With the second rise of UKIP, the toxic rallies for Tommy
Robinson, and the normalisation of genuine fascists like Steve Bannon by
British radio shows and Gammon-baiter Piers Morgan, the far-right is seemingly
gaining more ground in Britain than ever, and – in a moment of “literal
communism” and manifestations against Trump – the tone of the Brexit debate has
thus become increasingly – how would I put it? – divisive. The battle flags
have been unfurled, and, especially after the release of convincing reports on fraud
by Team Leave during the referendum, it is becoming seemingly impossible for a
left-winger to approve of Brexit publicly, let alone make a case for it.
Which is why Jeremy Corbyn’s speech last week saw comments
across the board that he was echoing the language of UKIP and Trump, and even
becoming the “far-right’s new hero.” Combined with the scare over anti-Semitism
(a reactionary tradition), one could be forgiven for believing that the leader
of the opposition was an “existential threat,” not just for Britain’s Jews but progressivism
in the country as a whole.
To start this off, let me say that I strongly oppose the
Brexit deal proposed by Theresa May, let alone the ultra-Thatcherite vision of
Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson. Calls for remaining or a second referendum should be
fully seen as part of the discourse, and the chilling accusations that supporting
the EU is “treasonous” must be interpreted as the fascist rhetoric that it is.
And the idea that “the British people have had their say” is dumbfounding when
applied to restricting immigration, as polls show increasing support for migrants
as much as they show revulsion towards the free-market nightmare Tory leavers
demand.
That being said, there is indeed a left-wing tradition of
opposition to the EU. We don’t even need to look at the handful of current (in
some cases ex) Labour members like George Galloway or Dennis Skinner. Tony Benn
himself was an opponent of the bloc, as are many European communist and
socialist parties and organisations.
Furthermore, Corbyn’s speech, while undeniably containing
some ugly phrases (“Build it in Britain” and “British workers first” were not the
ideal bits for the party to highlight on social media) was overall a blend of standard
social democratic rhetoric and Lexit arguments (a bigger controversy could be
voiced over the fact that it was his second in front of the corporate lobby
shop EEF this year).
Outbursts that Labour is turning towards “left fascism”
either due to its Brexit rhetoric or its alleged anti-Semitism, are not just
harmful but part of an overall greater and highly toxic narrative promoted more
than ever by the mainstream media and centrist politicians – that the extreme
right and left are the same. The “red-brown theory” is increasingly being used
to attack communism and, worst of all, the alter-Europeanist left like France
Insoumise and DiEM25. Nobody who considers themselves a socialist, communist,
or anarchist should support these ideas.
To further the debate on this topic, I have posted below a
translated version of a book review on the subject from Communist Initiative, a
French website run by the anti-EU Pole of Communist Revival In France, a political
movement that is pro-refugee and anti-racist, as well as staunchly against
Brussels.
In April 2018, a book was published by Bernard Bruneteau, a
historian of ideas and professor of contemporary history at the University of
Rennes. The title of the book? "Against Europe: Lenin to Le Pen." You
are not hallucinating: a "historian" somehow achieves the feat of
including the communist thinker who implemented Marx's ideas with the heiress
of the manor of Montretout and a party founded by fascists in 1972 in the same
title. We have a better grasp of history!
This odious amalgamation, more appropriate for a popular
writer than of an academic historian, is not an accident. Indeed, Bruneteau has
specialised in promoting the concept of "totalitarianism," which has
been used by anti-communists on all sides to justify the conflation of Nazism
and communism.
Thus, he published in 1999 "Totalitarianism," a
later updated in 2014. In this latest version, he opens the book with a quote
from the work of Boris Souvarine - a man known as an "unrivalled anti-communist
specialist" according to the historian Ariane Chebel of Apollonia -
published in 1935 and titled "Stalin, Historical Picture of
Bolshevism": "It took new words, such as Bolshevism or fascism, to
designate unknown social movements and their empirical ideologies, movements
that in the long run exhibit so many similarities, engage in so many mutual
practices, with so much exchange of ideas that the same word,
"totalitarian" suits them both perfectly."
The tone is set, and Bruneteau spends the rest of his time
indulging in the most boring confusionism, derived from the classical liberal
tradition of Hannah Arendt and François Furet, that Nazism and communism are
the same. For proof of this, let us recall that Furet, who saw in the French
Revolution the birth of "totalitarianism" (!), wrote in "Le
Passé d'une illusion" that "Stalinist Bolshevism and National
Socialism are two examples of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century.
Not only are they comparable, but they sort of form a political category. I do
not see a more fitting term that has been suggested to define regimes in which
an atomized society, made up of individuals systematically deprived of
political participation, is subject to the "total" power of an
ideological party and its leader."
The idea of totalitarianism has continued to be criticised
and challenged, and is increasingly considered - rightly so - as totally
unfounded by many historians. Thus in 1991, Denis Peschanski - a man difficult
to discount as a communist sympathizer - wrote in a series called Political
History and Social Sciences : "Totalitarianism is both a descriptive and
ideological concept, based on politics and therefore a purely symbolic idea
that does not help us understand history, as it is based on morality and emotion,
not scientific objectivity."
In the same vein, the American historian Michael Scott
Christofferson published a book in 2003 (translated into French in 2009) with
the unambiguous title, "Intellectuals Against The Left: The
Anti-Totalitarian Ideology in France (1968-1981), where he states in the
introduction that,
"During the second half of the 1970s, a vigorous
offensive against "left-wing totalitarianism" roiled French politics.
In their books and controversial articles, in newspapers and on television,
antitotalitarian intellectuals loudly denounced, in a hysterical fashion, a
link between Marxist and revolutionary ideas and totalitarianism. Themselves
former leftists, facing weak opposition, antitotalitarians soon marginalised
Marxist thought and succeeded in undermining the legitimacy of the French
revolutionary tradition. They paved the way for postmodern centrism: the
liberal and conservative politics of the 1980s and 1990s. Antitotalitarianism
also radically changed the political priorities of the intellectuals of the
non-communist left, who launched into a crusade against communism in the 1990s.
These debates reached an international audience, and, at the national level,
led to the further deterioration of the already difficult relationships between
these intellectuals and the PS and PC."
Never mind, despite this (hardly exhaustive) duo of books-
to which we can add the Slavoj Zizek's "Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
Five Interventions On The (Mis)use Of A Notion," published in 2004, and
Michael Parent's "The Myth Of The Totalitarian Twins," published by
Delga in 2013, Bruneteau continues to promote this idea, becoming enraged when
historian Johann Chapoutot dares to say that "there is no totalitarian
project in itself" in the journal "Texts And Documents For The
Class" in January 2013. Bruneteau writes: "We note in particular a
distressing commentary of the historian Johann Chapoutot who, out of ignorance
or a desire for gratuitous provocation, asserts that "there is no totalitarian
project in itself!"" For Bruneteau, the idea of totalitarianism is an
indispensable requirement for historians. We might concur with him, but the
rest of this article will show the ideological biases of this historian.
One thing is certain: "totalitarianism" becomes a
useful tool for Bruneteau, who has turned it into his "intellectual"
obsession. Thus he published "Totalitarianism. Origin Of A Concept,
Genesis Of A Debate (1930-1942) at the Editions du Cerf in 2010, a year later,
he returned with "The Totalitarian Age: Thoughts About
Totalitarianism," where he exploits all his "talents" by not
hesitating to extend the use of "totalitarianism" to other historical
periods in a comparative logic that is based more on ideological intent than historical
truth. Thus, a box is devoted to the following question: "Totalitarian
Plato?" (And without quotation marks around the word totalitarian, of
course).
Quoting the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, Bruneteau
writes: "Plato is credited by Karl Popper with the dark merit of having
invented the first totalitarian organisation"; he goes on to qualify this
by saying that "The Republic has of course nothing to do with Mein Kampf.
One can nonetheless wonder about the fact that certain works lend themselves
more than others to the logic of deformation." The order of the sentences,
the instillation of suspicion in the form of "scientific
questioning," the reference to Plato which, let us recall, inspired much
the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau - a favourite author of Robespierre, and
also of Marx and Lenin: a simple coincidence, or desire to amalgamate Nazism
and communism?
Polemically, Bruneteau adopts the outlook of a
"concept" which, as he admits himself in an article published in
2014, "Instrumentalised during the cold war, [totalitarianism] works
towards the aims of liberal democracy by forcing us to think inside its value
system." But despite this, he considers it a valid idea, to the point of
taking to the defense of Ernst Nolte, a right-wing reactionary historian who sees
Nazism as a rational reaction to Bolshevism. Bruneteau deplores the fact that
in history textbooks, "the USSR is not mentioned at all: the
dehumanisation of the class enemy, ethnic cleansing ("former
people"), the Ukrainian genocide famine of 1933, the extermination of the
Polish elites of the Eastern Zone in 1939-1941 (killed for class reasons or
because they were Polish?).... Let us note in passing how much Bruneteau wants
to focus heavily on the claim that the famine in Ukraine was a
"genocide" - the controversy over the Holodomor is a specialty of
anticommunists intended on smearing the USSR and thus equating Stalin and
Hitler - as well as "extermination."
This intellectual argument is utilised to demonstrate the
case that Bernard Bruneteau wishes to enshrine in his book "Against
Europe: From Lenin to Le Pen," and one can now easily see why the author
manages to unite in a single title the political philosopher Lenin with the
impostor Le Pen. The European Union is not a new subject of analysis for
Bruneteau, who already wrote in 1996 a history of European unification before
his further publishing two books on the idea of Europe in the twentieth
century, anthologies of texts in the Europeanist tradition.
An unconditional defender of the European project,
Bruneteau, exasperated by oppositions to the capitalist, anti-communist and
anti-democratic EU, wrote a pamphlet whose cover blurb set the tone "In a
demanding and incisive essay, Bernard Bruneteau shows that this hostility is
part of a long history... from Lenin to Marine Le Pen, from communist
internationalism to identarian populism. In the name of the class struggle
anti-capitalism, the International was violently opposed to the projects of European
federalism which flourished in the inter-war period. At the same time, on the
other side, nationalists came to attack the dream of a supranational Europe
devised by a handful of liberal thinkers. The modern incarnations of these two
tendencies continue to inspire anti-EU discourse, and increasingly tend to mix
their arguments."
In his introduction, Bruneteau lists works including
"The End of Europe" (Eric Juillot), "The End of the European
Union" (Coralie Delaume and David Cayla) or "Thirty Good Reasons To
Leave The EU" (Olivier Delorme), denouncing them as pessimistic. "The
media are just as obsessed with the idea that the EU is in decline or facing
the apocalypse." One wonders how Bernard Bruneteau could have missed the
enormous amount of pro-EU propaganda served up daily by the political, economic
and media oligarchy (OPEM) to justify European federalism, the privatisation of
public services, the destruction of the Republic, etc. All of this is ignored
as this "historian" of ideas lists the various opponents of a united
Europe, which he subsumes under the three ideological matrixes
internationalism, nationalism, and globalism.
Thus, Bruneteau brings together globalised liberalism,
fascism and communism and conflates they based on their opposition to
"Europe," saying "some [ideologies] already thwarted the success
of the European idea at the end of the nineteenth century, feeding into the
world views of the totalitarian mystics who rendered the European federation
inoperative in the inter-war period."
We do not expect Bruneteau to show how the crisis of the
1930s was the main force behind the failure of European unity and the rise of
Nazism, or that the pan-European ideologies of the time were not great
defenders of the democracies - Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, maniac
defender of supranationalism and author of a book entitled "Hero or
Saint" in 1929, described Italian fascism as a "semi-democracy"
in Paneurope, a regulat publication published in 1923, or that many of the the
partisans of European played a major part in the collaboration with Nazism to
fight against "Judeo-Bolshevism."
Bruneteau says curiously little about these (pseudo)
contradictions that want many advocates of the European idea to join German
Europe, the hatred of communism becoming the major cement of united Europe
since the 1920s (while remaining so today): think of Francis Delaisi, author of
Les Deux Europe in 1929, who wants a united Europe around France and Germany
based on the principle of " freedom for everyone" to be or not
fascist or democrat, anti-semite or philosemite ", or to Gaston Riou who
publishes Unite or die in 1929 and joined Vichy on July 10, 1940.
This does not mean that all the supporters of the European
idea were obviously fascist, but a common feature of many of them was hatred of
democracy and the superiority of aristocracies, two world views that sum up the
"father of Europe" Coudenhove-Kalergi, who advocated an "erotic
eugenics" in Id practical realism (published in 1925)
"Only the alliance of the noblest men with the noblest
women will be free, and conversely, people of lesser value will have to be
satisfied with people of lesser value (...) The new nobility of reproduction of
the future will not emerge. artificial standards of human caste culture, but
rather divine laws of erotic eugenics. The natural classification of human
perfection will replace the artificial classification of feudalism and
capitalism."
At least Bruneteau has the merit of recalling (in an
incomplete way) Lenin's very lucid observation in "The Word of the United
States of Europe" published on August 23, 1915: "From the point of
view the economic conditions of imperialism, that is, capital exports and the
division of the world by the "advanced" and "civilized"
colonial powers, the United States of Europe is, under capitalism, very
impossible, or else reactionary.”
"Europe's chance is to be a third antitotalitarian
way"
For Bruneteau, the opportunity is too good to fall into
ideological confusionism through his holy struggle for the rescue of a European
"Union" that continues to crush the peoples of Europe (ask the Greeks
what they think of the EU ...), to destroy social and democratic victories,
etc. The publication of this book could not leave insensitive the OPEM, and it
is Liberation which opens the door it by giving the floor to Bruneteau on April
3 in an article entitled neither more nor less: "The luck of Europe is to
be a third antitotalitarian way." The circle is complete: on one hand, the
kind EU that "gives money to the regions ", develops "a European
humanitarian diplomacy" and brings together "the centre," be
they liberals, Christian Democrats or social democrats"; on the other,
"far-right and left populisms "which are the counterparts of two
totalitarian projects."
The interview is a model caricature of media treatment and
pseudo-scientific EU: while the "journalist" asks a question taking
up the ideas of Bruneteau - " In your opinion, the criticism of Europe
begins with Lenin on the left, and with Maurras on the right - he launches into
analyzes that leave him speechless:
"In France, the tradition will be divided between a
weakened FN, the party of Florian Philippot, which advocates an exit of the
euro, that of Dupont-Aignan, rising in the polls, and The Republicans (LR),
whose president Laurent Wauquiez has developed a more eurosceptic rhetoric to
counter Macron "the European." Not to mention the alter-Europeanist
posture of France Insoumise, the leader of which defines himself as a
"French independenceist" against a Europe "close to the model of
the Holy Roman Empire."
Or :
"If the current situation is perfectible, the process
in oligarchy is unfair: all member states are democracies, and the EU itself
has reduced this deficit: codecision and control power of the European
Parliament, citizen initiative ... In parallel, institutions consult interest
groups to motivate their decisions in a competitive deliberation process. Some
find this lobbying obscene, but in the United States, it is quite acceptable.
"
Thus, we have not learned anything about what the EU
actually is. Fortunately a "historian" explains a real democratic
system where citizens decide (as we saw during the referendums!), with similar
lobbying practices as the United States (Monsanto, Google, Facebook and all the
multinationals fond of tax and social dumping will appreciate this unexpected
support, in the same way as Jean-Claude "LuxLeaks" Juncker), all the
member states are democracies ... even though Jean-Claude Juncker declared at
the end of January 2015 that "there can be no democratic choice against
the already ratified European treaties" etc. And all while maintaining the
eternal ideological and political confusionism by grouping all the (more or
less real) oppositions to this under the term of "populism".
Despite this, Buneteau's propaganda work has three positive
merits. First, it shows the fear and weaknesses of the Europeanist propaganda.
Not knowing to where to turn to defend its project, it relies more than ever on
pushing a crude and deceptive amalgamation of fascism and communism under the
term "totalitarianism," Second, to encourage anyone wishing to truly
understand the history of the European Union to turn to books that are
otherwise more instructive, such as Annie Lacroix-Riz's "The Origins of
the European Shackles, 1900-1960," and finally, above all, to give reason
to the PRCF in its fight to reconstitute a powerful Marxist-Leninist party
combining the red and the tricolor flags, to form a broad antifascist Front,
patriotic, popular and ecological - a open call to all the communist forces,
progressive and democratic against the destruction of social and democratic
conquests - and the FOUR OUTPOSTS: the euro, the EU, NATO and capitalism!