How to Stop Fascism, page 3
Teenagers took selfies, and posted videos of their part in the attacks, apparently in order to boost their status with the movement.13 Many of the murders were not investigated individually, but in the case of just one – a Muslim man shot as he left his home – a total of sixteen activists from the RSS were arrested.14
In this single outbreak of mass violence, all the standard operating procedures of modern fascism were on display. The attackers used social media and messaging apps both to instigate the violence and to advertise what they’d done. The violence was politically symbolic, designed just as much to terrorize the wider Muslim population as to harm those present. It was incited by elected politicians of the populist right but executed by the foot soldiers of the extreme right. And it served a wider political purpose.
Trump, who arrived on the second day of the rioting, had only praise for Modi. ‘They have really worked hard on religious freedom,’ he said of Modi’s government, making no reference to the mass killing in progress just eleven kilometres away from the press conference. ‘We talked about it for a long time and I really believe that’s what he wants.’15 The BJP rewarded Trump’s loyalty by mobilizing its networks to support him in the November 2020 election, just as they had done for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in Britain, in December 2019.16 Though the Hindu community in the USA is just four million strong, and not all support the BJP, nearly half a million Hindus live in Texas, with six-figure populations in Georgia, North Carolina and Florida; elections in these states were decided by much smaller margins.17
All over the world the main driver of far-right extremism is the fear that people who are not supposed to be free might achieve freedom, and that in the process they might redefine what freedom means. Listen carefully to the attackers’ words and you’ll hear this fear expressed. As they beat the Muslim street-traders, the crowd shouted: ‘Take Azadi, we are giving you Azadi.’18 As they torched a mosque and blinded those inside with acid, they taunted their victims: ‘This is Azadi.’ At one point the police dropped their trousers and showed their genitals to a group of Muslim women, shouting: ‘You want Azadi, we’ll give you Azadi.’19
Psychologists studying fascism in the 1930s described its primary motivation as the ‘fear of freedom’.fn1 If so, the north-east Delhi attack provides a literal case in point. The Muslim protesters used the word ‘freedom’ in an amorphous and expansive way. In return, their attackers told them: the only freedom you’re going to get is to be raped, beaten or killed.
There is nothing new about intercommunal violence in India; it was encouraged for centuries by colonial divide-and-rule tactics, and is deeply rooted in the caste system.20 These intercommunal tensions were restrained during the post-1947 period by a secular constitution, a firm judiciary and a democratic political culture, with the secularist Congress Party as the dominant political force. But from the 1980s onwards, a combination of corruption, urbanization and rising inequality fuelled rivalries between religious groups, allowing the BJP to become a powerful opposition party, eventually taking power in 2014, with Modi at its head.
The wider Hindu nationalist culture – labelled Hindutva – has existed for decades, with the RSS and other grassroots extremist groups operating symbiotically with the BJP, underpinned by a quasi-religious philosophy that is drilled into activists in daily lessons. It is, in a way, an arrangement that all other forms of far-right politics aspire to.
After Modi came to power, the question facing India was: can the judiciary, the electoral system and the constitution hold him in check, or will he redefine India as a Hindu state, with a permanent BJP government? If the ‘text’ of the February 2020 massacre was that Muslims should forget freedom, the subtext was that – at a time of Hindutva’s choosing – the secular basis of India’s post-independence society will be destroyed. That threat, on its own, casts a long shadow over the twenty-first century.
VIGILANTES AT THE GREEK BORDER
In March 2020, during a diplomatic standoff, the Turkish government encouraged thousands of refugees to storm the country’s border with Greece, threatening a return to the refugee crisis of 2015, when more than 1.5 million migrants entered Europe.
As Greek security forces struggled to contain the refugees, people in the border city of Volos formed a Facebook group called ‘The Association of Illegal Migrant Hunters’. They posted snapshots of the firearms they intended to use to ‘clear the city of migrants’ and defend the border. Ioannis Lagos, a former leader of the fascist party Golden Dawn, now an independent member of the European Parliament, arrived with ‘volunteers’ clad in military camouflage to patrol the border.21
Soon, contingents from extreme-right groups across Europe began to arrive. Prominent among them was Martin Sellner, the former leader of Generation Identity, an Austrian group which shot to notoriety after receiving a donation from the man who murdered fifty-one people in two Christchurch mosques.22 Sellner posed with a banner at the fence telling refugees to go home.23 Also present was Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing populist party that achieved 17.5 per cent of the vote in the 2018 election. He handed leaflets to the refugees with the same message: go home.24
Away from the cameras, groups of right-wing European extremists joined armed Greek villagers in tractor convoys to hunt down migrants by night. Photos in the Italian media showed armed civilians ‘guarding’ a group of refugees whose shoes they had confiscated.25
This, in short, was a mobilization of the European far right. By October 2020 Lagos would be facing a long jail sentence, convicted of leading a criminal organization. His form of closet Nazism represents the far-right’s past, but Sellner and Åkesson are its intended future: slick, presentable and oriented to electoral politics, they communicate through gestures like the one at the border.
If the text of their intervention was, literally, ‘Europe is full, go home’, the subtext was even more chilling. The ultimate far-right fantasy is of an ethno-religious civil war in Europe, with white Christians on one side, refugees and Muslims on the other, with the Greece–Turkey border one of its main battlefields. This border standoff was designed as a small-scale demonstration of what it might look like.
A FAR-RIGHT MILITIA IN BRAZIL
On 3 June 2020 the Brazilian far-right activist Sara Winter arrived outside the country’s Supreme Court with fifty armed followers. Proclaiming their support for Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, and calling themselves the ‘300 Brazilians’ – a reference to the small force of Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae – they pitched tents, attacked journalists, launched fireworks at the building and then stormed it, getting as far as the roof while the police stood helpless.26
In a YouTube video, Winter – a 27-year-old former sex worker turned anti-abortion activist – promised potential recruits they would become part of a far-right guerrilla movement and receive training in ‘subversion’. The stunt was part of a wave of protests against the Supreme Court, over its attempts to investigate President Bolsonaro for interference in a police investigation concerning his business dealings.
Winter’s avowed aim was to ‘Ukrain-ize’ Brazil – that is, to overthrow its Congress and Supreme Court in a revolution modelled on the Euromaidan protest of 2013.27 She threatened one judge via Twitter:
We are going to make your life hell. We will find the places you go to. We will find the cleaners who work for you. We will discover everything about your life. 28
Winter herself does not conform to the typical image of a fascist. Nonetheless, her group fits the typology of the fascist militia perfectly. They were armed, in face masks, with burning torches; even Winter’s name, a pseudonym, is borrowed from that of a wartime British Nazi. But Sara Winter was not the main problem for Brazil’s beleaguered judiciary. For among the wider mass of demonstrators who assembled outside the Supreme Court to demand its dissolution early that June was President Bolsonaro himself.
Bolsonaro rose to power because of a double collapse: the collapse in commodity prices and wages after 2008, which ended a decade of growth and improvements for the poor; and the collapse in support for the ruling left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) as its leading members were engulfed in a corruption scandal in the mid-2010s. This scandal culminated in 2016, with the impeachment and removal from office of Brazil’s then president, Dilma Rousseff, as millions of right-wing demonstrators took to the streets, while prosecutors also jailed the PT’s iconic leader, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula).
The anti-Rousseff movement mobilized all those who had lost out under the left’s redistribution programme: landowners, big farmers, the financial elite and parts of the urban middle class. But it also mobilized poor people who felt betrayed after the global economic downturn made further social reforms impossible.29 And now, alongside its traditional propaganda channels – the Evangelical churches, newspapers and clandestine publications advocating military rule – the right-wing elite had social media, above all YouTube, which helped to create a mass, popular, far-right ideology.
A 2019 investigation by the New York Times found that YouTube’s algorithm, whose rules for video recommendations have never been disclosed, systematically promoted and expanded the far-right video universe in Brazil, facilitating its merger with a pre-existing subculture of anti-vaccination (‘antivaxx’) conspiracy theorists. In the process it normalized the practice of linchamento: online lynch mobs targeting doctors, teachers, journalists and left-wing politicians, sometimes inciting physical attacks. One of linchamento’s main exponents was Bolsonaro himself.30
Long before Covid-19, Brazil became a laboratory for what happens when social media algorithms reward, amplify and bring together ideologies promoting irrationalism and hate. Even the atmosphere in schools changed, with teachers suddenly finding basic scientific facts challenged in the classroom by pupils who’d been exposed to far-right propaganda on YouTube. The result was Bolsonaro’s 2018 election victory, after which he set out to intimidate and degrade the judiciary and parliament, repeatedly inciting violence and calling for a military coup.
Is Bolsonaro a fascist? Not by most definitions offered in political science. But if he is a right-wing populist – sharing the same category as Nigel Farage or Italy’s Matteo Salvini – he is at the extreme end of it.
The main problem, ultimately, is neither Sara Winter nor Jair Bolsonaro, it is the process of political disintegration and polarization they are exploiting. A quarter of Rio de Janeiro, the country’s biggest city, is effectively controlled by ‘community self-defence’ militias, armed and trained by the police and prepared to kill left-wing politicians who get in their way.31 In the Amazon, meanwhile, vigilantes protecting the interests of farmers, mining companies and loggers killed twenty-four environmental activists in 2019 alone.32
When Covid-19 hit Brazil in 2020, all Bolsonaro had to do was mobilize the pre-existing machinery: the parties, the Evangelical churches, the junior officer networks, the extreme right and the paramilitary groups. Defying science, Bolsonaro declared the virus was ‘mild flu’ and, despite catching the disease himself, began agitating against the public health lockdowns desperately mandated by regional governors. Bolsonaro led his supporters to protest outside army bases, calling for military interventions to lift the lockdowns, at one stage appearing on horseback. At the time of writing Brazil has suffered one of the worst death tolls from Covid-19, at 384,000 and rising.33
Sara Winter’s attack on the Supreme Court was intended as a stunt. Police action eventually dispersed the 300 Brazilians and broke up their camp. She was then arrested and banned from Facebook. By October 2020 she was posting tearful videos on Instagram, claiming that Bolsonaro had abandoned her.34 But Winter’s protest had served its purpose: to send a message that if Lula, now released from prison, makes any kind of serious bid to form a democratically elected left government, all the forces of disorder are prepared to attack Brazil’s democratic institutions for real.
A NAZI CELL IN THE BUNDESWEHR
In May 2020 German police dug up an arms cache containing two kilograms of plastic explosives, a detonator, an AK-47 rifle, knives, a crossbow, thousands of rounds of ammunition, an SS songbook and a pile of Nazi memorabilia. Its owner was a sergeant-major in the country’s elite special forces unit, the KSK.35
An investigation by German security services found that the soldier’s unit was so thoroughly infiltrated by the extreme right that it had become ‘partially detached from the chain of command’ – a polite way of saying ‘out of control’. The unit was duly dissolved.
The security services announced, moreover, that they were watching 550 suspected neo-Nazis in the Bundeswehr, twenty of them in the KSK. For years, the German authorities had denied the existence of a far-right network in the army; now they had to admit it was real, and extensive. Four months later, twenty-nine police officers in the Ruhr city of Essen were suspended after they were found exchanging swastikas, Hitler photos and faked photos of refugees in gas chambers.36
The discoveries were part of a rising tide of terror threats emanating from the German far right. In September 2019, German security forces had uncovered a secret network of soldiers, police and veterans known as Nordkreuz (Northern Cross). Its members were using the Telegram messaging service to coordinate the compilation of hit lists, using data stolen from police computers, of 25,000 German citizens deemed to be too supportive of refugees.37 One message said that, in the event of a crisis, those on the list should be ‘collected and taken to a place where they are to be killed’. The group members continually fantasized about the collapse of the German state and made active preparations for ‘Day X’ – which they expected to be triggered by a climate catastrophe, a Muslim uprising or a new financial crash.38 They are part of an international right-wing subculture known as ‘preppers’ – people preparing to survive a catastrophic event.
Separately, throughout 2020, more than a hundred left-wing politicians, lawyers and celebrities were bombarded with death and rape threats from a neo-Nazi network calling itself NSU 2.0 (National Socialist Underground 2.0), again using personal data traced to police or judicial computer systems. Meanwhile, over the same period, Germany saw three lone-shooter attacks, which killed, respectively, an anti-racist conservative politician in Hesse; two people at a synagogue in Halle; and nine Kurdish people in a café in Hanau. In each case the perpetrator had expressed far-right views online.39
This is the extreme end of the radicalization process: armed, secret networks operating inside the state, with lists of targets and the means to kill them. Though the numbers were small, the violence they imagined or executed was deadly.
Because Germany has an overtly anti-fascist constitution and a police force dedicated to the surveillance of extreme-right groups, the political space for those advocating violence is tightly constrained. But the political space below that is huge. The right-wing populist Alternativ für Deutschland party (AfD) is the third biggest party in Germany: at time of writing it has ninety-four members of parliament and 34,000 members.
Though a few of the Nordkreuz activists were members of the party, there is no proven link between the AfD and terrorism. Nonetheless, it contains thousands of people who think what fascists think. Around 7,000 members of the AfD were, until March 2020, part of a subgroup called Flügel (Wing), which was shut down after police formally designated it extremist.
A survey of AfD members in the central German region of Hesse showed that a large majority were fully subscribed to the mythology of the new far right: that migrants are responsible for crime; that they ‘feel alien in our own country because of Muslims’; that ‘gender madness has to be stopped’; and that ‘global warming is exaggerated’.40
Like all right-wing populist parties, the AfD remains unclear in its direction (whether deliberately or unintentionally is itself opaque), subject to the pull of parliamentary respectability and waves of radicalization washing over its support base. The main obstacle to its advance has been mainstream German conservatives’ refusal to collaborate. This position wobbled early in 2020, when conservatives in Thuringia tried to use the AfD’s votes to form a regional coalition government, ousting the left.41 But after concerted political pressure from Berlin, and some resignations, the policy of non-cooperation held. There is a lot riding on whether it holds in future.
DEFENDING WINSTON CHURCHILL
London, 13 June 2020. ‘If you’d done your jobs we wouldn’t be here,’ the man next to me yelled at a group of riot police. About 5,000 people had gathered in Parliament Square: white, male and mainly over the age of fifty. The far right had mobilized to ‘protect’ the bronze statue of Winston Churchill, which, standing in the square’s north-east corner, had been sprayed with graffiti by Black Lives Matter protesters a week before. I went undercover among them to report.
London is an obviously multicultural city. But a good half-mile away from the Churchill statue, I entered a zone of white monoculture. Suddenly there were no students, no people of colour, no tourists, no out gay people. I was back in the world I grew up in. White men, working class and from the suburbs, walking close to each other despite the pervasive presence of Covid, shouting profanities and swilling lager.
Self-appointed guardians of Churchill, they were executing their mission by urinating against the gates of Parliament, littering the road with discarded cans, surging into pointless scuffles with the police, posing for selfies with uniformed military veterans, and ranting.
‘Call us racists? We’re all fucking racists!’ one shouted at the cops. The rest cheered raucously. Another, a postal worker in uniform, held a white feather in the face of a policeman: ‘That’s what you deserve. We should all be here. Cowards the lot of you! Why are you protecting them?’ Another – shaved head, cheeks flushed, drunk – yelled into the face of a police officer: ‘Arrest them!’ – ‘them’ being the term for Black Lives Matter protesters, none of whom were in sight. He threw a punch and was arrested himself.
