Sweden is often held up as an archetypal Scandinavian utopia. A
somewhat lazy liberal commentariat led by the likes of Guardian doyenne
Polly Toynbee have been known to dub it ‘the best country in the world’
(she Telegraph’s Tim Worstall of
Sweden’s right-of-centre tendencies.) And yet now, there is trouble in
paradise- at the time of writing five days of bitter rioting in suburban
Stockholm in a set-piece of civil unrest that instantly conjures up
images of London in 2011 or Paris in 2005 for those whose political
memory stretches that far back. Meanwhile on the streets of London last
Wednesday an innocent man was hacked to death by meat-cleaver wielding
thugs. In Greece, the Hellenic Statistical Agency last week released new
figures showing a soaring suicide rate off the back of the ongoing
economic crisis, in the context of several recent cases (and two
well-reported economic suicides in Britain.) One might wonder why these
disparate events from across Europe are being meshed together. It is
because all in their own way are tragedies for which solutions should be
sought, but all have been met with the same terrible backlash- an
outpour of racism and bigotry.
was recently reminded by the
When and how did we get to this point? Why, when a brutal murder
happens in our capital city, is it compounded by a mob of EDL rampaging
around the crime scene throwing bottles, three separate attempted
attacks on mosques and the smashing up of a Muslim-owned chicken shop in
Newham? Why is coverage of Stockholm so heavily focussed on ‘a lack of
debate about immigration’ leading to the unrest with little proof that
it was in any way racial (a repetition of the discourse around the
London riots.) Why can Greek fascist party Golden Dawn drum up applause
when responding to the suicide issue by telling Greeks to ‘kill others
[i.e. immigrants] not yourselves’?
The easy explanation is to make idle Godwin-inducing comparisons to
the 1930s- in times of crisis, extremism finds natural currency. Yet
economic crisis is a sufficient condition for an upsurge in bigotry, but
in itself is not enough. I promised myself on Wednesday night I would
not get trapped in keyboard wars with bigots, and yet they seemed to
come looking. Such charming nuggets in response to the Woolwich attack
as ‘lets kil all the fucken muzzie cunts with machetes’ and ‘how about
we play football with a pakis head’ exploded across my newsfeed whilst I
was attempting to enjoy a pint. We have to question where such a
narrative comes from – and it is induced from above, from a political
formation that for all its multicultural pretensions panders to a
racialised worldview. When in Birmingham three weeks ago an elderly
Muslim man was murdered by a white man with a machete, it went
unreported beyond local news. It was few media sources that would call
Anders Breivik, or to look further back David Copeland or Timothy
McVeigh ‘terrorists’, and none that would take their actions as a
problem with ‘white Christian culture’ or encourage ‘the moderate
Euro-Americans to stand up to the extremists in their community if they
did not want to be tarred with the same brush.’ The argument that crisis
fosters extremism is one that we don’t seem to apply elsewhere, in
spite of a million deaths in the Iraq War. Golden Dawn in Greece insists
that civil society will not stand up to mass immigration- the reality
is that the media consistently fails to take a tough enough line on
fascism. And the consequences become viscerally real when two hundred
Bangladeshi workers in Greece demanding money after being unpaid for
fruit-picking for six months were gunned down. It was Labour that
brought in immigration-curbing acts years before Powell had the
political confidence to speak of ‘rivers of blood’, it is the ‘honestly
just Eurosceptic and not racist’ Ukip that act as cheerleaders for the
EDL, and it is newspapers like the Daily Mail that claim a vote for the
French National Front ‘is the only responsible’ one. It is historians
like David Starkey that respond to the London riots by saying ‘the
whites have become black.’ The oxygen of fascism is the normalisation of
its ideas in small doses, the creation of an environment in which they
can exploit the vulnerable based on pre-existing narratives handed them
by the mainstream on a plate.
The fascist project is populist; it relies on the narrative of the
‘common man’s struggle’, an insular story of isolation and attack from
elites as much as ‘foreigners’, hence why parties like Ukip, despite
themselves being composed of can look like they are outflanking the left
on issues of equality! This is deepened by the failure of anyone to
provide a political alternative- Labour have nothing to offer beyond a
slightly fluffier alternative to austerity. Sweden seems happy to
tolerate crippling urban inequality in its liberal paradise. An incident
in Greece not long ago involved a woman who called the police to
apprehend a suspected intruder being told they had no resources and to
call Golden Dawn instead (50% of Greek police officers voted for Golden
Dawn when they received 6-7% of the overall vote.) She did not, but they
were dispatched anyway and after failing to find an intruder, burned
down her Pakistani neighbour’s home. When in London you are up to
twenty-six times more likely to be stop and searched if young and black,
our police start to seem only a number of shades of grey away. As the
far-Right enjoys a renaissance across Europe, it is of course of the
most paramount importance that we condemn them and oppose them wherever
they manifest themselves. But we also have to look far more deeply at
ourselves and our society
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