EXTREME POLITICS

With incidents like these, you know there’s a finger on the pulse. The most visible event always conceals many that don’t get reported:

Erica Connor was forced into early retirement through stress after governors at New Monument School in Woking turned her into a scapegoat by claiming she was Islamophobic.

The court heard that in 1998 Mrs Connor took over the school – where up to 85 per cent of pupils were Muslim and 90 per cent spoke English as a second language – and test results improved “very considerably” for the first few years.

However in 2003 two new members – Paul Martin, a parent governor, and Mumtaz Saleem, a nominee of the local education authority – joined its governing body and tried to take it over.

While clearing Mr Saleem of harassment, the judge added: “Mr Saleem’s approach extended to offensive verbal attacks at governing body meetings.”

Eventually Mr Martin was voted off the “dysfunctional” governing body but claimed he had been “removed for blowing the whistle on institutional racism” and “cited an old school document with pictures of seven children, only one of them dark-skinned”, the court was told.

An anonymous petition was circulated, “attacking Mrs Connor falsely and in vituperative terms”, it was claimed.

The High Court agreed that the Surrey County Council was negligent in not stepping in to support the headteacher, and ordered it to pay £407,781 in compensation.

The Telegraph

How does this happen? Monkey follow monkey: everyone is afraid of being called a racist, so if someone brings it up, they automatically assume the accused is guilty. Not surprisingly, this gets abused by those who hunger for power. But apparently such events are relatively commonplace, and the tension is rising.

Last September, Austria’s far right gained massive political influence in an election that saw the FPO along with another far right party – Alliance For The Future (BZO) – gain 29 per cent of the vote, the same share as Austria’s main party, the Social Democrats. The election stirred up terrifying memories of the rise of the Nazi Party in the Thirties.

Recently, in Hitler’s home town of Braunau, a swastika flag was publicly unveiled. The FPO wants to legalise Nazi symbols, while its firebrand leader has been accused of having links to far right extremists.

After the FPO’s election victory, Nick Griffin, leader of the British Nationalist Party (BNP), sent a personal message to Strache.

‘The Jew on Wall Street is responsible for the world’s current economic crisis. It is the same now as in 1929 when 90 per cent of money was in the hands of the Jew. Hitler had the right solutions then,’ [former SS man Herbert Schweiger] says, invoking the language of Goebbels.

‘The black man only thinks in the present and when his belly is full he does not think of the future,’ he says. ‘They reproduce en masse even when they have no food, so supporting Africans is suicide for the white race.

‘It is not nation against nation now but race against race. It is a question of survival that Europe unites against the rise of Asia. There is an unstoppable war between the white and yellow races. In England and Scotland there is very strong racial potential.

Daily Mail

That’s about enough extreme for us, but it’s quoted for a reason: you’ll see reference to those issues again.

We all know that the far-right has been rising in Austria. The BNP continues to succeed in England.

And in Germany?

“The neo-Nazi scene, both inside and outside the NPD, is becoming stronger, not as a nationwide electoral force but in its influence on racist attitudes and violence,” Professor Hajo Funke, a prominent analyst of the far right at Berlin’s Free University, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “There are places I wouldn’t advise anyone who looks foreign to go without protection.”

Funke’s analysis was backed up this week by a major new study which showed that fully one in seven German teenagers — 14.4 percent — have attitudes deemed highly xenophobic. They agreed with statements like, for example, “Most immigrants are criminal.”

The two-year, government-commissioned survey of more than 20,000 15-year-old schoolchildren concluded that a further 26.2 percent held “fairly xenophobic” attitudes. A proportion of 5.2 percent of teenagers were classified as far-right because they had racist views, listened to neo-Nazi music, wore corresponding fashions or had committed a far-right crime, the survey showed. A further 11.5 percent had strong far-right sympathies.

Of more concern is the fact that the financial crisis may boost the NPD, which has proved before that it can win protest votes by tapping discontent about the economy. In 2004, it won 9.2 percent in the last regional election in Saxony after it campaigned against cuts to unemployment benefits.

Der Spiegel

What’s most interesting, and this is why the neo-Nazi is cited above, is that the same problems still exist with the same solutions which do not appear to be working. Therefore, people are turning to more extreme forms of activity, which is why they qualify as EXTREME POLITICS.

Yet for all the differences, intriguing echoes from the 1930s can still be heard. It is not that bits of Europe are flirting with fascism again. It is rather that the same issues irk voters then as now—and politicians are responding to them in similar ways.

Today’s German and French governments talk loudly about clamping down on tax havens: this is a highly visible way to seek extra revenue and punish errant plutocrats. Almost 80 years ago, an identical outrage gripped Europe, when French police in 1932 raided the Paris offices of a Swiss bank for customer records, coming away with the names of French members of parliament, newspaper editors and a brace of bishops.

Before the depression, France also had one of Europe’s most open labour markets, home to millions of Poles, Czechs, Belgians, Italians, Spaniards and Swiss, plus impressive numbers of political refugees. But between 1932 and 1935, a string of laws and decrees set quotas on foreign workers and stopped them moving from job to job. Tens of thousands, mostly Poles, were eventually expelled by force. The middle classes also protected themselves: new laws closed the French medical and legal professions to foreign-born graduates, often Jewish refugees.

The Economist

I think this is what governments must understand: successful responses to problems indicate a vital civilization. Inability to deal with problems suggests a civilization which is oblivious to reality, and that’s when anger converges on an intellectual desire for a different type of society, and people go to the extremes.

A final note on an even earlier historical cycle –

Social conditions by 1848 had piled up tinder for a conflagration. Resentments over everything from unemployment and taxes to labor demands on peasants — not to mention the aspirations among regional elites for greater autonomy — had rallied support for revolution. But transforming myriad grievances into positive program proved difficult. Tocqueville saw France drifting in June from political struggle to a social war of proletariat against the propertied classes. The specter of social revolution turned many toward accommodation with governments that, however imperfect, would at least provide security.

Many older accounts of 1848 depict the year’s events as a flowering of liberal nationalism crushed by the forces of order. A.J.P. Taylor described abortive revolution in Germany as a turning point that failed to turn, thereby directing Germany on a separate path — toward authoritarianism rather than liberal democracy. In “1848,” Mike Rapport sympathizes with European liberals but nonetheless offers a fully nuanced portrait of a tumultuous year. Ethnic conflict and deep social tensions, he notes, complicated the task of constructing liberal, constitutional regimes. Different interests had their own agenda, and Otto von Bismarck, the German statesman, grasped an essential point when he argued that liberalism appealed only to the urban middle classes. That fact gave the revolution a narrower foundation than its architects had expected.

Ethnic conflict had a major role in the events of 1848 because nationalism served to exclude as well as unite. Liberal nationalists were caught in a now familiar dilemma: whether citizenship would rest on pluralism or require the assimilation of ethnic and religious minorities. Smaller nationalities looked suspiciously at German and Hungarian aspirations, especially when nationalist leaders spoke of Slavs with disdain. The Czech liberal Frantisek Palacky argued that Austria protected the Slavonic peoples from both internal strife and Russian domination. Localism, and loyalty to the Catholic Church, remained a strong counterweight to nationalism in Italy. Even Giuseppe Garibaldi came to see “how little the national cause inspired the local inhabitants of the countryside.”

…

Conservatives before 1848 failed to implement the reforms that the most imaginative of them had envisioned to create a more flexible political order — one that would draw local elites and subjects into closer cooperation. (British leaders had managed to do just that decades before.) After 1848, the backlash against revolution brought an insistence on authority that made politics less flexible. Even where some liberal reforms survived, they operated to consolidate state power. The experience demonstrated that change with continuity works much better than revolution.

WSJ

As in that time, the liberal rhetoric dominates politics. But problems remain, and people are starting to wonder if liberalism addresses the issues at hand, or whether it has always been a means of pacifying the proles while business as usual goes on.