One of the worst things that you can be called in Spain is "fascist." That sentence, thrown lightly against anyone who contradicts the left wing, implies the civil death of the target.
They are trivializing the true fascism
The abuse of that accusation has had a doubly perverse effect. By a mars, calling "fascist" anyone who is not, the left has contributed to trivialize the true fascism, a totalitarian ideology that in the last century sowed terror in much of Europe. However, often the left launches this accusation against people who openly reject this totalitarian ideology: Catholics, Liberals, Conservatives, Christian Democrats ... It is a brazen attempt to intimidate the discrepant by falsely accusing him of something that is not, but that the left knows causes much rejection. Just like what many Francoists did, for example, signaling as "Mason" anyone who criticized Franco's dictatorship.
A way of whitening far-left totalitarianism
On the other hand, this insistence on exclusively identifying evil with fascism has served to whiten another totalitarian ideology as perverse as that: communism, which takes the palm in the classification of genocidal ideologies, being responsible for sowing the world with 100 million dead in less than a century. This systematic whitening, achieved by an unprecedented propaganda effort, has ended up being internalized even by many who consider themselves hostile to that ideology. To give an example, we have been able to see politicians and citizens calling "fascist" to ETA, a band of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The fact that communist dictatorships have committed mass crimes is even interpreted by many not as proof that this ideology is essentially vile, but that its implementation was not correct, so that all this could have been avoided if had established a genuinely communist regime. The obvious question is: how many more millions of dead are needed to realize the intrinsic evil of red totalitarianism? I have never heard anyone say that if Nazism murdered millions of people it was because Hitler's regime was not genuinely National Socialist. However, equally absurd messages that are often read to justify communism.
Is there a boom in the true far-right now in Europe?
Of course, I think that Nazism is equivalent to communism in terms of evil. Morally they are two ideologies that produce me the same disgust. However, and as forward in the title, to this day, the far-left is a much worse threat than the far-right, especially because today the far-right is a marginal political phenomenon. In Spain they did not reach 1% of the electorate. They have no representation in the Spanish Parliament. In other countries, according to the media, there are parties of the far-right that are in the ascendant, but in the review I must to put in question this cataloging. In some cases, these media dismiss as far-right parties that are priorely speaking- rather conservative, such as Alternative for Germany, the Austrian FPÖ or the Hungarian Civic Union. In other cases of rather liberal parties, such as the Dutch Freedom Party of Geert Wilders. In France a party that was properly right-wing many years ago, the National Front, has ended up supporting abortion and secularism. If something has in common these parties is that have nothing to do with classic Fascism or Nazism. The one that approaches the nazi theses is Golden Dawn, in Greece. However, they have no relations with the parties before mentioned, and its European affiliation is the European National Front, that groups far-right parties without representation or very minority.
The presence of the classic far-left and its new covers
On the contrary, the European far-left has a parliamentary force far superior to the one of the far-right. As an example, Syriza (which is a coalition of communist parties) governs in Greece with 144 of the 300 seats of the Parliament of that country. The extreme German left, Die Linke, political heir of the GDR, currently has 64 seats in the Bundestag and 7 in the European Parliament. In Portugal the Communists of the Bloco de Esquerda (with 19 deputies) and the Portuguese Communist Party (one of the most rancid parties of its kind in Europe, with 17 seats) are the supporters of the current socialist government of António Costa. In France the Front de Gauche has 10 deputies in the National Assembly (the FN has only two). The Sinistra Italiana of Nicola Fratoianni, who tries to imitate Podemos and Syriza, has 31 seats in the Chamber of Deputies of that country. Finally, in Spain Podemos and its electoral partners have 67 seats, to which we must add the 9 of Esquerra (Catalan separatists) and the 2 of EH Bildu (Basque separatists).
Podemos: an example of communism with new disguise
The Spanish case demonstrates the danger of the rise of the current far-left, often characters and groups of communist ideology that use new "cross-dress" disguises to provoke less rejection among the electorate. That was the tactic used by Podemos, a party created by certain people who until a few years ago had been active in the Communist Youths, such as Pablo Iglesias, and who, as soon as he had an opportunity, has allied with Izquierda Unida, the electoral cover that has been using the Communist Party of Spain since the 1980s. Anyone who knows the dynamics of these organizations may not have been surprised by the increasingly radical drift of Podemos. Yesterday Pablo Iglesias supported a rapper condemned by threats of death and apology of terrorism. Last year he supported a Podemos' councilor condemned for punching a Socialist councilor. On the other hand, and demonstrating their perverse international relations, Podemos have refused to condemn the repression of the Chávez regime in Venezuela in three parliamentary votes. In the same line of sympathy with the Latin American far-left, in November Podemos homaged to the communist dictator Fidel Castro, presenting him as "a reference of Latin American dignity" and a "referent of socialism." In 2014, one of the founders of Podemos defended his ideology as "friendly leninism". In fact, one of the members of his parliamentary group, communist Alberto Garzón, last year extolled the Bolshevik Revolution.
Against fascism we are already vaccinated: against communism no
As we can see, while classical fascism and Nazism are purely marginal in Europe, communist parties with parliamentary representation have no qualms about displaying their anti-democratic ideology, without showing any slight repentance for the crimes perpetrated by the dictatorships inspired by Marxism. Podemos support to attacks on freedom of expression, such as last week at the University of Seville, demonstrates that far from honestly assuming democratic approaches, the classical far-left has only disguised itself to enter institutions and to defend from them the same authoritarian approaches of the past. That is what shows that, as a threat to our democracy, the far-left is much worse than the far-right, because if we are already vaccinated against the fascist virus -which is to be appreciated-, against the communist virus we are not, at least in Spain and unlike what happens in countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which suffered completely communist oppression.
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Comentarios:
Salvador
Creo que se te ha colado un error en el título. «being afraid» es «tener miedo», no «dar miedo». No concuerda con el título de la versión en español. Puedes usar los verbos «to scare» o «to frighten» para lo que querías expresar.
11:23 | 24/02/17
Elentir
Lo sé, Salvador, pero preferí ponerlo así. Cuadrar los títulos no es fácil, y al fin y al cabo la idea que se transmite es la misma.
17:28 | 24/02/17
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