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.
