From Charlottesville to Athens, how do we deal with the neonazi international?

During the Charlottesville events in Virginia last week, we saw a bizarre instance of transnational solidarity and exchange of compliments, fit for the age of social media. In an interview with Vice News, Matthew Heimbach, one of the organisers of the far-right rally, said in no uncertain terms that him and his fellow white supremacists, have been inspired by Greece’s far-right party Golden Dawn.
A few hours later Golden Dawn responded through its spokesperson Illias Kasidiaris (who is currently facing charges of heading a criminal organisation), declaring that the rally was a “dynamic demonstration against illegal immigration” by “American patriots”.
This might seem bizarre to people with the slightest grasp of the history of Greeks in the US. Once, not that long ago, they were the ones labelled “illegal immigrants” and became the targets of racist slurs and even attacks by the KKK. In fact, Greeks weren’t considered ‘white’.
How this strange relationship — which defies commonsensical perceptions of the far-right — came to be of course, is no mystery to those of us who have been monitoring the network of far-right groups that is becoming increasingly interconnected across the globe.
It was only in March, 2015 that Matthew Heimbach, the white supremacist speaking to Vice, visited Greece. In photos taken by the Golden Dawn itself, we see him taking a tour of the Parliament building alongside the party’s leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos.

He is but one of possibly dozens of international far-right activists who have visited the country, to learn from the electoral success of the Golden Dawn, that seems to have built a solid block of almost half a million voters, which ranks them as the third largest party and grants them 17 seats in the Greek parliament.
If “America First” can sit alongside “Greece for Greeks” and, together with their British, Polish and other counterparts, get behind Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, while openly admiring strongmen like Modi, Duterte and (of course) Putin, we must look beyond just race and nation to understand what binds together these seemingly heterogeneous groups and individuals.
The answer is of course simple: power. Raw, unaccountable, unlimited power. Their gripe is not with individual groups, but with democracy itself. It isn’t so much superiority over other nations, but unshackled majoritarianism within individual countries, the freedom to trample on the weak as a form of governance. Cosmopolitanism becomes the arc-enemy because the individual who doesn’t abide by nations is able to not only refuse this absolute control, but escape it and wage intellectual war perhaps from abroad.
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario, as every dictator in modern history has had to face the loud voices of dissent domestically and internationally. And while the people trapped within a country’s border can be silenced, those abroad are a much harder target. Therefore the big plan becomes to turn every country into a prison under undemocratic, unaccountable control.
This is where the adoration for dictator Assad comes from. When his population rose up with demands of democracy and more justice, he cracked down on them with an iron fist and is still alive and in control, able to boast about it. He became a strongman to emulate. The Golden Dawn went as far as to send its representatives to meet him at his palace, and there are even rumours of Greek far-right activists fighting in Assad’s ranks.
Of course these people are deluded and if they got their “ideal world” they’d be at each others throats in no time at all. But that doesn’t make their plans any less dangerous. From the US to Greece, people have been murdered in the name of this paranoid fantasy of absolute control. Especially in the US, where we saw militias armed to the teeth ready for violence, the situation could spin out of control really quickly.
It is time we stop looking at the rise of the far-right as separate phenomena in each individual country. A first step would be to label adoptions of the far-right agenda by the mainstream as what they are, dangerous opportunism and cheap demagoguery which simply emboldens it. A second, more practical step, would be to start dealing with far-right groups as the outward looking, decentralised and international networks that they are, rather than almost metaphysical manifestations of irrational anger. There is a rationale there and it doesn’t simply boil down to racism or economic frustrations. A third, will be to act quickly to deal with manifestations of the phenomenon if and when it manifests at government level (for example in Hungary and Poland).
It is a paradox, but for tolerance to survive, we can’t tolerate the intolerant (as Karl Popper put it in 1945). It’s shameful for the EU to still look on while the Polish government stages attempt after attempt to consolidate power. It should be made clear that for instance, illiberal governments that break the fundamental tenets of the EU will lose access to funds (as almost happened both with Poland and Hungary). Firmer, more far-reaching action is clearly demanded from every side. Otherwise the list that includes Trayvon Martin, Shehzad Luqman, Pavlos Fyssas, Joe Cox and Heather Heyer among many others, will just keep getting longer.
