Golden Dawn, 1980-2012: The Neo-Nazis’ Road to Parliament

borderlinereports.net

REPORT: GOLDEN DAWN, 1980-2012. THE NEO-NAZIS’ ROAD TO PARLIAMENT

by Augustine Zenakos

425,000 Greek voters sided with a neo-Nazi political party in the last election. Though Golden Dawn is implicated in a surge of violent attacks, and while its views range from the ridiculous to the downright racist, its popularity is rising by the day. What exactly is Golden Dawn, where does it come from, what is its true nature? What is the extent of their relationship to the police? And who are the people that vote for them?

Golden Dawn storm troopers in the city of Corinth

“The political party of the crisis par excellence”. This is how Golden Dawn is described by Efthymis Papavlassopoulos, a political scientist and pollster.  And Christophoros Vernardakis, another political scientist and pollster, says: “It is the only political party that is clearly rising in popularity”.[1]

In response to this rising popularity, the principals of Golden Dawn have made some effort recently to disguise the nature of their party. Especially after their electoral successes, they have attempted through a series of public statements to pass their organization off as a “nationalist” party that is honestly interested in the well being of Greek citizens and has taken up the struggle against the austerity policies imposed by the Greek governments at the behest of the troika.

They are not being truthful in the least: Golden Dawn is a neo-Nazi organization, upgraded to a crowd-pleasing political party by riding on the wave of popular discontent with the established political system. Like their original source of inspiration–the German Nazis–the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn have held views as varied as they are laughable, including mystical beliefs in the ancient Greek god Pan and other gods of Mount Olympus, as well as satanist beliefs dressed up in the theatrics of Black Metal music. They have also subscribed to wildly irrational or conspiratorial views, such as that the once number two in the German Nazi party Rudolph Hess was of Greek descent, or that Adolph Hitler roamed the streets of Berlin for forty days after his apparent suicide, only to ascend to the heavens at the end.

Unfortunately, again like their source of inspiration, they can by no means be dismissed as plain charlatans, though charlatans they certainly are. In addition, however, Golden Dawn is responsible for a web of intimidation and fear that is ever intensifying, and its members have been repeatedly connected–though few of them convicted–with assaults, racial violence, beatings, extortion, and attempted murder.

Read the rest of this disturbing and well-researched report here.

Norway: Terror in the Eye of the Beholder? (Left Flank)

Editor’s note. We couldn’t have said it any better than “Dr_Tad,” writing at the Australian blog Left Flank.

Terror in the eye of the beholder? Norway, the far Right & the state-media complex

This weekend was a salutary lesson in how terrorism is treated by the media and political establishment. The lesson may surprise you, because there are two narratives constructed:

Firstly, with outrage, linking of associations on the basis of zero evidence, calls for continued military action and tightening of domestic security (read: curtailing civil liberties) to fight the terrorists, and defence of the liberal freedoms that make “them” hate “us”.

Secondly, with sober reportage, calls for reflection rather than “politicised” reaction, with careful examination of the terrorist’s motives, sensible collateral information from family members and experts, and even sympathy for his grievances.

These two approaches just hours apart. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

The first approach is simply the set response to Islamist terrorism, especially since the events of 9/11, almost exactly 10 years ago now. And it was on display in the hours after the atrocities in Oslo and the island of Utoya. Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, as if his editor didn’t realise how much trouble he was having currently, immediately seized on the attacks as a Jihadist plot with this front page:

Neo-con opinion makers in the US, like the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, immediately jumped on the same bandwagon, quoting security “experts” on the Islamist nature of the attacks and using the opportunity to demand a freeze on any cuts to defence spending, reminding Americans that this would mean “curbing our ability to defend the United States and our allies in a very dangerous world”.

As Think Progress points out, Murdoch’s flagship Wall Street Journal was equally brazen:

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, rushed up an editorial Friday, blaming “jihadists” for the attacks and exclaiming, “Norway is targeted for being true to Western norms”:

… in jihadist eyes, [Norway] will always remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy, and every other freedom that defines the West. For being true to those ideals, Norwegians have now been asked to pay a terrible price.

As more information came out about the attacks and the attacker, the WSJ rewrote the online version of the editorial, albeit by removing any trace of the above paragraph. Instead, it mentioned that it had falsely attributed the attacks to jihadists and called the attacker an al Qaeda “copycat.” [Emphasis added]

The same logic was at play locally in Andrew Bolt’s blog: “Once the identity of the attackers becomes known, the consequences for Norway’s immigration policies could be profound.” It’s now been edited in retrospect including this justification:

(UPDATE: i’ve removed here an excerpt from the first report I linked to spelling out the earlier Islamic threats and attacks that led many, including the Guardian and New York Times, to initially suspect an Islamic attack. I had left it up so as to explain the context of my original reaction, and so not to seem I was trying to cover up my original suspicions. Now I find that leaving it up is being interpreted as my insisting on a gratuitous point instead.)

The focus on Islamist terrorism has always been part of the general climate of Islamophobia whipped up in the “War on Terror” than any facts on the ground. As Juan Cole has pointed out, Europol has repeatedly recorded that Islamists are a tiny part of the mix of terrorist threats and actions across the continent.

Sympathy with the oppressors

Now the facts are in, the media is suddenly hard at work downplaying the hysteria. So we’re treated to carefully reconstructed accounts of the killer’s childhood and political views. His motives in attacking the youth wing of a Left of centre political party are detailed as part of a “calculated” (if horrific) plan.

Andrew Bolt now claims Breivik is not a real Christian because of what he’s done, in a complete reversal of his repeated linking of Islam with violence. We should “look not as his creed but his wounds”, descending into pop psychology about his traumatic upbringing. Bolt reminds us, “[E]xtremes of the Right and Left are indistinguishable,” just in case you thought we were talking about a right-wing terrorist here.

The Guardian can see fit to reprint commentary by a former member of Sweden’s far-right New Democrats, which minimises its racist policies while suggesting the real problem was that too many hate-filled people were allowed to run riot in its ranks — as if the two are so easily disconnected.

There are two things we learned on Friday afternoon. One: extremists are found in all groups, and all are at least as dangerous. Two: hatred breeds hate. Never help to spread it unless you are ready to take the consequences.

More insidiously, the coverage has expressed some agreement with the motivations that drove Breivik to his crimes. The New York Times, in its detailed dissection of the rise of far Right sentiment across Europe, writes:

A combination of increased migration from abroad and largely unrestricted movement of people within an enlarged European Union, such as the persecuted Roma minority, helped lay the groundwork for a nationalist, at times starkly chauvinist, revival.

Such an analysis could easily have come from Breivik’s own mouth. It is the ultimate in sympathy with the oppressor, justifying anti-immigrant racism on the basis of the immigrants themselves. Recall the hysteria when people pointed to the grievances that drove Islamist terrorists — Western military occupation of Muslim countries, support for brutal dictatorships — we were told that this was outrageous and that it was all about “them” hating “us” for our way of life. Yet those grievances had a basis in reality rather than febrile racist ideology, even if the terrorists’ methods were a disaster for the struggle against oppression.

A little more anger, please

One response to the media’s astounding ability to jump to conclusions and whip up prejudice has been an understandable desire to see this is a chance to more soberly assess and reflect on what has happened, to understand political violence rather than engage with a left-wing mirror image of the Right’s hysteria. This was the position put by Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo yesterday, and while I am sympathetic to the argument I think it doesn’t deal with the reality of how this is playing out.

I’m not advocating that we get all Chicken Little about this, but the problem the Left now faces is precisely the cold, measured approach the media and political establishment are taking to the issue of far Right extremism. Because, in its own way, that is just as seductive a narrative as the exaggerations, lies and racialist paranoia driven around Islamist terrorism. Its function is to settle fears, to isolate “extremists” as “lone gunmen” divorced from wider political developments, to paint a picture of a healthy society whose only internal threats are aberrations.

It is vital for the media, the political class and the state to create a particular narrative here because to shine the spotlight on liberal democratic societies that could produce such reactions would be a bridge too far. Yet if one thing has been true of modern societies it is that when profound social polarisation occurs, so the fringe voices of the extreme Right can gain a hearing. Those voices articulate not a class solution to the social problems that sharpen in periods of crisis, but a national one built on scapegoating and authoritarianism.

That ideological framework doesn’t simply arise spontaneously at the fringes; it is conditioned by the reality of how states operate to manage social divisions within national boundaries (see here for Left Flank on nationalism in the era of neoliberalism). My prediction is that it will not be long before mainstream politicians seek to assuage the “rising tide” of racism in Europe by pandering to it, talking of “understandable” grievances and the need to “manage” multiculturalism more closely. The far Right is a small but very serious danger in a Europe increasingly racked by economic turmoil. But it is the official discourse, frequently peppered with pronouncements about the “failure” of multiculturalism, which is a key part of the problem. What’s more, states have the power (which they frequently exercise) to actually repress, control and expel migrants.

If his writings are to be believed, Breivik seized upon a common point of anger expressed by right-wing extremists: The failure of governments to act against “Islamicisation” and multiculturalism. This is a signal feature of fascism, the need to act outside the state when it won’t go far enough in the national interest. Indeed, in language similar to Nazism’s rantings against the ever-present menace of “Bolshevism”, Breivik railed against the “cultural Marxism” of the very mainstream Norwegian Labour Party. That the language is not so different to repeated accusations by leading Australian right-wingers of Julia Gillard’s “socialism” or the Greens’ “environmental Marxism” should give pause for thought about the forces they may be legitimating.

It is therefore important to not accept that the media’s softly-softly approach here as a sign of a new maturity. It is precisely because the media is so deeply implicated in the last decade of state-sanctioned Islamophobia and diminution of civil liberties that it is rushing to frame a story that perpetuates a lack of comprehension about the links between the extreme Right and how governments have managed social polarisation with the media’s collusion. Indeed, they will do so alongside a continuation of the very anti-immigrant tropes that fostered the current climate.

If they were being truly reflective, they would be angrily going after the “mainstream” political system (of which they are a key part) that encourages extremists’ paranoia, hatred and violence. I’m not holding my breath.

________

In support of Left Flank’s argument, we couldn’t help notice that even after Norwegian police had Breivik in custody, the formidable Voice of Russia continued to toe the anti-Muslim line:

The head of the Centre of Northern Europe of the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yuri Deryabin, shared his opinion of possible motives for the double terrorist act in Oslo with The Voice of Russia.

“This is undoubtedly a terrorist act but not against a certain politician. It was meant to intimidate the public and to prove that al-Qaeda is alive even after Bin Laden has died. Why Norway? Because it is taking an active part in the NATO operation in Afghanistan. As for the incident at the youth camp outside Oslo, the reasons are not so obvious. The suspect has been arrested and is answering police questions. I do not rule out that he has links with an international terrorist organization like al-Qaeda. Not all Islamists are Muslim nationals.  The second version is that the suspect who is an ethnic Norwegian is a mentally unbalanced person. In any case this is a terrible tragedy which proves that the world community should close its ranks in the face of the terrorist threat”.

January 19 Committee: Call for Antifascist Demonstration, January 19, Moscow

http://19jan.ru/

Call for Antifascist Demonstration, January 19, 2011, Moscow

January 19, 2011 will mark the second anniversary of the murders of two antifascists, lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. They were murdered in Moscow in broad daylight, shot in the head by a gunman.

The murders were brazen and demonstrative. Although from the outset various explanations were given for the murders (as a lawyer, Markelov had handled cases in Chechnya, both against the federal forces who tortured and murdered Chechen civilians, and the Chechen leadership, who are suspected of kidnapping and murdering people; he had also represented journalist Mikhail Beketov, who was nearly beaten to death in autumn 2008, in his court battle with Khimki mayor Vladimir Strelchenko), Stas and Nastya’s comrades in the antifascist movement assumed that neo-Nazis had been involved. For it had been Stanislav Markelov who had pressured law enforcement authorities to conduct a thorough investigation of the murder, in the spring of 2006, of the young antifascist Alexander Riukhin. It was thanks to Markelov’s efforts that the authorities were unable to sweep this case under the rug or drop it altogether. It was thanks to his persistence that police investigators not only came up with a list of suspects, but also brought the case to court. Half of the people involved in Alexander’s murder were arrested and convicted for the crime, while the rest were placed on the federal wanted list.

Today, we have almost no doubts that law enforcement authorities have Stas and Nastya’s real murderer in custody, along with his female accomplice. Their court trial should begin soon. These two people are neo-Nazis, and one of them is in fact one of the people who was involved in the fatal attack on Alexander Riukhin but was not found by the authorities after being placed on the wanted list.

The murderers have been apprehended, their trial will soon begin. Does that mean society can breathe a sigh of relief?

No, it does not.

Dozens of less publicized racist murders take place in our country every year. The victims of these murders are Russian citizens of non-Slavic appearance as well as immigrants from former Soviet republics and former Soviet allies. S0viet-era international solidarity (whether fictitious or real) has been replaced by ethnic intolerance, by hatred towards people who are different, who speak a different language, whose eyes are differently shaped, whose hair and skin are a different color.

As a rule, we don’t remember the names of these victims of neo-Nazi terror. Often we don’t even learn their names: the press merely informs us that someone has murdered a citizen of Uzbekistan, a citizen of Kyrgyzstan, an Azerbaijani, an Armenian, an immigrant from Vietnam, a refugee from Afghanistan. We do not see their faces or the faces of their grieving relatives. It as if they pass anonymous into nonexistence, inhabiting our consciousness for the several seconds it takes us to read this terrifying news on our computer screens or in the pages of a newspaper.

But in fact none of the people who have died at the hands of neo-Nazis murderers is nameless. None of these people was born in a test tube, bereft of pain, reason, love, attachments, and hope. All of these people were brought into this world by mothers. Each of them had families and friends, people whom they cared about and who cared about them.

This problem, which was long ignored both by Russian society and the Russian authorities, was raised only by the local ethnic communities of the murder victims and by young antifascists, the same people whom lawyer Stanislav Markelov had befriended and defended, the same people in whose ranks journalist Anastasia Baburova (who herself had immigrated from Simferopol, in the Crimea, to Moscow) had stood.

A year ago, on the eve of the first anniversary of Stas and Nastya’s murders, people who had known them united together in the January 19 Committee to commemorate their lives and deaths in a worthy manner, and say a decisive “no!” to neo-Nazi terror. The members of the committee belong to different parts of the Russian social movement, and they have different views of our country’s present and future. And yet on January 19, 2010, they joined around 1,500 other people in an antifascist demonstration in downtown Moscow, braving minus twenty degree weather and active interference on the part of the Moscow police. The demonstrators included both people who frequently protest against the authorities and people who might not have taken part in public protests since the perestroika era. These people were joined by folks who had never participated in a demonstration before: society had begun to recognize the problem of neo-Nazi terror, and caring people were moved to act whatever their age, social status, profession, sex, and so on. The march was joined by students and pensioners, confident middle-aged professionals and poor people who had lost hope of making it, members of the intelligentsia and young workers, all kinds of different people. What united them was a troubled conscience, an intolerance of neo-Nazi murders, and shame for their country and city, a city in which such medieval monstrosities have nearly become a norm of daily life.

As we see now, a year later, this protest was more than timely. It is possible that it happened too late. In any case, the events of December 11–15 in Moscow and other Russian cities have proven that neo-Nazism has not been cowed. Extreme right-wing ideas have struck a chord with large numbers of young people, and these masses of young people, who were badly educated and poorly brought up during the years of the Yeltsin-Putin stagnation, are willing to engage in violence. The half-forgotten, moth-balled Russian word pogrom was heard again: the crowd on Manezh Square was on the point of starting a genuine pogrom, and the crowd that gathered outside Kiev Station four days later was prepared to engage in fighting, stabbing, beating, and shooting.

During those same days, people also asked where the antifascists had been. Why hadn’t they tried to confront the raging neo-Nazis? There are several possible answers to this question. First, why don’t you try to stand in the way of a crowd like that yourself? Second, try organizing resistance to an aggressive crowd of neo-Nazis, people who think nothing about murdering and beating other people, when you have become the target of a harassment campaign (if not a witch hunt) on the part of the authorities. These were the conditions faced by Russia’s youth antifascist movement during the second half of 2010. Police searches, police dragnets at concerts, arrests, and violent interrogations by police who wanted to force testimony from them: this was what being antifa meant in 2010, not educational work amongst young people, cultural events, publishing literature, and even the martial arts and football tournaments that young antifascists had still been able to organize in 2009.

Sensing that the young antifascists were a rising force, the state has thrown the entire weight of its police apparatus against them. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis have been holding their legally sanctioned Russian Marches, convening round tables and posing for journalists in expensive hotels, and continuing to murder the defenseless – janitors, petty laborers, teenagers. While the state was unleashing its dragnet against the antifa, the neo-Nazis were trying to go respectable, to show the authorities and the business world that they could be a source of “order” during a complicated economic and political situation, that they were capable both of doing the dirty work and putting on a fashion show in well-ironed shirts and ties.

This fashion show crystallized on Manezh Square in early December. Judging by the absence of real measures to find and punish the people who organized that riot, certain high-ranking Kremlin officials found it to their liking.

Given this situation, the January 19 Committee declares the need for all people opposed to Russia’s slide into the abyss of nationalism to unite and organize solidarity actions. We live in a huge country, and we are all different. Our country is divided by contradictions, arguments, and discrepancies, and at the end of the day we aren’t obliged to like each other. But we are united on one point: Nazism, which in the twentieth century brought incalculable suffering to our country and other countries of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, is once again blazing a bloody trail. It is too late to say that it must not rise again. It is already rising again, and now we have to talk about how to stop it.

We call on all honest people, people who value the ideals of freedom and justice and just plain normal life in our country, people of different nationalities, religious confessions, convictions, and guiding principles, to join us in an antifascist demonstration in Moscow and other Russian cities.

This will not simply be a memorial action to remember the dead – Stas Markelov, Nastya Baburova, and many, many others. January 19, 2011 must become a day of determination, a day of protest, a day of struggle against the fascist threat in Russia.

Demonstrators in Moscow will gather at 7:00 p.m. on January 19, 2011, at the Timiryazev Monument (near the Nikitsky Gates at the beginning of Tverskaya Boulevard). We will have more information about the route of the demonstration and slogans in the coming days. Check for updates at the January 19 Committee web site:  http://19jan.ru.

Stop neo-Nazi terror! Save Russia from the ultra right-wing threat!

As long as we’re united we can never be defeated!

—The  January 19 Committee