If you want an indication of the madness into which British elite society has descended in the last few years, just consider its attitudes to two flags – the Ukrainian and the Palestinian.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian flag fluttered from public buildings across the land, alongside the Union Jack. It became almost treasonous – and a sign of a depraved fascistic mindset – not to unconditionally support Ukraine and the sending of whatever weapons it requested (including cluster bombs) for its fight against the indisputably evil Vladimir Putin.
Now, following the genocidal Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the completely opposite mentality reigns. Displaying the Palestinian flag is semi-illegal and a sign, according to our government and the ‘opposition’, of hate-filled venom and support for terrorism.
This is despite the fact that, in the words of British veteran Joe Glenton, the two cases, “they’re not exactly the same, but they are similar. There are people resisting an occupation.”
To explain the flagrant double standards, it’s easiest to look at Britain’s inveterate ‘how high’ Atlanticism, which means it automatically does whatever it thinks the US wants. But there are deeper, historical reasons – to do with Empire and who is considered worthy of support and who isn’t – onto which we should shine a light.
Universal human rights
In January 1941, when trying to get Congress to approve his lend-lease proposals, Franklin Roosevelt set out what would become war aims (even though it would be almost a year before the US entered WW2 and then explicitly because of Pearl Harbor). “Freedom,” he said “means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them.”
The speech formed the foundation of the famous Atlantic Charter (released in August 1941 still months before the US entered the war) whose third point emphasised self-determination to those deprived of it.
This set off a torrent of speculation that the right to self-determination should apply not only to those suffering under Nazi and Fascist tyranny but to the hundreds of millions of subjects of western empires across the world. Clearly they didn’t live under governments of their choosing. What about their freedom?
Winston Churchill, at that stage, in Orwell’s phrase “posing as a democrat”, went to great pains to make sure people didn’t lapse into error on this matter. The charter’s third point, he told the House of Commons, only pertained to the restoration of self-government to the states and nations of Europe “now under Nazi yoke”.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since these words were uttered – including (often involuntary) decolonisation. But the attitude behind them, as shown by the black and white reactions to Gaza and Ukraine, has proved remarkably resilient.
Ukraine is an example of the unbearable sight of Europeans suffering from war crimes and human rights abuses. Gazans, clearly, don’t merit similar sympathy despite their plight being much worse. In fact, they are perpetrators, not really genuine victims at all. And to go back to the Churchillian distinction, you can’t restore self-determination to Palestinians because they’ve never actually enjoyed it – not under the British mandate, not under post-war Egyptian control, and certainly not under Israeli occupation since 1967.
People like us
This aliveness of this attitude can be seen in a myriad of ways. Ukrainian refugees are treated with the understanding due to people who we can, there but for fortune, imagine being. Refugees from the Middle East, by contrast, are seen as dangerous interlopers who we must keep out – either from Britain or continental Europe – by any means necessary. This ‘people like us’ mentality can even be discerned in something as apparently innocent as the inclusion of Israel and Australia in the Eurovision song contest.
In recent years, it has been common to suggest that post-Brexit Britain is in danger of “creeping fascism”. But the fascist temptation is, in my opinion, equally strong in both Britain and in the European Union from which it so tortuously parted company from just three years ago. While pro-Palestinian demonstrations are denounced as “hate marchers” by Tory politicians in Britain, in Germany and France they are simply banned and Israeli Jews protesting against the slaughter are arrested.
Fascism is not Nazism
“Much against their will the British governing class have been forced into the anti-Hitler position,” George Orwell noted on the eve of the Second World War. These days, for the wealthy and powerful, the same impediments to realising your heart’s desire don’t exist. But I don’t want to suggest that a revitalised Nazism is the danger. The master race ideology, later annihilationist insanity, and the impulse to empire-build on the European continent, strictly limit its appeal. But classical Fascism – of the Italian vintage – is a different matter.
It’s little remembered that liberals, when forced in the 1920s to choose between Mussolini’s black-shirts and the workers’ movement they physically smashed, enthusiastically plumped for the former. And once in power, Mussolini’s economic policy, in its initial years, followed some eerily familiar patterns:
· Fascism embraced austerity in the form of cuts to welfare spending and slimming down the civil service (reduced by 65,000 in 1923 alone). Just as in 21st century Britain and Europe, austerity has been imposed for more than a decade with the exception of – just as with Mussolini – skyrocketing military spending.
· Fascism increased VAT, a regressive tax because everyone – billionaire and disability claimant – pays the same. In Britain, VAT stood at 8% in 1979. Now it is 20%. Since 2008 around 80% of the member-states of the EU have increased their VAT rates. Mussolini also reduced tax on corporations. In Britain corporation tax stands at 25%. It was 51% in 1981. ‘Social Democrats’ in Europe have likewise sought to ‘stimulate’ growth through corporate tax cuts.
· Fascism put technocrats in full charge of economic policy. In its first three years of power, liberal economist Alberto de Stefani, formerly of the Centre party, was granted “unprecedented authority” as minister of finance. Today, the European Central Bank now oversees EU economic policy, ensuring the debt of member-states doesn’t rise above acceptable levels. And the ECB and the European Commission have no compunction about imposing technocratic governors like Mario Draghi on recalcitrant countries. In non-EU Britain, the central bank – the Bank of England – is now ‘independent of political control’. In fact, a key neo-liberal reform across the world has been to remove economic decision-making from the hands of politicians and give it to unelected technocrats.
· Fascism privatised state enterprises. Between 1922 and 1925, the fascist government implemented a “large-scale privatisation policy”, selling most of Italy’s state-owned telephone networks, for example. The aim was to balance the budget, a “core objective of fascist economic policy in its first phase”. Privatisation of utilities such as telephones and water was a signature policy of Thatcher in Britain and embraced by her successors. Since the 1980s, the privatisation mania has spread around the world, including to Europe.
· Fascism was not initially anti-Semitic or at least no more so than other western ‘democracies’. It implemented policies of confiscating Jewish property and rounding up Jews as a result of its alliance with Nazi Germany but this attitude was not home-grown. At first, being Jewish and Fascist was not some kind of hideous non-sequitur. Fascism was, however, inherently racist towards non-white people from the get-go, employing poison gas on a wide scale in its 1936 invasion of Ethiopia, for example.
This indicates that elite liberalism of the kind represented by both Britain and the EU (which means liberties for the elite) is not, in principle, incompatible with Fascism. This is not to say everyone to the Right of Jeremy Corbyn is a Fascist itching to remove the mask, but many people will tolerate it if the only alternative is seen as worse – for example some sort of socialism, which is regarded as far more inimical to freedom.
For instance, the election of the far-right Georgia Meloni in Italy – in her youth a member of a neo-Fascist party – was seen was by many as the trigger for a period of unbridled conflict with the EU. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Her “relatively conservative 2023 Budget law,” notes one assessment of Meloni’s first year in office, “quelled investors’ fears.” Maybe, in truth, if you are an investor (or a CEO, or someone of ‘high net worth’), there isn’t much to be afraid of.
The danger of Europeanism
Much-vaunted Europeanism is not an antidote to this. It can easily degenerate into the idea that we must protect our European culture and freedoms from outsiders, usually of a darker skin tone, who seek to destroy it. And, when all is said and done, the EU is a trading bloc for Europe. If you’re not lucky enough to live there – and the vast majority of the world’s population obviously aren’t – well, that’s tough luck.
Culture can easily serve as a synonym for the way race was used in decades gone by. For example, justifying the invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, Mussolini said he was putting an end to slavery in a “barbaric pseudo-state” and bringing the benefits of western civilisation. And slavery certainly existed under Haile Selassie. Naturally this civilising mission entailed wide-scale extermination of the native population.
Looking at the way the war on terror has been prosecuted in places like Iraq, Syria and Libya there are clear echoes in the way the immense cost to the indigenous populations of imposing allegedly morally superior regimes – or in the case of Libya no regime at all – is downplayed in a manner that simply wouldn’t happen if they were white and European.
All this is supremely relevant because the government our governments are giving carte blanche – and weapons – to, to bomb hospitals and commit ethnic cleansing is basically Fascist. In a letter to the New York Times in 1948, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, among others, claimed that Tnat Haherut (the Freedom party) in the newly-created state of Israel was “closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties”. Tnat Haherut was the forerunner of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. He is unquestionably “nationalist, genocidal, chauvinistic” and his coalition government, the most right-wing in the country’s history, contains out and out Fascists. One, Bezalel Smotrich, identifies as a “fascist homophobe”, lives in an illegal settlement, and denies that the Palestinian people even exist. Another, national security minister Ben-Gvir, was convicted in Israel of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation.
Netanyahu’s government is, in classic fascist style, attacking the independence of the judiciary and is brutally cracking down on free speech among Israelis.
There are internal conflicts. The government contains a self-confessed “fascist homophobe” but the Israeli Defence Force, which is leading the attack on Gaza, proclaims a progressive attitude to LGBTQIA+ people unusual among the world’s militaries. But just as in the Ukraine, where the support for the Nazi Azov Battalion has gone hand in hand with allegedly advancing the rights of sexual minorities, these apparently intractable contradictions are not insurmountable.
Bringing it all Back Home
The classic ingredients of fascism – extra-parliamentary violence against the Left, cracking down on free speech, corporate-friendly economic policies, war preparation, and blatant racism – are already present in the UK and Europe, ready to be assembled into a coherent whole. Anyone who doesn’t the see connection between support for genocide abroad what happens domestically is engaging a fatal delusion.
