Fascist terror
In the autumn of 1980 a wave of right-wing terrorist
attacks tore through Europe. In August that year 84 people were killed
and 180 injured when a bomb ripped through the Bologna railway station.
Eleven people were killed when the famous Munich Oktoberfest was
targeted on September 26; four persons died when a bomb went off in
front of a synagogue on the Rue Copernic in Paris on October 2.
Little attention, the scholar Bruce Hoffman noted in a
1984 paper, had been paid to right-wing terrorists by Europe’s police
forces. Their eyes, firmly focused on left-wing organisations, had
characterised the right “as ‘kooks’, ‘clowns’, ‘little Führers’
and, with regard to their young, ‘political punk rockers’.” Less than
four months before the Oktoberfest bombing, Dr Hoffman wrote, an
official German interior ministry publication dismissed the threat from
neo-Nazi groups, saying they were “most armed with self-made bats and
chains”.
Earlier this year, the analysts who had authored the
European Police organisation Europol’s ‘Terrorism Situation Report’ made
much the same mistake as they had before the 1984 bombings. Lack of
cohesion and public threat, they claimed, “went a long way towards
accounting for the diminished impact of right-wing terrorism and
extremism in the European Union.”
Zero terrorist attacks might have been a persuasive
empirical argument – if it were not for the fact that no EU member state
bar Hungary actually records acts of right-wing terrorism using those
terms.
Europol’s 2010 report in fact presented a considerably
less sanguine assessment of the situation. Noting the 2008 and 2009
arrests of British fascists for possession of explosives and toxins, the
report flagged the danger from “individuals motivated by extreme
right-wing views who act alone”. The report also pointed to the heating
up of a climate of hatred: large attendances at white supremacist rock
concerts, the growing muscle of fascist groups like Blood and Honour and
the English Defence League, firebomb attacks on members of the Roma
minority in several countries and military training to the cadre.
Yet the authors of the 2011 Europol report saw little
reason for alarm. In a thoughtful 2008 report, a consortium of Dutch
organisations noted that “right-wing terrorism is not always labelled as
such”. Because “right-wing movements use the local traditions, values
and characteristics to define their own identity,” the report argued,
“many non-rightist citizens recognise and even sympathise with some of
the organisation’s political opinions” – a formulation which will be
familiar to Indians, where communal violence is almost never referred to
as a form of mass terrorism.
Thomas Sheehan, who surveyed the Italian neo-fascist
resurgence before the 1980 bombings, arrived at much the same conclusion
decades ago. “In 1976 and again in 1978,” he wrote in The New York
Review of Books, “judges in Rome, Turin and Milan fell over each
other in their haste to absolve neo-fascists of crimes ranging from
murdering a policeman to ‘reconstituting fascism’ [a crime under postwar
Italian law]”. “When it comes to fascist terrorism,” Mr Sheehan wryly
concluded, “Italian authorities seem to be a bit blind in the right
eye.”
Political crisis
Europe’s fascist parties have little electoral muscle
today but reports suggest that a substantial renaissance is underway.
The resurgence is linked to a larger political crisis. In 1995
commentator Ignacio Ramonet argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union
had provoked a crisis for Europe’s great parties of the right, as for
its left. The right’s failure to provide coherent answers to the crisis
of identity provoked by a globalising world, and its support for a new
economic order which engendered mass unemployment and growing income
disparities, empowered neo-fascism. “People feel,” Mr Ramonet wrote in a
commentary in the French newspaper, Le Monde, “that they have
been abandoned by governments which they see as corrupt and in the hands
of big business.”
In the mid-1990s fascist groups reached an electoral
peak: Jörg Haider’s Liberals won 22 per cent of the vote in
Austria; Carl Ivar Hagen’s Progress Party became the second largest
party in Norway; Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance claimed 15 per cent
of the vote in Italy; while the Belgian Vlaams Blok gained 12.3 per cent
in Flanders, Belgium. In France, the centrist Union for French Democracy
was compelled to accept support from the National Front in five
provinces.
Europe’s mainstream right-wing leadership rapidly
appropriated key elements of the fascist platform and successfully
whittled away at their electoral success but ultimately failed to
address the issues Mr Ramonet had flagged.
Now many are turning to new splinter groups and online
mobilisation. Mr Breivik’s comments on the website Document.no provide
real insight into the frustration of the right’s rank and file. His
central target was what he characterised as “cultural Marxism”: “an
anti-European hate-ideology,” he wrote in September 2009, “whose purpose
is to destroy European culture, identity and Christianity in general.”
For Mr Breivik, cultural Marxism’s central crime was to
have de-masculinised European identity. In his view, “Muslim boys learn
pride in their own religion, culture and cultural-conservative values at
home while Norwegian men have been feminised and taught excessive
tolerance.”
He railed against the media’s supposed blackout of the
supposed “100 racial/ jihadi murders of Norwegians in the last 15
years”. “Many young people are apathetic as a result,” Mr Breivik
observed, “others are very racist. They repay what they perceive as
racism with racism.”
Mr Breivik, his writings suggest, would have been
reluctant to describe himself as a fascist – a common feature of
European far-right discourse. He wrote: “I equate multiculturalism with
the other hate-ideologies: Nazism (anti-Jewish), communism
(anti-individualism) and Islam (anti-Kafir).”
These ideas, it is important to note, were echoes of
ideas in mainstream European neoconservatism. In 1978 the former British
prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously referred to popular fears
that Britain “might be swamped by people of a different culture”. In
1989 Ms Thatcher asserted that “human rights did not begin with the
French revolution”. Instead, they “really stem from a mixture of Judaism
and Christianity”– in other words, faith, not reason.
In recent years key European politicians have also used
language not dissimilar to Mr Breivik. Last year Angela Merkel asserted
that multikulti, or multiculturalism, had failed. David Cameron
too assailed “the doctrine of state multiculturalism” which he said had
“encouraged different cultures to live separate lives”. France’s Nicolas
Sarkozy was more blunt: “multiculturalism is a failure. The truth is
that in our democracies, we cared too much about the identity of the
migrant and not sufficiently about the identity of the country that
welcomed him.”
Mr Breivik’s grievance, like Mr Sharma’s, was that these
politicians were unwilling to act on their words – and that the people
he claimed to love cared too little to rebel.
The Norwegian terrorist’s 1,518-page pseudonymous
testament, ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence’, promises his
new “Knights Templar” order will “seize political and military control
of western European countries and implement a cultural conservative
political agenda”. He threatens an apocalyptic war against “traitors”
enabling a Muslim takeover of Europe: a war, he says, will claim up to
“45,000 dead and one million wounded cultural Marxists/
multiculturalists.”
For India, there are several important lessons. Like
Europe’s mainstream right-wing parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
has condemned the terrorism of the right – but not the thought system
which drives it. Its refusal to engage in serious introspection or even
to unequivocally condemn Hindutva violence has been nothing short of
disgraceful. Liberal parties, including the Congress, have been equally
evasive in their critique of both Hindutva and Islamist terrorism.
Besieged as India is by multiple fundamentalisms, in the
throes of a social crisis that runs far deeper than in Europe, with
institutions far weaker, it must reflect carefully on Mr Breivik’s story
– or run real risks to its survival.