Now there's 16, 17-year-old, 18-year-olds now where the Holocaust and
September War is like talking to my parents and my grandparents about the
Napoleonic period. The September War has become increasingly historicized. It's
not the touchstone that it once was for certainly younger generations, and I think
that partly explains why parts of the far right vote in Europe is in some
places actually a young vote.
Welcome to a history of xenophobia. From the gold mines to the rise of the
far right today, my name is Ariel Glen and I'm the host of this History Hope
Podcast series. History Hope is based at the School of History at University
College Dublin and Ireland. You can find a huge range of podcasts and videos
showcasing historical research on our website, HistoryHope.ie. You can also
follow us on various social media and if you want to get in contact with us
about the series please email
[email protected]. Dr. Joe Mohol is a historian,
journalist and writer and the director of research at Hope Not Hate, the UK's
largest anti-fascism and anti-racism organisation. He completed his PhD in
history at Royal Holloway University of London which provided the basis for
his excellent book British Fascism after the Holocaust published by Reynitch. He's a
co-author of the International Alternate of Rights with colleagues from Hope Not Hate
which also came out with Rebellige. Most recently Joe wrote drums in the
distance journeys into the global far right with the icon books. Joe writes
regularly for the print media in Britain including for the Guardian,
Independent and New Statesman and appears regularly on broadcast media
including the BBC News at 10 ready of force today program the moral maids and
child for news and others. He's worked on numerous documentaries including
undercover in the alt-right which was broadcast on Amazon Prime. Today we will
talk to Joe about post-war British fascism, the rise of the far right more
recently and the alt-right topics that Joe is over extensively in his
publications and his work with Hope Not Hate. So Joe, thanks a million for agreeing
to talk to us today. So maybe to start back with your doctoral work which was
as I mentioned in history and you focused on British fascism after the
Holocaust. So you wrote in this book entitled British Fascism after the
Holocaust that quote "If fascism did not die with the gas chambers it's likely
that nothing will kill it revealing its ability to change and adapt on the
persistence of prejudice and hatred." So how did fascists who remain active in
Britain after the Second World War justify their politics after the horrors of
the Holocaust came to light? That was kind of the key question of the whole
project. The whole PhD was, I was fascinated with the idea, how is it that
anyone, once the news of the Holocaust breaks, could still still be
interesting fascism, or still stick to their ideology, it seemed like an
anathema. And so when I started to dig into those early post-war fascists, I
mean as the news of the Holocaust starts to break in Britain in the
towards the end of the war, you do see a bit of a variety of reactions. There
are some kind of pre-war fascists who turn around and say I had no idea
that this is where the kind of logical conclusion of this politics was
going to end up and you do see some of them fade away. You see other ones that
just kind of obfuscate a little bit in term and say "yeah but that was German
fascism, we're talking about Britain etc." But lots of British fascists
during the war in turn under the thing called Defence Regulation 18B, where
they were kind of rounded up and kept in kind of prisons or kind of prison
of war camp types of things in the UK. And in some ways these offered like
hot houses where you had these individuals that had been in things like the
British Union fascists or the Imperial fascist league found themselves all in
the same place in this camp and they became little education units. And so some
of these people either continued with their fanaticism or were even became
more fanatical during the war. And so as the news of the Holocaust breaks and
a lot of these activists are back out on the streets and we start to see the
activism reemerge more significantly after the war, these ones are kind of
left with a crisis or a question they have to answer, especially the ones
that were fanatically anti-Semitic who traditionally believed that the Jews
ran the world and that the Jews were supposedly all powerful. How is it that
the Jews can be all powerful and run the world and then in their parlance
how would left the Holocaust happen to them? That there seemed to be some sort of
paradox there. And for some people it was too much for paradox so say and they
said well we must be wrong but for a lot of the British fascists it was much
easier to term and say the only way we can explain this is if the Holocaust
didn't happen. And you start to see the birth of Holocaust now really really
early in the UK before the end of the war is even over. In fact by 1945-1946
all of the tropes that we come to think of later on in the famous Holocaust
deniers of the 70s and 80s are there even down to these images and videos that
we're seeing were being faked in by Hollywood you know producers and all these
sorts of things. So for some people they genuinely believed that there was no
way that this all powerful group of people as in the Jews would have allowed
this to happen to them so this must be some sort of fabrication and in some
of them it would be it was a fabrication designed to to create guilt around
the world but also to create the state of Israel. So some of them went that way.
Some people were absolutely flatically believed and other ones I think it was
much more cynical. So there was some people that were anti-Semitic enough that
they actually didn't mind the fact that the Holocaust had happened. You know there
was a guy called Arnold Lee's who's perhaps the most anti-Semitic British
fascist ever who said publicly the Holocaust didn't happen but I wish it had
happened. So you kind of get that absolutely ludicrous extreme position there
but for other ones they just started to realise that if they were ever going to
be able to relaunch this ideology which they've dedicated their lives to in the
light of the Holocaust and the light of the news of the Holocaust being
increasingly well known around the UK and around the world they would have to
remove that kind of stain on its reputation which demanded that they remove
the Holocaust. To rebuild fascism you have to remove the Holocaust. It's
incredible how you know you talk about these conspiracy theories about
doubting pictorial evidence blaming Allied bombing typhus even arguing
Hitler's ignorance of crimes you know what that you said you know despite
this it survives. You know one of the most significant arguments you make in
that book is that understanding British fascism in the media post-war
period is really important to understand the later development of the far
right in the 1970s and 1980s why is that? I think a lot of the literature will
either kind of say fascism is this kind of time shackled 1930s, 1940s thing
that was either specifically German or Italian or even time bound into that
war and it couldn't fascism dies in 1945 Mussolini's strong up Hitler's dead
that's it you know and what's happening post-war is it's something separate.
British fascism because of course Britain doesn't have the destruction of
those movements in the same way that happens on the continent because of the
war. There is an unbroken thread in the UK it becomes very very difficult for
those historians that want to argue that fascism should either be divided into
two distinct periods pre-war and post-war all those historians that say there
is no such thing as post-war it becomes much harder when you look at the
British fascist movement because when is the break where is the break? The
people that are relaunching the movement in the post-war period are the same
individuals that were active in the pre-war period. The ideas often that they
were espousing and the politics that they were pushing was identical in many
cases to the pre-war period so there is no break in that UK scene which then
questions the idea of this kind of pre-post dichotomy a little bit and because
of that unbroken thread there was individuals that were active in the 1940s
that were central figures in the 1970s and 80s in the UK scene and in fact
there was figures only just a few years ago you know John thing of a guy called
John Bean specifically was involved in kind of post-war fascist movements that
was still around in the British far right into the 2000s and so you can trace
the lineage of both ideology and individuals from the 1940s when it is of
course a much smaller you know these groups are small tiny fringe and
fanatical into the period when we see the rise of things like the National
Fund and into the British National Party in the 80s a lot of the individuals
cut their teeth those key players that became the leaders in the 1970s often
began their activism in the 1940s and early 1950s in these small fringe groups
that's where they got their education in some sense as that was the swamp that
these mosquitoes later came out you know several times in that book you maybe
questioned the use of neo fascism you know that there wasn't anything new you
know okay circumstances have changed with what these people some of the
organizations involved were doing was very similar to what they had done before
the Second World War yeah again but for those that use the term neo and I of
course you know and some lots of people use it in kind of common parlance which I
get and I'm sure you know I do have it at home I hate it at times but certainly
when we're looking at the movement of the late 1940s and in the UK
also mostly comes back and we see the birth of the union movement in the
personal period for example there was some ideological shifts slightly there
are some you know and the context of course is very very different 1930s versus
1950s but the individuals are the same the hatred to the same the
ideology is often the same and the continuities to me seem to outweigh the
differences in terms of the movement itself which begs the question why
are we using the term neo and that's not just in the UK of course you know I
think I'd ask the similar questions about you know the MSI in Italy versus
Mussolini in the pre-war period and there's lots of examples where I think the
continuities are really really strong and it just seems too convenient because
the war stops that we then have this kind of binary
where we say, "Okay, this was fascism, and this is neo-fascism or neo-nazism."
When the continent was, he seemed stronger than the differences.
I remember you used Roger Griffin's ideal type to maybe as a definition, and there are
a lot of computing definitions, but he states that generic fascism is a genus of political ideology,
whose mythic core is, in its various permutations, is a palan genetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.
Can you, for people, maybe not OFA with some of that language, you know, try to explain that
in more simpler terms? Yeah, I mean, I liked his definition. I mean, as you say, like this is,
there was just an unending number of books and articles written, I mean, there's a whole
school of field of studies in there trying to work out how we define fascism, and what I liked
about his is that it isn't time shackled. You know, lots of the, there are lots of the kind of
definitions that are competing to that often talk very specifically about things like
either uniforms or iconography or specific time periods or regimes, and I think that's
unhelpful if your historian like myself that believes that the post-war fascism exists,
you need a general definition. Griffin's is useful in a few ways. Palan genetic populist ultra-nationalism,
if you take them at each, like Palan genetic, this sense of rebirth, right? This notion that
the nation is in crisis and that the people need to be reborn, or the nation needs to be reborn
in some sense. So it's a broad, broad idea that we see in all fascist movements, pre-imposed war,
the sense of rebirth. Populism, you know, and I kind of used the, the wider, except definition of
casmuda, the kind of this, the splitting of the country into a pure people and a corrupt elite.
Often the pure people seem to be being used by, by the fascist elite, you might argue, but this
is this idea that people are pure in some sense, and they are being corrupted by this nasty corrupt
elite, and that elite doesn't necessarily have to be the kind of traditional elites that run
the country. Often this elite, of course, in fascist senses may be some supernatural trans-national,
international Jewish conspiracy or whatever, but they are corrupting the people's soup. And then
nationalism is that idea that it's not just that the patriotism is that there is something
exceptional different, or specifically, you know, exceptional about the nation. And of course,
with fascism, depending on the elements or the far right, which bits of the movement you're
talking about, that nation is sometimes defined in a racial sense, sometimes in a cultural sense,
or geographic sense. And so when you tie them together, the nation is in crisis, the pure people,
you know, need to rise up and be listened to, and the nation that you're talking about, either a
racial or cultural one, is ostensibly the kind of there is something special different or exceptional
about it. When you combine them, that has a lot of the mechanisms by which fascism essentially
energizes populations. What fascinated me about your book was how you highlighted that the
British fascism was surprisingly slow when it came to seeing opportunities provided to them by
non-white immigration. So in your most recent book, "Drums in the Distance" turns into the
global far right. You described how the British far right of always sought out another to quote "secure
wider public support and gain entry into the mainstream or domestic politics." So after the war,
the British far right of still obsessed with Jews which only served to isolate them further from
the mainstream is what you maintain. But as public hostility to non-white immigration grew,
something we touched on with Liz Betner in our in a previous episode, which when we discussed
in a palace infamous 1968, "Reversible Speech," it was a far right belatedly shift to this tax,
it's a tax onto the new arrivals. So it's amazing that they weren't leading, they were following
kind of public opinion, our certain parts of the public of this and they didn't realize the kind of
the benefits that this could bring them, you know, and this is a really important shift as well
in, you know, we're talking about fascism and the far right and this kind of turn away from
focusing only on Jews and you know, it's still there, it's still in the background, but kind of
non-white immigration and immigration more generally is something that has, you know, created a lot
of support for them. So what benefits did it bring when they when they began to look at immigration
more so than then kind of Jewish tropes? Yeah, I mean, and this was one of the big shots, right,
was going through all of the kind of sitting in the Viennese library in London and going through
all of the fascist newspapers I can find and hope not hate has an archive of all the fascist newspapers
and and of course, you know, famously kind of the wind rush arrives, you know, people talk about
this as the gateway into modern Britain, the arrival of non-white immigrants from the West Indies
and of course, you had a large large scale immigration from the subcontinent as well, which is
when you know, my family came over and I just thought, you know, lots of the mainstream newspapers
had front page stories about when rush arriving and people, you know, black people from the West
Indies arriving and there was almost no mention of it in most of the British fascist newspapers.
They're still talking about either kind of Holocaust, Edenile stuff or it's about Jewish,
panaceous Jews took us into the war and really actually I mean, especially in most of these
newspapers, most of the conversation about black people in those early years of in the post-war
period was commenting on other groups in society complaining about the arrival of these people,
especially and sadly enough to trade union movement saying that, you know, that a lot of the
debates there about work, etc. And so yeah, they were still, they were still kind of obsessed with
this discussion about Jews and they weren't, I mean, of course, I'm not saying these people weren't
wildly racist against new communities that were arriving but for them, of course, the Jews ran
the world and and then there was just these these people that, you know, I won't use the language
they were Jews but these people were arriving and you know, they were in convenience, they didn't
want them but the real enemy of course was these kind of panaceous global forces. That begins to
change I think when you when you start to see into the 1950s, when you start to see wider societal
discontent about immigration growing and wider societal racism and governmental racism, etc.
And you're absolutely right to use that thing we're too often I think and I think it's a convenient
idea that the far right are the ones that lead society in racism and we're actually I think they
reflect it quite often and a great example of that is notting a riot that happened in race rights
in 1958 where, you know, actually groups like the British Union of Fashion also union movement
and most of these groups and the League of Empire loyalists and these, we're actually responding
they're turning up afterwards and I think it was quite convenient to say, oh, you know, it wasn't
a societal issue it was the far right wicking up tensions and actually most of the evidence I
think suggests that it was the far right looking and realising how much societal racism there wasn't
shifting tack and shifting towards it as I say none of that means that they weren't always racist
but one of the things you're right to kind of point out is that in the post-colour course
stage, banging on constantly about anti-semitism and Jews was a pretty fruitless task. Doesn't
mean there wasn't wide societal anti-semitism in the UK in the personal period their opinion it was
there was, you know, with the creation of Israel in '48 there was riots in the UK et cetera
there was still widespread anti-semitism but it was a hard political programme to be selling
right when people had seen those videos of bodies being pushed into all the, you know, bodies
bulldozed into pits and stuff to be still trumpeting this anti-semitic line whereas talking about
black people coming from the West Indies and Asian people coming from India and the subcontinent
that was a room into mainstream discourse that was something that was widely believed that was
stuff that was being propagated from mainstream newspaper outlets et cetera and the far right
throughout the personal period as I say often they follow rather than leave and they turn around
and they pick the target that they think is most likely to gain them traction in more mainstream
places and so we do see a shift towards them talking much more about people of colour in the
in the 1950s and 1960s later on we see the shift towards talking much more overtly just about
Muslims et cetera you know during a various periods in the 80s and 90s they would be talking about
gay men today they talk about trans the trans community they look that it doesn't mean they don't
hate all of these people at the same time and it doesn't mean that actually the core of their
politics often especially within the more extreme ends the fascist end of the movements
there was a continuity of anti-semitism at its core but the thing that they talk about most publicly
and openly externally is what they think is most likely to allow them to engage with mainstream
people and recruit individuals and that shifts through time. We spoke to Ruth Vodak the linguist
you know about her work on the far right as well and she you know talks about how these anti-semitic
attitudes are still there but they're often communicated in code and as he said you know there's
more explicit mention of different immigrant groups because they think that's what generates
their popularity or helps to generate more popularity but you mentioned there the 1980s the 1990s
so you have the national front in the 70s and that is much more regularly racist and focusing
non-hoyed immigration for instance but as kind of happened in the 60s the conservative party in
Britain also kind of waits in on this and maybe gets rid of the challenge from the far right by
embracing this topic itself are becoming more and more restrictive and hostile in many ways
in the late 19th century.
70s, the National Front is kind of hoodwing a bit by Margaret Tatcher, who kind of comes
out questioning the level of immigration, and I think she uses the word Swant. But you
say in the 1980s, the British National Party come to prominence, and they must alien
on the political space previously occupied by the National Front. But you observe that
quote, it remained a party of the streets best known for provocative and confrontational
marches, unquote. But then in the 1990s, it made an electoral breakthrough, kind of local
elections in East London, and then in the late 1990s, Nick Griffin took over as a leader
and became, in your words, quote, the great modernizer of the BNP, the man who led the
British far right out of the wilderness and into the European Parliament, unquote. Can you
tell us a bit about that modernization of the BNP, because even before we started recording,
I was mentioning in Ireland how the far right is still kind of very much the extreme right,
but it hasn't made this transition yet to the radical right, but underneath Griffin,
the BNP made this transfer or something that we've touched on elsewhere in the podcast
series about going from kind of extreme, on the street violence protests to trying to put
forward a more sanitized image that would allow it to gain some kind of foothold in electoral
politics. Yeah, so as you say, you know, the National
Front kind of peaks out in 1979, you know, they stand 303 candidates, but the rug essentially
is pulled under them a little bit, as you say from the batches. Swamp speech, and then
there's all these internal massinations, and you know, my new show you don't need to
get into, but the British National Party, and then the far right is basically through
much of that period, is the 80s and 70s and 80s is talking about marching and growing.
It's about dominating the streets. It's about taking back communities, et cetera. In 1993,
the BNP got an electoral breakthrough in the eye of dogs in London and called Derek Beacon.
And when we talk about like learning the lessons of who they're going to target, you know,
they target at least any community where you've had immigration into that community,
especially kind of like Bangladesh, you know, Asian immigration into that community,
and they went big on that, and they exploited kind of societal angle or community angle in
that space. If some sense is Nick Griffin, as you kind of quote there, is the person that
takes this rag bag of steel toe caps, you know, bleach jeans, skin headed movement. Those
people were always still there, but he takes that batch, people put them into suits and
the movement turns into the point where they've got two MEPs, one member of the London Assembly
and, I think, 64 odd councillors by 2010, which makes the British National Party the most
successful electoral far-right party Britain has ever seen, more so even than mostly, mostly
was, in some senses. But in many ways, he's looking across the continent. The British National
Party's modernisation project has to be looked at in the context of what we're seeing in
the continent, most, most clearly with Le Pen, not Marine, who we now have, but her father,
and the modernisation process that were happening in lots of European far-right parties at similar
time. And in fact, we had the European elections just a few days ago. A number of the parties
that won really quite largely, or did okay in the European elections far-right parties,
would have traditionally, at this period, we're talking about in the 80s and 90s, we're
talking about kind of neo-Nazi groups or Nazi groups and fascists and holocausts and
eyes and anti-seemites. And now we're talking about them having, you know, dozens of seats
in the European Parliament. Sweden Democrats would be another great example of a party
that went on that modernisation, who'd actually Le Pen, or National Rally as it now is in
the Front National before, that went on that Vlam's Belang. There's lots of these parties.
And so Gryffin was certainly looking across to the continent. And this idea that was
turning around and saying, perhaps there is an electoral route to power. This isn't just
about the streets. There is a way that we can modernise in a way, which means essentially,
they started to present a view to the world or a vision to the world that was very different
to their core politics. You know, as I said, they were talking much less about, you know,
Gryffin was always talking about the holocaust and white power and this sort of stuff. And
they moderates the tone, moderates the language that he's using and he moderates the image
of the party eventually. Where they turn around and say, "Actually, we're just like you.
We're just normal people. They care about the same things that you care about. We're concerned
about our country. We're just good patriots here." And that modernisation is a modernisation
of tone and rhetoric rather than reality. The core of the British National Party, even
through into 2010 in its peak, the core of its ideology remains a small number of people
that in some senses, as they knew the truth, which remained fanatical anti-Semites. You
know, they were the ones that had swastikas under the bed. And that process was remarkably
successful, less successful in some of its European counterparts for various reasons.
But it was successful to the point where we took a movement that was marching in places
like Lewisham and facing kind of street-level anti-fascist resistance in place of that
Lewisham and demonstrations around the country. And it took it into council chambers around
the country. It took it into the European Parliament. And it took it into the London Assembly,
which things that would have been almost incomprehensible in the '70s and '80s previously.
Yeah. In drums and the distance, you talk about hope, not hate's work in, you know,
2000, 2010s and the success they met with in stopping the BNP. What you also talk in
a chapter about Farad and Britain in that book about how the UK, UKIP, was a very different
piece to the BNP and quote, "One that had a far more important effect on British politics
than any far-riding party before then had managed." Can you explain this to us? You know,
talk about their electoral success, nearly four million votes in 2015. They're centrally
in the Brexit debates. They're, you know, the poster to the famous kind of poster with
Nigel Farage in front of, you know, during the Brexit debates. So how were they different
to the BNP and can you tell us a bit about the impact they had?
Yeah. So it almost seems odd looking back to those debates. I mean, so when the British
national party imploded in 2010 and the elections there was disaster, there was kind of a massive
anti-fascist mobilisation across the country and that was supposed to be the moment the BNP
were going to break through and they didn't break through. They lost all their seats in
Dagenham and in the years that followed, they lost in Burnley and Stoke and until that, you know,
the party bellies exists anymore. And I remember kind of sitting in meetings with our fellow
kind of anti-fascists at Hope Not Hate and we were saying, "Do we talk about UKIP?" We knew that
UKIP had lots of racists and we knew that it was xenophobic in some ways. We knew that it was
nativist in its politics but it wasn't fascist. And Nigel Copsin is book on the history of British
anti-fascists and kind of says this was a bit of an existential crisis for the anti-fascist movement.
Now of course looking back, it just seems like the obvious thing, the BNP finish would go for UKIP.
But it really wasn't. It was a big discussion because the groups like the British national
party were pressed, you know, as I mentioned that unbroken thread previously, the national front,
previously the union room, previously the BUF. There was a continuity of people and ideas
that were at their core, they were fascist. Even if they'd moderated their tone and language,
they'd call these were fascists. UKIP in many ways didn't come directly out of that tradition.
They weren't the next step along. The English defense team also didn't come directly out of that
position. And so it was something of a debate to argue, well, if they're not essentially fascist,
is it the job of the anti-fascist movement? And partly because they didn't come out of that
so explicit tradition of fascism, partly because they didn't come out that they were meant
they were much more successful. It was much harder for groups like Hope Not Hate, but you know,
journalists and researches, etc. There was fewer swastikers under the bed if we use that analogy
in the way that there was one of the big tactics that movements had used was turning around and saying
this person who's standing for the British national party here is a picture of them with a swastika.
That was happening much less frequently when when we come to UKIP, which meant the toxicity
of the party was less. They were talking about more mainstream issues. They already had a much
more moderate, respectful image. And they were much more likely or much more engaged with from
mainstream journalists, mainstream politicians. They were on television much more, they were on
radio much more because they were in some senses unfortunately perceived not to be beyond the
called unsanitary, not beyond the pale. And so they were much more successful in that sense. And
they, you know, if we'd had an European style electoral system, that, you know, the millions of
votes they received would have ended up in a sizable showing not just in the European Parliament
of course, but also in our own parliament in the UK, which didn't happen. But in some ways,
despite you not winning MPs and those sorts of things, they were having a seismic effect on
British politics more broadly, on the particular issues that they were most interested in. Of course,
there's the obvious one which is Brexit, but more broadly, a huge amount of the driver of the
support and interest in that party around Brexit was about immigration. And they're a really great
example about this poorest wall between what we call the mainstream and the radical right of the
mainstream and the far right. It's not a solid wall. It is a poorest wall where ideas and individuals
move back and forth across it. And you were very, very successful about pulling the centre ground
of British politics right on issues like immigration, identity, integration, and of course in one
sense, the European Union, it's more complex. But whether or not that was the Labour Party then
talking about British jobs for British workers or whether or not it was the subsequent radicalisation
of the Conservative Party or whether or not it was David Cameron calling the Brexit election
journey. A lot of that was caused because of the gravitational pull of the UK, which hung
off the right of politics. And UKIP shouldn't be understood as like, well, the far right more broadly,
but UKIP certainly shouldn't be understood as a tumour that hangs off the body politic. And if you just
off everything else is fine. It was a gangrenous limb, it was a better analogy, which was poisoning
the body politic, but it was part of it. And I think that's why it was so successful.
You also talk in drums and the distance about the European far right, and I think there's
parallels there with UKIP, what you just said there, because maybe the people who are voting for UKIP
look very different, you know, I can appear very different to those who had supported BNP or
who were prominent in BNP. And you saw the same thing. You talk about going to Pegida protest in
Dresden in November 2015, and you wrote that the crowd was overwhelmingly made up of very
respectable looking people, usually in couples and overwhelmingly middle aged. And as a result,
you said this was much more scary than the violent far right events that you would see in
England, because it was families rather than skinheads who were attending. Can you tell us a bit,
you know, we did discuss Pegida and the kind of half day, the rise of half day, and how it was
actually focusing on bailouts initially, you know, and the economy and then kind of switched.
But can you tell us a bit about the rise of the radical right in Europe and the
reparent move into the mainstream more recently, you know, along similar enough trajectory to UKIP,
although as you mentioned, UKIP didn't gain many MP seats because of the electoral system in
Britain, whereas in Ireland and Germany and elsewhere, the proportional representation, it's
a bit different that they can, you know, the equivalent, I think there would have been something
like 15% of the parliament in Britain would have been UKIP, if it had been a PR system,
you know, you talk about the crumbling of the anti-fascist consensus in Europe,
the diminution of traditional parties, the economic crisis that I've just mentioned,
and then the so-called crisis, refugee crisis in 2015.
Yeah, I mean, I think when we look at both the rise of the European,
all right, a radical right of the last 20, 30 years, but also I think you can probably actually
extrapolate it out a little bit further to the global networks, you know, whether or not we're talking,
you know, Modi and India, Trump and, you know, America, Bosnia and Brazil, there was as many
differences between all of these countries in Europe and around the world as there are similarities,
but I do think there's a couple of commonalities which allow us to say why is it that, you know,
in 1991 or '90, you know, at the end of the Cold War, when the war crumbles in Berlin,
you know, Francis, with the armors, talking about the end of history, he's talking about the kind
of the liberal democracy being the final form of government, this kind of now, it just seems
absolutely absurd looking back on it, but there was that sense that, yeah, liberal democracy
had won. And so how was it that just two or three decades later in a situation where we had
European elections last week and, you know, caught with a vote went to far-right parties and,
you know, nearly two billion people at various time at one point were living under radical
right or far-right governments. And I think there's a couple of things. I really like Dan
Stone, the historian, the Holocaust historian, and we wrote a great book called, you know,
what happened to that, it's like history of post-war Europe. And he talks about saying, actually,
a lot of the post-war debates, he goes back to what we were talking about earlier, a lot of the
post-war discussions, when some senses were kind of, there was a fire blanket over them throughout
the Cold War period, right? In the West, anti-fascism was like a national myth in countries like
Britain, et cetera, across Western Europe, it was a national myth and the East, it was obviously
an instrumentalized tool of the state, but it meant that a lot of the debates and discussions
were kind of, there was a fire blanket over them and he argues that essentially that fire blanket
is lifted in the early 90s and a lot of those forces and discussions that had been suppressed
start to peak out. So we have those kind of long historical reasons that we've seen the rise.
Then we have, we throw in long webinars, things like the legacies of colonialism, racism,
et cetera, those are all bubbling in the pot. Then, of course, we also have the increasing
impacts of globalization for all of its good things, you know, international integration as in
some senses, we've seen national disintegration, so there's the issues around globalization,
neoliberal economic, hegemonial politics across large parts of the world, or
large parts of the Western world, again, has created some winners, but it's created lots of
losers as well. So there's all of these long-term factors which are currently creating a sense
that, ostensibly in large parts of the populations of lots of these countries, the status quo is not
working for you know, and so to turn around to them and say just stick with the mainstream parties,
it's a pretty unappealing argument when when the lives have become stagnate, the welfare
consensus is starting to crumble, the what the people expected from the state throughout most
of the personal periods no longer being offered to them. And then I think that we have these trigger
events which I think are really important for understanding where we are today. Some of them are
things like we have to take into account, it's not just about economics, the impact of the terrorist
attacks, whether or not we talk about 9/11, but Islam is terror attacks, the ones in Paris,
the ones in Germany, the ones in 7/7 in London, but 9/11 is certainly not just the terror attacks,
the way they were discussed and weaponized by not just the far right, but we're talking about mainstream
politicians, mainstream media outlets that essentially and rapidly normalized Islamophobic
narratives, collective responsibility for Muslim communities and migrant communities in Europe
became normalized really, really quickly. You mentioned yet the so-called migrant crisis,
a very similar phenomenon whereby the reaction from again, this is about the mainstream legitimizing
far right politics. We talked the way that those that that kind of period discussion was happening
was extraordinarily negative and harmful and again it normalized the politics that opened
the door to these far right parties. 2009 financial crisis again is really fundamentally important.
Again, so many people's lives were made worse off both by the crisis and the subsequent
austerity that followed it. There is a whole generation of people, me included, that doesn't
remember a barely a period that is pre-economic crisis or pre- austerity. It goes back,
there's kids of finished university that were born during this sort of period and so all of this
kind of comes together to create this sense that why would you stick with either social democratic
parties or centre-right conservative parties when lives are not getting better and this is something
we would see at Hope Not Hate when you knocked on doors in Dagonon more Burnley or Stoke in the UK
or if you went to the outskirts of Paris or if you went to Dresden and you spoke to people from
Beguida, you went to these places and they turned around and said, "Look, I'm in my 30s, I can't buy
a house, I live with my parents, there's no hospitals, there's no schools, there's no jobs,
they're consuming a media narrative about Muslims and immigrants on the day-to-day basis,
which is vicious and negative." And then a parties turn up and turn around and say, "We can fix
all of this for you very, very easily." And they offer super simple answers to all of these complex
phenomena and it's extraordinarily appealing. And the part of the issue is that much of mainstream
politics, whether or not that's liberal democratic or social democratic or centre-right parties,
their response to the rise of these far-right parties was to try to mimic the more echo them,
rather than try to defend the institutions of liberal democracy, to defend the rights of
the communities they're supposed to represent and deal with the material needs of these people.
They ran right and legitimised further the far-right in terms of these issues and then it becomes
this almost runaway trade. And so when you put these things together, you can go from 30 years ago where
it always been far-right parties in Western Europe, of course, throughout the whole political period.
But the speed with which you start to see this rise, to the point where now it almost seems normal,
you know, we were saying before, you look at the electoral results of the European Union,
this, you know, just recently. And the conversation in lots of the media is relieved. You know,
I think the BBC called Maloney and the Brothers of Italy doubling their vote. They call it reassuringly,
kind of reassuringly as predictable, rather than horrifyingly terrifyingly awful. And what is this
going to mean for the communities of people that they're going to target in Italy? And so I think
it's that mixture of long-term systemic factors tied in with essentially the decline of the
anti-fascist consensus. You know, there's 16, 17-year-old, 18-year-olds now where the Holocaust
and the Second World War is like talking to my parents and my grandparents about the Napoleonic
period. You know, the Second World War has become increasingly historicised. It's not the touchstone
that it once was for certainly younger generations. And I think that partly explains why, you know,
the youth vote in parts of the far right vote in Europe is in some places actually a young vote,
which is not what it used to be, is because the Holocaust and the Second World War is this historical
thing that happened to their great grandparents. I'd like to talk about the poor water people
of kind of our generation. And then you throw the internet and then just like a firecracker into
a swamp. A lot of what you just mentioned that we've touched on on previous episodes, you know,
but let's say demand side factors and losers and winners of globalization and neoliberalism
and all these things. And we've also touched on cultural backlash, you know, that, you know,
you talk about BMP, let's say focusing on gay men in the 1990s and today on the trans community,
you know, so that's also going on at the same time as all these other issues that you mentioned.
But you just, you know, touched on there at the end, how young people have, you know, maybe think
of the Holocaust as we might think of the borough war or even the Napoleonic wars, you know,
as being in the deep past, you know, not something that they can relate to. And that's partly because
time has kind of changed a bit with the internet, I think. And it's something we did touch on a bit
of Lars Ransman had the internet, and particularly certain social media apps, their algorithms embraced
hostility and conflict. So, you know, how important have technological changes
been in facilitating the rise of the far right? I think they've been
fundamental. I'm always kind of staggered how many books are out there and
articles are out there and they talk about the rise of the far right and they
don't mention the rise of social media and the rise of the internet and what
it's done. I think it's done a few things that I think are really important.
One is it's significantly lower the the bar of entry into the far right. If you
think about what getting active meant most of the post-war period in terms of
getting becoming far right, you probably have to go to a street stall, you know,
in London you go to Brick Lane or you know, you'd have to go to a major
conurbation and you'd have to get a leaflet and you'd have to sign up or you'd
have to go through the phone book and you know, you know, I spoke to a guy who used
to be a far right guy fascist in the 80s and 90s and he said like he knew the
name of someone in the BMP and he would ring everyone with that second name in
the phone book till he eventually got the right person. There's all of these
hurdles to getting involved that you really have to be interested in committed.
If you wanted to read Holocaust denial for long periods, you'd have to send
off a letter to a book list in America that would send it back, you would then
send off a post-order, all these things. The internet has just made the bar to
entry so much lower. Nowadays you can sit anywhere in the entire world as long as
you have an internet connection and you can read any far right book that's
probably ever been published or any far right pamphlets that you can consume and
to create social media content. You can watch videos, you can make videos, you can
interact and engage with far right people from all over the globe. So it just
means that the ease with which one can come across material and in some cases
unfortunately because of the failings of social media companies, the ease with
which people have been fed to the material even without looking for it has meant
that the bar is much lower and I think that's that partly explains why we are
seeing high levels of youth radicalisation now because if you were a 15 year
old or a 14 year old in the 1980s who wanted to get involved in fascist
politics and you lived in rural Scotland or rural Ireland it was pretty hard to
work it out whereas now if you have a phone and you can sit there you can consume
content at the touch for button. So there's that level to it as well. The other
thing is I think it also allows for the kind of the internet it's like sign
apps. It's all of the things that make it really positive and exciting and
wonderful the way that we communicate across borders and you know find out
all this amazing information can also be weaponized and I think it's why so much
of what we're seeing in far right movement certainly at street level for
example they look so familiar wherever you go in the world you know whether
or not you know when I was in Ireland speaking to people that were
campaigning against kind of anti-migrant activism on the street the stuff they
were talking about was identical to what we were seeing in the United Kingdom.
It was very similar to the stuff that you'd hear on the streets that we were
hearing in Germany and Stockholm and Budapest and Warsaw and it's because
these communities are reading each other's information they're watching each
other's videos it means that there is like their sign apps is around which the
internet can happen and then finally the other thing I think that's really
important that the internet's done is it's changed as well as making it easier
for far right parties it means that the gatekeepers have disappeared again
another thing that's really wonderful about the internet is you don't have to
have a major record label to get your music out there you can just make it
stick it up on Spotify yourself and all that. Traditionally far right parties
were ostracized from mainstream discourse it was very hard for them to get
on television it's very hard for them to get on radio they weren't interviewed
in national newspapers etc. The internet's changed that it means that far
right figures can reach millions of people tens of millions of people in some
sad cases hundreds of millions of people through the content that they're creating
they can go directly to people you know I think about in the UK groups like
Tommy Robbins and the anti-Muslim street activists that ran the English
defense league you know all Britain first again an anti-Muslim movement you
know that had like a million a million people on Facebook which was more than
most BBC shows get when they were pumping out their content whereas you
might remember those huge outrage when Nick Griffin the former leader of the
British National Party went on question time at TV show in the UK there was
mass outrage because they were saying why are we letting him on television now
of course he does his show admittedly between leg numbers but he does his show
on YouTube each week and you can so it means that they can reach millions of
people because they don't have those gatekeepers there it makes things like no
platform the policy of stopping fascists having platforms much harder to
maintain because they can serve and navigate these things and even when social
media companies have tried to clamp down on it some of them haven't like
Twitter and Elon Musk for example it means that these places can reach millions
of people so if putting that all together I think it's they are synapses with
tactics money information are transferred globally by the movement but it also
means they can reach huge numbers of people there's very little that anyone can
kind of do about that to stop it now there's you and several of your
colleagues from Hope not hate wrote a book entitled The International All Right
can you explain to listener as what the all right is I mean so the all right
was this movement actually it's a great example it's kind of it's a good
follow-on from the from the last question really and that's saying like what
one of the things the internet's done is and as well as helping establish
movements that would you know national movements that would collaborate with
each other the alt-right is a great example of a movement emerged out of the
internet which was genuinely transnational generally global in its in its
makeup it wasn't just a British movement could collaborate with an Irish
movement collaborate with the general movement it's very makeup was like this
post-organizational thing this notion of thousands of individuals all over the
world collaborating towards a single cause and broadly there was kind of three
parts to it part the ones element of the movement was at a very old 90 from the
late 1960s movement called the New World Watt which which you may have kind of
touched on before this which talked about a meta-political approach which it
would broadly means that culture so politics is downstream of culture they
need to change the debate and it came out of France these kind of far right
philosophers that these ideas became increasingly important in the international
far right were being picked up by American groups you then had the
traditional far right and fascist movements etc and then on top of that you
had this third element which was essentially kind of and to online antagonistic
communities whether or not that was troll trolling or the meme style the way
that the movement worked and you put those kind of things together on
broadly they had a core ideology which was it was an international set of groups
and individuals primarily operating online though there were kind of groups
that would operate offline or there would be conferences and together they had
a core set of beliefs right which was broadly that white identities under attack
from pro multi-cultural and liberal elites what they would call social justice
warriors and together they were there was a unite around what they opposed
they were against LGBTQ rights they're against women's rights they're against
ethnic and religious minority rights and it was broadly this decentralized network
that had a core set of beliefs and it operated in different ways in different
parts of the world but it was ostensibly a global internet movement that did
have conferences etc and did have organizations but it was like a current if
you will rather than a single form of organization you mentioned trolling can
you tell us a bit about the role of the troll it's one of those things that
kind of there was a time when you were like a historian of fascism you were
spending a whole time reading books about I dense ideology and or you know and
then you start researching trolls and stuff and it's just it it starts off
almost being hard to take seriously but the impact and the reality of of this
kind of trolling communities that has been really really punicious and is
really really serious ostensibly it's it's the wrapping of the way I would
describe it is the wrapping of politics or the wrapping of far right politics in
irony so it's this notion that it's extraordinarily hostile it's it's very
very confrontational in its style in some ways of course it just mimics quite a
broad it doesn't have to be especially far right of course trolling it's a
wider internet culture which is about attacking mimicking laughing ironizing
but broadly hostile behavior towards an individual or target online but the
far right found it extraordinarily useful because it did a couple of things
in one sense there was extension of things they really believed it was they
felt like it was a legit you're allowed to be racist you're allowed to be
misogynistic you're allowed to be homophobic and transphobic and all these
things but it also gave her back door it also gave a get out which was this
is a joke don't take this so seriously you don't understand the internet the
internet has a culture which is ironic which is confrontational which is
about laughing and joking and attacking and you can say outrageous things you
know no more of your gatekeeping we're going to be free and it meant that it
became much harder to pin down far right targets because their term and you
know they might use the thing you famously Pepe the frog is now an outdated
one but it was one that was quite important in 2017 this kind of little green
frog that would be used you know and they would use this green frog at
Auschwitz and when you say this is anti-semitism their response would always
be you don't understand internet culture this isn't anti-semitism this is a
joke but actually the core message at the core of it was anti-semitism so it's
this ironic wrapping of far right politics in in irony was what the far right
were attempting to do by using the kind of trolling culture and it allowed
them to attack the people that they wanted to attack online and justify it as
saying this is what part of internet culture when we were earlier talked about
the far right and modernization it seems that they were you know took advantage
of these technological changes a lot more so than the mainstream established
parties and you also show I think in your book about the international all right
what happens when
Some of these social media companies actually clamped down on groups, you know, you talked about Tommy Robinson and Nick Griffin having their own kind of outlets.
And when that's actually stemmed, it's incredible had their support diminishes because they don't have them any avenues.
So it does show you that if there is proper regulation, this can be tackled to a certain extent, although, as you mentioned,
things like Twitter and Elon Musk that there's not always that willingness there.
And you could also question a lot of the social media companies in that they want activity conflict, as we mentioned earlier, you know, fits into their algorithms, makes people use these things more than they would otherwise.
Just finally, you know, when I was reading in drums in the distance, you stated that, quote, when I first got involved in anti-fascist politics back in 2010, it was inconceivable that just a decade later, over 1.9 billion people would live in countries with radical right governments.
As of 2020, this includes the three of the five most popular countries on earth with the US under them, President Donald Trump, Brazil under Bolsonaro and India under Modi.
So you also noted the role of the law and justice party in the then Polish government, Orban's government in Hungary, as well as the radical rights presence in various coalitions around the continent.
So in the since then, you know, Trump and Bolsonaro last power, law and justice party no longer are in the same kind of ascendancy in Poland.
Nevertheless, you know, we you've mentioned Georgia Maloney and her fertility, Italy, for instance, and their popularity.
We know that her filters parties, the most popular in the Netherlands, and that's been confirmed by the European elections.
And we know that Trump easily won the Republican nomination for the upcoming US presidency.
So it's a difficult question and a sad one in many respects, but are you more optimistic or pessimistic about the position of the far right now than in 2020?
So I work for an organization called Hope Not Hate Rights. I'm always supposed to do the hope bit, but I always forget to do the hope bit.
No, I'm not unfortunately. I mean, there's been there's been victories, right? Of course, Trump lost, you know, Bolsonaro lost.
I was lucky enough to be in Brazil when he lost, but it was funny.
It didn't feel like a victory in some sense. It's, you know, because Bolsonaro's party still did really well in São Paulo and still did really well in Rio.
But when the far right is in power, it puts down roots.
And I think what we need to start to understand is that there is it is about what is the direction of travel for the far right, not necessarily just individual results here in their law and justice.
Yes, they lost in Poland. And they came, you know, the European election, they came second and, and Confederation came third.
So it's about it. Look at taking a longer term view of it as I say, maybe a 20-year view or a 30-year view.
And while it's an uneven rise and there are victories and losses, there is an upward trajectory, the far right.
And I think that's what we need to be concerned about. And that's what we need to be watching is the slow death of liberal democracy.
It's not going to be a rapid. It's not going to be a collapse. It's not going to be jack boost marching down the roads, like the 1930s.
It's going to be a slow erosion of liberal democratic institutions, norms and principles, to the point where we will probably end up with illiberal democracies increasingly taking their place.
And then we can throw in Russia and China, etc. But maybe that's another podcast.
So we should of course take take heart from the victories like Poland and Trump's loss of Bolsonaro's loss and Modi's reduced victory just recently in India.
And we should say, yeah, it was great Sweden-Democrats last week had the very first time in their history they've ever went down.
But this is kind of thin-grue, right? This is actually in some sense as a recognition of how normal this now feels.
But we are saying, isn't it good news that a party that had its roots in explicit Nazi, Nazis are not that long ago?
It goes down slightly in the votes, but doesn't lose any seats in Sweden. And we're saying, well, this is good news.
And we're taking a heart from what's happened in Denmark and Finland where the vote wasn't quite as bad.
And people are taking a heart from legal in Italy doing less bad despite the fact that Malone is in front of those severely doubled their votes.
I think complacency is going to be our enemy with this.
And it's not about doom saying and saying that liberal democracy is about to collapse, fascism is about to return.
That's not going to be helpful either, because that also ends up having a gravitational pull on the centre of our politics and mainstream parties turn around and say, well, we need to listen to the will of the people and run right on immigration, that's unhelpful as well.
And there is pockets of light. I mean, we have to also remember turnout is always important in these things.
You know, even in the European elections and even in the elections where the far right win almost never is it the far right party that has a majority of the population?
It's they have a they have a winning minority, if you will.
And so even in the places where they do get over 50% they're usually about a quarter of the population, which means that those people that are not voting for the far right in all of these countries, we remain in a massive majority usually.
And there's a lot of hope in that.
The question then is we only lose these battles if we decide not to fight them. And that's where I think the hope lies is if we those parties and groups and individuals that if we prioritize fighting and destroying the far right politics.
And we will win because we are in a massive majority here. And if we start to deal with the material needs of the people that are susceptible to that politics, we will win.
So there's loads of optimism there. But currently, I just don't see that happening, which is where the pessimism creeps back in.
And I think, you know, we could be in a situation without sending to a populistic in the next five years where Trump may well win the White House back.
Modi's obviously kept his seat. There's a chance that France will be run by the pen or national rally, Malone in Italy, AFD have got elections, there's elections in the eastern states of Germany in September, they're the AFD are polling on 30%.
There'll be almost nowhere in Europe where the far right or radical right are not in electoral parliamentary chambers across the continent.
What does Europe look like in 10 years time, 20 years time, we could have most major European countries being run by far right governments.
These are things that were incomprehensible just 10 years ago and already now we've seen feel quite normal.
And so I don't want to say I want to be optimistic, but I think if we don't start to do things, the situation is extraordinary serious.
The pillars of liberal democracy are wobbly. It's not about Naziism, it's not about to return, but a liberal democracy may be able to supplant liberal democracy.
And so no, I don't feel particularly optimistic, but so far the good news is everywhere we have fought with one.
And so if we keep fighting and we start to fight more, then I'm convinced we will win.
Thanks, Joe. I know you ended on a mixed note, there's pessimism and optimism.
But I do feel, let's say the work of Hope not hate the fact that it's sustained itself, you know, that it didn't, let's say with the end of the BNP or the demise of the BNP, it didn't finish its work.
You know, this is a fight that has to go on, that continues to go on. And as you say, if you don't fight, you can't win.
I think this is perhaps a message of hope for the future, but I think you're also correct in saying, you know, the trajectory is such that, you know, the fact that as we mentioned, maybe before we recorded that, you know, the reaction to the European elections is like, oh, the far I didn't win as much as we thought, you know, it's still gained, but we thought it was going to be a collapse of the center, but that hasn't emerged yet.
But, you know, what you're saying about in 10 or 20 years time is, is the real warnings that we have to keep fighting in the future.
But thanks so much for taking the time out, Joe, really informative and also for providing such a historical swell from the late 1940s until today.
No, thanks for having us, let's go fun.
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