Richard Painter: ‘This Is The Face Of Fascism In The U.S.’ | AM Joy | MSNBC

Joy Reid and her guests discuss the clashing of protesters at the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, and the influence of conservative media outlets on the rise of ‘Alt-Right’ groups.

Stop Fascism: Chris Hedges in Portland (Parts 1 & 2)

40 Years On, Franco's Ghost Still Haunts Spain

Activist: Trump More Dangerous Than Hitler, Is a Fascist

Feb. 22, 2017 - 6:06 - Tucker takes on member of Refuse Facism Now who insists President Trump is a fascist, more dangerous than Hitler and is urging people to rise up and drive him out of office

Op-Ed: Greece’s Fascists Are Gaining

Nikos Michaloliakos greeting supporters at a pre-election
rally in Athens last month.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: ATHENS — Just hours after Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s new cabinet was sworn into office on Sept. 23, Twitter users began protesting the appointment of one of his junior ministers, Dimitri Kamenos, from the right-wing anti-austerity party Independent Greeks. Mr. Kamenos had published homophobic, anti-Semitic and racist comments on Twitter.

Within hours, Mr. Kamenos was fired, making his tenure one of the shortest in Greek political history. What’s most worrying about the incident is not his racist tweets, but the fact that reactionary views have gained popularity in crisis-ridden Greece, especially in areas where migrants are arriving in large numbers. And there is real risk that the popularity of these views will increase.

In Kos and Lesbos, the epicenters of the refugee crisis, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party doubled its share of the vote, exceeding 10 percent in some places. The absence of functioning government institutions in Greece — and the total lack of a collective European Union policy to address the crisis — have created the conditions that hateful ideologies need in order to grow. While the local authorities were waiting for the central government to react, and as the Greek government waited for the European Union to make up its mind about the growing waves of immigration that flooded the islands, the neo-Nazis took advantage of the situation to spread their hate. » | Matthaios Tsimitakis | Sunday, October 4, 2015

Are the Fascists Coming Back to France?

Is Marine Le Pen's smiling face a mask?

BBC: The Front National's victory in the EU elections - its greatest triumph ever - is attributed to the policy of "detoxification" conducted by Marine Le Pen since she took over in 2011.

But its enemies remain unconvinced that the FN has become in any sense a normal or acceptable political force.

Mainstream politicians regard the FN as a classic party of the nationalist extreme, exploiting economic distress to whip up hatred of the outsider, the immigrant.

For the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble, reacting to Sunday's vote, there is no question but that the FN is "fascist and extremist".

And in the UK, Nigel Farage of UKIP says he will never go into alliance with Marine Le Pen because of her party's "nasty, anti-Semitic past". » | Hugh Schofield, BBC News, Paris | Thursday, May 29, 2014

Newsnight Economics Editor Duncan Weldon's 'Embarrassing' Fascist Past

Duncan Weldon is the TUC's chief economist but once
dabbled in far-Right politics

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Duncan Weldon admits to youthful 'flirtation' with fascism and once wrote about attending BNP demos

When a TUC official was hired by Newsnight as its new economics correspondent, the BBC faced familiar accusations of Left-wing bias.

But Duncan Weldon has admitted that he once had a brief, “witless” dalliance with fascism, having been an admirer of Oswald Mosley when he was a boy.

As a 19-year-old student, he wrote an article for his university newspaper headlined “I was a fascist”, in which he described attending British National Party meetings and taking part in a “violent” demonstration against asylum seekers.

Writing under the pseudonym Sam Healey in the Oxford University student newspaper Cherwell in 2002, he wrote that after attending several BNP meetings: “I was starting to consider myself a Fascist – a patriot – one of the few who understood that in order to regain what we once had, we may have to take distasteful methods.”

The hiring of Mr Weldon by the Newsnight editor Ian Katz, a former deputy editor of The Guardian, had already raised eyebrows because Mr Weldon has virtually no professional journalistic experience. » | Gordon Raynor, Chief Reporter | Friday, March 21, 2014

America – From Freedom To Fascism (2011)

Is there a law which requires you to pay the Federal Income Tax? Is the Federal Reserve a part of the United States Government, or is it a private bank owned and operated by multinational corporate interests? Do they have our nation's best interests at heart? Unless something changes, what does the future of the United States look like?

People & Power: Hungary: Towards the Abyss

Investigating why critics of Hungary's authoritarian government believe it is leading the country towards fascism.

Fascism: Mussolini in Power

Part 2
Part 3
Part 3
Part 5

Support for Greece's Golden Dawn Rises

Read the article The Spectre of Fascism in Greece here | Tuesday, July 09, 2013
Related »

France's Fascism Fear as Activist Killed in Skinhead Attack
Thousands of enraged protesters gathered across France on Thursday in homage to a teenage activist who died after being attacked by skinheads. Police have arrested seven suspects in connection with an attack deemed "politically motivated"

Read more here »

Golden Dawn Takes Advantage of Recession Ravaged Greece
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Fascist gangs are turning Athens into a city of shifting front lines, seizing on crimes and local protests to promote their own movement, by claiming to be the defenders of recession ravaged Greece.

Thugs wearing the black T-shirts of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party are carrying out attacks on immigrant markets and in public squares, according to the United Nations, with victims speaking of areas in the capital which are now strictly off limits.

Malik Abdulbasset, an Egyptian-born shopkeeper, found himself the target of one of the mobs on Wednesday night after the barber across the road was stabbed during a robbery.

Golden Dawn members led a crowd of enraged locals in a protest on Mikhail Voda St that turned violent despite the presence of riot police.

While no one witnessed the attack on the barber, residents were adamant the assailant was black.

After battering his Egyptian assistant, the mob turned on Mr Abdulbasset, who had defied police to keep his shop open.

"I had to turn and point to my Greek children and my Greek wife and say, look I am Greek, we are Greek, if you want to kill us we cannot stop you but you are killing your own."

The riot police watched on but did not intervene and threats of more protests were pasted on nearby doors. » | Damien McElroy, Athens | Friday, November 02, 2012

Journeyman Pictures: Backlash - Greece

Fear and Loathing in Athens: The Rise of Golden Dawn and the Far Right

THE GUARDIAN: In austerity-ravaged Greece, neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn is on the rise. Their MPs give fascist salutes, while on the streets black-shirted vigilantes beat up immigrants. And some of their most enthusiastic supporters are in the police

You can hear it from blocks away: the deafening beat of Pogrom,Golden Dawn's favourite band, blasting out of huge speakers by a makeshift stage. "Rock for the fatherland, this is our music, we don't want parasites and foreigners on our land…" It's a warm October evening and children on bicycles are riding up and down among the young men with crew cuts, the sleeves of their black T-shirts tight over pumped-up biceps, strolling with the stiff swagger of the muscle-bound. They look relaxed, off-duty. Two of them slap a handshake: "Hey, fascist! How's it going?"

Trestle tables are stacked with Golden Dawn merchandise: black T-shirts bearing the party's name in Greek, Chrysi Avgi, the sigma shaped like the S on SS armbands; mugs with the party symbol, a Greek meander drawn to resemble a swastika; Greek flags and black lanyards, lighters and baseball caps. I lean over to talk to one woman stallholder, dressed in Golden Dawn black with thickly kohl-rimmed eyes, but as soon as she opens her mouth a man in a suit strides up: "What are you writing? Are you a journalist? Tear that page out of your notebook. No, no, you can't talk to anyone."

Tonight is the opening of the Golden Dawn office in Megara, a once prosperous farming town between Athens and Corinth. The Greek national socialist party polled more than 15% here – double the national average – in the June election, when it won 18 seats in parliament. (One was taken up by the former bassist with Pogrom, whose hits include Auschwitz and Speak Greek Or Die.)

Legitimised by democracy and by the media, Golden Dawn is opening branches in towns all over Greece and regularly coming third in national opinion polls. Its black-shirted vigilantes have been beating up immigrants for more than three years, unmolested by the police; lately they've taken to attacking Greeks they suspect of being gay or on the left. MPs participate proudly in the violence. In September, three of them led gangs of black-shirted heavies through street fairs in the towns of Rafina and Messolonghi, smashing up immigrant traders' stalls with Greek flags on thick poles. » | Maria Margaronis | Friday, October 26, 2012

Threats against Journalists: The Aggressive Tactics of the Greek Right Wing

SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: Greek far-right parties could end up with as much as 20 percent of the vote in Sunday's elections. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party has intensified the xenophobic atmosphere in the country. Those who confront them are threatened with violence, journalist Xenia Kounalaki recounts.

At night, the streets leading to Omonoia Square are empty. That wasn't always the case. The area was the premier multicultural neighborhood of Athens and one of the first quarters to be gentrified. Jazz bars and Indian restaurants lined the streets, separated by the occasional rooms-by-the-hour hotel. It was a quarter full of immigrants, drug addicts and African prostitutes, but also of journalists, ambitious young artists and teenagers from private schools.

Today, the immigrants stay home once night falls. They are afraid of groups belonging to the "angry citizens," a kind of militia that beats up foreigners and claims to help the elderly withdraw money from cash machines without being robbed. Such groups are the product of an initiative started by the neo-Nazi Chrysi Avgi -- Golden Dawn -- the party which has perpetrated pogroms in Agios Panteleimon, another Athens neighborhood with a large immigrant population.

There are now three outwardly xenophobic parties in Greece. According to recent surveys, together they could garner up to 20 percent of the vote in elections on Sunday: the anti-Semitic party LAOS stands to win 4 percent; the nationalist party Independent Greeks -- a splinter group of the conservative Nea Dimokratia party -- is forecast to win 11 percent; and the right extremists of Golden Dawn could end up with between 5 and 7 percent.

My name is Xenia, the hospitable. Greece itself should really be called Xenia: Tourism, emigration and immigration are important elements of our history. But hospitality is no longer a priority in our country, a fact which the ugly presence of Golden Dawn makes clear. » | Xenia Kounalaki | Thursday, May 03, 2012

Related »

Fascism Rises from the Depths of Greece's Despair

THE INDEPENDENT: A neo-Nazi party that wants work camps for immigrants is on course to win its first seats in parliament on Sunday

It started, as many days do in Greece, with a trip to the kiosk to buy cigarettes. Still half-asleep, Panayiotis Roumeliotis was surprised to be asked to show his identity card by two young men with shaved heads. It was his first direct contact with the vigilante groups that have become a feature of everyday life in some areas of the Greek capital.

"They were calling themselves the residents association but they were just fasistakia (little fascists)," said the 28-year-old.

Over the last two years, Mr Roumeliotis has watched the central Athens neighbourhood of Ayios Panteleimonas, where he grew up, undergo an ugly transformation. Taking the bus on another morning soon after, a gunshot shattered the back window and a gang of men forced the driver to stop. When the doors opened, they came on to the bus and started to assault the non-Greek passengers. The attackers were wearing T-shirts from the right-wing extremist group Golden Dawn. While panicked people were trying to escape from the bus the men were hitting them with flagpoles.

"They were beating people with the Greek flag," said Mr Roumeliotis.

When the police arrived they stood off until the thugs had finished. When he asked the police why no one had been arrested one of the officers replied to him: "Why, did they do something to you?"

Formerly a solid middle-class neighbourhood, the economic crisis and waves of new arrivals have changed the area and erased old certainties.

Property prices here have dropped to as little as one quarter of what they were five years ago. The Greeks who could afford to have left. For rent signs are plastered over almost every one of the area's shabby five-storey apartment blocks. On the side streets among the North African-run mini markets and Nigerian internet cafes, newcomers from West Africa push shopping trolleys full of scrap metal stripped from deserted buildings. Large-scale drug dealing has overtaken an entire street in the neighbourhood. Violent crime has rocketed.

The square in front of the local church, daubed in anti-immigrant slogans such as "foreigners don't fit in our square", has witnessed pitch battles between anarchists and Golden Dawn supporters. » | Daniel Howden | Friday, May 04, 2012

Controversial Dutch MP Geert Wilders Says Islam Is 'Fascist'

Avertissement de l'antisémitisme! Avertissement du fascisme! Cimetière juif profané à Strasbourg
TRIBUNE DE GENÈVE: TRISTE ANNIVERSAIRE | Dix-huit tombes du cimetière juif du quartier Cronenbourg de Strasbourg ont été marquées de croix gammées, vraisemblablement la nuit dernière, annoncent le Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (Crif) et la police.

"Le cimetière juif de Cronenbourg a été profané, 18 stèles ont été taguées avec une croix gammée inscrite en couleur brune et 13 ont été renversées", a déclaré Patrick Roussel, commissaire principal de la Sûreté départementale du Bas-Rhin (est).

Laurent Schmoll, président de la communauté israélite de Strasbourg, a ajouté que l’inscription "Juden Raus" (Les Juifs dehors) avait également été relevée sur une tombe. >>> AFP | Mercredi 27 Janvier 2010

Now Italy May Follow Switzerland with Referendum on Islamic Minarets
MAIL ONLINE: Italy could be the next European country to consider a referendum on the building of Islamic minarets following the Swiss vote to ban the structures.

Cabinet minister Roberto Calderoli, of the xenophobic Northern League, said Italy should confirm its Roman Catholic roots and hold a vote as soon as possible.

Like the Swiss, Italian voters can have a direct say on an issue if a minimum number of signatures are gathered calling for a referendum.

The League is expected to now start the process for a referendum, despite the Vatican expressing unease over the Swiss vote.

Official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano compared it to a decision by the European Court of Human Rights last month to ban crucifixes from Italian classrooms - a decision that provoked widespread outrage in Italy.

Calderoli said the Swiss decision was a triumphant 'yes to bell towers and no to minarets' that served as an important example for other European countries losing touch with their Christian identities.

He added: 'Respect for other religions is important, but we've got to put the brakes on Muslim propaganda or else we'll end up with an Islamic political party like they have in Spain.'

Others within the anti-immigration Northern League have called for a cross to be inserted on the Italian national flag to symbolise the deep Christian roots of the country.

Italy has one of the tallest minarets in Europe standing just a metre shorter than St Peter's Basilica, at the Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre in Rome.

The country has around 1.2 million Muslims, making Islam the second religion after Catholicism. >>> Nick Pisa | Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Erdogan: „Das ist rassistisch und faschistisch“
DIE PRESSE: Der türkische Premier Erdogan übt herbe Kritik am Schweizer Referendum.

Reccep Tayyip Erdogan. Bild: Die Presse
Ankara/Genf/Rom. Die hitzige Debatte rund um das Ergebnis des Schweizer Referendums über Minarettneubauten geht weiter. Der türkische Ministerpräsident Recep Tayyip Erdogan ortete nun in Europa eine „zunehmende rassistische und faschistische“ Haltung. Vor der Parlamentsfraktion seiner Regierungspartei AKP zeigte sich Erdo?an [sic] besorgt über das Ergebnis der Abstimmung. Islamophobie sei wie Antisemitismus ein „Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit“. Die Schweiz müsse daher das Verbot zurücknehmen. Ebenfalls betroffen zeigte sich der türkische Staatspräsident Abdullah Gül, der das Ergebnis der Abstimmung als „Schande“ bezeichnete. Laut UN-Menschenrechtskommissarin Navi Pillay sei die Abstimmung „klar diskriminierend“ gewesen. Vor allem kritisierte Pillay, dass das Ergebnis nur die islamische Religion beträfe. Die Schweizer würden mit ihrer Entscheidung die Menschenrechte missachten. >>> APA/duö | Dienstag, 01. Dezember 2009