The antecedents of the far-right in France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany and a number of other countries go back to its origins in Europe in the 1920s with the triumph of Italian fascism.
The current strategy of Meloni, Le Pen and others in the fascist camp in Europe is similar to Mussolini’s.
This strategy, in other words, is to gain heights of power in each respective country, and once that occurs, an all European authoritarian dictatorship can be implemented.
To clarify further: not in one country but with the possibility of major economic European powers such as Italy, France and others under the iron heel of fascism within, say, the next ten years such a strategy could have a clear run to establish a European Fascist union. This is one future possibility.
The pan-European fascist strategy is to establish the revival of Hitler’s New Order with the intention that this time around it will be permanent.
Two key factors contribute to this 21st Century fascist strategy.
First, structural: sections of reactionary industrial capital, mostly located within fossil, mineral extraction and nuclear industries are backing authoritarian and fascist political formations and parties and, as in the 1920s and 1930s, provide massive funding to these formations.
Second, is the desire and willingness of these authoritarian and far-right formations, once in power, to implement a totalitarian repressive regime on the model of Mussolini or Hitler.
These fascist formations willingly offer themselves as arms of brutal repression of the working class, ecological, feminist, first nations and LGBTQ movements with the aim of freeing this Thanatos capital in its drive towards total destruction of all life on planet Earth. Here we have reactionary industrial capital and far-right formations uniting in their psychopathology to destroy the basis of all life on earth.
In the present moment, Meloni, Le Pen, Wilders and other fascists, including Trump, are in their camouflage phase. They focus on the massive discontent with the Neoliberal Order, but their focus is on the victims of this neoliberal order: the refugees, the migrant working poor, attacking invariably and viciously the former and social movements. Absent in the rhetoric of the far-right is any attribution of the responsibility of the capitalist system and its neoliberal order as the cause of misery of large sections of the working class, the precariat and unemployed.
This is a well tested fascist strategy of the Italian and German fascists of the 1920s-1930s in that it focuses its propaganda on winning the support of disaffected and pauperised petit-bourgeoisie and declasse sections of the working class to gain enough support to attain power through electoral processes. Once in power, in a number of key countries, the strategy of establishing a fascist dictatorship will be fulfilled by enacting legislation akin to the Enabling Act in each country, as Hitler did in 1933.
The fascists currently have Italy, France is on the brink and the far-right is gaining ground in a number of other European countries; that is why the antisystemic Left has to urgently form a United Front to counter this far-right wave and defeat it decisively by offering an eco-egalitarian alternative.
John Janusz Ebel
John-Janusz Ebel is the son of Holocaust survivors. Soon after coming to Australia from Poland, Ebel chose to be a draft resister and activist against the Vietnam War; he also participated in Aboriginal struggles against continued oppression and genocide of Aboriginal people. Ebel has practised as a radical existentialist psychotherapist.
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