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Description
Europe was torn apart by fascism in the 1930s, and when the Second World War ended in 1945, remnants of extreme right parties re-emerged on the margins of politics. By the 1980s, when the forgetting had started, some began to pick up protest votes as immigrants became an issue, driven by tabloid journalists looking for a cheap story.
In the new millennium, there is a step change with new political racism in Europe. For one, Jewish conspiracy and Holocaust denial have given way to the clash of civilizations and Islamic fundamentalism. Secondly, traditionally fascist right-wing parties have chosen to dilute their message and their membership to "fascist light". No longer pure fascist parties, they have become right-wing populist parties, who embrace a broad church membership that stretches from ideological fascists to racists, xenophobes and the alienated working-class whites. They now use a language of nation and tradition, sovereignty and community, rather than eugenics, extermination and fatherland. Thirdly, they are deliberately narrowing the gap between themselves and traditional democratic parties as they dress down their rhetoric, and traditional parties steal these sound bites for electoral advantage as the new racist language leaks into the mainstream. Aided and abetted by Europe's Eastern widening, which has not proved a tool for tolerance, prejudices suppressed for decades by communist regimes... |
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