Know Your Enemy: Is the far-Right really the far-Left?
“The Conservatives need to get stuck in and expose the BNP as a neo-Nazi outfit. This task can no longer be satisfactorily left to the Socialist Workers party. Voters will understandably dismiss anything coming from that quarter as hysterical abuse – even if in this case it happens to be true.
“What Conservatives can add to this critique is something that the left can never admit: Nazism and communism are ideological twins. The BNP is in fact an extreme leftwing outfit. It wishes individual liberty to be sacrificed to state control. It seeks the overthrow of capitalism, and rages against profit and speculators. It wishes to institute a siege economy with protectionism and the nationalisation of foreign-owned companies. In this it is being consistent to its founding inspiration. Hitler nationalised the banks and insurance companies, the economy was rigidly centrally planned, there was an extensive programme of public works, independent schools were banned.”
For the full article click here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/22/conservatives-bnp
Phibbs has an important point, but not the one he thinks he is making. It is true that totalitarian ideologies converge on a number of core issues. They are indeed collectivist rather than individualist. They are, in essence, fundamentally opposed to the rights-based societies typified by the modern West. Phibbs is also right to say that this extends beyond political authoritarianism into the social and economic spheres.
It is impossible to achieve the kind of total control over a society that both kinds of totalitarianism aim for unless there is state control over the economy. Someone of the libertarian Right would understandably, therefore, be tempted to look at groups such as the British National Party, the Nazis or the Italian Fascists and see in them the precise opposite of everything that they believe in. “I am on the Right,” it might be said, “and they, my opposites, must therefore be on the Left”.
But there is a flaw in this thinking. There are other traditions inside the Right which are not libertarian in character. Traditional conservatism, like socialism, is also a collectivist (or communitarian) ideology. While traditionalist conservatives are certainly more favourably disposed towards market economics than socialists this is as much a matter of political evolution as ideology. Conservatism has adapted over time by making common cause with classical liberals on issues where their interests converge: low taxation and small government generally being prime among them.
And yet there are still strains of thinking inside Conservatism which make it logical to see at the far end of the continuum some sort of a relationship, however remote these days, with the far-Right. National and even racial exceptionalism do play a role in some brands of old-fashioned Conservatism in a way that they do not on the Left. To be sure, mainstream Conservatism has civilised such sentiments by merging them with more powerfully held beliefs in the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, international cooperation and the like. But it is no accident that it has been the Left rather than the Right which has been at the forefront of the fight against racism and discrimination in recent decades. And since, when one really boils it down, it is the hard-line racist nationalism of the far-Right that is its real selling point among its constituency it is easy to see why we have come to use the term “far-Right” as a shorthand to describe Nazis, fascists and groups such as the BNP.
Admittedly this is an extremely complicated argument, especially since the new alliance between Islamism and the far-Left has made out of parts of the modern Left a new receptacle for anti-Semitism. Ideologies develop and mutate.
My own take on this is that when one puts all of the above together it would be better to see parties like the BNP as movements which fall outside the traditional terminology of Right and Left altogether. Better just call them “racists” or “chauvinists”. That at least has the merit of making a truthful appraisal which is readily understandable to a wide audience and which may help build the kind of broad-based coalition we will need to defeat them.
September 25th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
You are all wet! You miss the first point that Stalin saw Hitler as being his enemy and knowing that communism was on the far left he falsely reasoned that national socialism must be on the far right. You are using Stalin’s reasoning, which was simply a matter of convenience in naming his enemy. The primary differences between Communism and national socialinm were that first Communism was aimed at internationalism and secondly communism used proletariat ownership of companies whereas national socialism did not own the companies but rather directed the running of them.
As far as racism is concerned, you miss the boat again. The ones who are always pointing out race and shouting racism are the leftists. Those on the right have nothing racist about them which is why they are willing to discuss the issues and not the race of those behind the issues.
Maybe things are different in England, but that’s the way it is in the USofA!!