THE OUTRAGEOUS FAR-RIGHT
With banners screaming ‘White Europe’, ‘Clean Blood’ and ‘Pray for Islamic Holocaust’, it was World War 2 all over again in Poland
WORLD War 2 was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and, everything that caused it. But “memory” was struggling with “forgetting”, as the Czech writer Milan Kundera would have put it. Last Saturday in Poland, in the Kundraesque struggle, “memory” prostrated to “forgetting”, when over 600,000 people, reportedly from all over Europe, gathered to celebrate the country’s independence day.
With banners screaming “White Europe”, “Clean Blood” and “Pray for Islamic Holocaust”, it was World War 2 all over again. You won’t be blamed if you thought it was Hitler’s second coming.
But it is not just Poland going berserk; it seems that the whole of Europe is swooning over the far-right. Madness seems to have found a method.
In Germany, although Chancellor Angela Merkel’s win in September’s elections placed her in the front ranks of Germany’s postwar leaders, it was shadowed by the entry of a far-right party into its Parliament.
Alternative für Deutschland, had gained representation in 10 of the 16 German state parliaments since September last year.
In Austria, the far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs now holds 38 of the 183 seats on Austria’s National Council.
Its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, has been accused of Nazi sympathies and his party has been hoarse with its anti-Islam stance.
Strache had even travelled to Trump Tower in January when Donald Trump first won the presidential election and had a meeting with his then national security adviser, Mike Flynn. It was only last August that the Charlottesville rally was held in Virginia where protesters chanted racist, anti-Muslim and antiSemitic sentiments.
With all of these episodes and alarming nature of the world’s mainstream politics, one can’t help but wonder if the far-right movement is turning into a worldwide movement. It appears to be so.
Consider Poland. Over 60,000 people from all over Europe calling for Muslims to be slaughtered, with banners screaming “Pray for Islamic Holocaust”. What can be more disturbing than one people calling for the extermination of another?
Lessons of the Holocaust, Rwanda and Rohingya are sadly lost on some part of the society. Poland has both angst and anger. Muslims make up 0.1 per cent of the country and for some unexplained reason, the Poles think seven per cent of the population is Muslim.
The fact that there have been a recent influx of Syrian refugees may have contributed to it. How 35,000 of 38 million is seven per cent is a mathematical mystery only some Poles are privy to. If you want to be magnanimous to the 60,000 far-right protesters, you will call it the peril of perception.
This is a manufactured moral panic exaggerated to marshal anger against the Syrians, and Muslims, in general.
Again, the Poles have forgotten their history. Islam did not arrive in Poland with the Syrian refugees; it is as old as the 14th century. Poland was a diverse society, too.
The far-right has even come up with a conspiracy theory that the Syrian migration is part of a plot between Jewish financiers and Communists to destroy the European Union with Islam, syariah law and homosexuality. We live in strange times.
The second most shocking revelation of this rally — apart from them praying for an Islamic Holocaust — is that the radical group is considering itself as the new version of a movement with the same name in the 1930s that tried to drive out Jews from Poland.
These are invented narratives by people who feel sidelined of some social changes.
They know that 35,000 — the actual population of Muslims in Poland — is a number that doesn’t induce fear in 37 million Poles, so they exaggerate it to be over two million. This is a disturbing trend, but it is a small comfort that the leaders of the country are trying to put a stop to xenophobia by condemning the national march.
Polish President Andrzej Duda has said that there was no place for racism and “sick nationalism” in Poland .
Sick it definitely is. And, a section of Poland is going feverish as evident through the march. The worry is, the rest of Europe may fall ill if the leaders of Europe do not go beyond this unequivocal condemnation.
Duda has made his move; now the rest of Europe must follow his lead. If not, when Poland sneezes, Europe will catch cold.
How 35,000 of 38 million is seven per cent is a mathematical mystery only some Poles are privy to. If you want to be magnanimous to the 60,000 farright protesters, you will call it the peril of perception.