Posts Tagged ‘fascism’

Hungary: a lesson for lovers of populism on left and right

26/04/2018, 05:02:57 PM

by Rob Marchant

It is pleasing to see Jeremy Corbyn get something right, for once.

A couple of months ago, he recorded this video message in support of Hungarian socialists, rightly warning how their country was in danger of becoming home to despotism, although he put it more politely. In his words, that the far-right government “is not only weakening democracy, but allowing intolerance and racism to take hold” (ok, so the irony meter in the Leader’s Office was switched off that day).

In contrast, our country’s government, in the person of its idiot Foreign Secretary, was quick to congratulate recently reelected president Viktor Orbán in a lugubrious tweet, failing to mention his racist campaign, or his fixing of the media and electoral system to win. I suppose that, in the post-Brexit world, his low calculation is less maintaining a democratic continent and more “any port in a storm”.

As Nick Cohen pointed out recently, Orbán is – like Putin – starting to treat harmless NGOs as enemies of the state. Not to mention demonising one of the country’s great entrepreneurs and philanthropists, George Soros, by fabricating ridiculous stories that he will flood the country with immigrants (he is clearly neither a government nor standing for office). As Cohen says, “It’s as if UK ministers were pretending the choice before the electorate was between the Conservative party and Human Rights Watch.” Quite. But more of Soros later.

Back to Budapest, where I was last week. A beautiful city and not – not yet – the seat of a dictatorship.

But it very soon is likely to be, as its election a matter of days ago has largely demonstrated. Not only did Orbán’s authoritarian Fidesz party win (again), the anti-immigration rhetoric seems now to have reached fever pitch. And that’s before we even start with Jobbik, an ugly and even more far-right party, which came in second with a fifth of the vote. In short, the “top two” choice is now between the far right and the really far right.

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Doesn’t anyone check what Cameron says?

02/01/2016, 08:00:36 AM

by Kevin Meagher

David Cameron famously doesn’t believe in “green crap”, but that didn’t stop him recycling his New Year message slogan.

His pledge to focus on knotty social problems in order to build a ‘Greater Britain’ is a neat enough line, until you remember its unfortunate antecedents.

It was the title of Oswald Mosley’s 1932 tome extolling his vision of a British fascist state.

Meanwhile, the campaign group formed in the early 1960s by Britain’s most notorious post-war Nazi agitator, John Tyndall, was called the Greater Britain Movement.

Okay, it’s a small gaffe in the grand scheme of things. But it’s emblematic too of just how slack Cameron’s Downing Street ‘chumocracy’ is. It’s the kind of mistake that would never have been made under Blair or Brown (or, indeed, Thatcher).

It reemphasises how Cameron is beatable, but also how Jeremy Corbyn’s team should be much sharper in exploiting these kinds of miscues.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Uncut

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Laugh if you can, but be afraid

22/01/2015, 09:58:26 PM

by Ian McKenzie

I like Dan Hannan. I rarely agree with him, many of his views are politically toxic, but I respect him. He’s a right-wing Conservative, self-described as coming from the Whig tradition, and he’s an MEP. He was a high profile supporter of the People’s Pledge, the campaign for an In-Out referendum on the EU, and I was its Director. We used to do a little double act banter at fund-raising dinners: he would do the highbrow politics and the Euroscepticism; I would do the lowbrow campaigning and the Europhilia. He wants the UK to leave the EU; I want us to stay a member.

Dan is extremely good company and the most dangerous sort of political opponent there is: he understands your position better than you do and he respects it. He is well read, well prepared and unfailingly polite. If the Trots had done their Trotskyism Dan Hannan style, they’d be running the Labour Party by now.

Because I take Dan seriously, it was with some sadness that I read his reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders, and I scribble this blog post with considerable trepidation.

He introduces several dichotomies: we are asked to believe that the Charlie massacre was not as an act of holy war but merely a crime; the perpetrators concerned not soldiers, but common criminals, not religious zealots but pathetic figures. And then, rather strangely, he suggests the public policy response to Islamism should be to ignore its stated rationale as mere self-description, and subject it to ridicule. Seriousness or ridicule are his choices.

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