A comment on the complaint of my correspondent cited in the post immediately below. Of course at no time has it been my purpose to "attack the progressive left"; the progressive Left is where I stand. It is assuredly not, however, to "stand political ideology on its head" to associate some parties nominally of the Left with the cause of fascism.
It is not only that many intellectual forebears and political leaders of fascism have come from the Left (notably Georges Sorel and Benito Mussolini, respectively), or that unambiguously pro-fascist parties have sprung from the Left and considered themselves part of the Left. (Most prominent among those parties was probably the Parti Populaire Français establised by the Communist leader Jacques Doriot in 1936. The British traitor John Amery, hanged after the war, was a follower of Doriot, and the short-lived British People's Party - which I cited in an earlier post as a precedent for today's Respect 'Coalition' - was clearly modelled on Doriot's organisation.) In addition, ideas from certain parts of the nominal Left were assimilated into fascist ideology and made a significant impact upon it. The most interesting historical figure in this respect is the Belgian Marxist Henri de Man, whose ideas were a powerful influence on Mussolini, and also on a generation of French Socialists led by Marcel Déat. Déat founded successive pro-fascist parties in the 1930s and under Vichy - which he strongly opposed on the grounds that it was insufficiently accommodating to the Nazi occupiers.
This part of the European Left has been brilliantly analysed by Zeev Sternhell in Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, 1986, especially chapters 4 and 5. There is also a good summary of Sternhell's thesis in Richard Griffiths, Fascism, 2005, chapter 8. Griffiths notes (p. 129):
As Sternhell has pointed out, even under the Occupation, Déat still saw himself as a revolutionary socialist. Indeed, like de Man, he saw the German New Order for Europe as the best vehicle for the anti-capitalist renewal which had eluded him and others like him under the democratic system.
No historical parallel is exact, and as the Observer columnist Nick Cohen has pointed out, there is something novel in an alliance between the totalitarian Left and theocratic reaction. But Cohen is also on to something important in his comparison of two former Labour MPs and "moustachioed loudmouths" active in the same part of London but separated by 70 years. The point caused outrage among Respect's supporters, of whom this correspondent to The Observer is probably typical:
In the 1930s, Jewish people [note, incidentally, this bizarre genteelism, which crops up quite often among declared progressives: it's as if the word "Jews" is thought impolite] in east London were being pilloried and persecuted. The left came to their defence. Today, another ethnic and religious group is being pilloried and persecuted - the Muslims. Respect takes exactly the same attitude as the left in the 1930s. Muslims must be protected and Respect is doing exactly what the anti-fascists did in the 1930s.
Apparently George Galloway made a similar claim in his speech to his party's rally in London last week (though I cannot for the moment track down the press article where I read it), distinguishing between the campaign of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, which attacked immigrants, and that of Respect, which defends them. His distinction is bogus and ahistorical. Mosley's campaign was directed not at immigrants, but at Jews - the "big Jews", who he alleged controlled the nation's economy and finances, and the "little Jews", who supposedly threatened the livelihoods and cultural identity of British workers in particular areas. (The distinction was made in Mosley's speech to his party's Albert Hall rally in October 1934.)
Nick Cohen (who quotes Mosley's speech) slightly overstates the degree of cynicism involved in Mosley's antisemitism. Mosley certainly did believe that the Jews controlled Britain, having been convinced of this notion by a report he had commissioned from one of his party workers, A.K. Chesterton (nephew of the author G.K. Chesterton, and later chairman of the National Front). But it would be true to say that Mosley latched on to a strain of bigotry and made it central to his campaign, rather than that his political movement was itself founded on antisemitism from the outset.
Mosley later subtly rewrote the history of his pre-war political campaigning, as in his article entitled Antisemitism - take great care with the link; it takes you to a fascist site dedicated to Mosley - which is excerpted from his 1968 memoirs. He claims that:
While anti-Semites are busy pursuing the little Jews, the big villains of all races who run international finance are sitting back and laughing at them in the City, or Wall Street, or in kindred haunts of the usury species.
Mosley's insistence in his memoirs and elsewhere that he never espoused antisemitism is disgustingly, dishonestly self-serving. In fact the "big villains" in his scheme were the Jews; but his distinction between the big villains and the little Jews is, in that respect alone, an accurate recollection of what he was saying in the 1930s. The BUF unquestionably pushed antisemitism as a populist campaigning issue in the East End (where around a third of Jews in the UK lived in the 1930s, many of whom had fled persecution in the Europe in the previous half-century), but the anti-immigrant stance was less central to the party's purpose than its preposterous conspiracy theories about the control of Britain. Those exercising such control had been initially designated the "Old Gang" by Mosley, but it rapidly became clear whom - or rather what ethnic group - that gang consisted in.
I have written much about the position of the Respect 'Coalition' on comparable matters, and will not rehearse the argument in this post. It is enough to say that Respect is a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party, whose adoption of traditional antisemitism in my judgement parallels the history of the British Union of Fascists. Antisemitism is not central to the SWP's founding (or rather that of its predecessor organisation, the International Socialists), and the SWP's adoption of it is partly cynical; but having adopted antisemitism, the SWP is campaigning hard on it, and has made the issue fundamental to the party's current political identity. The SWP is not alone on the far Left in its resort to standard anti-Jewish themes, and I have written of other instances. But it is the most influential antisemitic organisation active in Britain today. It is properly regarded as the ideological heir of a particular strain of pre-war fascism, and the Respect 'Coalition' is aptly compared to the Mosleyite tradition.