Germany Has a Historic Debt to the Palestinian People

By Marcel Cartier

The crimes of German fascism are of a magnitude so enormous that they are almost difficult to comprehend. Without question the most heinous in its breadth was the Holocaust, the systematic attempt by the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish people that ultimately led to the mass murder of around two-thirds of the European Jewish population. It is only correct that today’s German state would see itself as having a historic responsibility towards Jews, both at home and abroad. This point should be indisputable. However, there are divergent positions on what the nature of this responsibility should entail.

For the modern German state, being responsible means seeing the State of Israel as the primary representative of the Jewish people. It means muting any serious criticism towards Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Germany refuses to retrospectively assess how the country was established through ethnic cleansing, and certainly doesn’t actively challenge today’s status quo in which an system of occupation and apartheid prevails.

That solidarity with the self-professed Jewish state today goes beyond placing Israeli flags outside of official government buildings, where they have flown in the aftermath of October 7. It also explains why it was inevitable that Chancellor Olaf Scholz would end up in Tel Aviv just over a week later to express his condolences and offer an increase in military support, saying Germany’s place in hard times was “by Israel’s side”. The German state’s notion of “Never Again Ever” means ensuring Israel’s stability and security as a Jewish homeland. It sees expressions of anti-Zionism as inherently anti-Semitic.

Contrary to this view espoused by the German government is that Israel does not necessarily represent the Jewish people. This perspective either holds that Zionism as an ideology is inherently racist and rooted in settler-colonialism, or at the very least that the State of Israel today is an entity that engages in dispossession and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. This view places a distinction between critique of the Israeli state and anti-Semitism.

This position allows Jews themselves a sense of agency in being able to choose to either support Israel’s actions, or to stand firmly against the crimes that are carried out in their name. For those who agree with the latter, it means “Never Again Ever” applies equally to all scenarios that take on genocidal proportions, not merely to those claiming to safeguard the Jewish people.

Tough Times Opposing War Crimes in Berlin

These are difficult times in Berlin if standing up for Palestinian liberation – or even simply international law – are on your agenda.

Just after the bombs began being rained down on Gaza, Bernie Sanders visited Berlin to great fanfare. However, not pleased with his presence was the Social Democratic Party’s co-leader Saskia Esken, who cancelled an appearance alongside him. Why? Because he had the nerve to make a simple, humanitarian statement: “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” Apparently, Sanders – perhaps the most famous Jewish political figure in the western world - was displaying anti-Semitism by aligning with the Geneva Convention.

Demonstrations in support of Palestine, or those merely calling for a humanitarian pause or ceasefire, have been banned. In the German mainstream media, these protests have been billed as the work of “Hamas lovers” or “Jew haters.” In some cases, protests are literally banned minutes before they are set to begin, when hundreds have already assembled. When it comes to calling out war crimes, the German state has decided that the right to assembly that is enshrined in the country’s Basic Law can simply be ignored.

A cursory look at these illegal demonstrations over the last two weeks reveals that many Jewish organisations have also endorsed and actively participated in them, among them the Jewish Bund and Juedische Stimme. In fact, police have hauled off Jewish activists and arrested them, because Jews are not granted the agency to espouse their positions.

For those who are Palestinian, the ban on demonstrations by Berlin’s authorities means a complete targeting of their identity. When a German police officer arrests somebody for wearing a kuffiyeh, or schools in the capital ban the Palestinian scarf, they are saying the Palestinian identity is that of a terrorist.  

Palestinians are being threatened with deportation if they are proven to be supporters of Hamas, but also Samidoun - the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network associated with the Palestinian left (both organisations have now been banned). This means the possibility of Palestinians being uprooted not once (from their historic homeland), but twice (now from Germany).

The Other Germany and the Palestine Liberation Organisation

Although Germany’s post-war history has been shaped by attempts to deal with the crimes of the Nazi regime, this hasn’t always meant that German state entities have taken the view that the current state does towards Israel. The history of the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, offers a very different perspective.

First off, it’s necessary to understand that the GDR was created principally as an anti-fascist state, something that was considered even more important than the construction of socialism. Its top priority was indeed “Never Again Ever,” which is why a much more robust de-Nazification process happened there than it did in the western part of the country.  

The new Federal Republic of Germany set up by the U.S., Britain and France became a country where Nazi ideologues were not only allowed to join the government, but were actively sought out for participation in the Cold War. On the other side, much of East Germany’s leadership knew first-hand what is felt like to be hounded and targeted by the Nazis – we should remember that the first concentration camps, after all, were set up for communists, and that they were accused of being part of the global “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”.

In 1948, the newly created Socialist Unity Party that was operating in the Soviet occupation zone that would become East Germany the next year, backed the creation of Israel, saying "We consider the foundation of a Jewish state an essential contribution enabling thousands of people who suffered greatly under Hitler’s fascism to build a new life".

Once it became clear that the new Israeli state was actually a reactionary entity that refused the right of return for the 700,000 refugees it had created, and enacted martial law against the Palestinians who remained, the SED leadership changed its tune. It reverted to the position long-held by the communist movement in regards to Zionism, which is that it was an expression of a reactionary, bourgeois nationalism that always sought the patronage of colonial and imperialism powers.

In 1973, the GDR set up official relations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation of Yasser Arafar. That same year, it had supplied Syria with weaponry for use in the Yom Kippur War against Israel. In 1975, East Germany voted in favor of a UN resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination.

It is not merely coincidental that the PLO was supported by East Germany at the same time that another crucial liberation movement against minority rule, that of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, was also being given support from East Germany. The battle against apartheid was inextricably linked by the East German leadership to that of opposing settler colonialism in Palestine. This was all happening at the same time that West Germany held deep relations with the racist South African government, branding those who rebelled against this rule as “terrorists” - just as the Palestinians are referred to today. Given the similarities in their struggles, it’s no small wonder why Nelson Mandela once proclaimed upon the end of apartheid that, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

This history of the rival German states that existed for 40 years shows that there was no consensus on the question of whether Zionism could be seen as representing the legitimate aspirations of Jews as a whole.

Germany’s Dual Responsibility

It should be evident that today’s Germany has in fact not learned the lessons of history. It’s selective application of “Never Again Ever” is symbolic, but ultimately meaningless. It is complicit in Israeli war crimes, and those who espouse anti-fascist politics have a responsibility to stand against it. To fight against anti-Semitism should also mean fighting against imperialism, colonialism, and all forms of racial discrimination.

As the creation of Israel was agreed to by world powers against the backdrop of Nazi Germany’s attempt at exterminating the Jewish people, this means that the consequences – including the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab masses from what became Israel – should also be laid at Germany’s feet. It means that not only does Germany have a responsibility to the Jewish people – it also has a responsibility towards the Palestinian people. Simply put, Palestinians should not have to suffer for the crimes of Hitlerite fascism, whether at home or here in Germany.

How Ordinary People Become Nazis: A Review of Robert Gellately's 'Hitler's True Believers'

By Charles Wofford

Imagine a political speech so venomous, so hate filled, so threatening, that at times it is impossible to understand the speaker. He rages against enemies foreign and domestic, against capitalism, against communism, against ethnic and political minorities, against disabled people, and insists on the superiority of his own nation. Thousands of torch-bearing zealots respond with orgasmic delirium. Is it not obvious who this image is supposed to evoke?

The image of German fascism as an overwhelming, cult-like madness is common and is re enforced by the Hollywoodization of the Nazis. In popular media Nazis might as well be demons who merely appear as human. As a result the protagonist may kill them without any guilty conscience. Ironically, this same mechanism of spectacle-induced failure of conscience found extensive use in German fascism. The radical Othering of the Nazis is comforting; it ensures us that it couldn’t happen here, it couldn’t happen to us, because the Nazis are not us, they are the radical Other.

In Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis, Robert Gellately shows that the German fascists were far more rational and normal than we often imagine. This is not his endorsement, of course. Gellately’s real accomplishment is in showing how normal the Nazis were without “normalizing” them, showing how rational they were without “rationalizing” their atrocities. The Nazis were not the radical Other; most of them were not very different from us. They went to work, followed the law, and loved their families. The lesson is how easily it all happened to the German people, how every step along the way made sense at the time, and by implication how easily the same thing could happen to us. Perhaps it already has.

The German people were aware of the regime’s crimes; indeed, they were in many cases active participants. If it were not for mass grassroots initiative the Nazis would not have been as successful as they were. Gellately writes of racial persecution, “It was all so public and impossible to overlook. […] The public did more than stand idly by, because numerous individuals cooperated in the enforcement of racial policy, before and after the milestone reached with the Nuremburg Laws in 1935” (263).

The most difficult lesson for those of us on the Left is recognizing that the “socialism” in “National Socialism” is not just a moniker but had real content. German fascism was a broth of nationalism, socialism, and antisemitism. The nationalist angle put it in opposition to the international socialism of Marxism, and the socialism positioned it as a foe to the bourgeois democracies of France, Britain, and the United States. Though the Nazis were hostile to the idea of abolishing all private property, they did seriously attempt to abolish finance capital (which, of course, they linked with Jewish influence), and they did attempt to nationalize several industries to wield them in the name of the German people. The antisemitic conspiracy mongering enabled the fusion, as the German fascists cast their capitalist foes and their Marxist foes as two sides of the same Jewish-led effort at world domination. The negative manifestation of this worldview culminated in the Holocaust. The positive vision was the Volksgemeinschaft.

Volksgemeinschaft is the National Socialist utopia; a futuristic vision of a society living in harmony with nature. “Nature” here is conceptualized in terms of a bogus blood-and-soil theory, but that was not an invention of the Nazis. Similar forms of racism were widely entertained throughout the global scientific community. “Volk” literally means “people,” but refers to a racialized concept of it as in the Völkisch Movement of late 19th century Germany. “Gemeinschaft” may be translated as “community,” but refers more to tight-knit communities of people who know each other personally (contrast Gesellschaft, a more rationalist conception of society as defined through social contracts, rational self-interest, etc.) Volksgemeinschaft is what emerged from the blending of nationalism and socialism. Its racism makes it repugnant to an internationalist or humanist perspective championed by the Left, while its community-oriented nature is repellant to today’s neoliberal individualism. The point here is that the Nazis were anti-humanist and reactionary, but they were also futurist and modern. They were not conservative.

But that recognition puts us in a difficult spot. Today’s popular left discourse has committed itself to an outright denial of any authentically socialist character to German fascism. So acknowledging that National Socialism is one of the infinite conceivable varieties of socialism leaves the Left rhetorically exposed. One of the foundational premises of socialism is that society is what we make it. We can therefore arrange society however we wish. But our time and place is so hyper capitalistic, and its ideology so individualist, that any and all socialisms are seen as equivalent. Yet the figures who became major Nazi leaders had, in Gellately’s words, “an obsession about socialism. Indeed, thanks to the creation of a welfare state from 1881 onward, reinforced by the social impact of the war, a degree of socialism engrained itself in German society and was enshrined in the Weimar Republic’s constitution” (41).

The place of socialism in the Nazi vision was not unambiguous, and there were internal debates. Gellately relates a debate between the Nazi Left represented by Gregor Strasser and the Nazi Right represented by Alfred Rosenberg.

If Gregor Strasser bowed to Hitler’s authority or at least his political abilities, he still advocated a more socialistic line. As might be expected, Alfred Rosenberg, as one of the party’s self-styled ideological experts and a die-hard anti-Bolshevist, pushed back in a newspaper article in early 1927. Nationalism in its purest form, he said, united with socialism and, if stripped of any internationalism, represented the nation’s spirit of liberation. Hence, emphasizing the socialism in the Party’s name (as Strasser and his comrades wanted) was wrong, because the main point of their activity was to rescue the nation. Strasser replied quickly that socialism meant more than merely using the state to protect the people from capitalist greed, as Rosenberg would have it. Instead, it aimed to create another form of economic life and implied the participation of workers in ownership, profit, and management. This socialism accepted that private property was the basis of all culture and because capitalism was an immoral system that stole the nation’s goods, the state had to step in to restore fairness (77).

These debates abated as the Right wing of the party took greater control. Eventually the Strassers were marginalized, and the working class elements of the party leadership liquidated in a series of purges. But their socialist contributions were still a part of Nazi doctrine, and if they did not represent a powerful wing of the party there would have been no need to purge them in the first place.

Another difficult lesson: many devoted Nazis in the 1930s had been equally devoted communists and socialists in the 1920s. The Nazis did not come to power primarily through violence; they persuaded the vast majority of Germans (and Austrians, and many others across Europe) that they really were the way forward. A big part of that was refuting of the Treaty of Versailles. The humiliations it imposed on Germany were despised by the entire population, so that anything done to escape its terms was met with enormous praise, and even foreigners were in admiration of Germany’s unwillingness to stay down.

Hitler’s True Believers belongs to a genre of “How the Nazis Came to Power.” It is not a strictly historical genre, and it includes such varied titles as Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason and William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. No matter the angle, the point is generally the same: this movement of German National Socialism, which culminated in mass murder on an industrial scale and the self-immolation of European civilization, emerged from beliefs and social structures that had been present in Europe for centuries, and every step of its development made sense at the time. National Socialism was not an aberration or explosion of barbarism in the midst of an otherwise civilized world. It was the culmination of particular processes of civilization which contained these murderous possibilities from early on. The hideous racism of the Nazis was well-supported by the scientific establishments of the time. Hitler’s survival-of-the-fittest mentality was derived from theories in the natural sciences (particularly Darwin) applied to the social realm. The Nazis saw Bolshevism as the death of civilization and the Western democracies as its decay. Thus they were (in their own minds) the sentinels of civilization, driven by science, united in their desire for progress toward a newly unified society, the Volksgemeinschaft.

One clear parallel to our own predicament is in the rhetoric employed to defend American military presence around the world. Neuroscientist and public commentator Sam Harris, for instance, is known for arguing that American-committed atrocities just aren’t as morally bad as those committed by official enemies, since we are “well-intentioned,” while they are not. But that merely brings us back to the issue of a failure of conscience. For the Nazis it was that they were Das Herrenrasse (the master race) while their victims were Die Untermenschen (sub-humans). For the French it was the cultural appeal: they were “civilized” and on a “civilizing mission” (Mission Civilisatrice), while the colonized were primitive. Whether we appeal to the Nazi blood theory, the French cultural theory, or Harris’s intention theory, the end is to facilitate that same failure of recognition, that same failure of conscience, which we also inflict on ourselves through our representations of the Nazis in popular media.

Hitler’s True Believers will remind leftists of the importance of internationalism. Yet even this concept is too limiting. In an era of mass anthropogenic environmental destruction and mass extinction, not even humanism is sufficiently broad. After National Socialism there is no excuse for blindly trusting humanism, enlightenment, science, rationality, technology, “the People,” “the Proletariat,” or any other idealized construct to save us from ourselves. These ideas must be engaged critically, their limits registered, and their employment must be razor-sharp. If we fail this challenge, then we may already have one foot in the jackboot.

My copy of Hitler’s True Believers shows on its cover a crowd of bright-eyed Germans giving the Roman salute, presumably to their Führer off camera. The focus of the photo is a young woman, flanked by several soldiers and many children. The exuberance on their faces is beautiful. It is hard to see anything political inspiring such admiration in 21st century America. Consider how defeated, how humiliated, how despairing many Germans were after World War I; is it so hard to understand why they would want to believe in something that could inspire that sort of joy? Our contemporary situation is also marked by widespread depression, anxiety, and despair about the future. How easy would it be for a Hitleresque figure to bring us all, by dint of our own reason, to the brink?

Charles Wofford is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology and critical theory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Revolution in an Age of Resurgent Fascism

By Atlee McFellin

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright used the phrase “ruptural transformation” as stand-in for revolution, inaccurately summarizing this as “Smash first, build second.” [1]  His immensely popular and useful work also unfortunately erased historical European anti-fascist strategy whose approach to revolution differed from the caricature he presented.  To move beyond Wright’s important, yet misleading framework, one can even turn to DSA-founder Michael Harrington’s last book, Socialism: Past and Future.

Published in 1989, Harrington expanded upon his own earlier critique of the German social democratic party, specifically the electoral path to socialism as strategy against Hitler and the Nazis. [2] Harrington would ultimately look to a leading member of that same party at the end of this book as the basis for what he referred to as a “new middle class” on the march of “visionary gradualism.”  That “new middle class” is not the “irreversible feature of the system” he thought it would be though.  Despite his misplaced optimism, rather than an electoral path to socialism, Harrington argued for the proliferation of “little republics” across the so-called USA, looking to Antonio Gramsci on a cross-class “historic bloc” and the Paris Commune of 1871. [3]

This Paris Commune was catalyzed in defense against an outside force invading the city to restore the power of a monarch, a dictator supposedly appointed by god.  The commune in Paris sprung from socialist clubs that had formed throughout the city, and where feminists had been building internal systems of mutual aid for decades. [4] They learned from a similar experience during the decline and fall of the republic twenty years earlier.  Marx referred to those socialist clubs in 1851 as “constituent assemblies” constituting a “proletarian commune” to sustain general strikes as a systemic alternative during that republic’s fall to dictatorship. [5] Back then though, the left remained dependent on electoral approaches until it was too late.  Twenty years would pass before that dictator was overthrown and the Paris Commune of 1871 was born.

When it came to the German left against Hitler and the Nazis, Harrington criticized socialist strategy that solely relied on the republic and its supposed capacity for managed capitalist development.  Throughout Germany there were also autonomous councils in communities and workplaces, formed by people in both the socialist and communist parties who rejected orthodoxy in recognition of the threat posed by fascism.  Though these councils were identical to the socialist clubs in France, they also looked to the successful 1917 revolution in Russia, similarly catalyzed in defense against violent forces who sought to restore the power of a monarch. 

 Against the Nazis and using the Russian word for council, this approach was best described as a “Soviet Congress for a Soviet Germany,” socialist clubs as dual power with inherent mutual aid to sustain general strikes as another republic declined and fell. [6] Harrington never wrote on this particular commune against Nazi fascism, but whether it is a little republic, soviet, assembly, council, or socialist club, they were all meant as systemic alternative, dual power in the midst of crisis.  

But this is just European history.  No matter how important it is to learn from these past struggles, our fight against resurgent fascism is taking place in the settler colony known as the USA.  However, we can relate these European movements to historical forms of Black abolitionist mutual aid, communes, and the solidarity economy along with contemporary queer, feminist, Indigenous perspectives on communal resistance.  

Going back to at least 1780, Black communities in both the north and south pooled resources, financial and otherwise, democratically deciding how to sustain the movement for abolition, most often led by women.  In some cases, this resulted in the formation of rural communes for raids on slave plantations.  Over time and up to the first decades of the twentieth century, “mutual aid societies” spread across the country.  These democratic organizations operated their own internal solidarity funds so members could support one another and from which the nation’s first Black church, first Black labor union, and first movement for Black reparations were born. [7]  They were like European socialist clubs, but far more sophisticated.

This important yet still largely hidden history informed Ella Baker’s work running the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League from 1930-1933.  As a chapter-based organization, each would first form a council made up of young Black leaders.  These councils sought to identify what critical infrastructure was needed in the community to then learn enough about cooperative development and solidarity economics to turn those ideas into reality. [8] Importantly, many of these chapters were located in the Jim Crow south.  The YNCL practiced a socialist strategy meant to help communities survive conditions of racial segregation and white supremacist violence, conditions that inspired Hitler himself. [9]

Hitler was also inspired by the genocidal origins of the USA, the “cult of the covenant” at the core of our settler colonialism. [10]  As such, Nazi fascism sought Lebensraum or “living space” in pursuit of their own version of the American Dream as “summons to empire” for war and holocaust. [11]  Though fighting for bread and butter issues is imperative, especially in these times of profound crisis, the dream of universal middle classes masks a genocidal settler nightmare.  The actual alternative to resurgent fascism is not a more inclusive settler colony, but the proliferation of communal societies like what has repeatedly emerged from within sites of Indigenous resistance like Standing Rock, i.e. “caretaking relations, not American dreaming.” [12]

Constant warnings of constitutional crisis means that defeating fascism at the ballot box is essential, but also fundamentally insufficient for the cause of multi-racial democracy and socialism.  The elections of 2022 and 2024 could lead us down the path of a possible quasi-constitutional fascist coup.  Without our own systemic alternative as dual power rooted in mutual aid and the solidarity economy, including to sustain an uprising, we could again be dependent upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military to supposedly save democracy in a “color revolution” inspired by the CIA. [13]  Instead of repeating the mistakes made as other republics declined and fell, we have the chance to build an alternative as communes of resistance in process of formation from the midst of crisis. 

References

Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, (New York: Verso Press, 2010). P. 303 ; Ibid, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: Verso Press, 2019).

Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism, (New York: Macmillan Press LTD, 1976). P. 208-215 ; Ibid, Socialism: Past and Future, (New York: Arcade Publishing, Inc., 1989). P. 53-59.

 Ibid, 275-277.

Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004). 24-26 and 130.

Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, (New York: International Publishers, 2018). P. 83 and 98-99.

Clara Zetkin, “Fascism Must be Defeated,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, (New York: International Publishers, 1984). P. 175.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). P. 27-47.

Ibid, 112-125.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003). P. 86-88.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). P. 45-51.

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016). P. 13-14, 28, and 325.

Marcella Gilbert, “A Lesson in Natural Law,” in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). P. 281-289. ; Kim TallBear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou, Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2019). P. 24-38.

Frances Fox Piven, Deepak Bhargava, “What If Trump Won’t Leave?” The Intercept, August 11th, 2020. https://theintercept.com/2020/08/11/trump-november-2020-election/

Fascism and the Politics of the Past

By Yanis Iqbal

Fascist groupings are in the ascendant throughout the world. While some are emerging from the political peripheries - slowly but steadily gaining traction on the terrain of ideological hegemony - some have already taken the reins of state power. This new wave of fascism poses an important question: why did the intensifying crisis of neoliberalism strengthen the Right instead of revitalizing the Left? The post-1990s trajectory of austerity and immiseration should have bolstered the appeal of progressive forces among the masses. However, what we have been witnessing is the growing hold of extremely conservative ideas on the proletariat.

Non-synchronicity

Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist philosopher, witnessed a similar situation as the left-wing camp in his country was trounced by Nazism. His response to this contradictory development resonates with the current conjuncture. Bloch deployed the concept of “non-synchronicity” to understand fascism, writing, “Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others”. There are social strata that have been left behind in the process of modernization. These layers express their dissatisfaction with the present by looking back, towards a better past.

In other words, fascism draws from the future in the past, calling up mythologized forces, responding to modern disenchantment, joining a romantic anti-capitalism - roots, soil, homeland - among rural strata with fears of decline and genuine impoverishment among middling urban strata and a youth out of step with the capitalist drive toward abstraction and immateriality. Fascism, therefore, expresses an authentic longing for something different. It creates new figures, synthesizing various elements into hybrid structures, using materials from elsewhere - fairytales, myth, kitsch, Romanticism, occultism and magic, masculine qualities (strength, openness, decency, purity), as well as vitalist philosophy (will, life, creation, instinctive knowledge).

The palingenetic ideals of fascism serve transhistorically as a medium for processing every historical present. The subjects of fascism are called upon to leave a shameful normal life and to enter a proud life of bravery. It is important to note that pride and shame are fundamentally related. Feeling pride involves a realization of the ideals that define the faults and errors that cause us to feel ashamed. Shame collapses the “I” with the “we” in the failure to transform the social ideal into action, a failure which, when witnessed, confirms the ideal, and makes possible a return to pride. In the fascist case, the return to pride depends on the positioning of the subject as someone who confesses to being part of the imminent chaos and decline. Thus, the enactment of shame functions as a means of returning to pride. This return involves correcting wrongdoings by defending the survival of the nation, the people and the race.

Destroying Public Discourse

Fascism’s nostalgic idealizations are always empty. And yet, we know that the emptiness of the mythically constructed past that the Right holds out as a lost version of a better life as well as the emptiness of its promises with regard to the contradictions of capitalism are precisely the point of the underlying strategy. Empty times and spaces are effective spaces for the creation of the fears, fantasies, and hopes that the Right seeks to cultivate. Vague references to a better past ask the audience to fill in the gaps in content and logic with their own nonsynchronous projections; a rhetorical model of broad strokes, vague slogans, provocations, and propositions clearly replaced articulated programs. The point is not precision or the communication of actual information but the establishment of spaces in which anomy and anxiety can play themselves out and which can amplify discontent rather than finding answers to it.

The invocation of historically indeterminate imageries has real consequences for electoral battles and discursive struggles. Eberhard Knödler-Bunte argues that the entanglement of fascist ideology in the past turns it into a “depoliticized mass movement.” The “fascist public sphere,” Knödler-Bunte contends, is ultimately nothing other than “a politicized public sphere aimed at real depoliticization.” Hence, fascism operates on an innately contradictory ground - establishing a public sphere that encourages politicization while simultaneously reducing political dialogue and thought to impoverished versions of public deliberation.

Knödler-Bunte’s arguments help us understand the strategy of contemporary right-wing governments that lower the bar of public and political discourse in order to replace political dialogue with emotionally charged slogans. Paired with the mere semblance of rebelliousness, these tactics obfuscate structural problems and promote a depoliticized discourse, including pseudo-political branding efforts, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy narratives, in place of political analysis, debate, and programmatic thinking. The extreme Right has traditionally relied on this co-optation of revolutionary energy and its displacement from a critique of capitalism to a vehement yearning for a hazy past.

Liberatory History

Fascism has a constitutive contradiction: the rising tensions between the ironclad rhythms of the working day and the promise of a magical rupture with these empty homogenous routines. Demagogic talks about national-cultural regeneration are always in dissonance with the brute system of surplus value extraction. In order to use these weaknesses of fascism to its own benefit, the Left needs to adopt a liberatory conception of history. Instead of turning to the past to restore lost forms of order, we may understand the past as a rich collection of unheard appeals, unfulfilled hopes, of silenced demands for freedom - and such a relation to the past in turn shows us what is missing in the present and what cries out for completion.

Understood in this manner, the past denotes for us not mythical unity and purity but the history of systemic injustice, oppression, and exploitation, which in turn means that the past contains the energy that leads the way into the future. The past is not just what was. It is that which was never allowed to be, that which never could be, and it therefore points towards that which may yet be. A truly utopian and revolutionary imagination examines the past as an archive of emancipatory struggles that were repressed or abandoned but that reach into our present and herald a future through their continuous demand for realization.

Social Distance with a Vengeance

(Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

By Werner Lange

Long before the practice of social distancing became the new normal, there was the concept of social distance. Named after its founder, the Bogardus Social Distance Scale was developed within the Chicago School of Sociology during the turbulent 1920s to empirically measure the degree of affinity (or lack thereof) Americans felt for members of various racial and ethnic groups in our highly diverse society. Seven categories of “social distance” were established ranging from willingness to marry a member of specified groups to outright exclusion of all such group members from the USA;  the higher the number on a scale of 1 to 7, the lower the affinity and greater the felt social distance. Not surprising for a white-supremacist society, European-Americans consistently ranked as having the lowest social distance standing in several nationwide surveys over a 40 year period, while Americans of color had the highest.

Particularly instructive for our troubling times is the comparatively high social distance score consistently expressed toward the Chinese, an ethnic group that has  never fully escaped the racist stigmatization of the “Yellow Peril”. In fact, precisely that virulent castigation gained new life with repeated recent presidential denunciations of the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”. Not satisfied with raising the specter of a new deadly Yellow Peril, Trump used his press conference of March 19 to even evoke the ugly spirit of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by congratulating himself for having “called for a ban for people coming in from China”. Such Sinophobia is viciously echoed at increasingly alarming rates in the streets of America and in the halls of Congress, where a US Senator recently blamed the “culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs” for the coronavirus pandemic.

These utterly racist mindsets are not far from genocidal ones, patterns of barbaric thought and behavior hardly alien to the American experience as evidenced by the smallpox infestation of blankets given to Mandan Native Americans in 1837. In the midst of this pandemic, depraved visions of genocide once again rear their ugly heads. What else could have motivated the Trump regime to attempt, by a billion dollar bribe, to acquire exclusive rights and use of a developing coronavirus vaccine from German scientists? The prospect of witnessing others succumb by the millions to the pandemic while chosen Americans are safely vaccinated evidently fits the racist, even genocidal, game plan of this criminal regime.

That barbaric game plan is all too evident in regard to Iran. As of mid-March, Iran has suffered over 1,280 fatalities and 17,300 confirmed cases of coronavirus infections, the third highest of any nation in the world. Especially vulnerable are some hundred thousand Iranians who have survived the chemical weapons attacks by Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war but suffer from various lung ailments from that brutal conflict. Rather than lift the onerous sanctions imposed on Iran which deprive the beleaguered Iranian people of urgently needed medications and supplies, the Trump regime resorted to a new round of draconian sanctions on March 17 to intensify its “maximum pressure campaign” illegally implemented in 2018. The sanctions, a clear form of collective punishment, have already imposed enormous suffering upon countless Iranians. With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, these immoral sanctions are guaranteed to dramatically increase the Iranian body count, something that only a genocidal mindset could wish and seek. Yet with remarkably few exceptions, a roaring silence emanates from our national leaders regarding the calamity caused by these criminal sanctions. And the criminals themselves, ones responsible for the recent assassination of a beloved Iranian leader, likely greet the growing calamity in Iran with glee. There is no room for such barbarism in the greater moral universe to emerge from this crisis.

The social distance scale did not envision genocide as an option, and social distancing in our times is designed to keep people six feet apart to help prevent putting them six feet under. Hopefully we, as a more enlightened human family, will come out of this pandemic with an operative mindset much different than before.  Once this crisis is over we need to practice just the opposite of social distancing physically and massively implement social proximity mentally by finally overcoming the racist legacy manifested and measured by the social distance scale, let alone forever cleanse the world of genocidal thoughts and practices. We must recognize, like never before, that we are one human family united by a common origin and common destiny. Whether that destiny is to be peaceful co-existence or no existence largely depends of the extent to which, we, as one wounded but healed global family, make a paradigm shift from hate to love.

The New European Left: Reasons for Resurgence and Rejection

By Kacper Grass

The events of 1989 which culminated in the success of the Polish Solidarity Movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union effectively sterilized the revolutionary left in Western Europe. Insurgent militant organizations such the Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November, the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups in Spain, Action Directe in France as well as the Italian Red Brigades and West Germany's Red Army Faction, lost their patron in Moscow. Moreover, Marxism's failure to contend with global capitalism/imperialism widely discredited the remaining communist parties which sought to seize power through electoral means. Thus, it seemed as though Francis Fukuyama's end of history prophecy was becoming a reality, and neoliberalism was indeed to be the final form of humanity's sociopolitical evolution. In a desperate struggle for survival and relevance, that which remained of the European left was forced to accept the status quo and abandon revolution for reform.

This status quo went largely unquestioned for two decades, and as a result the left had no choice but to move its ideological orientations towards the center, campaigning on social-democratic platforms and often compromising its positions in order to form governments with parties from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Faith in this status quo, however, was immensely shaken by the shock of the European debt crisis in 2009, which was most strongly felt by the Eurozone's southern member states like Greece and Spain. The gravity of the recession made many people, especially those most affected by the crisis, look more critically at fundamental EU institutions such as the European Central Bank, which they saw as the root of the crisis. The right's reaction to the issue was a long line of austerity policies in many countries, which sought to resolve the national crises at the cost of the working-class citizens most dependent on the welfare state. The center-left parties' inability to find an alternative solution to the recession made them practically indistinguishable from their right-wing counterparts in the eyes of many, thus creating a political establishment whose member factions differed merely in name alone. As a result, a large class of unemployed students, workers, and struggling small business owners felt marginalized by the existing system and betrayed by a nominal left which no longer represented their interests. The time had come for an international movement that would change the political landscape of the European Union and put new life into the largely defeated or disappearing European left. This movement, however, would have its limits.

The wave of rebirth for the left did not reach the eastern reaches of the Union, where the 2009 recession was not experienced with the same intensity as it was in Southern Europe. There, the liberal center's rule went largely unchallenged since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, as the newly added members of the 2004 EU expansion slowly made progress down the path of social and economic integration into the European Union. Although rarely questioned and generally applauded, this decade of progress was first threatened by the Union's second major emergency in the 21st century, that of the 2015 migrant crisis. As Germany and the European Commission mandated quotas of Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers to be accepted by each of the Union's member states, many Eastern Europeans felt threatened by what they saw as an attack on their sense of national identity and state sovereignty. What resulted was a firm rejection of the "refugees welcome" slogan, which was largely viewed not only as the product of Angela Merkel's Christian democracy, but also of Western Europe's rising new left. Thus, the fears of many citizens in nations like Hungary and Poland, still mindful of the memories of four decades of communist repression, needed a voice on the European stage. That voice came in the form of a reactionary wave of right-wing nationalist movements unseen since the fall of Western European fascism in the 1970s.

Resurgence of the Left in Greece and Spain

In the words of Watkins (2016), "the common context for all the new lefts is anger at the political management of the Great Recession. The outcomes vary: after several years of zero interest rates, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and quantitative easing, the US and UK are officially in recovery, while Greece and Spain are still far below pre-crisis levels; less severely affected by the crash, France and Italy were suffering from stagnant growth and high structural unemployment well before 2008" (Watkins 2016, 6). She adds that "a second shared feature is the collapse of the centre-left parties, whose win-win 'Formula Two' of Third Way neoliberalism was the governing ideology of the boom-and-bubble years on both sides of the Atlantic. Having abandoned their former social-democratic moorings and working-class constituencies, Europe's Third Way parties were now punished in turn, whether for deregulating finance and pumping credit bubbles, or for implementing the subsequent bailouts and cuts… This rightward shift by the ex-social democrats-often into 'grand coalitions' with the conservatives-opened up a representational vacuum on the left of the political spectrum" (Watkins 2016, 7).

At the forefront of this movement was Greece, where a strong left-oriented political culture dominated the Third Hellenic Republic in reaction to seven years of dictatorship by far-right military juntas that ended in 1974. The first free elections saw the reemergence of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) as well as the formation of the significantly less radical Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), which maintained a strong presence in parliament for nearly 40 years, usually competing for electoral majority with the New Democracy (ND) party on the center-right. Nonetheless, a poll conducted in 2011 by the Athenian newspaper Kathimerini and the television network Skai TV revealed that 92% of people surveyed felt disappointed by the current PASOK government, while only 5% believed that a PASOK government would be best for the nation in the upcoming general elections (Kathimerini and Skai TV 2011). That same year, massive anti-austerity protests in the country's capital revealed the root of people's disenchantment with the ruling establishment, and a political vacuum was created by the absence of an electoral force capable of adequately representing the frustrations of a bankrupt nation in Brussels. That vacuum was filled, however, when "Syriza was founded as a unified party in [2012], through the fusion of the half-dozen groups that had formed an electoral 'coalition of the radical left' in 2004; at that stage its dominant component was Synaspismos, itself a coalition around one of the Greek communist parties, then with some 12,000 members. The new Syriza established a traditional structure: an elected central committee, on which the different factions were represented, a secretariat and a parliamentary group, centred round [Alexander] Tsipras's office and only nominally accountable to its base" (Watkins 2016, 13). Under Tsipras's charismatic leadership, the unified Syriza won a majority of 35% in the 2015 general elections and managed to form a government, putting Tsipras in the position of prime minister of Greece as well as making him the standard bearer of Europe's new left (Ministry of Interior of Greece 2015). Neither job, however, would prove to be an easy task.

Watkins (2016) explains that "by the time it entered office, the Syriza leadership was pledged to keep the euro and negotiate with the Eurogroup. Tsipras refused point-blank to explore Schäuble's offer of support for a structured exit in May 2015, as some of his Cabinet were urging. Syriza was reduced to begging for a debt write-down, abandoning one 'red line' after another, scrabbling for funds from hospitals and town halls to pay the ECB and IMF, until Tsipras was finally confronted with the choice of radicalizing his position, with the overwhelming mandate of the July 5 referendum, or submitting to the will of 'the institutions' and signing the harshest Memorandum yet" (Watkins 2016, 19-20). The party has also struggled in forming a coherent stance on immigration, as "Syriza switched from an avowed policy of anti-racism-closing down the previous government's notorious detention centres-to rounding up refugees for forcible deportation, in line with the EU's new policy" (Watkins 2016, 23).

In many respects, Spain's modern political history runs parallel to that of Greece's. The death of Francisco Franco in 1975 marked the end of his fascist regime, and free elections saw the restoration of the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and the formation of the right-wing People's Party (PP) by former Francoist minister Manuel Fraga. Both parties took turns ruling in what became a de facto two-party system, as the 1986 foundation of the radical coalition United Left (IU) failed to ever become an electoral threat to the PSOE. By the peak of the debt crisis, however, it was becoming quite clear that the PSOE was out of touch with much of its left-leaning voter base. This sentiment of growing popular indignation against the political establishment was ultimately manifested in a nation-wide anti-austerity movement that began with protests in Madrid on May 15th, 2011. Like in Greece the same year, a political vacuum had been created. As Watkins (2016) explains, "Podemos sprang into existence in January 2014, the initiative of the nucleus around [Pablo] Iglesias, who put out a call for a new, anti-austerity platform for the Europarliament elections. Nearly a thousand local 'circles' began forming almost spontaneously, built by 15-M and far-left activists. Podemos was formally constituted as a Citizens' Assembly in October 2014, with over 112,000 members signing up online to vote on its founding documents… Coalitions with regional left forces, sealed by support for a Catalan independence referendum, helped lift Podemos to 21 per cent of the vote in the December 2015 elections, with 69 deputies in the Cortes, nearly a quarter from Catalonia." (Watkins 2016, 14).

Unlike Tsipras, though, Iglesias remained in the opposition following prolonged government formation negotiations that resulted in a second election the following year. This time Podemos ran on the same ticket as the IU under the label Unidos Podemos and finally secured third place in parliamentary seats, behind the PP and the PSOE respectively. In terms of platforms and ideologies Podemos and Syriza share much in common, Iglesias even having referred to Tsipras as "'a lion who has defended his people' in September 2015" (Watkins 2016, 20). Regarding immigration, however, Podemos takes an even more radical stance than Syriza, as the party's "2014 programme called for full citizens' rights for all immigrants" (Watkins 2016, 23).

As Watkins (2016) summarizes, "the founding purpose of the new left oppositions is to defend the interests of those hit by the reigning response to the crisis-bailouts for private finance matched by public-sector austerity and promotion of private-sector profit-gouging, at the expense of wage-workers. In the broadest sense, this is, again, a defence of labour against capital, within the existing system" (Watkins 2016, 28). She adds that "Podemos has… established itself as a fighter for those afflicted by foreclosures in the housing-bubble meltdown, a demand that exceeds-or post-dates-classical liberal democracy. The fruite en avant of Syriza Mark Two towards the social liberalism, or neoliberal austerity, of the other, formerly social-democratic, now tawdry centre-left parties, serves to confirm rather than contradict the general rule" (Watkins 2016, 29).

Rejection of the Left in Hungary and Poland

As Euroscepticism in the south was being fueled by a still unresolved debt crisis, the anti-Brussels sentiment spread eastward following the unprecedented influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants that began in 2014. The following year, the European Commission with Germany's backing set quotas on the number of asylum seekers to be accepted by each member state in an attempt to lessen the burden on Greece, Italy, and the other Mediterranean countries that served as the initial points of arrival for many migrants. The mandate, which was viewed as a violation of state sovereignty by many Eastern Europeans, sparked a wave of nationalism in the largely ethnically and religiously homogenous countries of the Visegrád Group. The political landscape of the group, which serves as an alliance between Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic within the European Union, has experienced a significant shift towards the right, with all members effectively rejecting the European Commission's quotas following the wave of illiberalism that began in Hungary and later spread to Poland, the group's largest member state, before also finding fertile ground in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, Hungary held its first free elections the following year. After the transition to democracy, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP) was renamed the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and adopted a considerably more moderate social-democratic stance, competing for dominance in parliament with the originally libertarian Fidesz party since the 1998 elections. Nonetheless, in 2010 the MSZP was defeated by an increasingly nationalist Fidesz, and the 2014 elections marked the start of another term in office for prime minister Victor Orbán following the landslide victory of a coalition between his Fidesz party and the socially conservative Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP), which together won 133 out of 199 parliamentary seats. In order to compete for second place with the far-right Jobbik party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) had to enter into a coalition with four other center-left parties, finally winning 38 seats compared to Jobbik's 23. The remaining five seats were won by the centrist green party Politics Can Be Different (LMP) (National Election Office of Hungary 2014). With an absolute majority in government and the additional support of Jobbik, Orbán had a free hand in determining Hungary's stance on the migrant crisis. The result was two years of nationalist rhetoric leading up to a referendum on the issue set for October 2nd, 2016. The referendum posed the question: "Do you want the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?" While the poll was finally considered invalid for its low voter turnout of 44.04%, an overwhelming majority of 98.36% voted 'no' while only 1.64% voted 'yes' in response to the question (National Election Office of Hungary 2016).

Much like Hungary, Poland held its first free parliamentary elections in 1991 following the end of communist rule two years before. More than 100 registered parties participated in the first elections, with the political landscape changing frequently until the elections of 2005, in which the liberal Civic Platform (PO) and the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party emerged as the main contestants. The moderate Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), founded largely by ex-members of the dissolved communist Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), was pushed into opposition after holding president Aleksander Kwaśniewski in office since 1995. By the elections of 2015, the composition of the Polish Sejm was very reminiscent to that of Hungary's parliament. In reaction to the migrant crisis, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński adopted a significantly more nationalist and conservative rhetoric, which proved effective in winning his party an absolute majority of 235 of 460 seats, effectively forming a government while also enjoying support from the smaller right-wing Kukiz '15 (K'15) party, which won 42. The opposition was dominated by the PO, as it earned 138 seats, and was supported by the smaller liberal Modern (N) party, which won only 28. The agrarian Polish People's Party (PSL) won 16 seats while the regional German Minority (MN) won a single seat (National Electoral Commission of Poland 2015). The election was notable for two principal reasons. Primarily, it was the first time in Poland's democratic history that a party managed to win an absolute majority in the Sejm. Secondly, it was the first time that a left-wing party did not manage to secure any representation. Following the election, the newly inaugurated president Andrzej Duda reversed the previous government's promise to accept 2,000 refugees, adding that he "won't agree to a dictate of the strong. [He] won't back a Europe where the economic advantage of the size of a population will be a reason to force solutions on other countries regardless of their national interests" (Moskwa & Skolimowski 2015). Following Orbán, Duda has since raised the prospect of holding a referendum on the issue.

Germany Caught in the Crossfire

The reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 resulted in the merger of two extremely different political cultures into a single democratic state. Despite this initial obstacle, the country soon recuperated and advanced to become the economic and political hegemony of the European Union in the 21st century. Assuming office in 2005, Angela Merkel of the liberal Christian Democratic Union has been a central figure in European politics from the start of the recession throughout the ongoing migrant crisis. Much as in the cases of Greece and Spain, the onset of the recession proved that the existing left-wing establishment, represented in Germany by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), had compromised too much of its leftist ideology to remain competitive with its opponents in the Bundestag.

As Bergfeld (2016) explains, "the mass movement that emerged in the mid-2000s to oppose Schröder's Hartz welfare- and labor-market reforms led to a significant breakaway from the SPD. Labor and Social Justice - The Electoral Alternative (WASG) was founded in 2005 by activists frustrated with the ruling Red-Green Coalition. The WASG would go on to form one main component, alongside the East German-based Party of Democratic Socialism, of the new Die Linke. After nearly ten years of collaboration, differences between the East and West wings of the party remain stark. Sections of the party based in the former East Germany are eyeing state governments or already hold office in federal states (like Thuringia), while the West German section is not represented in any federal state parliaments, with the exception of Hessia" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). He continues by noting that "Die Linke's founding represented a historical opportunity for the German parliamentary left to move beyond the SPD. Today, it is the main opposition party in German parliament. For all the problems it entails, the party's institutionalization has facilitated the construction of a sturdy platform for antiwar and anti-neoliberal voices in mainstream politics. It was Die Linke that first popularized the demand for a national minimum wage, which was taken up by the trade unions, the SPD, and later on Merkel herself before becoming law in early 2015" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). Despite this, "The party has never acted as a catalyst for social, economic, or political struggles and is unlikely to ever do so. It has been able to involve itself, to varying degrees, in labor mobilizations and social movements initiated by others, most notably the demonstrations against Europe's largest fascist rallies in Dresden in 2011 and 2012. Even Bodo Ramelow - now prime minister of Thuringia - participated in mass civil disobedience to block the fascists from marching" (Bergfeld 2016, 4).

Since the beginning of the migrant crisis, the fascist rallies against which Die Linke demonstrated in 2011 and 2012 have since become an organized political force, opposing Merkel's neoliberalism from the right of the political spectrum. "To Merkel's dismay, her modernization of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has enabled a nationalist-conservative party to develop to her right. The Islamophobic and Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged on the main stage of German politics as Merkel's positions have become indistinguishable from mainstream social-democratic ones" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). Indeed, the chancellor's inability to secure an absolute majority in the 2017 Bundestag elections illustrates the challenge that the neoliberal status quo faces from both the new left as well as the reactionary right in the very heart of the Union.

Conclusion

Thus far, the events of the 21st century in Europe-from the beginning of the debt crisis in 2009 to the continuing migrant crisis-have done little to reflect the positivity felt by many at the close of the previous century. The neoliberal status quo is not only being openly put to question, but it is under attack by the rise of a new left movement, whose resurgence can be traced back to its Greek and Spanish instigators. There are two principal reasons why Syriza and Podemos were able to win the massive support that put them at the forefront of Europe's new left movement. First of all, they emerged in countries whose left-leaning political cultures were shaped by the lingering trauma of fascist dictatorship. Secondly, by framing the recession as the fault of neoliberal institutions such as the European Central Bank and blaming the political establishment for implementing austerity policies at the cost of the working class, their proposed leftist platforms had a particular appeal to citizenries desperate for economic relief.

Nonetheless, this is not to say that the development of the new left has gone unchallenged. The Eastern European countries of the Visegrád Group, starting with Hungary and Poland, managed to avoid the worst of the debt crisis but under cultural and historical pretexts reacted in stark opposition to the European Commission's assignment of migrant quotas on the grounds that the policy jeopardizes their respective national identities and effectively makes an assault on their rights as sovereign states. Moreover, the still-healing wounds of four decades of repressive "communist" regimes have made it easy for right-wing nationalist movements to blame the migrant crisis on the new left parties that take much more radical pro-immigration stances than do the neoliberal establishments in Brussels and Berlin.

Finally, as the new left continues its trend of resurgence and reactionary right-wing movements continue to form in order to reject it, Germany will be only one case of many where oppositions from both sides of the political spectrum arise to challenge the existing neoliberal status quo. In fact, as is the case in Germany of Die Linke and the AfD, in France Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise is fighting a similar battle against Marine Le Pen's National Rally with Emmanuel Macron caught in the middle. The same can be said of the opposition to Italy's ex-prime minister Paolo Gentiloni, which ultimately resulted in the victorious coalition of Luigi Di Laio's Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini's Lega Nord in the general elections of March 2018. Even in Great Britain, as Jeremy Corbyn fights to return the Labour Party to its leftist roots, Gerard Batten has taken up the work of Henry Bolton in leading the UK Independence Party towards an exit from the European Union. If this trend continues, the parliaments of Europe will continue to be turned into political battlegrounds where the Union's ideology, policies, and future are at stake. If this polarizing trend continues, the Europe of the 21st century may not resemble the perpetual liberal democratic union envisioned by Fukuyama. It could instead devolve into something more reminiscent of the previous century, the age of extremes.

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