comfortable with the despair and division represented by the blackshirts, but if it could preempt the hope and the unity represented by the strike committee then so be it.

The German rulers were scared of their own people because they knew that united, those people could never be defeated. That applies just as much to us today. We have the power to transform our society, and by not using that power we leave the door open to Nick Griffin and his crew of Nazi scum. We can learn from the mistakes of German communists: history doesn’t “take its course, it is made, it is built and it is fought over”. Leaving it up to fate is leaving it up to the Nazis.

The people of Iran have shown what is possible. Let’s take the hint.

Dave is up early tomorrow to visit the picket lines at the oil refinery.

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Comment

1. Probably one of the most important protests of our generation will be confronting the BNP at their Nazi jamboree the ‘Red, White and Blue festival’ in Derbyshire on 15th August. The BNP can’t really get away with doin all the Hitler stuff in public, so the RWB gives them a chance to do it in private, in the company of Europe’s most terrifying fascist organisations… Or so they think! Let’s get a mass protest to show these neoNazi scum that never again means never again! See http://www.uaf.org.uk for details.

   — D · Jul 28, 10:21 PM · #