The rise and rise of the right

Recent election results in Germany have seen the AfD, a right wing, neo-Nazi party achieve gains in regional elections. Likewise in Sweden and Norway, The Netherlands, Britain, France and Italy, right leaning parties are winning votes in regions which had previously been comfortably left to middle on the political spectrum.

Why?

And importantly here, as we see the right on the march with what can only be described as racist law enforcement policies, what can we learn from the European and American experience?

A starting point has been a  2024 book ‘White Terror’ by Jacob Kushner, which tells of the rise of violent neo-Nazi-ism in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the book deals specifically with one group of young people, the origins of the violence depicted have common threads to the divisive politics which led to Brexit in Britain and subsequently the election of Nigel Farage to the House of Commons, which follow the rise of Le Pen’s National Party in France, Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom in The Netherlands and similar results in other European countries as well as the continued divisions in American politics.

Discontents and fears drive political agendas. And these are grist for the political mills.

And what are the discontents and fears which motivated the rise of the Neo-Nazis in Germany after the fall off the Berlin Wall in November 1989?

White Terror follows the descent into terrorism and murder of three young people, and starting with the fall of the Wall, the three had:

‘… every reason the be mad. Mad at Germany’s government for leaving easterners in the lurch after reunification. Mad at immigrants, who they believed were taking their jobs. And mad at their fellow Germans for their culture of shame – treating patriotism as pernicious, as if being German was something bad.’ (Page 30)

Much as the rise of rap music in African American youth culture, radical music became a unifying force for the discontented, where some of the ‘underground’ clubs and musicians created a political sound track which:

‘… derided Polish immigrants as lazy and warned against the “foreign hordes” of immigrants who come to “enslave Germans”. Lyrics by the Berlin neo-Nazi band Macht und Ehre (Power and Honour) proclaimed “Jew, off to the oven!” And referred to immigrants as “grilled meat”…. Called on fellow fascists to “fight for their fatherland” – to mould Germany back into the white supremacist nation it had been.’ (Page 31)

In The Netherlands, Geert Wilders has used similar rhetoric, denying that the Holocaust ever happened, railing against immigrants with similar language as in other countries facing increased immigration, in Britain, one of the underlying fears which motivated the Brexit vote was immigrations, a theme which which continues to resonate with Nigel Farage’s campaign. As in each of the European countries experiencing the influx of migrants, the fears are the same, the fear of cultural loss, the fear of job losses, housing shortages and rising costs… And the same fears are expressed here.

Social media has become the power that music was in 1980s and 90s, the repeated messages of hate, the divisive rhetoric and images which fill screens thanks to the wizardry of logarithms which will put the messages of hate and division on repeat as effectively as rewinding the audio tape of the the neo-Nazi bands.

The issue of cultural identity is an important rallying cry in White Terror, the call for racial purity, the ‘white supremacist nation it had been’, as defined by the Nazis during the 1930s in Australia, in tackling that question, what does it mean to be Australian, how is Australian cultural identity challenged, and how would we, could we define an Australian ‘monoculture’?

In Britain much the same, what does it mean to be British? The ‘purity’ of the English is under threat, except of course if you read a bit of history, go back to the halcyon days of the British Empire, or back further as the waves of ‘invaders’ came through, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Romans… What does it mean to be British…

Similarly in The Netherlands, a comment by a Dutch immigrant I met on my morning beach walk was that it was virtually impossible to buy pork in Rotterdam these days, thanks to the influx and influence of the Muslim hordes who now fill that city. (As it happened, I visited Rotterdam on a recent trip to Europe, and buying pork is not a problem, but I dare not tell that to the man on the beach.)

Racial purity is an interesting concept… Have a DNA test, check the results. Blood lines intermingle in the most delightful ways. I wonder is there a cultural purity test we can invent?

Continuing the increasing criminality of the young people on White Terror, the crimes they committed started off with simple theft, and pilfering stuff, but escalated as the system seemed to allow their criminality, turning a blind eye, or directing attention more to the victims and  their ethnicity (Aren’t they drug dealers?) Home made bombs thrown into Turkish shops, even murders, the investigations worked against actually searching for the real perpetrators, to victim blaming. (Eg “This photo is the woman your now dead husband was having an affair with. Did you kill him?” The accusation was false, the photo a fake.)

As was the case with the Gestapo during the Hitler years, the arrest of, the investigations of the unwanted relied on informers, very often the Gestapo informers were Jews, ratting on other Jews, and in the investigation of the three White Terror protagonists, known neo-Nazis were conscripted to be informers, and they laid some interesting diversions, shielding the real criminals:

‘…they tiptoed across the line between extremist speech and violence. Each time the trio crossed that line line, they’d glance over their shoulder to see if they’d face any real repercussions. When they didn’t, they’d cross the next line, and then the next.’ (Page 55)

The ‘system’ is essentially biased against the victims. We see that here in the treatment of First Nations people, the ‘criminalisation’ of being Aboriginal is well noted. This is particularly evident in the northern parts of Australia, in the Kimberley, the NT and Queensland where imprisonment rates are extreme, but there seems to be no real desire to seek out the underlying reasons for that. Far easier to lower the age of criminal understanding so kids can be imprisoned. The system is stacked against them.

An example, when a young white man bragged on social media that he had left for dead two Aboriginal men… his words, ‘oxygen thief’ and ‘dog’. He was convicted to serve 12 months community service. The driver was related to a Northern Territory parliamentarian.

Is that a reflection of Australian culture, that it’s OK for a white person to hit and run when injuring, even killing Aboriginal people with their vehicles? And brag about it?

Trolling through social media posts which some people forward to me, whether they think I’d like that sort of stuff or not, and when you get away with it, there is a chance to ramp it up, that somehow insulting people for what they believe is a good thing. Perhaps the next bit is to graffiti on a mosque, or spit at a woman wearing a burka or a hijab, and if that goes unnoticed, ramp it up some more.

This is not foreign territory. When politicians play that game, wearing burkas to parliament as a stunt, throwing insults at opposing politicians instead of debating the issues at hand, and have that ramped up to insulting on line posts, threats of violence… Until a party volunteer or politician gets injured or even murdered. Some of the ugliness of the last federal campaign came close to a bit more than argy-bargy.

The thing to learn is that through radicalisation, people do bad things.

Somehow, ramp up the hatred until people get hurt, or even killed.

Can we forget what happened at Bondi on 14 December last year?

Or can we even remember the explosive device which did not detonate on 26 January this year, thrown into a gathering of Indigenous people protesting ‘invasion day’ in Perth?

Since 9/11, which saw about 3,000 killed, it has been convenient to see Muslims as ‘terrorists’, to brand them because of the actions of nineteen men who carried out that attack. Yet the resulting ‘war on terror’ conducted through NATO at the behest of George W Bush, the subsequent war on Iraq and various other conflicts has killed at least 4.5 million people and has displaced more than 38 million others, part of the over 100 million people who are refugees and stateless people seeking somewhere safe to live. Those wars have been fought principally on muslim countries, the war on terror became, and still is aimed at muslims, almost a ‘license to kill’, they are after all only muslims, terrorists.

That same rationale is used against Palestinians in Gaza and The West Bank, especially after the October 7 2023 attacks on innocent Israelis… again the ‘kill ratio’ terrorises the ‘terrorists’. 1200 Israeli fatalities and since then over 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza and an unknown number of fatalities on the West Bank.

And so It goes.

People feel threatened by the unknown, feel threatened by change. They built a wall around themselves, a parapet, a safety zone within which to protect themselves from the unknown threats, the perceived threats. And as they feel more and more threatened, they seek weapons to protect themselves, weapons of insults, dehumanisations, put downs, a continuation of ‘othering’ which ultimately leads to those being marginalised becoming targets of terrorist acts.

It is convenient to call the ‘others’ terrorists, but examining the aftermath, the statistics of revenge, we really should question the term, perhaps hold the mirror up and see that the ‘we’ are terrorists too.

In the German situation, the rise of the neo-Nazis, the denial of the Jewish holocaust is central to their beliefs. One of the issues there is that it is perhaps too convenient to see that holocaust as the only holocaust that ever happened.

Perhaps we too are in denial about a holocaust we, the ‘immigrants’ of this country, or the ‘immigrants’ in North America and other post colonial states are in denial of the holocausts carried out against the indigenous peoples whose lands were taken.

A recent article in The Conversation claimed that the Indigenous population of Australia was around 2.2 million at the time of the arrival of the first fleet. By the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, that number was around 200,000.

Two hundred and thirty eight years later the history taught in schools may touch lightly on the settlement and the treatment of the Indigenous population, but dare not question the cultural erasure, the loss of language, the ‘good work’ of the missionaries who brought the Christian religion to the ‘uncivilised’, a religion which in part is based on a set of laws called the Ten Commandments which included things like not killing people, not stealing from others, not to covet or in the dictionary definition, to strongly want to possess something, especially something that belongs to another person (or, in this context, another people)… Mmmmm.

The rise of One Nation, as other political movements based on discontents, having a policy of negativity, are pointing to problems and seeking simplistic answers, blaming any one or anything other than ‘me’ for the bad things we see around us, is scary.

Rhetoric of hate ultimately condones violence against the ‘others’, who ever they may be, and in the case of One Nation, targets are the ‘flavour of the month’. Indigenous people who are so damned ungrateful for all the things we have done for them for ‘civilising’ them, bringing the wheel they were too ignorant to invent, Asian immigrants… oh that’s a new one… think back to the ‘yellow peril’ of the Gold Rush days, Muslims are the current target, bringing the dreaded Sharia Law with them, soon all women will need to cover up with a Burkha or Hijab. It’s always conveniently easy to identify ‘others’.

Add the politics of targeting people instead of debating policies, and we see memes insulting politicians for not getting it right, for having reminded people of the humble background raised in, easy targets which deflect from really doing anything positive, anything to really address the issues of today, both here and in other democracies.

It is political dynamite to address the real causes of disadvantage, since that may require the advantaged to give a little of their of their accumulated wealth, to help those less privileged. Even to pay a fair share of taxation. Just check the progress in Closing the Gap targets in dealing with First Nations disadvantage. 

We see that also in the way immigrants were accused of terrorism in the White Terror book, we see that in the way Indigenous peoples are criminalised, the crime of being who they are, we see that across a wide spectrum where privilege, whether having financial wealth, positions of power in policing or in adjudicating in law, or even in considering the power imbalance within marriage and relationship, where any sense of privilege or power is threatened, privilege is protected.

I stress, this is not about One Nation or Pauline Hanson, that is just the Australian iteration of populism,  it is part of the populist politics of hate we see both here and across the democratic nations.

Here it becomes about how we conduct political debate. Sometimes we need to walk away from the toxicity of a debate, not to engage. To walk away from a religious debate which essentially becomes a ‘my god is better than your god’ argument, or where the latest memes become the argument, memes which do not countenance scrutiny, but return to legitimate debate where the real issues are debated, not ‘gotcha’ questions, not attempts at belittling people, demeaning those with whom we disagree.

It’s time to bring back respect in debate and a sense of understanding that we are  all people, and each of us here through a different pathway, a different walk through life, but all equally human.