The Sons of Cain: Youthful members of the Greek fascist party, The Golden Dawn, celebrate the news that their party has won 21 seats in the Greek Parliament. The frantic efforts of neoliberal European financiers and politicians to shore up the Eurozone is opening the door to extremist political parties not seen since the 1930s. The promoters of austerity have sown dragons teeth.
FRANCE has a new, socialist, president. Greece, no government
at all. The world’s stock markets oscillate between greed and fear. Only the
world’s editorialists seem content to reassure us that, in spite of
appearances, very little has – or will – change.
But, if they’re right, then we are all imperilled.
Because all those reassuring editorials are based on one,
chilling, assumption: that democratic politics no longer has the power to
countermand the world’s bond dealers and currency traders. That, in any showdown
between the power of the people, and the power of global financial markets:
it’s the people who will lose.
Except they won’t – not in the long run. Because, if the
weapons of democracy fail them, the people won’t stop fighting, they’ll simply
reach for new, undemocratic, weapons.
The editorial writers of The
Economist, The Wall Street Journal,
and even our own New Zealand Herald,
in their rush to shore up the crumbling intellectual edifice of neoliberalism,
and downplay the significance of the French and Greek elections, have failed to
digest all of the news emerging from those contests.
In their eagerness to paint Monsieur François Hollande as
some sort of professional, weak-kneed, say-one-thing-on-the-hustings-but-do-another-in-the-Elyseé-Palace
French politico, they have forgotten who helped him across the line in the
crucial run-off ballot. It was the Front
National, the supporters of Marine Le Pen, who, either by abstention or
active rejection, sealed the fate of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
If the global financial markets make it impossible for
Monsieur Hollande to keep faith with the French electorate. If the overweening
power of German capital is permitted to humiliate and “discipline” France’s
leader – to the profound dismay of his countrymen, then to whom, exactly, do
you think they will turn? Certainly not to the Socialist Party, nor to the
equally discredited Gaullists. No, they will turn in their hundreds of
thousands to the party of the Far Right. The Party that would tear up the
treaties binding France to the European Union. The party that would close the
borders of France, not simply to immigrants, but to the exports of France’s
neighbours. The party that would bring the Eurozone, and the dream which
inspired its creation, crashing down in the name of economic nationalism and
“France pour les français!”
Those editorial writers also appear to have missed the
ominous success of The Golden Dawn. These Greek fascists, with their Nazi-style
salutes and their Hellenic version of the Swastika, won 21 seats in the
Greek Parliament last Sunday. Their nostalgia for the days when the Colonels
ran Greece, and the jails were filled with leftist intellectuals and trade
union activists, casts a grim shadow not only over Greek politics, but over the
whole of Europe.
The neoliberals’ hatred of history blinds them to the fact
that the world has stood before where it stands today. In the 1930s: in the
midst of the Great Depression; with millions unemployed; and the political
leaders of the “civilised world” unable to conceptualise any way out of the
deepening economic crisis except to cut and cut and cut; the way was cleared
for the extremist demagogues of Right and Left. Men who preached the primacy of
politics over economics: politicians who specialised in identifying scapegoats;
butchers who slew them in their thousands.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His stimulus package, known as the New Deal, rescued American capitalism from its enemies to the Left and the Right, and made Keynesian economics the default setting of Western governments for nearly fifty years.
The one great exception to the economic folly of deflation
and austerity was the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt. His “New
Deal” offered a “third way” between the Scylla of Italian and German fascism
and the Charybdis of Soviet communism. In faraway Sweden, and here in New
Zealand, social-democratic governments followed Roosevelt’s lead – constructing
societies that became the envy of the world.
Too many nations did not. Inevitably, the world was rescued
from economic failure by that most terrible and irresistible of “stimulus
packages”. Those who had declined the peaceful path to economic success were
subjected to the awful audit of war.
There are worse things than fiscal deficits.
How does one account for millions of human losses?
This essay was
originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The
Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily
News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 May 2012.
