Greater Surbiton

With Serbian parliamentary elections due on 11 May, this chilling little film about the neo-Nazi Serbian Radical Party, starring its baby-faced general secretary Aleksandar Vucic and some of his comrades, is brought to you by Hattori of Parapsihopatologija, a Serbian artist who understands what his country is facing. It lasts three minutes, but you need to watch it to the end, particularly if you’re one of those left-wing ’anti-war’ types who are inclined to view the Serbian Radical Party’s sympathisers as members of their ‘extended family’. The Serbian Radical election caption at the end reads ‘On your side - Vucic’.

With thanks to Andras Riedlmayer and Jonathan Davis.

On a happier note, Greater Surbiton yesterday reached the figure of 50,000 page-views. I’d like to say a big thank you to all my readers, and in particular to those from among the brave citizens of the Republic of Macedonia, who have shown the world how to stand up to a bully with courage and dignity.

Smrt fasizmu - sloboda narodu !

Those who have been reading this blog since it was launched in November of last year may recall that my first two posts were devoted to explaining why I believed that the radical left, as a whole, was bankrupt and reactionary. In particular, I singled out the readiness of the majority of the radical left to support or march alongside fascists, ethnic-cleansers and other ultra-reactionary elements. It is just possible that readers may also recall the bluster and indignation with which my argument was greeted by a certain Daniel Davies aka ‘Dsquared’ aka ‘Bruschettaboy’, the chief mover behind a blog called Aaronovich Watch (AW), which exists to cyber-stalk David Aaronovich and Nick Cohen, and to a lesser extent other members of the Eustonite or ‘Decent’ left, and point out petty inconsistencies in their writings. Indeed, Davies and his merry men at AW devote a large part of their time to expressing righteous indignation at the fact that Eustonites frequently portray members of the left as fascist fellow-travellers.

At the time, I was ready to attribute this bluster and indignation to the affront that an honourable if naive leftist of the traditional variety might have felt at a perceived attack on his political tradition. I was at pains to point out that the fact that the radical left as a whole was characterised by a readiness to support fascists and ethnic-cleansers does not mean that all its members were guilty in this regard; as I put it, ‘it is the good apples - the small number of honourable socialists, Trotskyists, anarchists, pacifists and others - who are in the minority in a barrel whose contents are mostly rotten. However well meaning the good apples may be, they are part of a movement that is corrupt overall.’

Well, it seems I was a sucker. Davies has now ‘come out’ and described an unabashed sympathiser of the neo-Nazi Serbian Radical Party - the all-round buffoon Splintered Sunrise - as ‘what I like to think of as AW’s extended family’.

How, you may ask, is it possible for someone to describe a neo-Nazi sympathiser as a member of his ‘extended family’, while giving vent to an unending stream of self-righteous indignation - sustained over a period of literally years - at the fact that Eustonites often accuse members of his political tradition of being fascist fellow-travellers ?

The only answer I can come up with is that it requires a total absence of integrity.

I’m still prepared to believe that there exists a handful of honourable socialists, Trotskyists, anarchists, pacifists and other radical left-wingers of the traditional kind. I’m even ready to believe that some of them can consciously reject Eustonite politics from the standpoint of principled disagreement.

But the more closely one looks, the fewer the number of honourable left-wing opponents that we Eustonites have there turns out to be.

Like a lot of people of my broad political persuasion, I’ve been finding it very difficult to decide how to vote in tomorrow’s election for London’s mayor. Despite the importance of the post, the choice boils down to what one considers the least evil.

I’m a Labour supporter, and would vote Labour without a second thought if we had a regular Labour candidate. However, I’d prefer London’s mayor to be a Tory rather than a genuine extremist of right or left; I’d vote Tory if it were the only way to keep out the BNP or Lindsey German and the Left List.

Ken Livingstone is half-way between the Labour mainstream and left-wing extremism. He was resolute in supporting NATO over the liberation of Kosova and in condemning the 7/7 terrorist bombings in London (though his condemnation was shamefully marred by his description of the bombing victims as ‘working class’ - as if middle-class victims were less worthy). He has some real achievements as mayor to his credit, above all running an efficient bus service, something that I, who grew up in the 1980s and remember the horrors of the London bus service under the Tories at the time, greatly appreciate.

Yet while I do not hate Livingstone, I do consider him unelectable in principle. His endorsement of various fascist and extremist political elements, from Yusuf al-Qaradawi to George Galloway, Kate Hudson and the so-called Stop the War Coalition, and his collaboration with unsavoury anti-Western leaders abroad such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, make him unacceptable. How can we have a mayor for our capital city who has a working relationship with the enemies of our country and of Western civilisation ? Lest anyone think I’m simply being sectarian here: we’re talking about people who support the fascists in Iraq who are not only murdering innocent civilians, but killing our soldiers as well. What a disgrace. I’d rather have Boris Johnson as Prime Minister than Livingstone.

Additional minuses for Livingstone are his philistine disregard for London’s heritage and opposition to Heathrow expansion - things that I, as a born and bred Londoner and a frequent flyer (though probably not as frequent a flyer as Ken himself) deeply resent.

Having said all that, Livingstone has one great advantage over Johnson: he is a passing phenomenon. He will serve one more term and can then make way for a more palatable Labour candidate. By contrast, a win for Johnson could be the thin end of the wedge, leading to a Tory-controlled London for an unknowable length of time, and perhaps paving the way for a Tory victory at the next general election.

So I’ll cast my protest vote for Brian Paddick, with a transfer to Livingstone. I should add that I dislike the Liberal Democrats as an essentially irrelevant party and the ignominious recipient of the anti-Blair Guardianista protest vote at the last general election. But Paddick seems a decent enough chap.

I’m sorry if none of this sounds very idealistic, but such is the choice that we in London face tomorrow. Hopefully, we’ll be given a better choice next time around.

Image posted on the BNP’s website, 20 February 2008

The British National Party (BNP), Britain’s largest and best-known fascist party, has been running a series of articles denouncing the international recognition of Kosova’s independence from Serbia. On the day Kosova declared independence, 17 February, the BNP’s website ran an article entitled ‘Kosovo - the EU and USA get their way !’, claiming that the move represented

the successful takeover of part of a Christian country by a bunch of Islamic terrorists, and Albanian thugs. Aided and abetted by useful dupes who are themselves being manipulated by their puppet masters, pulling strings as ever behind the scenes! What we are left with is an embryonic Islamic state in the Balkans. It will cause destabilisation throughout the region.

Furthermore,

After today, the future balkanisation of other countries, including Britain, is no longer a flight of fancy. It will happen, unless you turn to the BNP: The last remaining political party willing to stand up to the growing Islamic threat within this country!

Playing on an ‘anti-imperialist’ theme, the BNP also claimed that Kosovo’s independence

wouldn’t have been possible without the full backing and support of America and the European Union.

The BNP condemns Kosova’s independence because most Kosova Albanians are Muslims, and because it identifies them with the Muslim immigrants in Britain. On 14 February, the BNP website published an article citing Kosova as an example of

What happens when a government loses control of immigration and gives special preference to immigrants for political reasons.

On 24 February, the BNP website ran an article accusing British church leaders of being determined to ‘appease Islam’, and linking the alleged Islamic threat in Kosova to that in Britain:

It seems incredible to us that those leaders of the Christian Church here in Britain so determined to appease Islam in our country, appear so apparently ignorant of the suffering of their co-religionists in the Serbian province of Kosovo!

Are they not aware, for instance, that since KFOR took responsibility for the province that around two hundred Christian churches, monasteries, shrines and other sites of worship have been systematically destroyed or otherwise desecrate, in what can only be seen as an organised campaign of cultural cleansing?

Can they really be unaware that quite apart from the great many Christians who have been murdered, raped, robbed and mutilated over the last nine years, that hundreds of thousands more have been driven from their homes and forced to flee for their lives by the adherents of the very religion that they go to such lengths to defend? Many would regard this as ethnic cleansing!

Do they seriously believe that Kosovo marks the end of Islamic expansion in Europe and are truly ignorant of Islamicist designs on adjoining areas of Serbia and Macedonia – both having very significant Islamic communities?

The BNP identifies the Kosova Albanians not only with the Islamic threat, but also with organised crime - as it does with ethnic minorities in the UK. On 8 March, it republished an article entitled ‘Kosovo - just one step in the Islamification of Europe’, which claimed:

Albanians are spread all over Europe and especially in the criminal underworld. They are notorious for their effectiveness, unpredictability and incredible cruelty. Their main advantage to the other organized crime is the fact that they speak language nobody understands, their organization is based on family ties and if someone dares to speak out that person is being brutally murdered. In Europe, today the Albanian mafia is the main engine of traffic of drugs and humans, theft and falsification of passports, weapons and human organs trade, abductions, extortions and executions. In London these people control the entire network of prostitution, in Italy and Greece they deal with weapons and drugs’ smuggling. There are entire towns in Italy where the business is controlled by Albanians. In the US there are more than 150,000 Albanian immigrants from Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania.

The article concludes:

I am just trying to explain why independent Kosovo is so dangerous for the cultural and social integrity of Europe. The Albanians and other Muslims for that matter have been refusing for years to integrate in the European society. The problems they have created in the UK, Italy, France, Germany, the Balkans and many other places are countless.

In its agitation against Kosova’s independence, the BNP has unambiguously adopted the ‘anti-imperialist discourse’ of the ‘radical left’, as in this article of 23 February, warning of the danger of a conflict with Russia over Kosova:

The blood thirsty warmongers of Washington, along with the self serving bureaucrats, and politicians of Brussels, and elsewhere, have now brought us closer to the brink of a major conflict, centred upon the Balkans, than at any time since the days of the cold war!

On 27 February, I wrote here at Greater Surbiton how right-wing anti-Muslim bigots were aligning themselves with the West’s enemies in opposition to Kosova’s independence. I cited articles by Melanie Phillips and Julia Gorin. Both of these articles have been reproduced on the BNP’s website, in support of its line on Kosova.

Interestingly, the BNP has also adopted the entire ‘anti-imperialist’ narrative of alleged Western victimisation and demonisation of Serbia, promoted by publications such as Counterpunch and Living Marxism.

On the alleged Western demonisation of Serbia:

Showing any sympathy for the present plight of Serbia is swimming against the tide of received opinion, which was largely generated by the successful propaganda of the West, particularly concerning Bosnia and Kosovo. The demonization of Serbia was taken to grotesque proportions and, in general, faithfully and uncritically repeated in the mainstream media.

Concerning the alleged German engineering of the break-up of Yugoslavia:

So, a clerico-fascist [Croatia's Franjo Tudjman] and an Islamic extremist [Bosnia's Alija Izetbegovic] were supported by Western intelligence agencies, governments and armed forces as bearers of “European values” to the benighted Balkans. To do this, the EU member states broke their obligations under the UN charter and the Helsinki Accords by which they had guaranteed to accept existing national borders in Europe. They recognized Slovenia and Croatia diplomatically. This was done principally at Germany’s instigation and the German government regarded this sudden about turn by the other EU states as a triumph. The Foreign Minister was cock-a-hoop “By this, Germany has regained diplomatically everything lost in Eastern Europe as a result of two world wars”. It opened the way for the new “Drang nach Osten”.

Note the reference to Western imperialism’s supposed violation of international law - a popular theme of the ‘anti-war’ left.

And concerning the alleged ‘invention of a genocide’ in the Balkans by Western propaganda, a favourite theme of John Pilger, Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour and others:

Wartime “information” from NATO told us that at least 100,000 young Albanian men from Kosovo were missing, presumed murdered. Yet the Spanish forensic team, sent to look for mass graves was gravely embarrassed. In late 1999 its leader complained that he and his colleagues had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machine because we did not find one, not one mass grave”. The Wall Street Journal concluded that NATO stepped up its claims when it saw “a fatigued press corps drifting towards the contrary story – civilians killed by NATO bombs… The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage. Genocide it wasn’t.” The Spanish forensic team found 2108 bodies in 1999.

The BNP’s rhetoric over Kosova and the Balkans is therefore in line with that of both the ‘anti-imperialist’ left and the anti-Islamic conservative right. One would have been surprised if it were otherwise.

Image posted on the BNP’s website, 14 February.

Two weeks ago, I argued here that the global ideological division between the pro-Western and anti-Western camps had superceded the ideological division between the Left and the Right. I am glad that some friends, such as Kirk Johnson of Americans for Bosnia, agree with me (Kirk is, like me, a Bosnia activist from a left-wing background who experienced a similar ideological shift to my own, and for very similar reasons). I am honoured that a whole entry in the marvellous Encyclopedia of Decency has been devoted to lampooning my article. But I have also received some intelligent criticism, from Peter Ryley, Bob from Brockley and New Centrist. One of the snappiest counter-arguments was Peter’s claim, that those who share my outlook are ‘Tom Paines abroad but Edmund Burkes at home’, meaning that we are radical only in relation to foreign regimes, but conservative in relation to our own.

While I appreciate the quip, it is not one that I can accept. Edmund Burke was the father of modern conservatism, who developed his ideas in opposition to the French Revolution. I’ll admit to being, like Burke, someone who does not support revolution in my own country, but that’s all the common ground I share with him. He was a supporter of King and Church who upheld native tradition as an alternative to the universal Enlightenment values championed by the supporters of the French Revolution, and believed only in the most gradual, organic change to the domestic order, where absolutely necessary. By describing those of us on the centre-left as ‘Burkes’, Ryley is conflating all those outside the radical left with conservatism.

In fact, someone who is a Burke at home cannot be a Paine abroad, because Burke’s way of thinking, precisely, meant that the British traditional order could not be transplanted onto foreign countries. By contrast, I believe that the liberal democratic model of the kind we enjoy in Britain and Europe is equally valid for any part of the world, and should be promoted globally as an alternative to tyrannical or authoritarian regimes. And, unlike Burke, I believe the existing domestic order should be reformed according to the principles of reason. Our true affinity, therefore, is with Whigs like Burke’s great opponent, Charles James Fox, who supported revolution abroad and reform at home. This is partly because the revolution has already triumphed at home. I wonder whether a true Burke would ever feel comfortable supporting a National Health Service, or gender equality, or same-sex civil partnerships. I would also therefore claim a greater affinity with the more moderate Jacobins who, having carried out the Revolution in France, sought to prevent its degeneration into extremism at home while simultaneously promoting it across Europe.

I support the abolition of the monarchy, a democratically elected second chamber, the disestablishment of the Church of England, the abolition of faith-based and private education and the complete secularisation of public life. This is another area where a centre-leftist such as myself parts company with the latter-day Burkes, and even with the Blairites. These are not trivial issues; I believe that, if we are going to integrate our Muslim and immigrant population, we need a modern concept of homogenous citizenship to which all faith-based and class-based schools are anathema. I am a strong supporter of an ultra-liberal immigration policy, partly because immigration is a means to dissolve traditional society and hasten globalisation. And globalisation - anathema to Burkeans - is something I strongly support.

Ryley argues further:

So when Marco [sic] Attila Hoare recently wrote that “the principal ideological division in global politics today” is “pro-Western vs anti-Western” I think that he too was oversimplifying. For the left, it is not about being reflexively pro or anti-Western. It is about standing with the poor, the oppressed and the exploited. It is about being consistently pro-social justice.

I agree with Peter that social justice is crucial; however, liberal democracy is the fertile ground in which social justice grows. In Britain, universal suffrage came first, the welfare state second. Working class people needed to be able to vote in a free election, so that they could elect in 1945 the Labour government that established the welfare state. Earlier social reforms were carried out by the Liberal Party in the years before World War I, largely to meet the challenge posed by the rise of organised labour and the Labour Party. Conversely, the welfare states established by totalitarian regimes have tended to be less durable, which is why the working classes are better off in Western Europe today than they ever were under Communist regimes. While I strongly disagree with US Republican hawks such as George W. Bush on domestic social issues, I believe their support for democracy abroad offers the best chance for the prosperity of ordinary people globally in the long run. The West European model of welfare capitalism is preferable to the US model; but the US model is vastly, incomparably preferable even to left-wing totalitarianism, let alone to Islamist totalitarianism. And as I pointed out in my last two posts, Bush’s foreign policy vis-a-vis Eastern Europe is simply more progressive than that of most, and probably all, of the present governments of Western Europe.

Bob from Brockley questions whether the West can be upheld as a positive model, given the murderous record of Western colonialism, and Western support for murderous dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Pinochet. As I made clear in my original article, the dichotomy ‘Western vs anti-Western’ cannot be projected back in time and equated with the Cold War divide between the Western and Communist blocs, let alone with the divide between the Western colonial powers and the colonised world. The ‘Western vs anti-Western’ dichotomy is a new one; the end of colonialism and of the Cold War has enabled both Western values and the Western alliance to assume a more unambiguously positive character that they did not possess before. As a historian of the Yugoslav Revolution, I can safely say I view the Communist-led sides in the Yugoslav, Greek and Albanian civil wars of the 1940s as the positive ones. I would not have supported the Americans in Vietnam or the Contras in Nicaragua. But these are yesterday’s wars that took place in yesterday’s world. I fear that Bob’s argument dangerously resembles the moral relativist one: that the geopolitical West is wrong today because it can never shed its guilt for past crimes. The ‘Western camp’ that I support is one that, as I made clear, embraces both former Cold Warriors and former Marxists, irrespective of whether they once held correct or incorrect views on Pinochet or Mao, the Contras or the Khmer Rouge. The point is where they are now, not where they were then.

New Centrist argues (and both Peter and Bob seem to agree):

Hoare also ignores the existence of ultra-leftists, anarchists, and other self-styled revolutionaries who advocate a third perspective that is classically “anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist” while also critical of Jihadist terrorism. I’m referring here to Three Way Fight, World War 4 Report, etc.

In fact, the radical leftists of this kind appear on my diagram in the far left, equidistant between the pro-Western and anti-Western camps. I had not previously heard of Three Way Fight, but I am familiar with World War 4 Report, as well as other blogs in this category such as the Drink-Soaked Trots. The problem with leftists of this variety is that they tend to be obsessed with their own ‘radical-left’ identity, with ideological purity and with loyalty to the anachronistic ‘revolutionary’ principles of yesteryear (In reality, to talk about ‘proletarian revolution’ or ‘world socialism’ or ‘anarchism’ today is no more ‘revolutionary’ than are the steam engine or the gramophone in today’s technological age). At best, comrades of this kind can set aside their antiquated shibboleths enough to be able to unite behind progressive causes alongside those further to the right, in which case their ‘revolutionary socialism’ or ‘anarchism’ may add a bit of diversity and harmless exoticism to the movement. And, joking aside, diversity and exoticism are good things. But at worst, leftists of this kind simply retreat into their own ideological foxholes, from which they write off %99.9999 of the rest of the world as heretical and Satanic, thereby consigning themselves to political irrelevance and sectarian oblivion.

In practice, if you want to avoid irrelevance and oblivion, you have to take sides in the struggle that really matters. And in that case, you can only be so left-wing, before you end up flipping round to the side of the far right.

Update: Francis Sedgemore (aka ‘Jura Watchmaker’) of Drink-Soaked Trots has responded to this article, arguing ‘One thing that stands out in Hoare’s post is his use of the term “homogenous citizenship”, when defending his vision of an egalitarian society. Homogenous? Hoare’s support for an “ultra-liberal immigration policy” aside, this reeks of the aculturalism that I associate with Burkean liberal-conservatism. The last thing I want to see is a homogeneous society. It would be the social equivalent of thermodynamic heat death.’

Leaving aside Sedgemore’s inability to understand the difference between ‘citizenship’ and ’society’, to associate Burke with ‘aculturalism’ and with ‘homogenous citizenship’ is a bit like associating Karl Marx with support for the maintenance of aristocratic privilege. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote:

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue, it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction which attends hereditary possession (as most concerned in it), are the natural securities for this transmission. With us the House of Peers is formed upon this principle. It is wholly composed of hereditary property and hereditary distinction, and made, therefore, the third of the legislature and, in the last event, the sole judge of all property in all its subdivisions. The House of Commons, too, though not necessarily, yet in fact, is always so composed, in the far greater part. Let those large proprietors be what they will — and they have their chance of being amongst the best — they are, at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth. For though hereditary wealth and the rank which goes with it are too much idolized by creeping sycophants and the blind, abject admirers of power, they are too rashly slighted in shallow speculations of the petulant, assuming, short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent, regulated preeminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.

It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic. This sort of discourse does well enough with the lamp-post for its second; to men who may reason calmly, it is ridiculous. The will of the many and their interest must very often differ, and great will be the difference when they make an evil choice.

Furthermore:

We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater.

In other words, both with regard to religion and with regard to class, Burke was about as far from supporting ‘homogenous citizenship’ as it was possible to be. He upheld a parliamentary system that privileged the propertied classes, and in particular the aristocracy, and that was underpinned by the established church - in opposition to the emerging French secular republic based on universal, equal citizenship.

In other words, Sedgemore is throwing around accusations of Burkeanism without having a clue about what Burkeanism is.

The distinction between the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’ in global politics is today increasingly redundant. The dialectic has given rise to, and been superceded by, a new dialectic: pro-Western vs anti-Western. The issues that traditionally divided the Left from the Right - redistribution of wealth, public vs private ownership, a planned economy vs the free market - have not ceased to be relevant, but they are not those that define the battle lines in global politics today. In domestic politics, the extent to which they continue to dominate political discourse varies between countries, but the trend is increasingly toward the middle ground, as represented by Western Europe: both capitalism and the welfare state are here to stay. We may disagree over just how much to tax the rich or whether certain utilities should be publicly or privately owned, but nobody is going to go to war over these issues. Nor are our divisions over them projected outwards onto the world stage. The Left-Right conflict has been essentially resolved through the establishment of a centrist model of welfare capitalism, one that takes a slightly different form in each country (the US model being somewhat to the right of the West European model). Those who continue to talk about abolishing either capitalism or the welfare state are the political equivalent of flat-earthers.

The triumph of the centrist political model has led to one section of the Left and one section of the Right breaking away from their respective comrades and joining up in opposition to this model: this ultimately takes the form of a Red-Brown coalition. Conversely, a second section of the Left and a second section of the Right have likewise broken away from the first sections and come together in support of extending this model globally. This, then, is the principal ideological division in global politics today: pro-Western vs anti-Western; globalist vs anti-globalist; the democratic centre vs the Red-Brown coalition.

This cannot necessarily be used to determine where any given individual or group may stand on a particular issue. Blairites and neoconservatives might find themselves aligned with Muslim fundamentalists against Christian fundamentalists in support of intervention in Kosova, and with Christian fundamentalists against Muslim fundamentalists in support of intervention in Iraq. George W. Bush might be close in many ways to the Christian fundamentalist right in the US, but he has nevertheless been ready to describe Islam as a ‘religion of peace’, attempt the democratisation of two Muslim countries and recognise predominantly Muslim Kosova’s secession from predominantly Christian Serbia. A significant segment of hard-liberal opinion supported intervention in Kosova and Afghanistan but opposed it in Iraq. Pro-Western and anti-Western are not the same as ‘pro-war’ and ‘anti-war’. Nor can this division be projected back onto the Cold War division between the Western and Soviet blocs; the issues today are not the same as they were then; former Cold Warriors and Marxists can be found in both of today’s camps.

The essence of the division is that the pro-Westerners support the extension of the liberal-democratic order across the globe, through the politics of human rights, promotion of democracy, universal values and interventionism (not necessarily always military). The anti-Westerners oppose the liberal-democratic model, at least as a universal model; they admire or support movements or regimes that stand in opposition to the Western alliance or to Western values - all of which uphold religious fundamentalism or nativist nationalism, sometimes combined with a ’socialist’ veneer, as an alternative to liberal democracy. Anti-Westerners may support military intervention for reasons of ‘national interest’ or religious sectarianism - whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu or other - but never for the sake of liberty or ‘Western values’; never for the sake of halting genocide or overthrowing tyranny. They may masquerade as ‘anti-imperialists’, but what they oppose is ultimately not the domination of smaller nations by more powerful ones. Hence they refuse to show solidarity with the people of Tibet, Darfur, Bosnia, etc. By which I don’t simply mean they do nothing - few of us can boast that we’ve actively ’shown solidarity’ with all the just causes in the world - but that they oppose the idea of such solidarity in principle.

Rather, the anti-Westerners’ ‘anti-imperialism’ means opposing the very ideas of ethical international intervention and of the global triumph of liberal-democratic values. Similarly, their support for ‘national sovereignty’ means supporting the sovereign right of dictators to reject pressure to respect human rights, not the sovereignty of democratically elected parliaments in Baghdad or Pristina. And their support for ‘international law’ never means abiding by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or respecting the jurisdiction of war-crimes tribunals established by the UN Security Council, but essentially boils down to supporting the right of Moscow or Beijing to veto acts of intervention that might halt genocide or overthrow tyranny.

It is often said that ‘fascism’ is used too broadly to mean ‘anything I don’t like’. Lots of people on the Left get very uptight and precious about their own definition of ‘fascism’, insisting it is the only correct one and getting upset when anyone suggests a different one. So I’m going to be very clear how I define ’fascism’: as ‘revolutionary anti-liberal chauvinism’; that is, the ideology and practice of mobilising chauvinism on a popular basis in order to assault liberal values, bring down a liberal order, cement in power an authoritarian regime and/or territorially expand. The regimes of Saudi Arabia and China are both extremely unpleasant; neither is fascist, but in the long run, each may have to choose between liberalisation or increasingly populist-chauvinist authoritarianism. In Russia, the regime has made its choice; in Serbia, the battle is raging.

National or religious chauvinism is the weapon with which opponents of liberal-democratic values seek to defeat them. And ever since the late nineteenth-century, elements of the Left, consumed with hatred for the liberal-democratic order but aware that they were too weak to overthrow it by themselves, have chosen to ally with the nationalist far right against it. The brilliant historian of fascism, Zeev Sternhell, has this to say of the early twentieth century French radical socialists whose hatred of liberalism led them to ally with the nationalist, anti-liberal right in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, when moderate socialists had come to the defence of the liberal order against this same nationalist, anti-liberal right:

Once again, the proletariat had become the bourgeoisie’s watchdog. Once again, in the name of liberty and the Republic, democracy and secularism, it had been cheated by its political leaders, who had persuaded it to save its own exploiters, its own oppressors. The conclusion, then, was simple: since democracy and the bourgeoisie are inseparable and since democracy is the most effective offensive weapon the bourgeoisie has invented, democracy has to be overthrown in order to destroy bourgeois society. Lagardelle, Sorel, Berth and Herve all agreed that not only did democracy not serve the interests of socialism, as Jaures believed, but it was its mortal enemy. In a parallel manner, Maurras and Valois believed that democracy brought the nation to the verge of extinction. Socialism and nationalism thus discovered their common enemy, whose elimination was necessary to their own existence.

Zeev Sternhell, ‘Neither Right nor Left: Fascist ideology in France’, Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 19

Furthermore:

The wish to break with the liberal order was the connecting link between the Boulangist rebellion of the Blanquists, the former Communards, and the extreme left-wing radicals and the fascistically inclined or already fully fascist revolt of the neosocialists, the frontists, and the PPF [Parti Populaire Francais]. For both of these groups what really mattered was not the nature of the revolution but the very fact of the revolution. For both of these groups the nature of the regime that succeeded liberal democracy mattered much less than ending liberal democracy. This total rejection of the established order motivated one of the most important factors in the rise of fascist ideology: the transition from left to right.

Ibid., p. 15

Somthing similar is happening today, but with one significant difference: our contemporary left-right alliance against liberal democracy is attacking not primarily on the domestic front, but internationally: they are seeking to defeat, or to prevent the spread of, liberal democacy in Iraq, in the Balkans, in Russia and Belarus, in Zimbabwe and in Afghanistan. They are ready to undermine our struggle and support our deadly enemies in all these places. The right-wingers among them fear that globalisation, immigration and Euro-Atlantic integration will dilute the ‘nation’ as they understand it. The left-wingers among them fear the final, definite triumph of capitalism globally. Theirs is the rearguard action of declining political traditions, motivated by fear and hatred of the world that is emerging. They have no creative potential; their politics is wholly obstructive and destructive.

Facing them, we have a left-right alliance of our own: the alliance of all honourable socialists, liberals and conservatives in defence of liberal-democratic values and our fellow democrats abroad. We may have our internal differences over taxation or public ownership, as does the other side, but in each case, these are differences within the family. It is the struggle between the supporters of liberal democracy on the one side and the Red-Brown coalition on the other that is the principal struggle of our age. Those who occupy the middle ground are either vacillating between the two sides, or have opted out of the struggle and are standing on the sidelines.

Readers of this blog will probably already know of two excellent, recently published books that raise the question of where the Left has gone wrong, and why it has reached its current state of moral degeneracy: Nick Cohen’s What’s Left and Andrew Anthony’s The Fallout. For anyone who hasn’t already, I’d strongly recommend reading them both as an introduction to the subject. Although they have produced many replies from among the ranks of those whom they target - the Guardianista soft-left and the harder, ‘anti-imperialist’ left - these replies have tended to be along the lines of ‘whatabout Iraq’, and without exception have failed to address Cohen’s and Anthony’s central accusation: that moral relativism, obsessive anti-Westernism and a fundamental lack of interest in the struggle of foreigners against oppression at the hands of other foreigners have led leftists in the West to abandon those they should be supporting (such as democrats and trade unionists in Iraq, or Muslim women abused at the hands of their families and communities) and lining up with those who should be their mortal enemies (Baathists, Islamists, etc.). We are still waiting for an alternative explanation from the ranks of Cohen’s and Anthony’s critics as to why this happens, or why it is wrong to resist this tendency.

Cohen and Anthony field a range of arguments to explain what is going wrong, most of which I agree with. But the one argument that both of them make, and that fails to convince me, is their claim that the degeneration of the Left is related to its abandonment of the working class. For Cohen, the readiness of liberals in the US to achieve major reforms, such as the legalisation of abortion, through the courts and the judges rather than through campaigning among the working class has led to a working-class alienation from liberal values. For Anthony, guilty white-liberal idolisation of non-white and non-Christian minorities has led to a readiness to denigrate the white working-class; this is a theme to which he has recently returned, and which a new BBC 2 programme is apparently also addressing.

My own background in left-wing politics is somewhat different to Nick’s and Andrew’s, and it has led me to the opposite conclusion: that the radical left’s obsession with class and class interests, over and above ideals and principles, is at the root of its degeneration. The Militant Tendency and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), two far-left groups to which I was close in the late 1980s and early 1990s, were always whinging on about the ‘working class’. The phrase ‘only a socialist party based on the working class’ is indelibly marked in my memory, but I’m not even sure if it belonged to one of these groups, or to several of them.

The point was always to support the ‘working class’ and oppose the ‘ruling class’, not because of what they were doing, but because of what they were. Something was only worth supporting if it had the correct ‘class character’. A strike by ambulence workers was a worthy cause; the campaign for proportional representation in the British parliament led by Charter 88 was not, because there was nothing ‘working class’ about it.

I discovered that this meant that, in the war in the former Yugoslavia, comrades from the Militant and the SWP were fundamentally uninterested in such mundane questions as opposing genocide or national oppression, and wanted to see Serb, Croat and Muslim workers joining together against the bosses of all nations, before the comrades would muddy their hands in this particular conflict. Indeed, I am still holding my breath, waiting for the workers’ revolution that the SWP suggested might stop the war in Bosnia.

Of course, this obsession with class was not just about supporting the working class, but also about opposing the ruling class. This may explain one of the enduring mysteries of SWP politics, one for which only a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist might be capable of providing a full explanation. Namely, over the Balkans, the SWP would berate defenders of Bosnia such as myself, for ‘lining up with one group of nationalists against another’, when all these nationalists supposedly had the same ‘class basis’ and were equally reactionary. Meanwhile, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the SWP lines up with one group of nationalists against another, even though all these nationalists supposedly have the same class basis and are equally reactionary. The SWP opposed the Croatian struggle for national independence in the early 1990s by pointing out that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had mentioned that he was glad his wife was neither Serbian nor Jewish; it nevertheless supports the Palestinian struggle for national independence, even though Hamas and other Palestinian groups have a much worse record on anti-Semitism than Tudjman’s Croat nationalists (the SWP itself probably does as well, but that’s a whole different article). I’m not a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist, but if I understand correctly, the disparity can be explained by the fact that the SWP views the Croatian nationalists as being ‘on the side of the ruling class’ (i.e. the Western ruling-class) while the Palestinian nationalists are ‘not on the side of the ruling class’. Accusations of anti-Semitism are purely instrumental and opportunistic in the goal of opposing the ruling class.

It should be easy to see why this should lead to moral relativism. Whatever the ‘ruling class’ does is for the sake of its class interests, therefore whatever it does should be opposed. If it arms and finances Saddam, it should be opposed; if it bleeds Iraq dry with sanctions, it should be opposed; if it invades Iraq to overthrow Saddam, it should be opposed. The Iraq War is opposed not because it will increase the suffering of the Iraqi people or involve large-scale civilian casualties or because it violates international law - such arguments are purely instrumental - but because it’s ‘all about oil’; i.e. it serves ruling-class interests. Leftist arguments levelled against Western leaders are made not because the leftists necessarily believe in them, but because they want to oppose the Western leaders whatever they do. Hence, the principles put forward in such arguments are inherently insincere and liable to be abandoned as soon as they are no longer necessary: emphasise Croatian anti-Semitism, ignore Palestinian anti-Semitism; emphasise ‘working-class unity’ over national liberation in the Balkans, emphasise national liberation over working-class unity in Palestine; etc.

Conversely, one is supposed to support the working class no matter what it does; all strikes should be supported, regardless of what the workers are striking over. Anthony complains that moral relativism leads liberals to ditch the white working-class in favour of even reactionary Muslims and homophobic black rappers. But it is difficult to see how this is any different from denigrating the middle class or aristocracy and idolising the working class; it simply involves a reclassification of the same old categories of groups one likes and groups one dislikes.

Unfortunately, even the most honourable traditionalist left-wingers cling to the certainties of ‘class politics’, and this leads them either into some extremely dubious company - or into no company at all. The summer before last, my fellow Eustonite Philip Spencer and I spoke at the annual conference of the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL), a Trotskyist group which is fairly sympathetic politically but incredibly dogmatic, in order to argue the merits of the Euston Manifesto. And what a dismal experience it was - being berated by a room-full of Trots for the fact that the Euston Manifesto says nothing about the class struggle, and about how disgraceful it was to support a manifesto that even a Labour minister would have no trouble supporting.

There is a very good reason why the Euston Manifesto is not concerned with the ‘class struggle’ (in the Marxist sense of supporting the ‘working class’ against the ‘ruling class’) - it is an anti-fascist, anti-fundamentalist manifesto whose purpose is to reaffirm a commitment to liberal, democratic and progressive principles that the Left has increasingly tended to jettison. Were the ‘class struggle’ to be inserted into this manifesto, it would involve splitting the anti-fascist front for the sake of obsolete Marxist principles. It would mean jettisoning non-Communist anti-fascists in order to remain part of a ‘Left’ that includes fascists and their fellow travellers. Indeed, the AWL apparently responded to the wonderful split in the Respect coalition (the British manifestation of the Red-Brown alliance) between the SWP and the supporters of George Galloway, by coming down on the side of the SWP. The AWL’s Sean Matgamna wrote an open letter to the SWP’s Chris Harman last autumn, appealing for the SWP to return to its socialist principles by opposing Galloway: ‘Comrade Harman, the revolutionary politics which you spent most of your life working for are still worth fighting for! In the SWP they will have to be fought for against the leaders and their “theoreticians”, such as you. Comrades of the SWP, the socialist ideas which the SWP claims to represent are worth fighting for! Break with Galloway!’

So long as support for the ‘working class’ against the ‘ruling class’ trumps support for Enlightenment values as values worthy of support in their own right, even a relatively honourable group of Trotskyists such as the AWL will not be immune to the temptation to ally with one Red-Brown faction against another, and against the ‘ruling class’, leaving more politically mainstream elements to do the serious work of resisting fascism and fundamentalism. Alternatively, insistence upon class-based politics may lead to self-imposed isolation, whereby the honourable left-wing traditionalist rejects allies both among the Red-Brown alliance and among the liberal mainstream, leading him to feel ‘desperately lonely’, as Bill Weinberg of WW4report complains. But even in this loneliness, it is difficult to escape moral relativism so long as one is determined to oppose the ‘ruling class’ no matter what it does; Weinberg has consistently spoken up for the oppressed Kosova Albanians and their right to self-determination, but is less than enthusiastic about Kosova’s independence now that it has been recognised by the US.

Anthony is right to condemn moral relativists for their grovelling before Muslim fundamentalists and homophobic black rappers. But in his defence of ‘white working-class’ Jade Goody from the charge of racism, on the grounds that her critics are anti-white-working-class, he falls into the same moral relativist trap.

All social classes and ethnic groups should be judged by the same standard; none has any inherent nobility greater than the others; all should be subject to criticism but defended when necessary. So long as one places the support of groups above the support of principles, then principles will inevitably degenerate. It is principles, not groups, that should be supported: support social justice and trade-union rights, rather than the ‘working class’ as such; national self-determination, not Croats or Palestinians as such; religious tolerance, not Muslims as such; anti-racism, not Jews or black people as such.

It is humanity as a whole that should be supported; the only principles worth supporting are those that apply to the whole of humanity.

Hat tips: Daniel Davies, Chris Bertram.

I have noted before the parallels between the Islamic fascists of al-Qaeda and the Christian Chetnik fascists in Bosnia, including the fact that both groups share the same left-wing apologists. I have also noted before that Islamophobes and Islamofascists are two sides of the same coin. I am therefore unsurprised to see that another piece of the Red-Brown jigsaw puzzle has slotted into place, and that right-wing anti-Muslim bigots are beginning to view the West’s dangerous and aggressive enemy, the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, as a desired ally in their crusade against the Muslim peoples of the world.

An exceptionally bigoted article by Irina Filatova, representing the Putinist Russian-nationalist perspective, appeared on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ website in response to Western recognition of Kosova’s independence. Filatova writes: ‘This opposition [to Kosova's independence] among the Russians is practically unanimous. From the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky to the communist Gennady Ziuganov to even Nikita Belykh, leader of the Union of Right Forces, a crumbling but consistent defender of liberal values in Russia - all support the official line of Putin’s government.’ She goes on: ‘Many Russians warn that the creation of a Muslim state in the middle of Europe will strengthen the position of Muslim minorities and of Islam in Europe generally. They also point to the role of Kosovars - even under Nato control - in drug and people trafficking in Europe… how would the British feel if in 20 or 30 years Windsor, for example, proclaimed its independence on the grounds that the majority of its population was now Muslim and if the US decided to support this claim?’ What we have here is a bogey raised of ‘Muslim minorities and of Islam in Europe generally’; of a particular ethnic group identified with organised crime; and of a Muslim demographic threat leading to a Muslim state on British soil. However offensive such BNP-style sentiments are, and however inappropriate to find them expressed in an article on the website of Britain’s leading liberal newspaper, they are undoubtedly representative of the chauvinistic mainstream in Putin’s Russia.

Russian nationalists like Filatova are selective in their presentation of Russia as the aggrieved party, righteously upholding international law - an area in which Russia’s record is less than immaculate. The Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and Japan’s Kurile Islands during and after World War, and subsequently invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan - all without the sanction of the UN Security Council. Previous Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin have repudiated or apologised for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but this tradition of apologising for has not been continued by Putin. The current Russian president describes the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the twentieth century, and has refused to apologise for the Soviet Union’s illegal annexation of the Baltic states - an annexation that the US never recognised - claiming that the act had been consensual. He has refused also to return Japan’s Kurile Islands. Other Putinist actions that have been less than fanatical in their respect for international law include Russia’s launching of a cyber-war to destabilise Estonia, because the Estonians decided to move a statue from one place to another; the murder of Alexander Litvinenko; and the maintenance of a military presence in Moldova’s and Georgia’s break-away territories of Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in violation of the sovereignty of two UN member-states, Moldova and Georgia. Indeed, Putin’s support for these break-away territories, which are much closer to Russia than is Kosova, suggest that Russia, as well as being less than consistent in its support for international law, is less than consistent in its opposition to unilateral ’separatism’.

Russia’s conflict with the Western alliance over Kosova is, in other words, a crisis that Putin unnecessarily manufactured for his own purpose, which is to split the EU, disrupt its expansion and cause problems for the US and Britain. This is not a conflict that can be attributed to aggressiveness on the West’s part; Western leaders have bent over backwards to accommodate Putin since he took power in 1999. Tony Blair very publicly (and shamefully) supported Putin’s murderous war to crush Chechnya. Putin responded to Western benevolence by supplying Saddam Hussein’s regime with military information in the run-up to the Iraq War. This is not a conflict that we started.

There is a global struggle taking place against Islamic fascism, and it is one that all democrats should support. But in doing so, we find ourselves in some sense aligned with some unsavoury bigots whose motivation has less to do with support for democratic Western values and more to do with simple hatred of Muslims and Islam. Since democratic Western values include respect for freedom of conscience and religious toleration, such bigots clearly have no place in our ranks. Their hatred of Muslims is essentially no different from the Islamofascist hatred of Jews and Christians, and their bigotry only alienates ordinary Muslims and pushes them into the arms of the extremists. It is therefore gratifying that the Kosova crisis has prompted these bigots to reveal their true colours: as supporters of the West’s enemies. Writing in the pages of Frontpagemag.com, the screaming American chauvinist Julia Gorin suggests: ‘If Russia intervenes [over Kosova], then 2008 might become the year that war broke out between Russia and NATO. America, the EU, Europe’s immigrant ‘youths,’ and Osama bin Laden would find themselves on one side, fighting Russia, China, and those Europeans who resist Islamization on the other.’ No question about which side Gorin would be on in such a conflict; it wouldn’t be ours. Her antipathy toward the Kosova Albanians apparently originates with the support given by Democrat President Clinton’s support for them. Never mind that the Kosova Albanians are about the most pro-American nation on the planet; if you sufficiently hate Muslims and Democrats, it is apparently acceptable to align yourself against them and on the side of the West’s enemies.

Melanie Phillips, writing in the Spectator, has this to say: ‘It was at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 that some 70,000 died to keep the Islamic Ottoman Empire from advancing further into Europe. What is the point of fighting the jihad in Iraq when we are cheerfully opening the door to it in that very same place? Russia’s President Putin has warned that recognising Kosovo will rebound very badly upon the countries who have blundered into endorsing it. The fact that this outcome is merely the inevitable consequence of the war so unwisely prosecuted by those countries against Serbia does not soften its deeply alarming implications. Putin is warning only too correctly of the dangers to the west of this development and the supreme folly of endorsing it.’ Mad Mel’s article is about one of the craziest I’ve ever read, and contains too many gems to be listed here, but one of my favourites is this one: ‘The Albanians [in Kosova] have turned Christian graveyards into car parks, playgrounds and rubbish dumps. Anything relating to Serbia or Christianity libraries [sic], public records, books, names of places and even towns have been wiped out.’ Anything, apparently, except for the statues of Mother Teresa and Skanderbeg - the Albanians’ two most revered national heroes, both of them Christians - that stand right in the centre of the Kosovar capital of Pristina. Perhaps the Albanians didn’t notice them ? Thus, an anti-Muslim bigot with no knowledge of Kosova, its history or its people is allowing her prejudices to align her with the anti-Western regime in Moscow.

Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihadwatch argues: ‘Among major world powers, both Russia and China are opposed to an independent Kosovo. Even within Europe there are nations that oppose this independence — Spain — and others where many are uneasy. It would have been politically possible for the American government to have thought a bit more about the implications, the consequences, of having another Muslim state — the product of centuries of Ottoman rule — within Europe, and to have thought a bit more about the historical treatment of the Serbs under that same Ottoman rule, and their understandable bitterness.’ He goes on: ‘There is no reason not to take Serbia’s side now. There is every reason — of principle and of Infidel self-interest — to take it.’ In other words, you can burn down US embassies, you can give military information to Saddam to help him kill American soldiers, you can drive a wedge into the Western alliance, but you will still be our ally against people who wave the American flag in gratitude - provided that you are Christian and they are Muslim.

Albania has sent troops to Iraq and has shown much greater loyalty and staying power as our ally there than many predominantly Christian states. Albanian Defence Minister Fatmir Mediu has said that Albanian troops will remain in Iraq as long as US forces remain there. Western anti-Muslim bigots would like to deprive us of yet another ally, simply in order to satisfy their own hatred for all things Muslim.

What a disgrace.

In the global struggle against the Islamist menace, the anti-Muslim bigots are a liability. They should have no place in our ranks.

Hat tips: Hakmao, Drink-soaked Trots; Oliver Kamm.

Italian Fascists marching on Rome, 1922

‘The list of countries refusing to recognise Kosovo’s sovereignty reads like a global A-Z of separatist strife.’ So says Reuters. Indeed, the division of the world, between states that are and states that are not recognising Kosova’s independence is very largely a division between the majority of democratic countries on the one hand, and those that either themselves fear ’separatist’ threats to their own territorial integrity, or that are politically hostile to the West. Russia falls into the second camp. Having itself promoted the separation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, and of Transnistria from Moldova, Russia cannot seriously be described as ‘fearing separatism’. Russian President Vladimir Putin has deliberately manufactured an international crisis over the Kosova issue with the express intention of disrupting the expansion of the EU and NATO and of splitting the ranks of their existing members. This has been openly stated by Moscow’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, who has threatened force in the event that the EU adopts a common policy over Kosova: ‘If the EU works out a single position or if NATO steps beyond its mandate in Kosovo, these organizations will be in conflict with the U.N., and then I think we will also begin operating under the assumption that in order to be respected, one needs to use force.’

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez naturally opposes recognition: ‘We do not recognize the independence of Kosovo’, he said; ‘This cannot be accepted. It’s a very dangerous precedent for the entire world’. The parliament of Belarus has condemned Kosovo’s declaration of independence; Belarus’s despot Alexander Lukashenka lamenting the fact that opponents of Kosovo’s independence ‘betrayed our fraternal Slavic nation’ in 1999 and failed to defend Serbia from NATO. Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the UN, Dayan Jayatilleka, criticised Serbia for having failed to stand its ground against NATO in the Kosovo War: ‘Never withdraw the armed forces from any part of [your] territory in which they are challenged, and never permit a foreign presence on [your] soil.’ (Sri Lanka is fighting a brutal war against its Tamil population). The chorus of voices raised internationally against Kosova’s independence is a chorus of demagogues, despots and xenophobes.

Within the EU, the mature democracies that make up the core of the alliance have been largely united in their readiness to recognise Kosova’s independence. Opposition has come from those whose experience of democracy is more recent and which themselves have nationalistic reasons for opposing recognition: Spain and Greece were dictatorships as recently as the mid-1970s; Slovakia and Romania as recently as 1989. Slovakia, Romania, Greece and Cyprus all have strong recent histories of xenophobic bigotry and intolerance. While Spain is in most respects a mature democracy, it is in a sense the exception that proves the rule; its historic fear of Catalan and Basque separation, manifested most brutally by Francisco Franco and the Spanish fascists in the 1930s and after, is guiding its Kosova policy.

In this international context, in which enemies of the West are seeking to attack us over Kosova and profit from our divisions, and with EU ranks suffering from dissention on the part of those members not fully assimilated to post-nationalist European values, it is absolutely essential that our resolution does not waver. Given existing British and US commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, some might be tempted to say that we cannot afford a major commitment in the Balkans. In fact, we cannot afford not to make such a commitment. The danger is that if Russia and Serbia succeed in embarrassing us over Kosova, both our credibility in the eyes of the world and EU unity itself could be jeopardised.

Western credibility was already slightly dented by the Serb attack on Kosova’s border crossings with Serbia, against which sufficient precautions were not taken. Northern Kosova, with its artificial Serb majority manufactured by ethnic cleansing, has long been an unhealed sore, and is an area where Serb obstructionists can cause problems for us if we do not resolve the problem promptly. An informally partitioned Kosova, such as exists at present, will not simply be another Cyprus - an annoying problem whose resolution can be postponed indefinitely at minor but bearable cost to Western interests. Serbia in northern Kosova, unlike Turkey in northern Cyprus, is not ready to rest content with a quiet, de facto partition. The Serbian government minister for Kosova, Slobodan Samardzic, has stated openly that the attack on the border crossings was ‘in accordance with general [Serbian] government policies.’ In other words, Belgrade intends to use northern Kosova as a weapon with which to destabilise the whole of Kosova and the stability of the Western Balkans in general. Indeed, some of the Serbs who attacked the border were in all probability agents of the Serbian Interior Ministry.

Belgrade will undoubtedly make life difficult for newly independent Kosova. Ultimately, however, Serbia is not strong enough to overturn the new order in Kosova. This raises the question of what the Serbian government is hoping to achieve by engaging in a struggle it cannot possibly win. A lot of commentators in the West like to stereotype the Serbian people as irrationally and spontaneously nationalist, and their politicians and statesmen as simply expressions of this characteristic. According to such a model, the attack on the Kosova border, as well as Thursday’s demonstration and rioting in Belgrade, simply reflected atavistic Serb nationalism, which reacted to the recognition of Kosova like a bull to a red rag.

In reality, three things about Thursday’s demonstration are apparent. The first is that a demonstration of that size does not take place spontaneously; it was the result of careful planning and organisation by the Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and his supporters and allies, above all Tomislav Nikolic’s extreme-right Serbian Radical Party. Workers and schoolchildren were given the day off and bussed into Belgrade from all over the country to participate. The second point to note is that, this being the case, a demonstration that enjoyed the full logistical support of the Serbian state but still numbered only 150-200,000 is actually a fairly sorry affair. Milosevic’s regime in its prime was capable of mobilising demonstrations several times larger, reaching up to and above one million people. And the third point to note is that the demonstration rapidly spawned a riot in which, not only the US embassy was attacked but also the Croatian and Bosnian embassies, McDonald’s restaurants and several shops, some of which were looted in the process. In other words, this was a demonstration of the state-organised hooligan fringe of Serbian society, to which the ordinary citizens and celebrities who attended merely added a respectable veneer.

‘The “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.‘ - Karl Marx

During the Kosovo War of 1999, I lived for more than a month in an ordinary Belgrade suburb, solely in the company of the native people of Belgrade and without any contact with other foreigners. Several times, during and immediately after this war, I crossed the Serbian international border. During this period, on not one single occasion did I, as a Briton, experience so much as a curse or a rude word from any Serbian citizen or border guard, despite the fact that my country’s airforce was bombing their country. One border guard even said to his colleage, in front of me, that what NATO was doing had nothing to do with me, but was the fault of higher powers. The Serbian people, for the most part, are not hooligans and do not engage in random acts of mob violence and destruction. Why should yesterday’s demonstrators have attacked McDonald’s restaurants, when during the Kosovo War the local management of these restaurants patriotically (as they saw it) supported the Serbian defence against NATO ? McDonald’s posters in 1999 Belgrade displayed the colours of the Serbian flag and promised a share of their profits to a fund for military invalids. Those who view themselves as engaged in a righteous act of national self-defence (as most Serbian people, however misguidedly, genuinely did in 1999), do not degrade themselves with acts of rioting and looting. One rioter was burned to death in the attack on the US embassy; this wave of violence, which has already produced dozens of injuries in recent days, is already violent in comparison with the revolution that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000.

This rioting and looting was not just the action of a few troublemakers; it is an expression of the new climate of violence and intimidation that the Kostunica regime and its allies in the Serbian Radical Party and other extreme right-wing and nationalist groups are deliberately encouraging. Hence the deliberate failure of the police to restrain the rioters or to protect the embassies. Former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic said of the police: ‘I am sure they were told to let thugs smash all embassies on their way and then to deal with the aftermath.’ He said that Kostunica’s supporters ‘are now in a position to freely spit on everything that sounds and looks even remotely European… This is the decline of democracy in Serbia.’ Serbian Minister of the Economy Mladjan Dinkic condemned the ‘political parties that are justifying hooliganism, and are abusing the misery of the Serbian nation for political gains.’ Dinkic is an ally of Serbia’s pro-European President Boris Tadic. Significantly, the Croatian and Bosnian embassies were also attacked, even though Bosnia has no plans to recognise Kosova while Croatia has been fairly reticent about it: the vandals were venting chauvinistic rage - against symbols of the West and against Serbia’s ‘enemies’ in general - that reflects the new climate, and that has little specifically to do with Kosova. The Radicals, who provide the backbone to this nationalist coalition, are bona fide fascists: direct and conscious political heirs of the Nazi-collaborationist Chetniks of World War II; friends of France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen; and organisers of paramilitary forces directly involved in the mass-murder and ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia in the 1990s.

The target is not ultimately the US and its allies, or even the Kosova Albanians, but domestic opponents. Thugs attacked the headquarters in several cities of the Liberal Democratic Party in Serbia, which accepts Kosova’s right to self-determination, as well as the homes of its leaders. According to Liberal Democrat sources, government minister Velimir Ilic threatened that Liberal Democrat leader Cedomir Jovanovic should feel ‘lucky if he stays alive until March, but that it will not be easy.’ Serbia’s organs of law and order have failed to respond to the attacks on the Liberal Democrats. Aleksandar Vucic, Secretary General of the Radicals, said the victims were themselves to blame: ‘parties which recognize Kosovo’s independence were responsible for the riots.’ Serbia’s leading independent media station, B92, is also under threat. According to its director, Veran Matic: ‘The threats escalated in the last couple of days through e-mails and on different internet forums where some people openly make plans for burning the B92 building. This building is state property and B92 is only a tenant. The last threat came as a video on Youtube in which someone calls for the assassination of our journalists. The B92 shop in the centre of Belgrade was destroyed during the protest last Sunday.’ Ilic personally threatened: ‘Those people at B92 and other media had better be careful how they talk about those young people [the rioters].’ When rebuked by Snezana Markovic, Minister for Youth and Sport, Ilic threatened her too: ‘Madam, you have been in sports for two months, and I have been for twenty years. Be careful, the sportspeople will come to you.’

Over the past week, reporters, photographers and TV crews have been frequently attacked and injured by masked assailants. Meanwhile Ivica Dacic, the leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia, said he would call for a ban on all political parties and non-governmental organisations which recognise Kosovo’s independence. He singled out in particular the human-rights activist Natasa Kandic.

Although it is the media, human-rights activists and the Liberal Democrats that are on the receiving end of the violence, the ultimate target is the section of the Serbian political establishment grouped around pro-European President Tadic and his Democratic Party, which shares power in Serbia’s coalition government with Kostunica’s supporters. Tadic defeated the Radical leader Tomislav Nikolic in the presidential election earlier this month, and has been falling out with his erstwhile ally, Prime Minister Kostunica, who failed to support him against Nikolic, while Kostunica’s own popular support has been dwindling. The nationalists grouped around Nikolic and Kostunica were therefore faced with a political eclipse. They are using the Kosova crisis to regain the upper hand in their power-struggle with Tadic. The latter is the prisoner of his own contradictory policy: pro-European but supportive of the nationalist position over Kosova, he has found himself outflanked by the chauvinistic eruption that Kostunica is fostering. Serbian Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovic, a member of Tadic’s Democratic Pary, said that yesterday was ‘one of Belgrade’s saddest days’ on account of the violence. But it is a tragedy for which Tadic and the Democratic Party are in large part responsible: by failing to challenge the nationalist consensus over Kosova, they have left themselves and democratic Serbia defenceless against an assault of this kind. For all his undoubted pro-European sympathies, Tadic has played the role of a Serbian Hindenburg. This may not save him: on the day of the Belgrade demonstration, Russian state television lauded the assassination of his predecessor, Serbian Prime Minister and Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic, describing him as a ‘puppet of the West’ who ‘received the bullet he deserved’.

The nationalist-fascist coalition behind Nikolic and Kostunica is therefore trying to achieve through mob violence and intimidation what its members have failed to achieve through the polls. Its ultimate goal is the establishment of a Putin- or Lukashenka-style authoritarian-nationalist regime in Serbia, under which the media will be controlled, journalists and human-rights activists assassinated when necessary, and the economy colonised by Russia. Serbia’s suspension of diplomatic relations with Western states that are recognising Kosova conveniently burns the bridges to the democratic West and creates the isolation that the nationalists crave. This is not what most Serbian people want. It is one thing to be unhappy about the loss of Kosova, but to favour turning Serbia into an isolated, impoverished Cuban- or North-Korean-stye satrapy of Russia, under a repressive regime that condones mob rule and murders dissidents, is quite another. The opinion of the majority of Serbians is probably best represented by Tadic: angry about losing Kosova, they nevertheless do not want this issue to stand in the way of Serbia’s European integration. The Serb-nationalist commentator at the inappropriately named website Antiwar.com, Nebojsa Malic, a supporter of Nikolic and of the late Milosevic, wrote bitterly that Tadic’s election victory proved that the Serbian people were insufficiently warlike, and would not want war in response to the loss of Kosova: ‘After all, what are the Serbs going to do, fight? They’ve just shown they don’t have the guts.’ Which is one way of describing a healthy Serbian popular aversion to renewed war and isolation. But as in Italy in the early 1920s and Germany in the early 1930s, a violent, determined minority is entirely capable of intimidating and crushing a passive majority.

This brings us back to where we began: the alignment of forces in the world for and against Kosova’s independence. On the one side stands most of the democratic world; on the other, an unholy alliance of authoritarian regimes that are either hostile to the West, or that want to be free to crush their subject nationalities without fear of outside interference. The conflict within Serbia is essentially the same struggle in miniature. In this context, to abandon democratic Serbia - both the mainstream pro-European democrats under Tadic and the brave independent journalists and human rights activists - would be to hand a victory to our enemies globally.

We must stand by democratic Serbia. This means continuing to work with all pro-European elements towards Serbia’s Euro-Atlantic integration, while pressing them to confront more resolutely the chauvinistic poison. Tadic must be pressed to come down off the fence, to break completely with Kostunica and the nationalists and to repudiate publicly their destabilisation of Kosova and intimidation of domestic opponents. Not one inch of ground should be conceded to the nationalist-fascist coalition, in Kosova, Bosnia or anywhere else. Milorad Dodik, Prime Minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic (Republika Srpska - RS), spoke at yesterday’s demonstration in Belgrade and aligned himself with the nationalists, stating that Serbia, and not Bosnia, was the RS’s ‘fatherland’. This appears to mark the beginning of his campaign to break up Bosnia and unite the RS with Serbia to form a Great Serbia. It is high time that we completed the reintegration into a unified Bosnia of the RS - the product of a genocide that the International Court of Justice, European Court of Human Rights and the UN’s war-crimes tribunal in the Hague have all recognised. This would serve the dual purpose of reducing the nationalist ability for mischief-making in the Balkans and strengthening Bosnia as a pillar of the European order. The Stabilisation and Association Agreement should be signed with Serbia as soon as possible - to punish Serbia with further isolation would only play into the hands of the nationalist-fascist coalition that wants isolation. Above all, we must take the necessary steps to secure fully the Kosova-Serbia border, prevent the entry of Serbian government personnel and other trouble-makers, and rapidly reintegrate northern Kosova with the rest of the country.

This is a battle that, provided the leaders of Europe and the US are resolute, we cannot lose. It will not be won overnight; as with the overthrow of Milosevic, the defeat of the new crop of Serbian fascists may require years of patient promotion of a democratic alternative. But if our will falters and we do lose, the consequences could be catastrophic, not just for the Balkans, but for Europe and the world.

This article was published today on the website of the Henry Jackson Society.

Hat tip: Eric Gordy, East Ethnia

Members of the Eustonite left (aka the ‘Decent’ left - I can’t speak for my comrades, but I have no problem with the label) are sometimes stereotyped as describing anyone and anything we don’t like as ‘fascist’. Other left-wingers, by contrast, often prefer to define ‘fascism’ so narrowly that the phenomenon virtually disappears altogether. Richard Seymour of ‘Lenin’s Tomb’, a supporter of Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP), had a go at those of us who describe the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic as ‘fascist’, on the grounds that to do so ‘degrades the very concept of fascism’. Yet the SWP readily describes the British National Party (BNP) not merely as ‘fascist’, but as ‘Nazi’. When I pointed out that this was a strange inconsistency, given that by just about any measure the Milosevic regime was more fascistic than the BNP has ever been, Richard responded with a lot of bluster but without actually being able to resolve the paradox, something that did not go unnoticed. In order to defend the Islamists, Serb Chetniks, Iraqi ‘insurgents’ and other murderous chauvinists they support - or at least don’t like to oppose - from the charge of ‘fascism’, leftists like Seymour choose to reserve the ‘fascism’ label for those political parties organised by white people in Europe or in the white, English-speaking world, that are openly racist or chauvinistic and that are more hardline on race and immigration than the mainstream conservative parliamentary parties. It’s not a very intellectually satisfying definition, but functionally, it serves the purpose of the leftists in question. On this basis, Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front (FN) in France qualifies as ‘Nazi’; the Iraqi Baathists and the Hizb ut-Tahrir do not.

In Serbia, the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) occupies a broadly similar political space to the BNP in Britain or the FN in France. Even the Western leftists most ready to apologise for Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic are generally ready to concede that the Serbian Radicals are ‘fascist’. And with good reason. Le Pen visited Serbian Radical leader Vojislav Seselj in Serbia in January 1997 to express his support:

‘Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French far-right National Front, met in Belgrade on 21 January with Vojislav Seselj, leader of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, international media reported. Le Pen, who was invited by Seselj and is on a whirlwind Balkan tour, said Seselj’s party protects and defends “near enough the same things that we defend,” AFP reported.’

In April 2002, following an FN electoral success in France, Seselj congratulated Le Pen:

‘In a message of congratulations sent to Le Pen, Seselj said: “Your victory and those of the French patriots provides encouragement and immense hope for all of us, Serb patriots and other nations of Europe, who are caught in the claws of internationalism and seek to win freedom and the right to a better future,” the Tanjug news agency reported.’

In 1989, Seselj visited the US and was awarded the honourary title of ‘Vojvoda’ (warlord) by Momcilo Djujic, President of the ‘Movement of Chetniks of the Free World’. Djujic, whom Seselj revered, was a former commander of the Nazi-collaborationist Chetnik movement; his forces had literally fought alongside the Nazis and Croatian Ustashas against Tito’s Partisans in World War II. No mere opportunistic collaborator, Djujic was an ideological fascist-sympathiser and anti-Semite. A recent Serbian biographer of Djujic has this to say about him: ‘During 1944 Momcilo Djujic was in contact with Milan Nedic, the president of the government of Serbia. Of him, Djujic spoke only good words. He deemed that Nedic, along with Ljotic and Dragoljub Mihailovic, are doing the same work for the Serb nation, but each in his own way.’ (Veljko Dj. Djuric, ‘Vojvoda Djujic’, Belgrade, 1998, p. 49). Nedic was the Nazi-quisling Serbian leader who served Hitler directly and who helped implement the Holocaust. Ljotic was the Serbian fascist leader, whose Serbian Volunteer Corps formed part of the Nazi SS during 1944. Mihailovic was the Chetnik commander, therefore Djujic’s leader. In my book Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia, I cite a proclamation by Djujic, in which he denounces the Yugoslav Communist leaders as ‘paid Jews’ and ‘Communist Jews’, whom Djujic and his fellow Chetnik leaders pledged to ‘crush’ (p. 162). This, then, was the heritage to which Seselj and his supporters subscribed from the start. During the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, Seselj and the Radicals organised a militia called the ‘Chetniks’, after the Nazi-collaborationist militia of World War II. Seselj’s Chetniks were under Yugoslav military command during the assault on Bosnia, and were centrally involved in ethnic-cleansing operations.

Seselj and the Radicals are, therefore, fascists who I hope would satisfy even the Richard Seymour definition of the term. Be this as it may, given the current evolution that the ‘anti-imperialist’ left is currently undergoing, it was only a matter of time before, here in the West, someone on ‘the Left’ came out in defence of Seselj and the Radicals. This is what the Irish left-wing blogger Splintered Sunrise does. He posted a comment on Seymour’s blog last January, questioning whether it was appropriate to call the Serbian Radicals fascist: ‘I’ve no doubt that Seselj is a nasty piece of work. But the term “fascism” has a definite meaning, and while I’ve heard lots of leftists call the SRS fascist, I’ve never heard a substantial case made for this. And I’m not defending SRS ideology either, but maybe it’s worth looking at what they say they stand for before pontificating about what they stand for. The trouble is, this stuff isn’t readily available to people who don’t understand Serbian, so Western leftists have to rely on agents of imperialism like Sonja Biserko for their factoids.’ (NB you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the comments box to read this).

This week, Splintered Sunrise offers a measured endorsement of Seselj’s Radicals: ‘I’m not exactly an ideological soulmate of the SRS, and the party contains a lot of, shall we say, colourful characters that people worrying about their respectability might like to avoid. So why do I find myself warming slightly to these fuckers? Mostly, I have to say, this is down to spite. And very largely it’s down to the Empire’s definition of “democracy”, which acquires a specialist meaning when it comes to Serbia. “Democracy” in this context means that the Radicals must never be allowed to form a government no matter how many votes they get.’ Which is to say, Splintered Sunrise sympathises with the Serbian Radicals because they are ‘anti-imperialist’. Of Seselj’s deputy, the acting Radical leader Tomislav Nikolic, currently contesting the Serbian Presidential elections, Splintered Sunrise has this to say: ‘Nikolić is no pearl of great price to say the least, but he has one thing going for him. That is that he isn’t a surrender monkey, which is why the Powers have determined he can’t be allowed to win. More to the point, there is an alternative programme on offer to simply going along with Washington and Brussels. Nikolić is nowhere near as stridently anti-EU as he used to be, but his support for national sovereignty and his call for closer ties with Russia and other countries that don’t regard Serbia as the Heart of Darkness has a lot of resonance.’

Of course, Hitler wasn’t a ’surrender monkey’ either. And it won’t be Splintered Sunrise who’ll pay the price for his ’spite’: in an ‘anti-imperialist’ Serbia kept out of the EU, it’ll be the ordinary Serbian citizens who’ll be denied the benefits in the field of work, travel and education that EU membership would bring. There’s no economic or material hardship our ‘anti-imperialists’ are unwilling to impose on the Serbian or Iraqi people in the cause of opposing the US. Also notable is Splintered Sunrise’s resistance to the labelling of Seselj and the Radicals as ‘fascist’, but simultaneous readiness to label the brave human-rights activist Sonja Biserko as an ‘agent of imperialism’. This is very much in the tradition of the late Gerry Healy, a Trotskyist leader in Britain who much preferred Saddam Hussein to Iraqi left-wingers, so much so that he was ready to inform on them to the Iraqi authorities, from which he received money. Indeed, the resemblance between the politics of Healy and Splintered Sunrise may not be coincidental…

Splintered Sunrise is not a serious blogger. He uses words like ‘Stalinophobic’ [in the comments] and ‘imperialised’. The meaning of ‘Stalinophobic’ is all too self-evident; ‘imperialised’ apparently means ‘made subordinate to imperialism’. No doubt James Joyce would have been proud. He frequently posts titillating pictures of lad-mag models on his blog, which also links to pornographic websites, and he muses on masturbation and female pubic hair. The combination of Red-Brown politics, sleaze and personal nastiness that characterises his site is highly distasteful.

In short, someone not worth mentioning, were it not for the fact that he has made it onto the blogroll of numerous left-wing blogs, some of them ones that I have time for. Now, I appreciate that putting someone on one’s blogroll doesn’t mean one agrees with everything they say. But surely, when someone is a fascist sympathiser by any definition of the term, then a line should be drawn ? Is it really defensible to publicise fascist or racist websites, simply because one finds them interesting or informative ?

Unfortunately, there are many on the left who regard it as a provocation even to ask such questions. While not themselves fascist sympathisers, such leftists are 1) ready to turn a blind eye to the powerful (I would say dominant) pro-fascist currents in the ranks of the radical left; and 2) liable to get extremely upset when anyone points out the increasing influence of such currents within the left, as I have discovered. If one raises the issue, one risks being labelled a class traitor, McCarthyite, neocon or such like. This is because the radical-left mindset depends upon a sense of moral superiority in relation to the existing liberal-capitalist order. Question this sense of moral superiority; suggest that perhaps the liberal-capitalist mainstream might actually be morally superior to a left that embraces pro-fascist currents; and you threaten the leftists’ very identity. It’s a bit like telling a devoutly religious person that the God they’ve worshipped all their life is an evil God.

Well comrades, you can have your broad-church united left. Or you can have your moral high-ground. But you can’t have both.