Fascists and football
Posted by John, April 3rd, 2016 - under Uncategorised.
Tags: Fascists, Football
The United Patriot Front unveiled a racist and Islamophobic banner in the Australian Rules football game on Friday night between Collingwood and Richmond.
Blair Cottrell, the UPF leader, defended the action. This is the same Blair Cottrell who has written glowingly about Hitler.
“There should be a picture of this man in every classroom and every school, and his book should be issued to every student annually,” Cottrell wrote.
His ‘hero’ blamed Jews for the problems of the world. Cottrell and the other sewer dwellers blame Muslims. Oh, and Jews.
In the UK the fascists have built a base among a section of football fans – the young, sometimes unemployed, male fans. Until the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the lack of a strong left wing alternative created a space for this filth to grow in the UK. However with Corbyn as leader of the British Labor Party and a clear message that blacks, Muslims and refugees are not the enemy, and the neoliberals destroying the welfare state and cutting wages are, there has been a swing away from the moderate racists UKIP and back to Labour. Explaining that the real enemy is capital and offering hope rather than hate can win people to your side.
The stunt at the MCG was an attempt by the UPF to get publicity for their cause and their small group. It was also an attempt, in doing that, to attract the angry young men section of football fans to them. This reflects the concentric rings of fascist organisation Hitler built – on the one hand among the respectable middle class terrified by the economic crisis and its impact on them and on the other among the street fighters from the unemployed and marginalised. The UPF is the thug wing of fascism. Its respectable face keeps trying to break through and you get glimpses of it in the Reclaim White Australia movement. It was no accident for example that Pauline Hanson’s meetings in the 1990s attracted large numbers of well dressed small business and other middle class people threatened by economic change.
The toe hold fascism in Australian society is getting is not just a result of the long drawn out economic problems and the uncertainty the middle classes feel. It feeds on the demonisation, the nudge nudge wink wink racism and Islamophobia of successive Liberal and Labor governments. Every government lie about asylum seekers, every Northern Territory intervention, every death in custody, every smug self satisfied panegyric to Australian ‘values’ from on high drives the racism and Islamophobia of the fascists and their useful idiots in Reclaim White Australia.
The answer to the fascists and to fascism is not to imagine that small bands of brave lefties can drive these people off the streets. It will require a movement of large numbers to do that, a movement built out of the various refugee, Aboriginal and other anti-racist campaigns specifically but more broadly out of all the campaigns for a better world from equal love on to safe schools and anti-fracking campaigns and for womens’ refuges, to name but a few. Most importantly it will require an orientation to workers as workers to make the arguments against fascism and try to mobilise them and their incredible social strength specifically against the fascists and more generally against all the political, social and industrial attacks on them as workers.
