During the 1980s, a local council in the UK came up with an intriguing slogan aimed at making people question their own social conscience. It went like this: “Are you a racist? ‘Cause you’d be a nicer person if you weren’t.” Never, on more than one level, has a more false note been struck.
It is certainly unlikely that a racist skinhead would be swayed by this appeal to social acceptability. If you want to be liked, the argument goes, then you had better be more tolerant; because likeability is always the first thing any self-respecting neo-Nazi thinks of. Self-image is very important.
Of course, it is possible those behind the campaign were appealing to the middle classes, where social acceptability is key to social standing. Curb that hate speech, your membership of the rotary club depends on it. And remember, you are always free to vote in any way you want.
At this point, it might be pertinent to introduce that other smug relic of 1980s bourgeois political sloganeering: “Nuclear? No Thanks”. That really gets to the heart of things.
Of course, there is a point to be found lurking behind all this; the fear to address issues at their root, that a snappy slogan (no matter how ill-conceived) can substitute for political engagement.
The comfortable bourgeois types who want to express their opposition to nuclear energy by not actually campaigning at a grassroots level, preferring instead to represent their views through the medium of a bumper sticker, also find themselves oddly mirrored in the authors of the racism slogan, who wish to alter perceptions, but do not want to address serious social and political issues.
On 9 October, the European Parliament debated the rise of right-wing extremism in Europe.
In many ways, it was a timely discussion; far-right and populist parties are expected to increase their representation in the parliament after next year’s elections. Far-right and populist politics are not exactly the same thing, although justice commissioner Viviane Reding was happy to lump them together, but the fear that parties representing those particular viewpoints will upset the political staus quo in Brussels is driving the need to expose the issue at this level.
The debate was predictably disjointed, with the right wanting to know why left-wing extremism wasn’t debated, and the Greeks feeling insecure; we are not the only ones with a problem, they argued (not unreasonably).
Still, the sad fact is that all eyes are on them right now, despite rising support for extremist parties in Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary and elsewhere.
A toxic mixture of failed economic policies, cumulating in the death-squeeze of austerity that has left so many of Europe’s young without the immediate prospects of employment, as well as its older citizens left starving, owing to a reduction is pensions and other social provisions, and the complacency of the European institutions and member state governments, that has fostered extreme and misguided opposition, is effectively giving votes to extremists.
The heavy-handed clampdown of the Greek authorities on Golden dawn serves only to martyr those it seeks to destroy. The weakly-worded response of Europe’s politicians serves only to enforce its own isolation from the political realities faced by so many of its citizens in this time of crisis.
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