Rodney Atkinson argues that The European Union’s corporatists are today’s real fascists
CORPORATISTS of left, right and centre react angrily to accusations that their “European project” is fundamentally fascist. This is perhaps not surprising since they combine (in their belief in supranational government, collective solutions, corporatist economics, State intervention and the “Third Way”) most of the characteristics of fascism. They must therefore seek frantically to distance themselves from that discredited ideology. This is made easier if they can find an enemy to whom they can ascribe the values of “fascism” – they choose nationalists and those they term “the extreme right”.
A prime example is the article by Professor Richard Overy in the London Evening Standard of 15th May 2002 who described “fascism” as an exclusively “right wing” movement. This false analysis was supported by pictures of the Frenchman Le Pen and the Austrian Jorg Haider who are principally nationalists, not fascists. The defining aspect of fascism is that it is neither right nor left nor centrist it is left and right and centrist as the support for fascism in the 1930s from Liberals like Lloyd George, Conservatives like Samuel Hoare and Socialists like Ramsay Macdonald, Lord Allen of Hurtwood and Arnold Toynbee clearly demonstrate. Fascism as represented by Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Vichy France did of course have right wing elements in it but it had at least as many left wing, socialist elements. Mussolini was a socialist (he edited the Italian Socialist Party’s newspaper). Hitler joined the German Labour Party (and like Tony Blair rid it of its “Clause 4” nationalisation policies). Whereas Le Pen joined the Resistance against Fascism, former French President Francois Mitterand, later the leader of the French Socialist Party was a hero of the fascist Vichy regime. Oswald Mosley was a Labour minister and became the leader of the British Union of Fascists. His wife Lady Diana Mosley (91) recently declared in a BBC interview her opposition to Le Pen and her support for the European Union!
Fascism is on the march again in the form of the Super-Statists who have reproduced in the EU virtually every political and economic structure of 1940s Fascist Europe. Then as now Czechoslovakia was broken up. Then as now Yugoslavia was broken up into petty statelets. Then as now currencies were abolished. Then as now national parliaments were abolished (or maintained as useless shells). Then as now the consistent anti-fascists in Europe – Russia and Yugoslavia – were attacked and the fascist States – like Germany, Croatia (which managed to kill 400,000 Serbs, Jews and gypsies in the Jasenovac concentration camp) and Albania (which had its own Waffen SS division) – are on the (political) rise again – thanks to the power of German Europe. Professor Overy wrote that the Dutch “have no tradition of fascism”. In fact they were the only country to supply two full Waffen SS divisions for the German army. To describe Pim Fortuyn (murdered by a real fascist thug) as a fascist is preposterous. The homosexual Fortuyn had been attacked by a Muslim cleric (Bosnian and Albanian Muslims and many Arabs were faithful allies of Nazi Germany in the 1940s!) who said that a homosexual was “worse than a pig”. His justified response was hardly extreme. What Haider and Le Pen are harnessing in their rather crude nationalism are the votes of those whose nations, democracies and jobs (5 – 6 million unemployed in Germany thanks to “preparation” for the Euro) have been destroyed.
It is the Blairs, Schroeders, Mitterands and Kohls of this world who have reproduced in the 21st century the unemployment and desperation of the 1930s and 1940s in their supranational, unaccountable Euro-State. It was Mitterand who removed the powers of French democracy, not Le Pen. It was the European Union which sought to tell the Austrians who they could not vote for, not Haider. It was Blair and Chirac who bombed journalists in a Belgrade broadcasting station not Fortuyn and it is the European Union which threatens to remove trial by jury and habeas corpus, not eurosceptics. And it was an adviser to Chancellor Schroeder of Germany who recently said: “Many Jews survive today because they were forced labourers and not directly killed by the SS. Germans are tired of philosemitic over-compensation in the media and sterile grief rituals of politicians.” It is perhaps fortunate that, in typically quiet constitutional fashion, there is in fact a British solution to our own absorption into this new European evil – the South Molton Declaration (see www.southmoltondeclaration.org.uk)
