Sadiq Khan is wrong. The Nazis are not coming back
(AP Photo)
A fairly good rule in politics and journalism is that the first person who quotes Hitler loses. I admire Sadiq Khan, who has been a calm, dedicated mayor for London’s enormous multi-cultural, multi-faith and multi-race communities. He has been a refreshing change from his two show-boating predecessors, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, who asked not what they could do for London but what London could do for them.
But I would have advised Mayor Khan not to use the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland to try and make contemporary political comparisons. I have a personal score to settle with der Führer: my father was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the Polish army 80 years ago.
My father took a German bullet in the shoulder that went on to kill his corporal behind him and had to go home to his parents’ farm to spend every minute with his hands plunged in buckets of dirty earth. When the Russians arrived, they examined every adult Polish male’s hand and those with clean white flesh and trimmed finger nails were shot.
He came to Britain via Romania and France to continue the fight against German and Russian supremacism, but his war wounds prevented further fighting, and he died when I was ten.
Sadiq Khan knows about Poles in London and is their friend, but I am not sure his wordsmiths were smart to use the anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland to compare Donald Trump, or Nigel Farage or even, indirectly, Boris Johnson with Hitler. Writing in the Observer on Sunday he argued, “For the first time in more than 70 years, it seems the lessons of the second world war are genuinely at risk of being forgotten or, worse still, being rewritten.
“This comes as a new wave of extremist far-right movements and political parties are winning power and influence at alarming speed – fuelled by Donald Trump, the global poster-boy for white nationalism. Politicians across Europe are following his example by seeking to exploit division to gain power – from Matteo Salvini in Italy to Marine Le Pen in France.
“The impact can also be seen in the UK, where the outsize influence of Nigel Farage and his Brexit party has pushed the Conservatives, under Boris Johnson, to become ever more right-wing, illiberal and intolerant. Just last week we saw the disdain Johnson has for parliament and our democracy.”
I deplore the Prime Minister’s suspension of Parliament at a time when MPs should be extracting information on Johnson’s high risk Brexit plans, but this is not the Reichstag.
And much as one agrees with Sadiq Khan’s denunciation of the “singular evil of Nazism and fascism” it was curious that he failed to mention the ideology of Hitler’s closest ally in September 1939 – Joseph Stalin. Apologists for the Russian dictator still exist, some in high places in the Labour Party, while others on the left act as the Kremlin’s useful idiots appearing on RT to promote the Putin world view.
That Donald Trump is a racist, a bigot, and a white supremacist is not in question. That Nigel Farage is a coarse xenophobe who has spent the last decade being fawned on by the BBC as he spews out his dislike of Poles and other European citizens adding mightily to our economy is also stating the obvious.
But one look at Boris Johnson’s cabinet and the charge of racism hardly sticks. A better line of attack against the immigrant Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is that had she been in charge in 1940, the Polish pilots and soldiers would have all been interned in France filling out Home Office jobsworth forms to stay in Britain.
The ten years since the 2009 crash have undoubtedly seen the rise of a nationalist right, with more than a whiff of Weimar in some statements and actions – including the suspension of the UK’s Parliament for the political convenience of the Prime Minister (which has led to much jaw dropping on the continent).
But now the xenophobic right is being pushed back. Matteo Salvini has been humiliated by MPs in the Italian Parliament, who repudiated his efforts to call a snap election to install himself in power. Marine Le Pen was defeated by Emmanuel Macron in 2017, and again in the European Parliament elections. Geert Wilders has disappeared. The Danish People’s Party and Swedish Democrats have flopped. As rightist Europeans look at what has happened to British politics since Brexit, they have all dropped demands for referendums on the EU or EU membership.
The nationalist Catholic government in Poland is not fascist, but closer to the kind of Britain-hating clericalist politics one saw in Ireland up to the 1970s.
Steve Bannon’s boasts that he was going to install a Team Trump of immigrant-bashing rightist nationalists to run the European Parliament and hold government posts have faded, despite the millions of dollars from Trump admiring rightist Americans that flowed Bannon’s way.
There is a reservoir in most European countries of 25 to 30 per cent of voters who will vote for populist nationalism or anti-immigrant and anti-EU lines. The communist parties that did well on the continent after 1945 appealed to such populist prejudices, and as communism faded, that segment of voters transferred to rightist populism.
Nationalist parties can win votes in impoverished, bitter Europe – be it East Germany, or South Yorkshire, or the forgotten regions of France which produced the Gilets Jaunes and votes for Marine Le Pen. But this does not extend to forming governments.
European politics, including British politics, has nasty elements, but Nazis are not coming back.
