Fascism Old and New

Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976-1982, David Renton, Routledge, 177pp, £16.99 The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right, Enzo Traverso, translated by David Broder, Verso, 200pp, £14.99

What to do about fascism? The great Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, who didn’t live long enough to witness the Kristallnacht, let alone the Final Solution, famously stated that on the matter of Adolf Hitler, he had nothing to say. Something of the same sentiment was expressed at the end of the two-tone period in British pop by the Fun Boy Three hit of 1983, ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’, which advocated silence as a defensive weapon against the hostility of the ignorant mass. As the victims of every pogrom and bullying campaign in human history know only too well, it doesn’t work.

Born from the chauvinist nationalisms of the nineteenth century, trained in the atrocities committed against their subject peoples by colonialists of the great powers, fascism was finally distilled into a potent force in the respectable political mainstream by the titanic shipwreck of the European Enlightenment that was the Great War. Reason had foundered on the rocks of antagonistic imperialism, and as many citizens of the defeated nations, immiserated by war reparations, inflation and depression, turned inwards in search of scapegoats for their plight, it seemed that reason itself was either entirely done for, or else had been brought to its logical fruition by its rationalised application to the business of social hatred.

While it initially took very different forms in Mussolini’s Italy and in Nazi Germany, fascism had at its core a belief in nationalist collectivism, the surrender of the self into the heroic mass of the nation-state, and an unvarying belief in the biological stratification of the human race. In

these enterprises, it was kept buoyant by the esprit de corps of colossal rallies, marches, parades and processions, often highly theatricalised in their presentation, dominated by the ranting of charismatic leaders, and then by the exigency of warfare, its inevitable lifeblood, when the ethos of merciless triumph, coupled where necessary with noble sacrifice, became the highest ideal of self-fulfilment a young recruit could imagine.

The Nuremberg trials and a generation of Holocaust remembrance appeared to have put an end to the appeal of fascism in the developed world. In Germany, a period of strategic amnesia set in, at least on the western flank of the Cold War divide, while in victorious Britain, where its pre-war popularity rapidly oxidised with its resort to street violence and its patronage by the more preposterous elements of the nobility, any residual thrill its militarism might have evoked in a young boy was neutralised by the fact that his own country had played a decisive part in its defeat. The word itself became a highly charged political insult, one that it was necessary not to devalue through its application to inappropriate contexts.

In the light of postwar history, its return to British politics in the 1970s in the form of the National Front, an amalgam of venerable Empire nostalgists, right-wing Tory nativists and tribal racists that had crystallised amid the libertarianism of the previous decade, seemed an improbable development. There had always been far-right candidates on the British electoral landscape, but they tended to poll about as much support as disgruntled local ratepayers or dyspeptic Stalinists. The Front changed all that, initially by exploiting the debate about immigration touched off on the right of the Conservative Party by its resident Nietzschean, the mercurial Enoch Powell, and then by increasingly defiant street tactics. While a decomposing Labour government wrung its hands over the provocations, the Front staged marches through inner-city areas with significant populations of first- and second-generation migrants, candidly advocating that they should be forcibly repatriated to their countries of origin, or the countries of their ancestors’ origin, as the case might be.

David Renton, who has written indefatigably on the subject (but nonetheless still thinks the Labour Home Secretary of the day was called

Mervyn Rees), returns with another exhaustive journalistic account of this most toxic period in recent British history. It is set against the concomitant rise of Rock Against Racism and its subsequent political affiliate, the Anti-Nazi League, which between them combined to mount a popular resistance to the National Front among the young. Brought together under the loose umbrella of the punk movement and its immediate successors, it was sustained by weekly coverage in a hugely influential music press, with the added provocations of reactionary outbursts by members of the rock aristocracy such as Eric Clapton and David Bowie, who would later blame his scurrilous espousal of Nazism in the 1970s on a surfeit of cocaine. Above all, it united around the tactics of confronting fascists in the streets where they marched and the town halls where they met.

The momentous public confrontations that took place in Lewisham in 1977 and Southall in 1979, the latter the scene of the killing of the New Zealand teacher and activist Blair Peach by a member of the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group, are documented here with all the meticulous scrutiny of the war historian. It was no secret that the ANL was run by a contingent on secondment from the Socialist Workers Party, so that these clashes were, for the time being, the last stand that the extremities of the political spectrum made against each other in the British public domain. By the end of the 1970s, the Front was defeated, its membership dwindling to a flyspeck, its leaders locked in mutual loathing. Its chairman John Tyndall, whose lifelong romance with Nazism did nothing to perfect his pneumatically crimson-faced impersonation of Hitler’s rhetorical style, drifted towards the British National Party, which fastidiously preferred the constitutional route to power to getting its knuckles bloodied in the public thoroughfares.

Cornell University’s Enzo Traverso has also attended to the cyclically resuscitated career of fascism, but approaches the topic from the viewpoint of political theory rather than simple reportage. The New Faces of Fascism considers the exasperating recrudescence of what he calls ‘postfascism’ in the most recent era, a series of manifestations that could hardly be more different to the public brawling of the National Front days. In the book’s

brilliant early chapters, Traverso analyses the trend whereby the postfascist right has monopolised the oppositional space vacated by the organised left, which it barely bothers to address. Its chief enemies are the monoliths of institutionality in the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank. Against this, the left has resorted self-defeatingly to the permanent special pleading of identity politics, a failure inasmuch as it has explicitly abandoned any perspective of unity.

Traverso proficiently dissects the ready recourse to the charge of ‘populism’, heard everywhere in the liberal lamentations over the variant catastrophes being enacted on either side of the Atlantic. He complicates the cherished image of the European Union as an ecumenical haven of democracy, pointing out that its defenestration of the elected government of Greece in 2015, its commitment to austerity economics and a brutally exclusive migration policy, and its domination by unaccountable financial technocrats, have rendered it helpless against the ultra-reactionary tendencies now fermenting among certain of its member governments, such as Hungary, Poland and now Italy. And his argument has no truck with the idea that fascism was provoked into its enormities by the countervailing threat of Bolshevism. If the antifascist resistances in Europe in the 1930s were dominated by Stalinists, Trotskyists and anarchists, that is largely explained by the fact that liberalism and constitutional conservatism had proved so disastrously congenial in accommodating the respective emergences of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.

The strong temptation not to humour frothing xenophobes by taking them seriously sooner or later runs aground on the reefs of physical provocation. It is undeniably the case that the National Front was trounced not by engaging with its arguments so much as by stopping it from operating at all. In today’s climate, the fretful indignation over the refusal of student bodies to allow right-wing ideologues to speak in public debates is the diluted equivalent of the hand-wringing of the 1970s over whether free speech ought to permit a gang of overweight sociopaths to march through south London shouting ‘Wogs out!’

During my brief period in the Labour Party in this era, it felt as though we spent an undue amount of time discussing the Front and diligently scraping its racist posters off walls and bus-shelters. And yet, the atmosphere of violence and threat that hung over the areas of decaying Manchester in which I lived was palpable. The urge to stand up not just for oneself, but for one’s minority ethnic neighbours and student colleagues, was an unremitting impulse that set the tone for the years to come. Where fascism fell short of direct intimidation, it provoked surrenders to paranoia that led people to detect it in the most unlikely quarters. ‘Good riddance to Nazi scum!’ the student union DJ yelled as he announced the suicide of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. If the frontal assault that fascism mounted in the 1970s, as Renton records, overtly dictated the terms of engagement with it, the more insidious, constitutionally mobilised threat it will pose in the near future represents a far more intractable logistical challenge.