Image courtesy: History.com

It is exactly eighty years since that infamous night of November 9-10, 1938. The world will never ever forget that night known as the ‘Reichspogromnacht’ or by a seemingly more pleasant sounding ‘Kristallnacht’ (crystal night), which ironically refers to the litter of broken glass strewn on the streets after the pogrom. The Nazis and their henchmen were on the onslaught as they attacked Jews and destroyed their property in a night of bloody violence and terror, across Germany and Austria. Thousands were affected, several killed; according to some estimates more than one thousand Synagogues and an additional 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. At least thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The violence on the Jews continued unabated the next day, and the following weeks and for several years after that. It was a pogrom, the start of a genocide. The sheer hate, brutality and inhumanity that unfolded over the period has been recorded for posterity.
 
Etched in the hearts and minds of all men and women at the end of the Second World War, were those immortal words, “Never Again”. It seemed that the world had learnt a lesson particularly with the promulgation of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ in 1948. Ground realities point to something very different: human nature seems to continue to be feeble and fickle. Eighty years down the road, it seems that we have neither the courage nor the capacity to learn from history; that we will continue dishing out flimsy justifications and incredible reasons to legitimatize hate, violence, divisiveness and war.
 
When will we ever learn that anti-Semitism has no place in this world? The lone gunman that killed eleven members of the ‘Tree of Life’ Synagogue in the United States recently is but an example of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in several parts of the western world today. This needs to be addressed and countered as soon as possible.
 
When will the Israelis ever learn that Palestinians have a right to their homeland?  Despite the decisions of the United Nations and the outcry by most thinking nations of the world, the Palestinians continue to be at the receiving end of inhuman treatment and hostility from the Israeli regime.
 
When will the Saudis ever learn that they have no right to continue to destabilize the Middle East? Their intervention in Yemen has resulted in widespread bombing of civilian areas, the deaths of several thousands and a terrible famine all over. The world is aware of the prime movers behind the ISIS- but sadly, everyone else is called out except the Saudis.
 
When will the US administration ever learn that democracy is about equals? That the core values and vision of any great country are justice, liberty equality and fraternity. That the dignity of the human person is sacrosanct. That agendas and speeches of hate and divisiveness are bound to have negative effects everywhere.
 
When will the Indian rulers ever learn that India is about diversity and harmony? That the essence of a great country is the constant pursuit of truth and non-violence. That the denigration of the minorities; the instutionalisation of violence, the partisanship in ‘name-changing’, crony capitalism are guaranteed signposts for the destruction of the country
 
When will the right wing ever learn that inclusiveness is at the heart of people’s development? Be it in the Philippines and Austria, in Brazil and Congo, in Myanmar and in Italy – the ‘official’ xenophobia is bound to have repercussions. A great nation is about building bridges to reach out to one another and not about constructing walls to keep out others.
 
When will the military industrial complex ever learn that they are responsible for so much suffering all over? The guns lobby, the other producers of weapons, the nuclear club are all having a heyday profiteering from fomenting violence in so many different parts of the world. They have no qualms of conscience when innocent, ordinary citizens have to flee their homes because of violence.
 
The tragedy is that there are these and too many other ominous signs all over the world today. The ‘Kristallnacht’ of 1938 was not a spontaneous event. There were conditions created: hate speeches given, lies and myths propagated a fear about the ‘other’ slowly but surely entrenched in the majority community. Finally, the demon unleashed itself to an unimaginable level. An objective analysis of the politics of today provides one with the grim reality of very similar indicators.
 
Sometime in the early sixties Bob Dylan gave us that haunting song, which several folksingers and anti-war protesters like Joan Baez made famous
Yes, ‘n’ how many times a man must look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ‘n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
 
Yes, the answer is blowing in the wind – but do we have the courage to learn from history and help make our world a better place for all?

 
 Fr. Cedric Prakash SJ is a human rights activist)
 

The post Never Again: Horrors of the Start of the genocidal Pogrom against Jews, 80 Yrs Ago appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Is this how it begins? With rage, with the demands of the entitled millions who feel their birthright has been stolen, with those who claim “we built this country, we fought its wars, when is it our turn?” Donald Trump is by any stretch of the imagination an awful candidate to be president of the most powerful state on earth, a sexist, racist, impulsive narcissist who lies with abandon and hates with fervour. His handlers don’t even trust him with his own Twitter account anymore. And now he is the standard bearer for an increasingly familiar social coalition, angry white working class men (and women) with weak formal education and weaker job prospects, along with disaffected white middle class conservatives, many of them religious, who are furious that they lost the culture wars. We’ve seen this coalition before: it’s a breeding ground for fascism. Liberals need to wise up and fast. The International Criminal Court (ICC), global human rights, international norms? These are sideshows. The battle is much more present and visceral than that now. It is the battle of democracy and in that struggle, human rights are too compromised by their association with the very liberal elite—exactly the elite that the Putin/Trump/Brexit coalition hates—to be a principal mobilizing banner.

It isn’t Left vs. Right any longer… It is the out-of-touch liberal elite vs. the rest.

For Trump’s constituency, his obvious and stupefying flaws are irrelevant. He’s a policy-lite hand grenade intended to spark a revolution. From his admiration for Putin to his authoritarian style, right down to the machismo, sexual bravado and contempt for minorities, the outlook for human rights in the US—let alone globally—under Trump is catastrophic. For his coalition, human rights are a shell game pushed by cosmopolitan liberals to steal the nation away from its legitimate, mainly white, heirs. Make no mistake about it, the right is on the move—in Britain, Hungary, Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, India and now, far more importantly than any of those, in the United States. If Marine Le Pen can win in France in 2017 then fascism will truly have arrived, just seventy years after we assumed it had been banished for good. Get those immigrants out, get those trade barriers up, put my nation first, and forever, crush those bespectacled intellectuals, demean the unpatriotic, wrap yourself in that flag and humiliate the non-believers. Trump even threw in a healthy dose of anti-semitism for good measure.

Also Read: The Rise of American Authoritarianism.

After Brexit, I argued that winter was coming for human rights. Well, it’s here.

It’s here because the liberal democratic market model that has underpinned forty years of human rights growth is broken. It is here because what was supposed to happen, trickle down affluence, never did in any meaningful way. The age of rights, four decades of a newly potent set of claims for dignity, equal treatment and protection—for civility, for vibrant opposition to authority—were built on what Trump supporters have come to see as a lie. For them, human rights were not heralds of a new era of fair shares for all but a way to steal the inheritance of real Americans. Of course human rights were not the drivers of this change, they were part of its ideology. What drove it was a massive democratic experiment in which millions of working class, largely white voters, those whose forebears—so their mythology goes—built the nation, were told to hang tight while the economy was modernized. Liberalize those markets and break that union power and we would all be free. For election after election, as millions lost out in this vast demographic transformation, where wages stagnated or fell, and cheap and even illegal immigration filled the service sector with low paid workers, a “precariat” grew whose everyday life experience was chronic insecurity. But where illegal immigrants and the recently arrived were disenfranchised, white working class voters and their culturally conservative fellow travellers were citizens. They seethed. “Left” governments who promised a Third Way—Clinton and Blair—failed the former, “Right” governments who did nothing to stem immigration and talked down Christian values failed the latter. The mix of class and race was suddenly salient again, posing a major challenge for a country with such a problematic race history as the United States. All forms of diversity were suddenly in the crosshairs.

Also read: Trump’s victory sparks dozens of protests across country

Political entrepreneurs, Trump, Le Pen, Farage, Wilders, emerged to say: there is another way. They were quick to identify immigrants, religious minorities, refugees, foreign aid recipients and the liberal establishment as the problem. Their supporters know the liberal elite sees them as ignorant, backward, an embarrassment. But with the help of Trump they found their voice, which says: you can take control. You just have to take back power from the government and throw out the foreigners who have stolen your jobs or are doing them in China. It was a vast conspiracy, after all. You were right. The (white) social contract has been reneged on. And you were forced to be grateful for this, forced by the PC police to tolerate those who attack what you stand for and trash your most cherished values.

It isn’t Left vs. Right any longer… It is the out-of-touch liberal elite vs. the rest.

Trump’s election has changed all of this. It isn’t Left vs. Right any longer because a lot of that Left’s natural constituency has been lost (hopefully not permanently—a ray of hope—but what a missed opportunity a Sanders candidacy was). It is the out-of-touch liberal elite vs. the rest. And, guess what? The liberals are going to lose. Their signature ideology, free markets and human rights, will be among the first things to go. It appeals to too small a demographic. Why have people missed this? Because liberal elites talk to other liberal elites and political science often can’t see the wood for the trees.

Trump did everything possible to lose and he still won.

Can he fix any of this? Of course not. The seismic economic shifts are impossible to reverse without cutting off trade and growth, in which case greater fairness will come at the cost of huge economic contraction. Let us remember he’s promised tax cuts for the wealthy! What’s needed is a long-term plan of retraining, strategic investment in education and a great deal of research and development work for the new economy. All of which requires coordination, rather than endless bipartisan confrontation in both political and legal systems. It will need the very same experts, whose names are now so tarnished, to help formulate and implement the plan. These are big problems and will take a while to surface. What of the short term?

There are so many areas in which human rights will suffer, but let’s highlight three. Supreme Court appointments: one at least (with a Republican Senate likely to approve) will be enough to repeal Roe vs. Wade, and Trump might get three during his four years. Hang in there, Notorious RBG. Immigration: if the plan is really to deport millions of undocumented workers, then internment camps, dawn raids by thousands of armed government officials, deaths and killings in custody, border firefights and lacerating misery are almost inevitable. And foreign policy: Assad and Putin know that they can crush Aleppo with impunity because President Trump is only interested in something they also want, a massive air attack on ISIS. This isn’t even to start on Trump’s repudiation of generations of US foreign policy consensus on NATO, his tendency to make unilateral demands of other countries that he cannot possibly deliver on without negotiation and compromise, and his commitment to torture. Trump’s toxic attitudes will also surely affect the general climate for rights, for women, for the disabled, for minorities, in a deeply negative way by legitimating discrimination.

So, what is to be done? For human rights on the global scale, fight Trump and Trumpism. Fight fascism. Stop this ill-starred pursuit of failing global norms and institutions like the ICC, criminalizing the crime of aggression and a Convention on Crimes Against Humanity, and go where the struggle really is, on the ground, in national legislatures, in national courts, where there really is an “us” versus “them”. Embrace domestic, rather than international, politics. The struggle is now about democracy, democratic organization, reaching out, building coalitions of support that weaken the fascist base and getting into, in a serious way, class, race and identity. You fight fascism by rebuilding support for progressive democratic politics within national borders, not by building castles out of international normative air. It is now the national ballot box, more than international law, where the battle for human rights must be won.

(Stephen Hopgood is a professor of International Relations at SOAS, University of London. His most recent book is The Endtimes of Human Rights (for critiques see here), following on from Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International). 

(This article was first published on openDemocracy).
 

The post Fascism Rising: Is this how it begins? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A mural on the wall in the Zollamtsstrasse refugee centre.

Our journey along the storm-swollen Danube threads through castle-and-schnapps country into Austria. The further we cycle on this ride across the continent, the more we see how urgently Europe needs a plan, not only to cope with the influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, but to deal with widening social divisions that have little to do with migration.

Two weeks before we arrived, Austria elected a new president. The two candidates were Norbert Hofer from the Freedom Party of Austria, whose first leader was an officer of the Nazi SS, and Alexander Van der Bellen, a member of the Green Alternative party: far right and far left. The nation is split almost exactly down the middle: the far right lost the vote by 0.35% and have successfully won a legal challenge to force a second election, due to happen in October.
 

A mural on the wall in the Zollamtsstrasse refugee centre.

The two parties are irreconcilable. In Vienna, I speak to Daniel Aschwanden, an artist who has been working in a Red Cross camp for refugees set up in a former financial law court. He tells me that the first showing of the work he created with the refugees was attacked by far right groups, who themselves came under mortal threat. The result was that the Red Cross installed bouncers to protect both sides. Daniel shakes his head: “I watch people from the right and the left argue and I don’t want to get involved in that”.

Zollamtsstrasse

Inside the former financial court building on Zollamtsstrasse, the rooms now stand empty. The last remaining Red Cross workers clear away the children's toys, the chairs and tables of the schoolrooms, and the books of the library. The refugees were recently moved after eight months here, and the building will become a university's fine arts department – apt, I think to myself, as I wander around, admiring the colourful murals daubed on the corridor walls by refugees and volunteers.
 

A dancer painted by a Syrian woman in her family bedroom.

Downstairs, a vast painting shows a woman's head on the shoulders of a flowering tree, messages of love and motherhood in among its leaves, while a golden phoenix soars overhead. Another mural is coated with flags and symbols of all nations, with meaningful words memorialised: security, hallo, freedom. Upstairs, a Syrian family's room is decorated with a beautiful woman in a blossom orchard dancing with a silk scarf, her skirts billowing in the gentle, petal-strewn wind. Similar flowers bloom around the electrical power outlets in the wall. An Afghani has drawn with coloured pencils two children, falling in love, playing music: Ich komme aus Afghanistan, ich liebe Afghanistan – I come from Afghanistan, I love Afghanistan. Another has drawn the crest of Arsenal Football Club.
 

The rooms of Zollamtsstrasse refugee centre.
 

Around 1,200 people were lodged here, mostly young men, but also plenty of elderly people, women and children, including unaccompanied minors. The doors to the bedrooms still bear the nameplates of the former tax inspectors, as well as the administrative chalk marks of the refugee centre. Room 421, formerly the office of Helmut Hummel and Magistra Regine Linder, was converted to accommodation for six persons. Office buildings aren't designed as living spaces, though: no showers, insufficient toilets, no clothes washing facilities, only the top-floor canteen for cooking – and no one was allowed to use the lift. At first, people were taken in small groups by mini-bus to municipal baths and might have one shower per week.

The building at Zollamtsstrasse was acquired by the university last summer and was lying empty before the builders moved in to start the art department refit. A student-run arts festival called Urbanize was due to take over the vast space last October, as the number of refugees arriving in Austria reached 5,000 per day. The university and the festival opened their doors to the refugees and from that moment this former tax court became a mixed space of students, volunteers and refugees from all over the world. It was only after civilians had turned the building into a welcoming space that the Red Cross were charged with its formal management as a refugee centre.

Zollamtsstrasse wasn't meant to be permanent, but the refugees liked being here because, unlike at other more institutional refugee centres, there was always something to do. German classes in one of the four schoolrooms and a kindergarten for the youngest children, regular clay modelling workshops and dance empowerment classes, games of table tennis, table football and chess, as well as other projects like designing and painting the murals. Students from the university also designed and delivered two metal container shower blocks. As one of the volunteers, Stephan, told me, the philosophy of the place was that anyone could just come and do anything. “There are no rules, no bureaucracy, just openness”, he says. “This is nice for students used to bureaucracy. They have the freedom to create”.

But the heart of the building was the café, which ‘sold’ free cakes, cookies, tea and coffee, and hosted concerts, talks, films and art exhibitions. Every Saturday was women's day, when men were forbidden, the blinds were drawn and hijabs could be removed in privacy. Although not without its problems, particularly with regards to the protection of women, Zollamtsstrasse sounds like it was a brief interlude of freedom and real attempts at integration between refugees and residents in Vienna. My volunteer guide Patricia is obviously shaken that the hall where the café once lived is now dead. The serving bar torn out, the dishwasher ripped from the wall, the stage carted away. The only survivor is a chalkboard drawing of blooming flowers and a tree in blossom: the enduring emblem of Zollamtsstrasse.
 

'I have learnt German!' on a chalkboard in a classroom.

The refugees have now been dispersed across Vienna to live in other camps – all converted, disused buildings, including the old offices of the Kurier newspaper. These makeshift camps are one sign, activists tell me, that refugees are not really welcome by the state. The resources are not being put into integration, but into moving refugees on, either further north to Germany, or back to the east. Patricia tells me about an Iranian who has been ordered back to Croatia, not because he had papers or a passport stamp from there, but because the bus he was on, commanded and escorted by the Greek police, happened to pass through Croatia. “And he was one of the supposed ‘good’ refugees”, she says. “He was a doctor”.

Stephan and Patricia and the other enthusiastic volunteers of Zollamtsstrasse have found a new empty building, a former phone shop near the station. In stark contrast to the old financial court, the walls are still bare, whitewashed. Over the coming months, those walls will be filled with the imaginings of refugees and the local community, creating a communal space where everyone belongs.

Back in one of the empty ‘bedrooms’ of Zollamtsstrasse, Patricia shows me a practice dialogue scrawled on the wall in pencil, first in German, then translated into Persian. It shows the linguistic preoccupations of the student, and illustrates the challenges that lie ahead for both refugee and resident in Austria. It’s headed Meine Fehler – My mistakes.
 

Photo by author.

Bitte zahlen sie Bar.
Please pay cash.

Ich habe kein Bargeld, leider nein.
I have no cash, unfortunately no.

Dieb.
Thief.

Ich bin kein Dieb.
I am not a thief.

Ich glaube Ihnen.
I believe you.

(David Charles is cycling 5,000 km across Europe, following the routes of migration back towards Syria. Along the journey, he is documenting the effects of migration on refugees and residents alike. Follow David's journey through his mailing list).

This article was first published on openDemocracy.

 

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Joerg Haider is the name of the man whose far–right Freedom Party (FPO) notched up 27 per cent of the popular votes in the general elections last October to emerge as Austria’s second largest party, with 52 of the total 183 seats. First in the electoral race but short of a majority, the Social Democrats failed to reach an agreement on renewing their 13–year–old coalition with Austria’s conservative People’s Party but refused any truck with the FPO. It was then that Herr Haider struck a deal and a very reluctant President Thomas Klestil finally swore in a new government on February 4.

(A throwback to 1933, when President Paul von Hindenberg had invited Hitler’s party into the German government? Not many had then foreseen the threat that Hitler’s 33 per cent of the vote posed to German democracy or world peace, no one had then anticipated the Nazi party’s aggressive military intent, its rampant anti-Semitism, or the ‘Final Solution’).

Herr Haider’s politics is as much a cause for concern as his background. The main plank of his party in the last election was his populist demand that the immigrants from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, who now constitute around five per cent of Austria’s population, be sent back to their countries. With unemployment running at nearly 11 per cent, the FPO attracted the votes of half of all male voters under 30. Haider also strongly opposes the entry of East European countries into the presently 15–member European Union of which Austria is a part.

That is not all. The FPO’s Nazi roots are well known. Haider’s own parents were strong Nazi supporters and the large estate he inherited from them was Jewish–owned until it was "Aryanised" in 1938. Recently, Haider publicly praised Hitler’s "orderly" employment policy, but subsequently apologised.

To compound matters further, unlike Germany, Austria as a country and Austrians as a people have yet to come to terms with their pro–Nazi past. Austrians see themselves as Nazism’s "first victim" while the rest of the West sees them as Hitler’s "first willing accomplice". When Hitler annexed Austria, there were jubilant crowds on the streets of Vienna and elsewhere; and spontaneous incidents of anti–Semitism followed. (Among other ignominies, Jewish women were made to scrub the streets on their hands and knees while Austrian Nazis urinated all over them).

This, incidentally is the second time in 14 years that Austria is troubling the European conscience. In 1986, the country elected Kurt Waldheim as its President ignoring his involvement in Nazi atrocities. Waldheim pretended he could not remember what he did many decades ago.

Now faced with a leader like Herr Haider in its midst, Europe is divided over how to respond to the challenge: No compromise on "principles and values", no truck with racism, rabid nationalism and crypto–fascism of the FPO variety? Or, adherence to the "first principle of democracy" ("parliamentary majority must be respected") and non–interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state?

The other 14 members of the European Union, besides Austria, had threatened to sever relations with one of its own partners if Haider’s chauvinist party became a part of the Austrian government. To make itself more presentable to the western world, the coalition government has evolved a formula which includes the following: Haider himself did not join the national government but continues as a regional governor; two, despite him being Haider’s first choice for the post, Thomas Prinzhorn does not occupy the vice–chancellor’s chair; and, three, the coalition partners have pledged themselves to an extraordinary declaration which reads — "Austria accepts her responsibility arising out of the tragic history of the 20th century and the horrendous crimes of the National Socialist regime. Our country is facing up to the light and dark sides of its past and to the deeds of all Austrians, good and evil, as its responsibility". The declaration also pledges the future government to work for "an Austria in which xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism have no place".

Despite this, several European governments — with Germany, France, Belgium and Portugal in the lead – took the first steps towards the political isolation of Austria the moment the new government was sworn–in. But some are worried that penal action against Austria will only increase Herr Haider’s appeal: the latest opinion poll in Austria indicates that if elections were held today, 33 per cent would vote for his party against the 27 per cent last October.

Is there some parallel between what Europe is now experiencing and India, where the political wing of the sangh parivar — the BJP — was a political pariah for other political parties for some years but now leads a coalition government at the Centre?

Archived from Communalism Combat, February 2000. Year 7  No, 56, International 

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