From Red to Brown

The watchdog blog on the activities of the neo-Nazis – NPD-Blog – mentions the defection of Andreas Wagner – a leader of the new left WASG party in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – to the NPD. This also caught the attention of erphschwester. Conservatives immediately jumped on this news as proof that the Left and Right are really the same (Rot gleich Braun).  In Bavaria the CSU party secretary Markus Söder claimed that this was proof that the WASG is an extremist political organization and should be under police surveillance. Some put the blame on Oskar Lafontaine for using the term "Fremdarbeiter" (alien worker) to drum up populistic support for the Linkspartei in last autumn’s election.

In truth the right-wing extremist parties in Germany have often used socialistic slogans to attract working class support.  The early National Bolshevists in the Weimar Republic fused Leninism with a voelkisch nationalism and found a great deal of working class support before they were subsumed into the NSDAP. And in the last years of the Weimar Republic there was a great deal of fluctuation in membership between the Nazi Party and the KPD – mainly due to the disasterous Comintern strategy of marginalizing the Social Democrats as social fascists. Hitler purged the party of its socialist wing – which helped him to power – in the bloody Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

The neo-Nazi NPD continues this tradition of coopting socialist populism.  Its Web site features a banner demanding Soziale Gerechtigkeit (social justice) – the rallying cry of the European Left. And the NPD also cleverly taps into the prevailing anti-American sentiment in Germany.  I read with interest this essay – Die blutige Spur der US-Kriegsverbrecher durch Zeit und Raum ("The Bloody Trail of the US War Criminals in Time and Space") – which sees a continuum of American war atrocities from the American Civil War, to the fire-bombing of Germany, to Abu Ghraib.  I have read similar essays in the socialist papter Junge Welt.  Still, as this excellent Tagesspiegel article points out, there is a major difference in how the Left and extreme Right define social justice: for the neo-Nazi NPD it is only native (that is, white, non-Muslim)Germans that deserve it:

Die sozial klingende Agitation der rechten Szene verleitet bundesweit allerdings nur wenige Linke zum Überlaufen. Neben Wagner posieren vor allem der ehemalige RAF-Terrorist Horst Mahler, inzwischen Holocaust-Leugner, und der frühere Apo-Aktivist Bernd Rabehl, heute NPD-Sympathisant, als Renegaten. Die Kluft zwischen Linken und Rechten ist kaum zu überwinden, weil trotz teilweise ähnlicher Rhetorik zentrale ideologische Differenzen dominieren. Die rechte Szene will „ soziale Gerechtigkeit“ exklusiv für Deutsche, Ausländer werden ausgegrenzt. Linke fordern, wie es beispielsweise die WASG verkündet, „Bildung, Ausbildung, Kultur und Wissen für alle“.

As this harrowing story illustrates, it is not social equality and economic justice that motivates the NPD and its members.

WASG linkspartei NPD neonazis rechtsextremismus