The word ‘fascism’ brings to mind goose-stepping, black-clad storm-troopers, Benito Mussolini baying from his pulpit in Piazza Venezia, and Hitler’s brown-shirts, cutting a swathe through Europe in a war that killed many millions. What people don’t see is the public sentiment that made all of this possible. Human nature never changes, but is held in check by external factors. When those factors begin to rupture, the ugliness seeps out.
Nobody would suggest that Norman Lowell and his black-shirts – or for that matter, Philip Beattie, Martin De Giorgio, and their Assocjazzjoni Nazzjonali Reppublikana – are about to seize power, forcing us to live under fascism. Our electoral system militates against small political movements, as Alternattiva Demokratika very well knows. Even if the system changes and the fascists succeed in obtaining seats in Parliament, they will never make it to government, or even to opposition. But that is an irrelevant argument, because fascists are not interested in democracy. Fascism and democracy are in direct conflict; the two cannot co-exist. Contrary to popular belief, Adolf Hitler was not voted into power in a democratic election. He was made chancellor by President Hindenburg in a backstairs plot generated by conservative rivalry for the post.
The danger is not that Lowell, Beattie and De Giorgio will seize power and send their black-shirts goose-stepping down Republic Street some time in the future. The danger is that they are fanning a frenzy of fear and hatred in the present: fear and hatred of the “outsider” and, by extension, fear and hatred of other Maltese who point out that they are wrong-headed and that their views imperil our democratic way of life and our upholding of human rights and individual liberties.
Of course, neither Lowell’s Imperium Europa nor Beattie’s and De Giorgio’s ANR call themselves fascists. They say instead that they are “far right”, conscious of the negative sentiments that the word fascism triggers in those with commonsense and respect for the rights and dignity of others. But the reality of what we are does not emerge from our own perception of ourselves, nor through how we define our beliefs, but in an objective assessment based on the facts of what we say and do, and how we think. On this basis, Imperium Europa and the ANR are fascist organisations. To be more precise, Imperium Europa is a Nazi group, modelled on Hitlerian politics, and because of this it lacks one of the defining characteristics of pure fascism: the attempt at harnessing State religion to its cause. Nazism was essentially a godless creed in which the call to Christianity did not factor as a means of rallying support. Beattie’s and De Giorgio’s ANR, on the other hand, espouses classic fascism, including the attempt to rally the crowd behind the torch of the State religion, Roman Catholicism. Its spokesmen repeatedly stress the need to defend Malta’s Roman Catholic values and identity in the face of what they see as encroaching Islam and dangerous liberal ideas. In this, they have had the rug pulled out from under their feet by the bishops of Malta, who issued a statement a few days ago reminding us that racism – a key tenet of fascism – is wholly incompatible with Christianity.
Beattie and De Giorgio will be dismayed at being compared with Lowell. They like to think of themselves as the acceptable face of fascism – or, in their words, the “far right” - while Lowell hovers on the crackpot fringe. They attempt to dissociate themselves from him without condemning his views or mentioning his name. Yet their attempts at distancing themselves are pointless, because they share the same supporters, who fail to make the fine distinctions that Beattie and De Giorgio do. When the ANR rallies its supporters on 5 June, we will see that many of them are the very ones who turn up at Lowell’s gatherings. “Racist placards and slogans will not be allowed,” Martin De Giorgio said when he announced the rally. The fact that he felt compelled to make that mealy-mouthed sop to decency only means that he is well aware of the kind of person his rally is going to attract.
Lowell has made no attempt at condemning the violent attacks on those who work with refugees and on others who, like me, remind the hysterical fear-mongers in our midst that, even if our Christianity and much-vaunted values are only things that we talk about rather than practise, Malta remains a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, and cannot commit human rights abuses even if its people want them to be committed. Lowell could have spoken harsh words against the violence in the hope that the message might get through to those who follow him like the rats followed the Pied Piper, but he didn’t. He is not the sort who will say things unless he means them, so one assumes that if he has not condemned the violence then he is in full agreement with it.
I make this assumption not capriciously, but because – unlike those who so carelessly say that “he has a point” – I am accustomed to making careful assessments of words and behaviour. It doesn’t take much assessment to understand what Lowell means when he says, repeatedly, that he wishes he were able to hang from lamp-posts the Jesuits, those who write in opposition to his ends, and others who make the call for common decency and the upholding of human rights. He must be aware, when he declares that he wishes to see us hanged in public, that some of his more evil supporters might feel obliged to grant him his perverse wish.
Beattie and De Giorgio have condemned the attacks, but their condemnation has scant real value. It is a clear attempt at distancing themselves from the escalating violence that is being attributed to nascent fascism and Nazism. They need to understand, once and for all, that they are contributing to a culture of violence through their words and the ideas they promulgate. We lived through years of politically-sponsored violence in the 1970s and 1980s, and we know how that violent culture was created. Dom Mintoff did not set fire to The Times building himself, but he created a climate in which others were moved to do so. The thugs that burnt the building did not wear T-shirts declaring their support of Dom Mintoff, but we were still aware of their ideological beliefs. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici did not shoot Raymond Caruana dead or ransack the halls of justice and the seat of the archbishop, but he failed to control the violence of the mob. These are things we lived through – bombs, deaths, shootings, ransacking, threats, fear – so why are we now behaving as though it is out of the question for rabid followers of an extremist organisation to set fire to the property of those who criticise them? We, more than others, should know that it is not just entirely possible, but that it is almost certainly the correct explanation of what has been happening. After all, we have lived through this kind of thing already.
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Malta is ripe for fascism because our political culture is rooted in it. We are new to freedom, we are fresh to democracy, and of the two parties between which power alternates, one was born in real, early 20th-century fascism, and the other practised fascism in the 1970s and 1980s – though many mistook it for extreme socialism because Dom Mintoff’s party called itself socialist. Fascism has caught on so quickly here because we are programmed to accept all that it stands for. In two years, the fascist organisations have got themselves more attention, and garnered more support, than Alternattiva Demokratika did in its first 10 years of hard work.
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Fascism is characterised by powerful and overbearing expressions of nationalism and patriotism, including the brandishing of the flag, the use of slogans (“Viva Malta u l-Maltin”; “Malta L-Ewwel u Qabel Kollox”; “Malta Ghall-Maltin”), obsessive pride in the military service and the celebration of soldiers as heroes irrespective of how they behave (to the local fascists, it is our soldiers, and not the refugees, who are the suffering victims). Fascism is suspicious of all “foreigners”, and minority groups, and regards human rights as dispensable if they do not serve the interests of the nation, or if they are a hindrance to achieving the objectives of the fascist movement.
Acceptance of human rights abuses (the sub-human treatment of African immigrants in detention camps; the burning of the personal property of those who object to this) is engendered among the general population by marginalising, even demonising, those who are targeted. If the violence reaches an extreme that causes people to reject it – as happened in my case because of the danger to my sons, which put it into a class entirely different to burning cars or front doors – the fascist tactic is to use denial and disinformation. “It could have been anyone! She’s upset so many people! Somebody else did it so that the far right would get the blame!” Yes, and Benito Mussolini is alive and well and living in my wardrobe.
The most significant common thread among fascist groups is the use of scapegoating: the shifting of blame for failures onto the scapegoat, and the channelling of general frustration in the scapegoat’s direction. The methods of choice are relentless propaganda and disinformation, or capitalising on prejudice. “Africans are like animals”; “They fight in their compounds like savages;” “The government gives them telecards and mobile phones instead of using the money for the Maltese”; “We feed them and they throw the food in our faces;” “They are ungrateful for all we do for them;” “They are coming here on purpose to marry Maltese women and raise a new generation of Maltese Muslims;” “They breed quickly and will soon turn Malta black”. I bet you’ve heard all of these a hundred times, if you haven’t also been saying them yourself. Well, congratulations: Adolf Hitler would have been proud of you. It is because you are blinded by fascist and racist prejudice that you cannot see how the real burden on the Maltese economy is not 1200 immigrants kept in detention, but the greater number of Maltese who every year suck up many millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in social benefits to which they are not entitled. The immigrants will move on; the Maltese scroungers will stay. And another thing, sitting there comfortably on your sofa with a hot lunch awaiting you and a soft bed ready for the night, and everything you need, how in hell’s name can you begrudge a phone-card to somebody who has only the clothes on his back, and who has gone through the kind of hell you cannot even imagine?
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The world’s leading authority on fascism is Robert O. Paxton. In his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, published two years ago, he does not simply hand over a definition of what fascism is. Unlike the other big ‘isms’ – communism, liberalism, socialism and conservatism – fascism is not really an ideology, at least in the formal sense. Its foundation is, rather, a set of what Paxton calls “mobilising passions”: about the beauty of violence, the primacy of the group, victimisation by internal and external enemies, and the right to dominate others. As Mussolini put it a few months before becoming prime minister of Italy: “So the democrats of Il Mondo (a newspaper) want to know our programme? I’ll tell them what our programme is. It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner, the better.”
Paxton’s concluding chapter is on the prospects for fascism in today’s world, finding its functional echoes in the ethnic cleansing and demagoguery of Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia and Franjo Tudjman’s Croatia.
Incidentally, when Milosevic died, Lowell and his Imperium Europa called a meeting to celebrate and glorify his memory. Remember this when you are tempted to suggest that “he has a point”. Nobody who celebrates a vicious and cruel butcher of men can ever have a point about anything. It is not only communicators who should know that the medium is the message; everybody must know this.
Paxton warns that no country is immune to fascism – and current events in many European countries, Malta and worst of all, Russia – are proving him correct. He does say that it would probably require “catastrophic setbacks and polarisation” to allow fascist fringe movements to enter the mainstream. Yet his parting sentence is unsettling, particularly in view of what we are seeing today: “We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular ‘march’ on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national ‘enemies’ is enough.” We have had enough of those anodyne decisions in our own country. This nascent fascism has to be crushed, before it crushes us. Stopping it starts with you. Do not tolerate, in your presence, any conversation with racist or fascist overtones, don’t start such conversations, and don’t contribute to them. To help you along, remember that the way you feel about Africans is exactly the same way that northern European racists feel about you. As a Maltese, you’re not at the top of the racist pecking order; you’re in the middle. German racists would say you’re at the bottom, side by side with Africans. An Italian man was killed last week in a racist attack in Berlin. That should give you something to chew on.
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