I think the following scrap shows us a bleaker story than JAWS II-IV....
From "Blood" to "Culture": A New Racism
Such imposed cultural stereotypes have never gone unchallenged: oppressed groups have demanded their right to self-determination and, critically, the right to define - and redefine - themselves rather than to be defined hegemonically by others. Such demands, which have long formed a central plank of anti-racist, indigenous and human rights movements worldwide, have frequently been based not only on the recognition of the diversity of cultures, but also on a commitment to confronting the political and social basis of racism, discrimination, exclusion and xenophobia. As such, these demands have played a central role in the struggle "against the hegemony of certain standardising imperialisms and against the elimination of minority or dominated civilizations".
Stripped of that commitment to confront racism and other forms of discrimination, however, the "right to be different" may take on very different overtones. Within Europe, for example, the New Right has attempted to appropriate the language of "difference" in the cause of ethnic separation. In France, the Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes pour la Civilisation Europ‚enne (GRECE), a group comprising largely right-wing intellectuals, some of whom have close ties to neo-fascist groups throughout Europe, has been at the forefront of developing what has been referred to as "differentialist racism". By portraying cultural identities as fixed fate40 and - depending on the "distance" between cultural communities - as more or less
irreconcilable, GRECE and its followers twist "the defence of the right to be different" so as to serve the cause of a new and subtle form of apartheid.
Unlike the racisms of the colonial age, the "differentialist" racism of GRECE and other groups on the New Right rarely makes claims for the biological superiority of one "race" over another. On the contrary, it is prepared to concede that the concept of "races" as isolatable biological units is flawed, "racial identity" being the product of contingent historical circumstances.
Moreover, this new racism does not seek to eliminate "the other": rather, it insists on respect for ethnic and cultural diversity and the differences these imply. Indeed, the leading intellectual architect of GRECE, Alain de Benoist, argues that "racism is nothing but the denial of difference", be it in the form of xenophobia or in the form of liberal, "humanitarian" integrationist programmes.
Cultural identity, however, is not portrayed by the New Right as something relative, fluid, multiple-in-form or open to negotiation - which is the lived experience of those whose daily comings and goings constitute the cultural differences that the New Right now embraces: instead, it is portrayed as a mechanism which, like genes, "functions to lock individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy . . . that is immutable and intangible in origin".
The Road to the Ghetto
Defending ethnic diversity thus depends on preserving the "essence" and "purity" of the supposedly closed cultures into which the New Right divides humanity. This in turn depends on keeping cultures separate, since mixing would cause either ethnic violence (on the premise that people of one culture are incapable of living with or among those with different traditions, life-styles and customs) or the destruction of identities through physical and cultural "interbreeding". The result is "a politics of exclusion, ranging from demands for `foreigners'/`aliens' to be sent `home' to genocide in the form of `ethnic cleansing'".
It is not hard to imagine where such a politics can lead, not just in Europe but more widely. Guillaume Faye, a leading light in GRECE prior to his departure to Le Front National, is candid:
"In keeping with the core of the right to difference doctrine, we must reject multiracial society and envisage, together with the immigrants themselves, their return to their country of origin."
Another leading figure on the French New Right, is equally explicit:
"It is preferable to avoid mixing and cross-breeding. It is preferable to preserve the superiority of the race to which I belong - its difference, its originality."
The theme has also been taken up with gusto by Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of Le Front National: "We not only have the right but the duty to defend our national character as well as our right to difference." To be harmonious, Le Pen contends:
"a nation must have a certain ethnic and spiritual homogeneity . . . The problem of immigration [must] be solved for the benefit of France by a peaceful and organized return of immigrants."
In Belgium, meanwhile, the right-wing Flemish Nationalist Movement - Vlaams Blok - is already advocating special schools to "refamiliarise non-Europeans with their own cultures" (defined, presumably, by Vlaams Blok), prior to their repatriation due to the "incompatibility" of non- European and European cultures.
Elsewhere, in Brazil, conservative landowners (and some Western conservationists) have called for indigenous groups whose members adopt "Western-style" clothes to be denied their rights to their traditional territories, on the grounds that they have "lost" their culture - as if culture were a discrete object that could be mislaid like a suitcase.
Instead of "difference" being a bulwark against stereotyping and the top-down imposition of identities, it becomes a route to the ghetto, threatening a totalitarian nightmare for those who do not fit into the new order or whose sense of cultural identity does not accord with the ethnicities prescribed by the New Right. "You're Turkish? Well, this is your culture. If you don't behave `like a Turk', then we must re-educate you." "You're a European married to a Jew? Sorry, you will have to separate. You belong to different cultures . . . "
What emerges is a project no less oppressive, culturally homogenising and imperialist than previous racisms: oppressive because the assumed "immutability" of cultures inevitably pigeon-holes people into cultural stereotypes that are not of their own making; culturally homogenising because it is assumed each and every culture has an "authentic" core, deviation from which must be rooted out; and imperialist because the "defence" of cultures justifies the top-down partitioning of existing nations and regions according to the pre-conceived territorial and cultural orthodoxies of the most dominant group. The logical outcome is ethnic separation, ghettoisation and, where the "authentic" culture of one group is derived from its hegemony over another, the legitimising of the subordinate culture's continued domination.
Racism with a Presentable Face?
"Culture" - viewed as an all-encompassing determinant of human behaviour - has thus become the latest resting place for those on Europe's Right who seek a discourse for legitimising racism and discrimination which resonates better than biology with the everyday concerns and worries of contemporary Europeans.
Indeed, as many commentators have stressed, the New Right's espousal of "difference" represents not a conversion to liberal pluralism but a deliberate strategy to make racist sentiments more acceptable to the general public. Internal GRECE documents, for example, describe the group's overall objective as "the intellectual education of everyone in whose hands the power of decision will come to rest in the coming years". Conscious that its views, if stated in the raw, would be unacceptable to the public, the group stresses the need to disguise its real objectives:
"The political aims may under no circumstances be exposed. We have to present our aim particularly as an intellectual and moral revolution, and must be extremely careful in the political strategy."
To that end, it has built up a network of front organisations, including publications and study groups, to ensure, in Geoffrey Harris' words, "that what are really extreme-right ideas enter the very fabric of French intellectual and political life" - a strategy that has proved highly successful in widening the appeal of neo-fascist groups such as Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National by creating an intellectual environment that is more "understanding" of (and receptive to) overtly racist views. It has also actively sought to establish links with other movements, such as the Greens.
Political organisation, however, only goes part of the way to explaining the New Right's success in "normalising" racism within many sections of mainstream society: of equal importance is the strategic use it has made of the "differentialist" discourse developed by GRECE to clothe racism in a benign, but radical, language that rehabilitates racism as acceptable politics.
For example, by falsely casting opponents of racism as "universalists" intent on eradicating the differences between cultures, and "differentialists" as the defenders of cultural rights, the New Right has sought to develop a discourse that resonates amongst those who feel their ethnic identities are threatened or those who are evolving new ethnic identities in response to the fragmentation of previous nation-states and the deterritorialisation of national sovereignties. It has also sought to excuse racism by passing it off as just another form of resistance to top-down, universalist, social engineering. As philosopher and sociologist Renata Salecl observes of the new "meta-racism" of the New Right:
"How would a meta-racist react to a Neo-nazi attack on Turkish women? After expressing his repulsion at the Neo-Nazi violence and sincerely condemning it, he would be quick to add that these events, deplorable as they are, must be located in their context. They are perverted expressions of a real problem, namely that in our contemporary Babylon he experience of belonging to a clearly delimited ethnic community which provides meaning for the individual's life is fast losing ground. The true culprits are, therefore, the cosmopolitan proponents of `multiculturalism' who advocate the mixing of races and thereby set off natural self-defense mechanisms."
A second tactic, closely allied to above, has been to characterise racism as just another form of identity building - on a par with other forms of identity building. Indeed, the New Right has wilfully sought to confuse social processes and practices that are actually radically different. For example, the observation that many identities are formed in part by relationships of exclusion is generalised by the New Right into an absolute: exclusion (viewed in the abstract) becomes a "natural" feature of all identity building. Discussion of the form such exclusion takes - its context, its history, the power relations it gives rise to and from which it springs, its motivation - is thereby curtailed: all forms of exclusion (read discrimination) are portrayed as equally valid. Racist
forms of exclusion ("No Blacks", "No Muslims", "No Irish") are thereby treated as being sociologically equivalent to any set of social or other rules.
In a similar vein, New Right theorists have ably sought to transform racism into nothing more than a deeply-felt ethnocentrism. Racism thus become defendable on the grounds that our ethnocentrism makes "all of us racists", in the words of the late British politician, Enoch Powell. There is a world of difference, however, between the cultural essentialism exhibited through, say, ethnocentric jokes ("the Englishman, the Scotsman and the Irishman") or in the yearning most people feel to be part of a community, and the New Right's systematic attempt to create communities peopled exclusively by one internally-homogenous ethnic group - in effect, to make exclusion and conformity the organising principle of society. It is the programmatic nature of the authoritarian Right's culturalism (whether exemplified by GRECE in France, by Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in Australia, the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party in India or elements in Louis Farrakhan's black separatist movement) that makes it such an oppressive and authoritarian - and, some would say, fascist - project.
Excerpted from:
sociology.org
I think Europe is pervasively implementing a neofascistic framework.... But what's neofascism, anyway? Is it the simplistic sequel of Nazi Germany and Fascistic Italy and Vichyist France? Certainly not. Public opinions and people's awareness have greatly evolved since WWII. You just can't fool the masses of Europe by replaying the same tragico-burlesque movie featuring dictators, infantile propaganda, and Nazi pomp and circumstance, like in a peplum-B-movie.... Today, resurgent fascism can rely on a cornucopia of sophisticated devices --both software- and hardware-oriented. The software ones were accurately depicted in the above article: the New Right ideology has smoothed out the biological and racialist claims that flawed early-XXth-century eugenics. The hardware devices deal with ID-smart cards (concealing personal/confidential data), video-surveillance cameras in every city, and various computer databases that, when linked together, can provide an employer/security firm/gov agency with an individual's whereabouts at any given time (remember the "Bernard Tapie" case, in France, where Tapie got trapped/traced by his phonecard....)
Gus. |
