NRP

National Radio Project

1714 Franklin Street #100-251 • Oakland, CA 94612 • 510-251-1332
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. For permission to reproduce and/or reprint, please contact us.

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #15-00 On a Mission: The U.S. and the European Right
April 12, 2000

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2000/0015.html

Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact....

Martin Lee: Jorg Haider went on a charm offensive. This was an effort to polish his image that had been tarnished by his pro-Nazi statements. But I think if you look at really who's still in the Freedom Party today, it's very clear that PRF needs a long way to go.

Chip Berlet: If you look at these movements and their effect, it's not the people who have membership in a particular ethno-nationalist group that matter. The question is, have these ideas moved into the Democratic or Republican parties in a way that's been sort of hidden by the use of coded language.

Phillip Babich: In February 2000 members of a far-right party were sworn in as part of the government coalition in Austria. Extreme right parties have also gained power elsewhere in Europe. On this program we take a look at this trend and its connections to right-wing organizing in the United States. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information.

Last fall, Austria's Freedom Party captured 27 percent of the vote in national elections, positioning the far-right party to become part of the governing coalition. When the Freedom Party was sworn in February 4, 2000, the U.S. government temporarily recalled its ambassador to Vienna, and several European governments began downgrading official relations with Austria in protest. U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright told the New York Times that contacts with the Austrian government would be limited, adding that there should be no place in a European government for a party that "doesn't distance itself clearly from the atrocities of the Nazi era and the politics of hate."

Martin Lee, author of The Beast Reawakens , which documents neo-Nazi activity and Fascist resurgence, says the Freedom Party has openly Fascist roots that grew out of surviving Nazis from the Hitler era.

Martin Lee: The leader of the Freedom Party is Joerg Haider, he's relatively young, charismatic, telegenic, very wealthy because his parents benefited from the expropriation--orAryanization as it was called--of Jewish property during World War II. His parents were members of the Nazi Party. And Joerg Haider tends to be rather outspoken. He's given to making pro-Nazi statements, statements sympathizing with veterans of the Rafen SS, the Nazi SS, which was condemned in toto as a war criminal organization. He's also praised Hitler's employment policies. The Freedom Party as a whole is staffed with many openly Fascist people. The co-speaker of the Austrian Parliament today--the number two person in the freedom party--is a man named Tomas Prinzhorn. Two days before the election back in October, he accused the Austrian government of giving free hormone treatments to refugees and immigrants, and political asylum seekers to make them breed faster. There's an obvious sexual, racial, psychopathology at work here.

Phillip Babich: The Far Right also scored well in Switzerland. The people's party, whose leader, Christof Blocher, is praised as the author of a book that denied the Holocaust, won 23 percent of the vote in October, 1999. Lee says that such a percentage may not seem significant in the context of the U.S. electoral process, but it can carry great weight in European parliamentary elections.

Martin Lee: When we speak about the advances of the People's Party and the phenomenal advances of the Freedom Party in Austria--which may well be poised to be the leading party soon in Austria, and Joerg Haider may become the chancellor of that country--we're not only talking about a phenomena of resurgent Fascism and right-wing extremism in these two countries, this is part of a European-wide phenomenon. In fact, I'd say it's in some sense a global phenomenon. In Belgium, the Vlams Bloc, it's a neo-Fascist party, it is the leading vote-getter in Antwerp, the second largest city in Belgium. It scored very well in the suburbs of Brussels in the most recent election. You have in Italy the National Alliance, another neo-Fascist party that gains about 15 percent of the vote nationwide. Also, in France, there is the National Front, that has recently sort of fractured and split in two, but still it is a powerful force in French politics. In Norway, the Progress Party gained 17 percent of the vote there. It's also another radical right wing populist party.

Phillip Babich: So how is it that the Far Right, and Neo-Fascist political parties are gaining ground in Europe, particularly in view of Nazi realities in the not so distant past? Lee says quite often there are more pressing concerns on the minds of many European voters that politicians ties to decades old war crimes, such as job security and cultural identity.

Martin Lee: There is a great sense of stagnation in Europe with respect to the political landscape. There's a sense that the left-of-center parties, the right-of-center mainstream parties, that increasingly there's little difference between them, much like our own Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, the mainstream of the two parties. It's very hard sometimes to tell the difference on substantive policy issues. Well, in Europe it's becoming increasingly like it is in the U.S., as far as the political landscape. And this presents a very ripe opportunity for right wing extremists Because they come along and say "Well at least we're different, vote for us, we're not like Tweedledee and Tweedledum."And of course there's a reason why Tweedledee and Tweedledum are sort of existing in these countries. It's because irrespective of what the particular party might be, if its a slightly left-of-center social democratic party or a right-of-center conservative party, both of the partiesare hemmed in by the constraints of the global economy and by the dictates of the European Union, which is the European version of economic globalization. It's essentially the way big business in Europe is responding to the globalization. And this gives people a sense that when they go to the voting booth, well what difference does it make if they vote for the Socialist or the Conservative, they're both locked into these policies. I'll vote for the guy who's speaking out against the European Union, who's speaking out against globalization. And in Austria that turns out to be Joerg Haider, in France it's Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Phillip Babich: How do these elections bode for the American political landscape?

Martin Lee: I think it's quite significant. We might think that Austria, while it's a small country, it's in Europe, it's far away, but when you have a situation where a leading politician can make lunatic statements, accusations claiming that immigrants are being given hormone treatments for free by the governments so that they breed quicker, this is crazy, thesis sort of beyond the pale. And yet it's no longer beyond the pale in Austria, or in Europe as a whole. So what the obvious significance initially is that it has stretched the boundaries of what's permissible about what's taboo and not taboo in European society. And this will have a direct effect on the United States. The obvious comparison or analogy is the Buchanan supporters. Patrick Buchanan's policies with respect to globalization and other issues are nearly identical to the policies of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Joerg Haider in Austria.

Phillip Babich: As with the Right Wing in Europe, the U.S. right is multi-faceted. It ranges from White Supremacist groups, such as Neo-Nazi chapters, Aryan Nation, the National Alliance, and the Ku Klux Klan, to Washington beltway think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. There's also the religious Right, which includes the Christian Coalition, the 700 Club, Promise Keepers, and Focus on the Family. Jean Hardisty, Executive Directory of Political Research Associates, which tracks Right Wing Activity in the United States, says that it's important to note differences among the various sectors of the U.S. right wing when making comparisons to right wing activity in Europe. For example, the religious right, or Christian right, which is a much greater political force in U.S. politics than the far right, has a specific policy agenda that it's trying to accomplish through the electoral process.

Jean Hardisty: Neo-Nazi ideology is less interested in the promotion of specific policies than it is in the capture of power. I think if you look at most of the elements of Nazi ideology, they are really based on capturing power in order to institute a radical transformation of society. In the electoral sphere of the right, which in this country is represented by the right wing of the Republican party, which I've identified as the secular right and the Christian right, the object really is to obtain certain policy changes within the context of the existing electoral system. And there is an agenda laid out, that which the movement sets out to achieve. It's revolutionary, in that the agenda itself is revolutionary, and the political parties are not necessarily the source of greatest allegiance. The agenda may be the source of the greatest allegiance. Often the Republicans, especially in the early days of the New Right, would say, "We don't really care about the Republican party. What we care about is the agenda."

Phillip Babich: Although there are tactical and ideological differences between the religious right and far right, certain leaders, adds Hardisty, act as bridge figures between the two sectors.

Jean Hardisty: The ideology of the far right, and the ideology of the right within the electoral sphere, is somewhat distinct. At the time of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 it was quite distinct. But there were certain bridge figures that picked up parts of the far right's ideology, especially its right wing populism, its isolationism. And it popularized those ideas, those right wing populist ideas within the electoral right. And two of the figures that did that were Pat Buchanan and David Duke.

Phillip Babich: Chip Berlet, also with Political Research Associates, further distinguishes between the far right and the populist right.

Chip Berlet: Let's draw a distinction between the far right in both Europe and the United States, and what I would call the right wing populist movement, which in the United States would be people like Pat Buchanan, and the militia movement, with the far right being more neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan groups. It's the same in Europe. You have right wing populists that perhaps have some fascistic elements like Joerg Haider in Austria, and La Pen in France, and a number of other movements, a sort of ethno-nationalist movements that have an aggressive populist style. And so you have that in the United States, and you have that in Europe. So in both right wing populism and in the far right, there's an interaction between the two continents. In the far right, traditionally, you had the racist skinheads picking up music from the British National Front and importing it into the U.S. You had Gerhard Louck in Nebraska...he was printing a number of different language versions of neo-Nazi material to be sent to Europe and to the Soviet Union as well. You still have that kind of interaction on a number of levels. People going back and forth between countries, literature flowing. And of course with the internet, it's very easy to have a kind of dialogue. In terms of right wing populist movements, certainly you look at Buchanan. He's been influenced by some of the ideologues behind Le Pen.

Shereen Meraji: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, please give us a call. It's toll free at: 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tape and transcript orders.

Phillip Babich: Right-wing coordination across various sectors gained strength in the 1980s when the secretive Council on National Policy got its start. CNP members have included Richard Shofe, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, Ralph Reid, former Executive Director of the Christian Coalition, Larry Pratt, president of Gun Owners of America (which has ties to the militia movement), Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation, R. J. Rushdoony, the ideological leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement, and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority. Republican Senators Trent Lott and Jesse Helms have also been associated with the Council on National Policy. According to Jean Hardisty, who recently wrote a book on the electoral right, titled, Mobilizing Resurgence: Conservative Resentment from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers , such widespread coordination has been waning in recent years.

Jean Hardisty: CNP was the vehicle of coordination, of that joint effort. I think it's almost unprecedented in U.S. history. What's happening now is it's becoming harder and harder to bring those sectors together in common agreement. The leaders are less driven by a common vision. The vision itself has been achieved to a large extent. And I think the final factor is that the mainstream of the Republican party is starting to reassert itself, not with a liberal agenda, but with a slightly more moderate agenda than that of the right wing of the party.

Phillip Babich: But the religious right continues to exert significant influence on electoral politics, according to Fred Clarkson, Communications Director at the Institute for Democracy Studies, and author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy .

Frederick Clarkson: The role of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Right generally is premised on the idea that they know that only a small fraction of the eligible voters agree with them. Sothey have a very astute analysis of the structure of the electorate. Because they know that in any given year, only about two-thirds of the eligible voters are even registered. And in a really good presidential election year like 1992,when it was an exciting race and it was Ross Perot's first run, there was higher than usual turnout. But even then, only about half of the eligible voters, rather the registered voters even turn out. And the farther down the electoral ladder you go, presidential races, governors races, state houses, school boards, the lower the level of voter participation. So, the Christian right knows you can pick up a school board or state legislative seat with only four or five percent of the registered voters.

Phillip Babich: This, adds Clarkson, has allowed the religious right to shift the so-called political center rightward.

Frederick Clarkson: It used to be that the most conservative wedge organizations were still secular in terms of their public face, whether it was the John Birch society, or other organizations like it, all throughout the 40s, and the 50s and even in the 60s. But these days even presidential candidates are wearing their religions on their sleeves and they have to pander to religious based political views. as if belief in God and Christianity were the same thing as beliefs in certain views on guns and taxes and a range of social policies that are not necessarily supported by religious views. So we're living in very demagogic times, and it runs across the more elite corporate kinds of conservatives to the neo-fascist populism of a Pat Buchanan, who, until just a few months ago after all, was one of the leading figures in the Republican party. These kinds of pieces are increasing rather than decreasing. They may not be gaining in terms of access to public office, but they're having profound influence on the movement of the center of American politics and culture vastly to the right.

Phillip Babich: In 1999, the Special Rappateur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights reported to the General Assembly that neo-Fascism and neo-Nazism are gaining ground in many countries, especially in Europe. The Rappateur also noted that a particular concern is the increase of power in extreme right wing parties, thriving in an economic and social climate characterized by fear and despair. According to the U.N. report, some of the key factors fueling the far right are the combined effects of globalization, identity crisis, and social exclusion. Author and journalist Martin Lee says the globalization plays into the rise of the far right in a number of ways.

Martin Lee: First off, globalization puts a lot of stress on the social fabric in different societies. Not just in Europe, but in the Third World, in poorer countries. And as a result of the structural contortions, particularly in the poorer countries, people are fleeing, looking for a better life, seeking jobs in other countries. So there's amass migration going to the relatively prosperous countries of western Europe. And the issue of immigration has been a key issue for the neo-Fascists and right wing extremists to rally around. And they do so in a number of ways, it's not just a matter of immigrants being a threat to a person's job, or stealing jobs as they claim, it's actually a bogus claim. But they also cast this in cultural terms. Clearly, globalization, while it's economically driven, is a phenomenon that has very far-reaching impacts that exceeds just strictly speaking economics. And in Europe, the extreme right leaders have been very effective in speaking to the anxieties around the issue of identity--cultural identity, social identity, national identity--that appear to be posed by both immigration and globalization.

Phillip Babich: In the United States, the politician who's most closely following this rhetorical path, says Lee, is Patrick Buchanan, who abandoned the Republican party to seek the presidential nomination from the reform party..

Martin Lee: I think what Patrick Buchanan has done very effectively, and very cynically, and in a sinister way, that he combines the critique of globalization with a kind of a racist anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric, much in the same way that Joerg Haider does in Austria. So that the image that Buchanan projects while on the campaign trail is that of a vice that's squeezing the little, middle class guy in the middle, the producer, the middle class producers. And from above you have the global economic powers, the big corporation, the big business, and he sites businesses with Jewish CEOs just by chance, it seems. And from below, you have the so-called lazy parasites, the welfare cheats, the immigrants, the poor, who are draining the poor little white guy in the middle usually of his hard earned money through taxes, by having to pay for these misguided social programs that are trying to help the underclass. So that's the way Buchanan frames it. It's that image of a vise, being caught from above and below, from the big business and the lazy parasites, that's very evocative and it appeals to a lot of people. It's very dangerous. And that image of a vise is a Fascistic image.

Phillip Babich: And you've written in your book The Beast Reawakens that we're not just talking about ideological links between, say, Pat Buchanan and Fascist organizations, extreme right-wing organizations. Perhaps you can lay that out a little bit for our listeners.

Martin Lee: Well, there are certain ideological links, but there are certain links in terms of personnel, and it happens on many different levels. We speak about resurgent Fascism, you're talking about a multi-faceted phenomenon. The most extreme or obvious examples would be the obvious skinhead wearing the neo-Nazi tattoos, and through music and whatnot, listening to racist music, that's very much of an international phenomenon, and there are links, explicit links, between those types of groups. Organizations like the Aryan Nations in Idaho, or the National Alliance led by William Pierce in West Virginia, overtly neo-Nazi groups. They have explicit links to their counterparts in Europe and other part of the world. Then when you get to more mass-based level, usually the rhetoric is toned down a little bit. But you have groups in the United States like the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose ideology is very similar to Pat Buchanan. It's mainly a southern-based organization in the United States, with close ties to Senator Trent Lott, who spoke out for the group. He praised its efforts and its members. Well, the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is a white supremacist organization, has sent delegations over to France, to meet with Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the national front there, and to meet with other neo-Fascist groups in Europe. And there was one point, on their website, how they described how they presented a confederate flag to Le Pen. He said, "Oh, I recognize that flag, I support your cause." See, those kinds of links as well. It's not just ideology, there are personnel and organizational things.

Phillip Babich: Chip Berlet, a Political Research Associate, adds that while the base of far right activists is relatively small, racialized and xenophobic politics seeps into mainstream politics through crafty orders such as Buchanan, who are able to repackage far right messages to have broader appeal.

Chip Berlet: Well, numerically the intellectuals are very small. We're talking about a handful of people and a handful of groups, maybe a couple of hundred thousand people who regularly read these journals. But what's important to understand is that the ideas have moved into the mainstream. People like Buchanan, who is a good example, he has one foot in a kind of quasi-fascist, world view, one foot in a kind of right wing populist electoral world view...he is someone who takes these ideas of Le Pen, and Alain deBenoir, or Sam Francis, and recirculates them into his columns which are picked up in newspapers and magazines around the country. So hundred of thousands of people then are introduced to these ideas by people like Buchanan. So you have to argue that these ideas have really grown way outside the circle that develops them. And you even see some mainstream politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, picking up some of the xenophobia, some of the anti-immigrant attitudes, and you see this happening in both the state and federal level.

Phillip Babich: The appeal of the religious right, says Jean Hardisty, is connected with a period of religious revitalization in the United States.

Jean Hardisty: Periodically, societies go through what anthropologists call religious revitalization. These occur when people are feeling that their lives lack meaning, spiritual meaning, or perhaps their lives have become dominated by too much materialism. And various groups or sectors within the society will attempt to more or less break away and redefine the culture in which they are living in a way that they find more meaningful. I think that we've been going through that period on a very large, broad scale in this society for the last 20 or 25 years. What you've seen is a tremendous growth in interest in spirituality and expression of spirituality. Most of this growth has been in new age. I think all you have to do is to go into any bookstore and look at the size of offerings on new age literature, new age paraphernalia, and groups. It's an enormous movement in this country. But a great deal of that growth has also been in conservative evangelicalism, which has grown at the same time as mainstream Protestantism has shrunk.

Phillip Babich: And religious right organizations are able to capitalize on this religious revitalization?

Jean Hardisty: I think absolutely. The other thing that evangelicalism in general, and especially conservative evangelicalism provides is a sense of community. And that often is what people find lacking and one of the reasons that they reach out to some kind of spirituality in their lives. Not necessarily because they are looking for religion; they're also looking for community. You get both with conservative evangelicalism, and that means that the religious right can talk to these people about politics. About not only about political ideology by political action as well, within the setting of their religious practice.

Phillip Babich: This fusion of religious practice, with right wing political activism, is part of a process of moving towards, what Fred Clarkson terms, theocracy... the belief that government should be run according to religious beliefs.

Frederick Clarkson: Many people of the Christian Right are theocratic inorientation. That is the idea that the United States once was, and should be yet again, a Christian nation. If you read Pat Robertson's books for example, he is a big fan of the Massachusetts Bay colony, which you had to be a white male landowner of the correct sect to vote or hold public office, and if you were not one of those, there were specific laws against you, and it wasn't just witches. There were laws on the books that banned being a Quaker, and there were Quakers who were hung on Boston Common decades before the Salem witch trials, just for example. That's the kind of society that Pat Robertson and many leaders of the Christian Right thinks is a role model for what modern America ought to look like. They feel very strongly that God will punish the United States for failing to keep what they consider to be a covenant withGod, to keep their understanding of God's laws. And they even talk about AIDS and natural disasters, and other kinds of things, high crime rates in certain places, as evidence of God's displeasure of the failure of the United States to live according to God's laws as they understand them. They really feel that God is going to destroy the United States the way God destroyed Sodom and Gomorra in the bible.

Phillip Babich: That's it for this edition of Making Contact: An international look at right wing politics. Thanks for listening. Special thanks this week to Martin Voelker for recorded portions.

Laura Livoti is our managing director. Peggy Law is executive director. Associate producer is Stephanie Welch. Norman Solomon is senior advisor, national producer David Barsamian; Lisa Rudman, Women's Desk Coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt, Prison Desk Coordinator. Production assistant, Shereen Meraji; archivist, Din Abdullah. And I'm your host and managing producer Phillip Babich.

If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. You can also go to our website at www.radioproject.org. Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. 'Bye for now.