The British playwright David Hare writing in the usually conservative magazine The Spectator last week presented a sixteen-point checklist for fascism. Hare is an achingly exquisite citizen of Hampstead-sur-Rive Gauche, most of whose citizens denounce Brexit as a cross between a Nuremberg Rally and the Black Death. The suffocating postcode sanctimony of his thoughts – pensées, actually, darling – on “fascism” are nonetheless rewarding, because they speak volumes for that intellectually forlorn and sorry waif, the English metropolitan Left.
The list runs:
1) Exploitation of historic grievances 2) Frequent resort to states of emergency 3) Rule by executive order rather than by assembly 4) Disempowering of the judiciary 5) Attacks on the media 6) Threats to annex territory 7) Constant blaming of an enemy within 8) Insistence that the leader is above the law 9) Assaults on higher education and universities 10) Withdrawal from international organisations 11) Extreme nationalism 12) Elevation of the heterosexual family 13) Obsession with birth rates 14) Impassioned denial of historical truth 15) Persecution of particular racial groups and 16) Attacks on cultural institutions.
Yet far from being precursors to fascism, at least half of these constitute a doorway to freedom.
In sequence –
4. From Bucharest to Belfast, judges – especially at the transnational European level – have been arbitrarily acquiring excessive powers over matters that are the proper province of parliaments, upon which legal coral they have been steadily building a reef of further powers.
5. The euro-servile media are central to Europe’s problems, both in their unconditional support for democratically unendorsed edicts from Brussels, and their venomous demonisation of local resistance.
7. Homegrown multiculturalists have been undermining the very notion of national identities, while Europe has been importing – often through interventions from judges, see 4 – alien populations with little or no regard for our local traditions.
9. Marxist university faculties have been systematically attacking the very concept of the nation behind the mask of “academic freedom”. Well, freedom, being free, works all ways always.
10. A withdrawal from international organisations is a prudent path (and sometimes the only one) when they attack both nationality and the family.
11. To illiberal liberals, “extreme nationalism” is any manifestation of an identity that rejects the quisling tropes of multiculturalism.
12. Hare’s fevered admonitions over the dangers of heterosexual family are his most dangerous, as well as being historically ignorant gibberish. Far from being an instrument of fascism, the heterosexual family is the very guardian of European values. Why else did the Nazis forcibly conscript all children into the Deutches Jungfolk for ten-year-olds and, for the 14-to-17-year-olds, the Hitlerjugend and the Bund Deutscher Mädel?
13. An almost dogmatic neglect of native birth rates has been the co-author of a catastrophic decline on the indigenous populations of every single European country.
14. Abstract truths do not exist outside the minds of those that hold them, and discussions about them, impassioned or otherwise, are fundamental to our civilisations.
16. By attacks on institutions, does Hare include assaults on Christianity, royalty and national armies, the staple of the doctrinaire European Left for decades?
Either way, Hare’s inane but inadvertently illuminating definitions make me a 50 per cent per cent Nazi, so now I’ll get an untermensch or two to polish my fascist jackboot, while the liberal suede shoe on my other foot remains firmly planted in the Place des Palais in Brussels. And that’s the way of things. Roughly half the electorates in most European countries are unhappy with the way the EU is working. Which, according to the Hare checklist, means they’re on the way to fascism, having already arrived at that way-station to doom known to the idiot-media as the “far-right”.
Nowhere in Europe has gone quite as far as Germany in its irrational phobia over “far-right”. The domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesverfassungsschutz (BfV), recently declared that the entire Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) should now be considered anti-constitutional. Previously, only the regional branches in Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt and the AfD’s youth organization had been so categorised. In essence, this implicitly authorises the BfV to spy on AfD meetings, tap telephones, recruit informers, cause party members to be sacked from their jobs and for political state-funding to be withdrawn.
Now, it would be both simplistic and stupid to liken such marginalisation to the early days of the Nazi regime. That aside, no zealously pro-Brussels movement would ever be treated as a threat to democracy and German values, while its members faced covert surveillance, domestic intrusion, social ostracization and even economic ruin.
Likewise, in the Netherlands, the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), Geert Wilders, is repeatedly referred to by the pro-Brussels media as “far-right” a term he explicitly rejects. “We are a country of consensus-building. We don’t even have that many far-right people in our country; we never will,” he said last year, adding (accurately): “Indigenous people are being ignored because of mass immigration… they feel mistreated.”
Even though his party has abandoned – or in his words, put in the koelkast, the fridge – some of its earlier, more hard-line policies towards immigrants, such as banning the Quran, Islamic schools and mosques – he still attracts the epithet “far-right”. Clearly, the Dutch electorate does not think he is far-anything, and in the last election, his PVV more than doubled its representation in parliament, from 17 to 37 seats. Many Dutch observers regard the recent collapse of the Dutch government as a prelude to even greater political triumphs for Wilders.
There is a larger truth at work here, which applies to almost all European cultures. Very many Europeans – whether in Gdansk, Glasgow or Galway – instinctively dislike tough policies towards less fortunate outsiders. This is one of the great but undeclared cultural legacies of the very Christianity that the EU explicitly rejected when creating its constitution. Perhaps this is because Christian charity towards to outsiders in need is not a virtue that is usually extolled in most national histories, their authors usually preferring to write about conflict and strife. Blood not benignity sells books: published words on the triumphs of kindness are soon remaindered and pulped to make room for more books on war.
Nonetheless, charity towards strangers is one of Christianity’s (and therefore Europe’s) defining – if usually unacclaimed – virtues. What non-Christian societies ever built lighthouses to prevent foreign seamen from driving their ships onto rocks? Which ones erected hostels for needy wayfarers, as medieval monks once did? There is scarcely a European child, in whatever culture, that did not imbibe (and as an adult still embodies) some of the virtues proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount. Few European Christians could recite those virtues today, but they are nonetheless written deep in the DNA of our cultures. Lingering in our group subconscious is the concept of the blessed to whom we must perforce be kind: the poor in spirit, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart and the peacemakers. But not least of all, blessed are those who are persecuted.
Such invocations serve as powerful and almost uniquely European inhibitions on hostility towards immigrants. For that same reason, Europe cannot allow itself to be transformed by the mass movement of peoples whose cultures, far from embodying that defining ethos, implicitly reject it. Islamic societies, at best, merely tolerate Christians in their midst, often enough at the price of a poll-tax: they do not embrace them with the fervent charity enjoined on all Christians by Jesus on the Mount.
Yet Europe refuses to acknowledge its debt to Christianity, in itself a civilisational heresy, though this denial of reality does not mean that the debt will disappear. A comparable aphorism about fooling people serves as reminder of the enduring nature of truth. This is often – but wrongly – attributed to President Lincoln, whereas its genuine author seems to have been a French Protestant, Jacques Abbadie, truly a citizen of Europe, who lived variously in France, Switzerland, Germany, England and Ireland. In 1684, he declared: “… ont pû tromper quelques hommes, ou les tromper tous dans certains lieux & en certains tems, mais non pas tous les hommes, dans tous les lieux & dans tous les siécles.”
“Tems” was probably a hasty misspelling of “temps”, and his words translate roughly as: One can fool some people, or fool everybody in some places for a while, but one cannot fool everybody everywhere forever.
Quite so. As the EU struggles to reconcile often profoundly contradictory views about its future, it will nonetheless prove impossible to deny the inescapable truth of its past, namely its Christian roots. Regardless of what the Hares of this world might want, those roots – through Bethlehem, Gethsemane and Golgotha – are what made us. Abbadie’s words should be written in gold over the entrance of the European Parliament in the Espace Léopold. Not just MEPs pass through those doors. So too does history.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Ireland defends nothing, its unarmed neutrality is ‘balderdash’