Neo-Fascism Hot and Cool
SALPETER, ELIAHU
COMING NTO THE OPEN Neo-Fascism Hot and Cool byeuahusalpeter Paris The October 3 bombing that killed four people in front of the synagogue on Rue Coper-nic, in Paris' fashionable 16th...
...And that relationship, in turn, raises the possibility that modern-day neo-Fascism has an uglier potential than is thus far generally recognized...
...Initially, the neo-Nazis attacked all foreigners indiscriminately...
...Consisting of members of the intellectual elite, they deny any kinshiporganizational or spiritual—with the crude, violent neo-Nazis, claiming to be purely cultural and philosophical movements...
...The unemployment and inflation that have in the past created social tensions are again coming into sharp relief, exacerbated by ever more exorbitant oil prices which promise to deepen the malaise and heighten extremism in all of its aspects, not merely anti-Semitism...
...for 1977 it was 40 per cent...
...The group operates by "Fabian methods," trying to infiltrate top political, administrativeand military positions...
...Openly racist, grece maintains that just as there are superior and inferior individuals, there are superior and inferior races, with human progress depending on the superior races "leading" the inferior ones...
...In France, an active Nazi figure of the Vichy era told a colleague of mine he was "plain frightened by the brutality" of the young Fascists...
...and France had 125, a fourfold advance...
...In the '30s Jews had to combat covert, if not overt, official approval of racism...
...It is the Zionists who dominate all the banking in the world, who are responsible for inflation, who are guilty of aggression against the Arab people...
...The youth of 1980 is far removed from World War II and the civilized world's revulsion against the Nazis' genocide...
...But the statistics provide the most dramatic evidence of the sharp rise in anti-Semitic acts in Europe: From 1973-76, the increase was about 10 per cent annually...
...Continuing this line of reasoning, it contends that the ills of Europe stem from Judeo-Christian notions of egali-tarianism, and that salvation lies in a return to Greek and Roman elitism...
...To make matters worse, they note, industrial societies have not felt the impact?or had to come to grips with the unrest —inherent in the microprocessor revolution just around the corner...
...for 1978,47 percent...
...Despite the failure to develop a con-creteconnection between the neo-Nazis and Arab terrorists, there is ample evidence of an "ideological merging" of the two extremist operations...
...Germany, Britain and France have experienced the greatest escalation of violent anti-Semitism...
...Many politicians and sociologists in Western Europe believe that this anti-Semitism would be of little consequence in the long run were it not buttressed by "respectable" Right-wing groups that have become fashionable in France...
...While one consequence of the Holocaust has been that substantial numbers of Jews are currently to be found only in France (750,000) and Britain (410,000), people travel as freely across borders as does the merchandise of Common Market members...
...Last year there were 165 cases in Germany, 10 times more than in 1973...
...Indeed, the lesson is clear: One may engage in the crudest anti-Semitism as long as one dubs it "anti-Zionism...
...The virtues of Qaddafi's revolution are extolled, and all the abuse is reserved for "Zionism...
...In this regard, some sociologists have voiced particular concern because unlike the cyclical economic crises of the '20s and '30s, the present one appears to be structural...
...The figure for only the first half of 1980 was close to the total recorded all of last year...
...And the fatal November 25 shooting here of Michelle Douek, a Jewish travel agent specializing in trips to Israel and Egypt, further underscored the growth of terrorist activities...
...the authorities are allies in the battle against anti-Semitism...
...The new neo-Nazis, in contrast, have taken as their model the Leftist terrorists of the late '60s and '70s, who have made a cult out of lawlessness and given a sort of ideological respectability to organized political violence...
...The resurfacing of several outspokenly anti-Semitic publicists of the dark past as writers for various organs of grece makes the relationship clear...
...and in 1979 there was a jump of 125 per cent...
...Through the New Left, Western societies also absorbed a good deal of the Arab propaganda equating Judaism, Zionism and racism, a phenomenon that has not been lost on Europe's neo-Nazis...
...At the moment, this sort of genteel racism among members of the intellectual elite appears to be almost exclusively confined to France...
...In addition, after 30 years of economic growth that saw everybody's slice of the prosperity pie steadily expand in size, leaving few to envy their Euahu Salpeter, a regular NL contributor, is a correspondent for Ha'aretz...
...Now, neo-Fascist hate-sheets no longer blast Arabs...
...the Holocaust is fast fading as a moral shield...
...neighbors' fortunes, a marked contraction has set in...
...This gloomy prospect faces a Europe where violent crime, especially of youth, is already becoming endemic...
...The Jewish tragedy has lost its uniqueness...
...Britain had 88 incidents, also a tenfold hike...
...Leftist terror groups do not conceal their ties with the PLO and other Arab terrorist outfits, but they are secretive about being part of a network of Leftist groups in various Western countries...
...Some are even reputed to be close to President Valery Giscard d'Es-taing...
...But even so, there can be little doubt that such movements lend cultural and moral support to the crasser Fascist elements now operating in Western Europe...
...grece has an estimated 5,000-10,000 adherents, including theexclusive "Club d'Horloge," limited to 120 members...
...Even assuming that intensified news coverage has resulted in a fuller listing of these crimes, the trend is alarming...
...In England, once renowned as a law-abiding country, brutal felonies have increased annually by an average of 9.5 per cent during the past decade, with people aged 20 or less making up half of the arrests for such offenses last year...
...On the other hand, the horror of the Holocaust no longer renders open advocacy of anti-Semitism unspeakable...
...No Western European government now espouses ultra-nationalist doctrines branding Jews as foreigners in their own countries...
...Of course, significant differences exist between the Leftists and their reactionary mimics...
...None of this is to suggest, though, that we are witnessing a rerun of the situation before World War II...
...Already, it is said, hundreds of the movement's followers occupy key posts at levels as high as deputy director general and department head in both industry and gov-vernment...
...Millions of foreign "guest workers" do engender a measure of xenophobia, yet their presence among local populations has at the same time lessened intolerance of strange tongues, customs and religions...
...It recently attained added respectability and special influence when the relatively new publisher of Le Figaro, who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, gave it Le Figaro magazine to serve as the movement's cultural organ...
...in France and Britain, Pakistanis and Arabs suffered more at their hands than Jews...
...The self-styled Fuh-rer Hoffman and his cohorts were arrested after the attack and released for lack of evidence, but Bavarian authorities disclosed that some of the group had spent time in Lebanese PLO camps and that Hoffman himself had visited Damascus...
...The murder of the six million remains the most traumatic experience for Jews since the destruction of the Temple by the Romans 2,000 years ago, but for many young people Auschwitz has been superseded by Bangladesh, the Gulag, Cambodia...
...For example, police suspected that the neo-Nazi "Military Sport Group Hoffman," aided bythe Arabs, was behind the Munich Beer Festival bombing last September that killed 12 and wounded over 200...
...COMING NTO THE OPEN Neo-Fascism Hot and Cool byeuahusalpeter Paris The October 3 bombing that killed four people in front of the synagogue on Rue Coper-nic, in Paris' fashionable 16th arron-dissement, spotlighted the resurgence of Right-wing anti-Semitism in Europe...
...Probably the most important of these is grece, an acronym for Group for European Cultural Research that also symbolizes its hankering for the pagan culture of classical Greece...
...The neo-Fascists exult in their international links with other Right-wing terrorists, but they play down their affinities with Arab terrorism and men like Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya...
...Behind its "philosophical" front, grece pursues a practical strategy that makes it dangerous...
...The Right-wing eruptions of the '50s still were largely an echo of the Hitler period...
...Moreover, excluding the Communist countries, Europe is open and heterogenous...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 22
