Earlier: Immigration Patriots Are Breaking Through Sweden’s “Cordon Sanitaire.“ What About America’s?
To American and European progressives, well-nigh all of European history happened between the rise of Benito Mussolini in 1922 and the death of Spain’s Francisco Franco in 1975. No doubt stuff happened outside that half-century window, they’ll say, but nothing worth thinking about.
That window of course included the twelve-year rule of Adolf Hitler in Germany, so progressives think of it as the Fascist Window.
To do so doesn’t actually make much sense, as General Franco disliked fascism and only used fascists when he had no choice. Franco disliked pretty much everything about the 20th century—everything since the Council of Trent, in fact. He was a Roman Catholic reactionary patriot who loved the past; fascism was a modern phenomenon.
Progressives don’t engage with that level of detail, though. They just want some stick figures to use for a Two Minutes Hate, where they can whip up their followers into a frenzy preparatory to telling them that some politician of today—Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen—is a fascist just like those guys from eighty or ninety years ago.
That point of view has been showing through in coverage of recent political news from Europe. Much-too-long headline from Daily Mail Online, July 22: Franco’s ghost haunts Spain as the hard-Right makes a comeback: With the ruling socialists set to be humbled in tomorrow’s election, how a new breed of young voter is turning back the clock.
As an example of the horrors in store under this resurgent Spanish fascism, the Mail tells us that the city of Valladolid in northern Spain will no longer be celebrating Pride Week. Can gas chambers be far away?
What a load of rubbish. I actually lived in Franco’s Spain for 24 days in 1965, when Franco was still in charge. It was a happy, easy-going place, the people cheerful, hospitable, and modestly prosperous.
All right, 24 days isn’t very long. I’ve been in seriously unhappy nations for similar lengths of time, though—Soviet-dominated Hungary and Romania, CIA-run (so far as I could tell) Laos. The difference was plain to the eye.
Similarly, Yahoo News was gasping on July 23rd that Germany’s conservative-nationalist AfD Party has been making ground. Polls now show the party favored by 22 percent of voters. They’ll be having a torchlight rally in Nuremberg any day now … or any night, I guess.
So what’s actually going on here? Let me explain.
What’s most worrying to progressives about Europe right now is that fences are breaking down, No, I don’t mean national borders. These are internal political fences.
The politics of most European nations consist of:
That’s the raw material of European politics. To actually form a government, the electoral systems of most European countries depend on coalitions. It has been the rule until recently that the (a) and (b) parties—democratic socialists and controlled opposition parties—would not go into coalition with the Far Right. The Far Right would be fenced off.
It’s those fences that are breaking down. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is the senior party in a center-right coalition that currently holds power.
Similarly, in Sweden and Finland parties that progressives call Far Right and that were fenced off until recently are today members of coalition governments, although not yet the senior members.
Sir Edward Grey famously lamented in August 1914 that, quote: “The lamps are going out all over Europe.“
Sir Edward’s progressive counterpart in July 2023 might observe that the fences are coming down all over Europe. That’s nothing to lament, though. Those fences existed to protect the entrenched parties of progressive, globalist administrative states. We should cheer their demolition.
