Prince Charles and his wife the Duchess of Cornwall were recently attacked by a mob — ostensibly protesting student fees — and their police protectors showed “enormous restraint” — that is, they did nothing — as the royal couple’s car was kicked and hit by paint bombs by “youths” who chanted “Off with their heads!” and “Tory scum!”
European Fascism stirs, Borepatch says:
The rise of fascism was spurred on by the sense of lawlessness and collapse of legitimacy in the ruling order following the end of the Great War. Street gangs fought state law enforcement, and each other. The majority increasingly kept their heads down, as the state showed itself increasingly unwilling — or unable — to establish and keep order.
The man in uniform standing next to Adolf Hitler is Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff, very nearly the victor in the last great German campaign in 1918. Hitler had one of the biggest and toughest street gangs around, and an ideology of social control over much of society. Sensing that the time was ripe, he looked for someone to add a veneer of respectability to his bully boy organization. Ludendorff fit the bill.
Of course, the Beer Hall Putsch failed miserably. Even as weak and decadent a state as the Weimar Republic rounded up his gang. But it was too weak to do much about things. Hitler was sent to prison, but it was all but a slap on the wrist. Not only did he become a celebrity, receiving many visitors in his cell, but he wrote his notorious polemic Mein Kampf while behind bars. Ten years later, he was Chancellor.
Europe has been sliding into chaos for a long time. Large parts of Paris — the banlieus, or housing projects — are effectively no-go areas, where the police dare not enter. Tens of thousands of cars are burned each year. In the UK, the population has been disarmed, while the police and courts refuse to do anything about a wave of “hot burglaries” — break-ins that occur while the residents are at home. The sense of lawlessness is palpable. People keep their heads down. The Ruling Class increasingly is seen to have no legitimacy.
Now the heir to the throne is attacked in the street by a mob. The streets belong to the gangs, from Malmo to Southend to Marseille. The gangs are motivated by ideology — the socialist welfare state, in the case of the yobs who attacked HRH Prince Charles’ car; radical Islam in the case of the banlieus.
Hitler would not have been possible without a great adversary. His German National Socialism was a counter to the International Socialism offered by the Socialist International, run from Moscow. His posturing as the defender of the old social order rallied the vast uncommitted middle to his side, or at least enough to tip the balance.
I said a while back that it was a short, half-step sideways for Europe to go from Fascism to Transnational Progressivism. It will only be a short half-step back.
All that the European countries lack is a charismatic leader. The current European Ruling Class — including Sir Paul — refuse to do anything to correct the tailspin that society finds itself in. Society is going to reach a point where they insist that someone — anyone — do something about it.
Read the criticism that Sir Paul finds himself under. Ask yourself if the next time, shots will be fired. Ask yourself what will happen after the gunfire stops. It’s said that fascism is always descending on America, but always landing in Europe.
Considering that Russia and China have gone from Red to Brown in the last 20 years and look no worse for wear, Fascism is the new hotness. It’s even better when the changeover is highlighted by a strategically placed touch of Green. When you hear Tom Friedman and others come back from China breathless about their wind power, solar power, and other “green industries”, they’re two breaths away from saying, “I have seen the future and it works.”
Peter Drucker, an Austrian who lived in Germany, analyzed the rise of totalitarian beliefs and specifically of Fascism in his 1939 book The End of Economic Man.
In a chapter titled “The Return of the Demons,” Drucker addresses the psychological roots of Fascism. One of these was the experience of the Great War — “Modern war appeared to be the denial of all tenets on which the mechanical and rational conception of society is based. This was not because war is amechanical and arational, but because it reduces mechanization and rationalization to absurdity… the war showed the individual suddenly as an isolated, helpless, powerless atom in a world of irrational monsters.” Another factor was the Great Depression, which “proved that irrational and incalculable forces also rule peacetime society: the threat of sudden permanent unemployment, of being thrown on the industrial scrap heap in one’s prime or even before one has started to work. Against these forces the individual finds himself as helpless, isolated, and atomized as against the forces of machine war.” As a result of these factors, “The European masses realized for the first time that existence in this society is governed not by rational and sensible, but by blind, irrational, and demonic forces.”
In a later chapter, Drucker specifically addresses the rise of anti-Semitism: “The real explanation for racial anti-Semitism in German, and even more in Austria, is that the substitution of the Jews for the hostile forces of bourgeois capitalism and liberalism was made possible, if not mandatory, by the unique social structure of the German bourgeoisie… Unlike the middle classes in western Europe, it was liberated from above. Its emancipation was not a social end in itself; it was effected for the purpose of national unification. Politically and socially the bourgeoisie therefore never became a ruling class.” (He means prior to Weimar.) He then provides data indicating extensive intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in the German and Austrian middle classes, so that whereas the ruling classes before the war had been entirely non-Jewish, “the mixture with Jewish blood was the specified distinction of the new ruling class… When this class failed and when its rule led to the emergence of the demons, it became therefore ‘rational’ to hold the Jews responsible and to personify the demons as Jewish.”
Later: “Nazi anti-Semitism… has been caused precisely by the absence of any distinction, conflict, and strangeness between the German Jews and a large part of the German people — to wit, the liberal middle classes. The Nazis did not persecute the Jews because they remained a foreign body within Germany, but actually because they had become almost completely assimilated and had ceased to be Jews.”
And “(Anti-Semitism) has nothing to do with any qualities of the Jews themselves, but exclusively with what the internal tension in Naziism requires the Jews to look like… The real enemy is not the Jew, but the bourgeois order which is fought under the name of the Jew. Nazi anti-Semitism stems from the failure of Naziism to replace the bourgeois order and the bourgeois concept of man with a new constructive concept. And this makes it imperative to denounce bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, yet impossible to resort to class war.”
Later: “It must be understood that for the convinced Totalitarian the personification of the demons and their persecution and oppression appear not only justified but alone reasonable. He is genuinely unable to understand why the outside world does not see the demons.”
Well played, Citoyen Fouché. Brown with a touch of green is the new black.
Again, David, you remind me that I need to set aside the time to read more Drucker. An Austrian who lived through one or both World Wars obviously has a very different perspective on them than a post-war American.
As a former scene painter in theater — check out Rosco Iddings deep-color paints — I can attest that mixing brown and green gets you a nasty near-black color — halfway between raw umber and black.