The terror group, Zwickau, turned itself in after a decade of murderous activity undetected by security services. One Greek and eight Turkish immigrants had been killed, along with one policewoman, in a slow and meticulous fascist spree that reads like a script from The Bridge. Alongside this, despite Germany being the country with some of the most advanced anti-fascism legislation in Europe, the far-right National Democratic party NPD was thriving, and the Free Forces, a loose collection of far-right groups, some militarised, some discursive, were becoming bolder.
It is commonplace to worry when the ancient creed of fascism meets modern technology ; the Free Forces, like Isis, seemed to be making a lot of headway and impact using social media. But a more ageless concern was that far-right intellectual heft matters: violent outbursts rely on the build-up of argument. Thugs look as though they have gone past the point of debate because their rage is physically iterated, but in fact they have gone through debate first to get there. Furthermore, the tie Nazis lend a respectability that draws in a new crowd.
When far-right rallies descend into violence, that itself becomes a meme that migrates back to the internet for the tie Nazis to laugh at. The rise of the hipster Nazi , as it were.
The urgent moral question is how to find the language and timbre to take on the tie Nazi as robustly as one would the boot Nazi, since they are, plainly, part of the same body politic.
If one ignores or indulges the tie, the boot will always come as a hideous surprise. A protester at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This article is more than 7 years old. The far right has declared cultural war — we have to stop them now Paul Mason.
