Many people will be familiar with the photograph of the lone German who refused to give the Nazi salute at a 1936 rally in Hamburg. First published by Die Zeit in 1991, this picture is fascinating, compelling and astonishing in equal measure, and it’s also something of an enigma.
Who was the ‘man who defied Hitler’ and what motivated him? What was he thinking in the moment this picture was taken? Was he angry or afraid? What effect did he think his gesture would have? What happened to him as a result?
Since the photograph was released, the lone man has been identified as August Landmesser, a shipyard worker who had been prevented from marrying a Jewish woman by the Nuremberg Laws. Another German family has claimed that the man in the photograph is a metalworker named Gustav Wegert, who refused to salute on religious grounds.
It isn’t necessary to know the identity of the lone man to be awed and amazed by his display of defiance that is on one level totally futile, and also breathtakingly courageous.
Other members of that crowd may well have felt the same disgust, but none of them dared show it. Most of us would like to believe that we would be like the lone man, but none of us can know for sure whether we would have had the courage to register our disapproval of a fascist regime that ruled by terror, violence, and intimidation.
Such bravery is rare even in better times. Perhaps we too would have found excuses to conform and done nothing, like so many Germans. Or confined our ‘resistance’ to private conversations in our own homes, hoping as Victor Klemperer and so many other ‘internal exiles’ did, that it would all turn out alright in the end.
We don’t know. But what we ought to be able to do, and what previous generations once promised in the aftermath of World War II that we would do, is prevent anything like this from ever happening again, so that no one will ever have to make such choices. And in order to be able to do that, we need to think not just of the terror and violence of fascist regimes in power, but of the ways in which fascist movements manipulate their way to power, and the ideas and attitudes that enable them to acquire it.
This exercise is particularly necessary in a country like the UK, where so many believed, even before the war and despite Mosley’s Blackshirts, that there was something intrinsic to the British ‘national character’ or rooted in our political institutions, which made us impervious to ‘continental’ political extremes.
Such complacency is ill-advised at the best of times, let alone in a chaotic, polarised and disruptive era like the one we are living through. Because the seeds of fascism may be present in every generation, but fascism is a protean political force. It doesn’t necessarily appear wearing black uniforms and leather boots and promising to eliminate Jews and Bolshevism. It might come wearing orange hair and waving a golf club, or a cloth cap and a Barbour jacket, or a white fur coat at a State of the Union address.
The Knowsley ‘Protest’
Fascism may be lurking on the fringes, but in certain circumstances it will find its way into your community and your home town, and it will seek to stay there. Take last Friday’s riot outside the Knowsley Suite Hotel in Merseyside, which the Daily Mail calmly dismissed as a ‘protest’.
You somehow suspect that the Mail would have taken a different tone had Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil protesters thrown fireworks at police and set fire to a police van, but then we can’t expect the same level of indignation towards an eruption of anti-migrant hatred that the Mail, more than any other single newspaper, has done so much to incite.
The UK is a country where the dehumanisation of migrants and asylum seekers by successive Tory governments, conservative politicians and much of the British press has become so routine and so toxic, over so many years, that you will struggle to find any acknowledgement of responsibility when a violent mob chooses to act in the name of what it thinks it knows.
Nor can we be surprised that the government has also sought to keep andiscreet distance from what took place at Knowsley, perhaps because it is guiltily aware of the extent to which its own words and actions have contributed to public perceptions of the ‘migrant crisis’. Or because so many politicians, including the new deputy chairman, have sought to weaponise anti-migrant sentiment in a last-ditch attempt to save their wrecked party from going under.
Even Sunak’s millionaires may be dimly aware that housing asylum seekers in a hotel in one of the most deprived boroughs in the country might not be the wisest thing to do. But they certain aren’t interested in doing anything about it, not when a potentially useful fight about Rwanda and the ECHR beckons.
Why should the government care that one in four residents of Knowsley is classified as income deprived? Or that nearly half of all secondary school children in the borough are in receipt of free school meals? No other conservative government has shown any interest in such matters, so why should Rishi and his cronies be bothered to help communities that are ripe for the kind of exploitation that fascism always specialises in?
Because if fascist movements do nothing else, they will always seek to turn poor people against other poor people. This is what happened at Knowsley, and it’s what will continue to happen in other places like it.
In hard economic times, fascism will always try to find nationalist/racial outlets for legitimate economic anger and grievances. It will do this in various ways. It might tell you that your community is being ‘invaded’ by faceless brown intruders. It will tell you that ‘illegal’ migrants ‘of working age’ are staying in luxury hotels at taxpayers expense while you and your family freezes; that you can’t see a doctor, but migrants can; that your schools are overcrowded because they have migrant pupils; that none of the refugees who have arrived in your community are ‘genuine’; that we should always ‘put our own people first’.
It will tell you that ‘your’ country is not your country anymore, because shadowy woke ‘elites’ and ‘globalists’ conspired to flood your cities with foreigners and destroy your culture. If you listen long enough, it will tell you that immigration is in fact an instrument of ‘white genocide’, and that ‘indigenous people’ are in danger of being ‘replaced’ by dark-skinned ‘pedos’ and ‘nonces’ who rape and harass ‘your’ women.
It won’t necessarily say these things out loud, at least not at first, because 21st century fascism has learned how to be polite in public order to insinuate itself into local and national conversations in private.
When fascism comes to your town, it will present itself as your defender, even your saviour. It will hold its hand on its heart and call itself ‘Christian nationalist’ and ‘patriotic.’ It will wave the flag and promise to make you ‘great again’. It will gaslight its critics and tell you that ‘liberals’ and ‘lefties’ are the ‘real fascists’ and the ‘real racists’, who refuse to listen to the ‘concerns’ of ordinary people that were being ‘silenced’.
Fascism will always listen to ‘concerns’ directed at minorities and foreigners. In some countries, like Greece, fascists will set up soup kitchens to help those affected by economic crisis, on condition that their users are ‘indigenous’.
Unlike the fascist movements of the 1920s and 30s, the more savvy 21st century fascists don’t talk so much about waging war and establishing new empires. In his 1940 review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell described Hitler’s ‘pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified.’
Today’s fascists also present themselves and their countries as victims of evil globalist conspiracies, whether directed by ‘George Soros’, the EU, or the WEF, or town planners promoting the ‘15 minute city’. They will tell you that your country is being invaded and humiliated by undesirable minorities and privileged ‘woke’ elites.
Unlike Hitler, they won’t not promise you ‘struggle, danger, and death’, as Orwell put it. They make seek to remind you of lost empires, but they won’t promise you new ones.
Instead of lebensraum, they will promise you high walls, border guards, detention centres, deportations, and endless displays of performative cruelty to appease your anger and resentment, because even 21st century fascists must have a victim/threat to direct their hatred - and yours - against. Like Trump, they will rage against immigrant ‘cesspools’ filled with foreign rapists, criminals and terrorists. Like Farage, they will stand on the white cliffs of Dover counting migrant dinghies through their binoculars and warning that Knowsley is a ‘portend’ of things to come.
They will present you, not with a vision of the future as a boot stamping on the human face forever, but a purged country living in a state of absolute sovereignty, where your everything is to what it was ‘before’ and you enjoy perfect ‘control’ with no obligations to any ‘global’ institutions or agreements.
They will do this because they care about you, the common man - and woman - ignored by the ‘cultural Marxist’ elite and cynically tossed into the maw of wokedom. Of course they understand your anger that an asylum seeker - or just a brown-skinned man, because in the end there’s not much difference - might ask a teenage girl for her telephone number.
And they will call it ‘resistance’ when you turn your attack the hotel where you think this man came from because they understand, as Tommy Robinson News suggested last Friday, that you are righteously angry with ‘ILLEGAL ECONOMIC MIGRANTS (from third world s***holes where kiddy diddling is fine)’.
So we need to recognise these signs when we see them, and we are seeing them now, in a country whose political class has crashed the country in an epic fit of pique and ideological delirium, whose economy is stagnating and failing so many, and whose governments seem more willing to weaponise racism and xenophobia for their own benefit than they are to oppose either.
We need to consider why far-right groups like Patriotic Alternative and Britain First are targeting hotels where asylum seekers have been housed, why they seeking to ‘defend’ the communities around them, and how - kindly assisted by the likes of Elon Musk and Zuckerberg - they are using social media to do this.
More than anything else, we need a broad campaigning movement of solidarity, education and resistance that, as in the 1980s, can help defend people under attack prevent the further disintegration and exploitation of the communities that surround them.
We need politicians and political parties that are not complicit in the weaponisation of the ‘migrant crisis’, who will recognise the gravity of the situation and speak out against those who are inflaming and exploiting the crisis.
Ultimately we need a national government and local authorities that are able and willing to redress the gross failures in the post-Brexit asylum process that has turned the people who came here in search of safety and protection into visible targets and potential scapegoats for distressed communities across the country.
Because if we can’t achieve these things, Knowsley will indeed become a ‘portend’ of dark things to come, as Farage the inciter-in-chief suggested. And we may one day find ourselves, like the lone German in the picture, stranded in a country that we no longer recognise, watching things take place that we once believed were impossible.
An apposite "canary in the mine" piece Matt. I tried to make a comment on Times online pointing out how the brexiteers tick the boxes when measured against Umberto Eco's 14 characteristics of fascism - but it was moderated away, no idea why.