Greece: "Fascism is the extreme perversion of liberalism" [View all]

[ellenrr]

"Fascism is the extreme perversion of liberalism"

"Greece’s corrupt corporate and political elite can once again play its favorite trump card: the country is descending into chaos, left and right are battling for control over the streets, and so a broad alliance of the “responsible center” is the only thing that can save democracy from the imminent threat of civil war. This narrative of the “two extremes” — also known as the horseshoe theory — is the most sinister myth facing Greece today. In reality, it is nothing but a strategy of tension that serves to obscure the violent extremism of the center that is truly ripping the country apart.

it wasn’t Golden Dawn that created concentration camps for immigrants, criminalized HIV and tortured handcuffed detainees — it was the successive governments of the center-left and center-right that did that. They have been doing it for decades and no one in Europe ever seemed to care.

Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panagiotaros told Paul Mason that “there is already civil war”:
Greek society is ready — even though no-one likes this — to have a fight: a new type of civil war. On the one side there will be nationalists like us, and Greeks who want our country to be as it used to be, and on the other side illegal immigrants, anarchists and all those who have destroyed Athens several times.

Apart from the obvious point that the centrist elite undermined democracy a long time ago, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset already showed back in 1970 that the horseshoe theory of political extremism is simply nonsense. Fascism, Lipset observed, is in fact the extremism of the center. Rather than the far-left and far-right bending off from the center and approaching one another in their violent means and authoritarian ends, fascism is actually the extremist perversion of liberalism, with which it shares a great aversion for the emancipatory struggles of the poor and excluded, as well as the political goal of bringing the disaffected middle class back into power."

more at:
http://roarmag.org/2013/09/golden-dawn-myth-two-extremes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+roarmag+%28ROAR+Magazine%29&utm_content=Yahoo%21+Mail