Marko Attila Hoare muses about the strange selectivity of some extreme leftists when it comes to applying the label “fascist” to certain political movements.
In order to defend the Islamists, Serb Chetniks, Iraqi ‘insurgents’ and other murderous chauvinists they support – or at least don’t like to oppose – from the charge of ‘fascism’, leftists like [Richard] Seymour [of “Lenin’s Tomb”] choose to reserve the ‘fascism’ label for those political parties organised by white people in Europe or in the white, English-speaking world, that are openly racist or chauvinistic and that are more hardline on race and immigration than the mainstream conservative parliamentary parties. It’s not a very intellectually satisfying definition, but functionally, it serves the purpose of the leftists in question. On this basis, Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front (FN) in France qualifies as ‘Nazi’; the Iraqi Baathists and the Hizb ut-Tahrir do not.