USER FRIENDLY NAZIS: HOW GREEN WAS MY HOLOCAUST

When extreme nationalists wear battle fatigues, shave their heads and do the nazi salute, they're easy to spot. But increasingly they are camouflaging their ideology to reach people who'd never have given them the time of day...

Nazi ideas have never enjoyed the support of ordinary people in this country. It was our grandfathers who fought against Hitler and freed Europe from fascist tyranny. We know the consequences of giving power to loonies who want to raise a swastika flag over every town hall and put a jackboot to our throats, which is why neo-Nazi views remain unrepresented in parliament. Having realised that showing their true colours does them no good at all, many Nazi activists are now presenting themselves to the public as greens and anarchists.

There is nothing really new in this situation, fascism was invented by the Italian dictator and former socialist Benito Mussolini. Fascism swept to power in Italy because it used socialist rhetoric to trick ordinary people into supporting its right-wing ideas. Hitler copied Mussolini's tactics with great success and even more chilling results. Millions of people were murdered by the Nazis, whose racist campaigns often took the form of animal rights style agitation against the ways in which live-stock must be slaughtered according to Jewish religious law. Traditionally the colour red has been associated with the left and blue with the right, because fascism mixed elements from both ends of the political spectrum it is now depicted as being brown, which was also the colour of the shirts worn by Hitler's uniformed supporters.

As long ago as 1989 Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine, was running front cover features on what it described as 'the greening of the brownshirts.' For many years former National Front activists have been setting up quasi-green organisations as recruiting fronts for their vile activities, but it is only more recently that the anarchist movement has been targeted as a potential vehicle for Nazi propaganda. Former National Front boss Patrick Harrington has even managed to get a letter published in the latest issue of the American journal Anarchy, in which he writes 'as a life-long vegetarian and pagan, I am genuinely interested in green issues... I do not see any contradiction between this and my other views , indeed I regard them as interlinked.'

A number of anarchists have been won over by this claim and it is these individuals who are most likely to succeed in getting it across to a wider public. The most notorious anarchist convert to National Front style racism is Richard Hunt, the founder of Green Anarchist and the driving force behind the magazine Alternative Green. Hunt vents his racism in anti-Irish rants with headlines such as Off Our Patch Paddy. Alternative Green has also run articles supporting the 'red and brown' united front fighting against democracy in Russia, and currently argues for tough immigration and deportation laws. More sinister still is Richard Hunt's claim that the population must be reduced by 75% if we are to have an ecologically sustainable society. Hunt doesn't make it clear whether he wishes to set up death camps or if people will simply be left to starve to death.

Green Anarchist, the magazine Hunt originally set up but subsequently left, has not yet adopted the openly racist style of its founder. However, it shares many assumptions with Hunt and its attacks on what it calls technological 'mass society' result in Green Anarchist being every bit as committed as Hunt to a huge reduction in the population. Likewise, Green Anarchist still sells many of the posters Richard Hunt created to promote his extreme right-wing ideas among anarchists. For example, the posters advertised in the latest issue of Green Anarchist includes one carrying the slogan Tax Is Theft. This idea is popular among Ku Klux Klan supporters in America because tax money is used to finance equal opportunity projects. Real anarchists want to abolish parliament and therefore have no need to campaign against the taxes levied by the government. They quite rightly see anti-tax agitation as a way of tricking people into accepting fascist ideas.

Last month a spoof bulletin calling itself Green & Brown Anarchist was mailed to radical groups around the world. Although this was obviously a prank, the leaflet demonstrated very convincingly the ways in which the green and anarchist movements have been corrupted with extreme right-wing ideas. The fact that many people did not realise the leaflet was a joke and assumed that Green & Brown Anarchist was a secret cell of either Green Anarchist or Alternative Green, shows how dangerously close these two magazines are to hardline fascism. This is a very worrying situation because if people can't tell the difference between the left and the right, they might end up supporting Nazi ideas without even knowing what they are doing. To exploit this situation, a number of people with extreme right-wing views now claim to be anti-racist, and attempt to justify their desire for racial segregation on the grounds that this will stop everyone from becoming alike while simultaneously preserving the diversity of races in the world! This, of course, is nonsense. Every culture is enriched by contact with other cultures, black and white youth share the same ideals when it comes to fashion and music, which is why they should unite to fight against racism.

PS: Incidently, the Michigan Militia, the movement recently linked with the Oklahoma terrorist bomb, was recently quoted as saying, in all seriousness, that four billion people need to be removed from the face of the earth.

First published G-Spot #17 Spring/Summer 1995

Although this commercially commissioned peice of journalism was credited to Stewart Home, he was not responsible for final edit, the headline, introductory strap-line or the PS.

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