Melanie Phillips: fascism rising in Europe

Sept 30, 2008

We should all be shuddering at the news from Austria where neo-Nazi parties, including the Freedom Party led by Hans-Christian Strache (pictured) have emerged as the biggest parliamentary block. It’s awful not just because it’s Austria, that cradle of Nazism which shows yet again that its terrible past remains its present. It’s because the implications are much wider for the whole of Europe – and are unlikely to be recognised before the danger spirals into the unspeakable...

These parties campaigned on an anti EU integration and anti-Muslim platform. Their success is due to the enormous feeling among the people of Europe against, on the one hand, the destruction of their powers of self-government and their assimilation into the undemocratic Euro superstate, and on the other the threat to western culture from Islamist conquest. On both of these seismic issues, the leaders of the democracies are either burying their heads in the sand or are actively bringing them into being. With no democratic party addressing these concerns and instead demonising legitimate nationalist feeling as ‘racist’, xenophobic’ or ‘Islamophobic’, people are turning to parties which truly are racist, anti-foreigner, anti-Muslim, anti-Jew and sometimes, indeed, neo-Nazi, but which are exploiting this political vacuum just as all such parties have always exploited other vacuums in leadership.

This presents a nightmarish prospect in which, if the democratic parties of Europe continue to demonise legitimate aspirations to maintain national cultures against undemocratic and anti-democratic forces, more and more people will be drawn to these parties – see the sophisticated pitch by and increasing support for the BNP in Britain, and social disorder will rise.[...]

The awful thing is that, as the far-right advances and social disorder increases – as it will -- muddled liberals and malign leftists will blame these political and social calamities on ‘the far right’. As a result, the steady encroachment of Islamism will proceed apace -- and anyone who objects will also be demonised as ‘the far right’. The rise of the neo-Nazis will thus turn the defence of democracy toxic. There is therefore a danger that the only people who will be fighting the Islamic fascists and in defence of the nation against the supranational supremacists will be the fascists....

Daniel Pipes agrees.