There’s been much discussion of the unholy alliance that’s been formed between the left and radical Islamism. Rather less attention has been paid to the fact that this is in fact a three-way alliance – between the left, radical Islamism and neo-Nazism.

The foaming hysteria that the left expresses towards the racist totalitarians whom they call the ‘far right’ is the rage of Caliban looking in the mirror. If one looks at the outpourings of certain individuals on the left, radical Islamists and neo-Nazis or white supremacists, one is struck by similar preoccupations, demonology and even whole phrases, particularly around the issues of Israel and the Jews towards which all three display a visceral hatred. This overlap is somewhat confusing because in Britain, at any rate, the neo-fascist British National Party goes to town on demonising Muslims. The far right is popularly thought to be anti-Muslim because it has a history of racism. Yet the left has a long history of racism too, and as can be seen every day from its demonising of Israel and the Jews, parts of the left are still hard at it.

In any event, is it quite correct to set up the left and the BNP as polar opposites? As Lord Tebbit suggested in a recent letter to the Telegraph, much of the BNP’s platform appears distinctly left-wing:

I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies. On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to ‘use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality'’, to institute worker ownership, to favour workers' co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato. That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.

Certainly the BNP poses as a patriotic party opposed to multiculturalism, and it has racist overtones, but there is no lack of patriotic Left-wing regimes; opposition to multiculturalism is now mainstream and racialism was not unknown even in the Soviet Union. So what is ‘extreme Right-wing’ about the BNP?

In today’s Times, Oliver Kamm writes a terrific piece exploring these conundrums. Pointing out that the Trotskyite/Islamist party Respect is just as bad as the BNP and yet is never considered as such -- even though both are anti-Jewish, for example, and both have antecedents in totalitarian movements -- he reminds us that there have been many historical instances where the left has allied itself with fascism. And just such an association of ideas – which both sides would doubtless strenuously deny – has emerged today too:

There is a common thread in the politics of the totalitarian Left and the far Right, which is to make people’s wishes secondary to pseudo-scientific abstractions such as race and historical forces. The far Left and far Right increasingly talk the same language: division, nativism and even deference to religious fanaticism. The BNP’s cult of violence was once expressed in support for the Islamic Republics of Iran and Libya. It matters that political debate lacks a language for this phenomenon.

The fact is, surely, that the old cliché is true: the old categories of left and right are meaningless. Fascism and communism have common roots going back at least to our old friend, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the romantic counter-enlightenment and, later, the French Revolution. The Nazis were, after all, National Socialists.

What Lord Tebbit was picking up was the BNP’s strongly anti-capitalist bent, which derives from a romantic hatred of free markets for destroying rooted communities. That, of course, is not a right-wing position – it is found also among liberals and on the communitarian left, and should more properly be thought of therefore as a ubiquitous position. In the case of the BNP, however, it is overlaid by a strong racial prejudice, which in turn has the effect of demonising everyone else who values rooted communities. Hence the impossibility in Britain of talking about the need for immigration controls or the dangers of multiculturalism without being vilified as a neo-Nazi.

The BNP’s one-time flirtation with Libya and Iran is of course particularly intriguing, given its current rampant anti-Islamism. The explanation is surely the reason why Trotskyites and neo-Nazis share some of the same preoccupations, and why they share them again with Islamist fascists: that the common thread that links them is a totalitarian mindset, an obsession with power and a determination to destroy freedom and democracy and the moral order of the western world. This is probably why -- at least in part -- they both hate Jews so much, because Jewish moral order is at the heart of western freedom and civilisation.

With all this in mind, it was particularly illuminating -- if horrifying -- to read in the Times yesterday about the latest grand guignol addition to Britain’s Islamist army – a neo-Nazi convert. David Myatt, a founder of the British National Socialist Movement (NSM) who has been jailed for racist attacks, has changed his name to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt and become a radical Islamist. He has thus embraced the very thing he previously hated. Myatt, who was jailed for leading a gang of skinheads in a fight against Muslims, now supports the setting up of a Muslim superstate and the killing of any Muslim who breaks his oath of loyalty to Islam. He said:

‘I spent several decades of my life fighting for what I regarded as my people, my race and my nation, and endured two terms of imprisonment arising out of my political activities.’ But his belief is now that: ‘The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West . . . For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy. They want, and demand, that we abandon the purity of authentic Islam and either bow down before them and their idols, or accept the tame, secularised, so-called Islam which they and their apostate lackeys have created. This may well be a long war, of decades or more — and we Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical jihad — to take part in the fight to free our lands from the kuffar (unbelievers). Jihad is our duty.’

And now look at why he embraced Islam. His neo-Nazi NSM, he said,

considered the creation of a revolutionary situation in this country as necessary since it wished to build an entirely new society, based upon personal honour, and believed this could only be done by destroying the dishonourable and corrupt society of the present… Myatt said recently that he had given up hope of a breakthrough by the far Right and believed that Muslims were the best hope for combating Zionism and the West. ‘There will not be an uprising, a revolution, in any Western nation, by nationalists, racial nationalists, or National Socialists — because these people lack the desire, the motivation, the ethos, to do this and because they do not have the support of even a large minority of their own folk,’ he said.

When it comes to the destruction of the west, therefore, the important thing is to make use of those who actually mean to achieve it, regardless of what each side thinks of the other. That’s why the Socialist Workers’ Party has climbed into bed with Islamist fascism; that’s why this neo-Nazi has reached the same conclusion. That’s why all three movements are in this terrible, hideous thing together: a totalitarian triple of red, green and black united in violent, pathological hatred against the free world.

There is no longer any left or right. There are those who are for life and liberty; and there are those who are for death and slavery. Those who cling to the old categories had better decide which of these two sides they are on.

Posted by melanie at April 25, 2006