Fascists attack New Zealand Mosques

Did NZ lose its innocence on 15^th March 2019? No, it lost it in 1991 when it followed the UN and US into the First Gulf War. About the same time Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilisations warning of the threat of Islam to Western Civilisation. 30 years of Islamophobia and the never-ending war on terror what do you get? Fascism defending Western capitalist "civilisation" from peaceful Muslims.

The bourgeois blinkered media commentary focuses on the ‘lone wolf’ theory to avoid confronting the reality of the rise of fascism reaching ‘downunder’. The spies weren’t doing their job, our friendly gun laws need a rebore, and give the cops guns. Let’s all hold hands and pray to our diverse gods to keep the evil at bay. But white supremacists are fascists and there is no way the NZ state is going to stop them when global capitalism is destroying the world to defend its barbaric 'civilisation' from 'radical Islam'.

Don't expect the state, even if 'warned', to act against white supremacists. The US surveillance state with its domestic war on terror screams Islamic terror yet 70% of mass killings are done by white supremacists. The cops enforce the white 'civilisation' that was imposed on the rest of the world for centuries, namely capitalism imperialist exploitation and oppression. Now that that system is on its last legs the defenders of that 'civilisation' are the fascists who blame the loss of white rule heritage on its historic victims and target those who advance the cause of the victims.

The Muslims they target are the victims of centuries of Western 'white' 'civilisation'. From the Crusades to the genocide of Syrian people in an 8-year war, it is the victims who are standing up and bringing their 'justice' back to the home countries. The NZ neo-colonial state is part of that story of conquest and oppression 'downunder'. Its racist oppression is still rampant in Australia and NZ. So, what is new? How is the Christchurch attack different from Parihaka?

Since the fascists are defending their mythology of white civilisation they will never be stopped by the modern version of the colonial bosses' state. We have to stop them by smashing them before they seize power. What this means is no-platform for fascists, and smash them in the streets before they can organise a reactionary social movement to wipe out humanity. It is a warning siren to us all that the fascists struck in Christchurch on the same day as the global Students 'fight for life'.

How to Fight Fascism in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Fascism is back on the agenda with a vengeance. Not merely because two Canadian ‘alt-right’ activists want to spread their message in Aotearoa. Of course ‘alt-right’ is a euphemism for fascism. But when someone actively attempts to stop refugees from Africa and the Middle East from reaching Europe by attacking their boats there is no denying fascism is ‘alt-right’.

Today, capitalism is dying and is thrashing about destroying everything it touches. It deserves to die, but not to take us with it. Fascism is the political response of last resort against the overthrow of capitalism by the working class. It will not give up its fight peacefully, logically, rationally, but resorts to undemocratic and illegal actions, wars and genocide.

Yet it wants its working class enemy to fight peacefully and respect bourgeois human rights – including ‘free speech’. Never mind the right to life of African refugees. It wants fascism to be normalized as just another ideology that deserves equality before the law. Meanwhile it builds and organizes a reactionary social movement against refugee rights, workers’ rights and socialist revolution.

The denial of a platform to fascists is a longstanding question, first raised with the rise of the fascist movement in Germany in 1920, rapidly followed by Italy and then Spain. If you look at these movements its clear that they took advantage of the pacifism and disorganization of the workers to put up resistance to its armed shock troops.

Remember Bertolucci's film, 1900, set in Italy during the early 1900s. The communists were a powerful political force but no match for armed fascist bands that attacked their union halls and murdered labour leaders defeating their movement. In Germany the same methods were used to weaken, divide and destroy the labour movement. Revolutionary leaders like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated and workers armed uprisings put down.

The fascists succeeded because workers were divided along ideological lines. Social Democracy was committed to parliamentary socialism and the rule of law. It looked to the state to protect them from fascists, denying the fact that the state supports fascism in defending capitalism against socialist revolution. Since social democracy prefers fascism to communism the Communists were isolated. Fascists even appealed to workers and declassed petty bourgeois as ‘socialist’ to deceive them.

Fascism is the militant, violent, undemocratic and unlawful instrument of brutal bourgeois class rule. It doesn’t defend bourgeois freedoms even while it attempts to hide behind them. Its main purpose is to smash the working class as the only class that can overthrow capitalism and build a new society free from exploitation and oppression.

Therefore, since we must learn from history or die, it is stupid to ignore that lesson and fall for the ploy that fascism is somehow an aberration that is equally at home on the ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt- left’ against the law-abiding, pacifist, moderate middle. That is to separate the symptoms of fascism from its cause.

The only language that fascists understand is that of force – class force. Either they use that force against us and win the class war, or we organize our own class force and defeat fascism in its embryo before it gains the upper hand.

Marxists do not call on the bourgeois state to ban fascists because we have learned that historically the state sides with fascism to smash the working class. We organize as a class to use every bourgeois freedom that advances our class interests in socialism. That is why we do not fetishize ‘freedom of speech’ when it disarms us in the face of the rise of fascism.

Those who want to survive capitalism’s decline and fall need to work out where their class allegiance lies now before it is too late, and build a working class anti-fascist movement to defeat fascism on the streets.

See also
https://situationsvacant.wordpress.com/2017/01/27/how-not-to-smash-fascism/
Leon Trotsky summary of key writings on fascism: What is Fascism and How to Fight It. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

First published: https://situationsvacant.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/how-to-fight-fascism-in-aotearoa-nz/