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Conservative think tanks and right wing realpolitik


Part of the offensive Tory lifestyle
marketing of
Cameron




What do right wing fascists and right wing Tories have in common? Anything?

If you live in a capitalist system and that system is under threat then the response of the most powerful stakeholders in that system is to abolish democracy and all forms of protest and install a military-fascist dictatorship when capitalism is threatened.

Cameron pretends to be a compassionate Conservative, a so called Red Tory. Some Tory marketeers even have the temerity to produce T-shirts with the face of David Cameron as Che Guevara. This is the man that fronts the compassionate party with links to the ultra-right in Europe.
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We like to forget just how popular Hitler was with the upper class in Britain in the 20s and 30s. Too many in the British establishment thought Hitler was setting Germany to rights before and after he took power.

David Cameron's aristcratic forebears, on the whole, approved of Hitler and of eliminating the chaos caused by the enemy within: the striking workers, the demonstrating Communists and Socialists. The British establishment was also, on the whole, racist - anti-semitic.
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But what is the connection between the "right" of a mass murdering fascists like Hitler and the right of a soft Red Tory

Well the point is that capitalism is not really under attack in Britain. They can still afford to look caring at home. But look at what the Tories want to do. They use Orwellian language, they use double-speak and the language of Bernays. The life-style marketeers use words like community and compassion to disguise the fact that they want to roll back the achievements of the Labour government of 1945.


The Conservatives have a plan to privatise education and the NHS and every other aspect of the public sector with the exception of the army and police. These they see, rightly, as the defenders of the establishment. Just how touchy-feely is that? Not very.
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In 1975 though, according to documents released under the freedom of information act, there were preparations in place for a coup d'etat against Wilson. No, really, there were. At the time the New Statesman and I think it was Duncan Campbell who exposed it, ran articles on the plot by the right in Britain. It was dismissed in the rest of the press and by politicians as a conspiracy theory, but it turns out that the New Statesman was right all along.
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Not much has been made of this revelation since. Remember this was one year before the communist participation in Italy was sabotaged by a well-funded covert campaign and the same year when left leaning leader in Australia, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed as Prime Minister by the governor general of Australia. Things don't have to go too far to the left before the right stops being cuddly and thoughtful and instead starts to show its sharp teeth.
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When there is no direct threat to vested interest and the status quo, the recourse of the right is not mass killings in stadiums and coup d'etats or the iron fist, but ideological warfare in order to entrench inequality in our society and permit the continued control by those people and interest groups who are rich and powerful and to ensure that ordinary citizens have little or no influence and are no threat.
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The following institutions listed display the ideological weaponry in waiting of the right. Some of them are wolves in sheeps' clothing. Some of them are just wolves. My grandfather always used to quote his boss, the head of Bernard Moteurs, who said:
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"I always read L'Humanite" (the French Communist newspaper) because I need to know what the enemy is thinking."


Well glance through the guff on these right wing websites. See if you can identify the strategies that they are using to manipulate public opinion. Expose them on your blog sites. See if you can flush the ultra-rightists from the soft Red Tory undergrowth they hide under. In particular pay attention to the the profound double-speak of Philip Blond on his Tory blog ResPublica.



American Enterprise Institute
Association for Liberal Thinking (Turkey)
Atlantic Bridge (UK/US)
Atlantic Partnership (UK/US)
Australian Polity
Center for Economic Development (Bulgaria)
Center for Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (Montenegro)
Center for Institutional Analysis and Development (Romania)
Center for Liberal-Democratic Studies (Serbia)
Center for the Study of Democracy (Bulgaria)
Centre for Independent Studies (Aus)
Centre for Liberal Strategies (Bulgaria)
Club For Growth (US)
Club Nouveau Siécle (Fr)
Competitive Enterprise Institute (US)
Economic Policy Research Institute (Macedonia)
Ekome (Greece)
Ethics and Public Policy Center (US)
Fondation Concorde (Fr)
Fondation pour l'Innovation Politique (Fr)
Fondation Robert Schuman (Fr)
Fraser Institute (Can)
Free Market Center (Serbia)
Free Market Foundation (SA)
Globalisation Institute (EU)
Hellenic Leadership Institute (Greece)
Heritage Foundation (US)
Hoover Institution (US)
Hudson Institute (US)
Institut Turgot (Fr)
Institute for Market Economics (Bulgaria)
Institute for Strategic Studies and Prognoses (Montenegro)
Institute of Public Affairs (Aus)
International Democrat Union
Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (Israel)
Leadership Institute (US)
Liberté Chérie (Fr)
Manhattan Institute (US)
Maxim Institute (NZ)
Menzies Research Centre (Australia)
Montreal Economic Institute (Can)
Movement for European Reform (EU)
Riinvest (Kosovo)
Romania Thinktank
Society for Individual Liberty (Bulgaria)
Stockholm Network (Europe)
Taxpayers Federation (Can)
Thatcher Center for Freedom (US)

Comments

DomzaNet said…
O.k., Phil.

Ja, well, no, fine; but I have a hard time thinking of the Tories as fascists, even though I am a communist and the main thing about fascists is anti-communism. The Tories are anti-communist, of course I do see that.

But hell, the thing about fascism, as practice, is arbitrary bourgeois power. You talk about the coup plot of Cecil King. It was a farce. The ousting of Whitlam was serious, but it did not stop Whitlam from contesting the subsequent election, which he lost. It was a crisis where the Oz upper house, in which Whitlam did not have a majority, had refused to pass the budget. It was procedural, even if it was brutal.

The trouble with labelling the Tories as fascists is that it creates an artificially wide distance between them and the Labour Party, a distance which for most practical purposes does not exist, in my opinion.

Labelling the Tories as fascists encourages the British communists to support the Labour Party and not to oppose it in elections, contrary to the advice of Karl Marx in such circumstances, for one.

Also, in a real anti-fascist crunch you would need a lot of those Tories on your side. It is by no means certain that the Labour would not provide any supporters for fascism. Mosely was in the Labour Party before he launched his fascist party and I am fairly sure that Cecil King was Labour, too, at the time of his weird coup plot.

Sure, the think tanks. But the communists still have the best intellectuals.
Philip Hall said…
Aren't the Tories good time fascists?
DomzaNet said…
No, I don't think the Tories are "good time fascists".

The Tory Party has deliberately and consciously relied on the consent of the mass franchise since the time of Benjamin Disraeli. The Tory Party depends on the working-class vote.

You may say that in a Machiavellian calculation, even a tyrant has to take account of the popular will.

But that argument avoids examination of the performance of the opponents of the Tories. The Tory Party plays by the rules, and wins. The rules in question are those of mass national democracy.

In South Africa, we are struggling to establish the national democracy. We are having a National Democratic Revolution. As we do so we create the opportunity for bourgeois democrats to bend this democracy that we have created to their own purposes.

Lenin quoted Switzerland and the USA in his time as countries that had the most highly-developed democracy, and at the same time the most hopelessly subjugated proletariat.

Appeals for support on the bare basis that the Tories are fascists, or that the BNP or UKIP are fascists, draws you away from what you have to do to if you are going to use the democracy for revolutionary purposes. That is to organise and to form the masses into a revolutionary collective Subject. This work never gets done in Britain. Britain has been marking time like an electoral metronome between Labour and Tory for nearly a century.
Philip Hall said…
"But that argument avoids examination of the performance of the opponents of the Tories. The Tory Party plays by the rules, and wins. The rules in question are those of mass national democracy."

This is such a cheering thought. It takes a South African communist to have such a positive view of the Tories.

OK, the Tories are not exactly fascists, but what is the relationship between right wing fascism Conservative right wingers?


Look at Latin America. Look at Pinochet. Who supported Pinochet? Who supported the coup attempts against Chavez? These are the same people who would otherwise have been happy with a Conservative government.

Surely it is when the masses began to be "organised into a revolutionary collective Subject" that the core of the support for the Conservatives in these countries turned to support a military dictatorship.

I think there is a relationship between the Tories and Fascism. But what is that relationship?
Philip Hall said…
And one thing is difficult to explain. Why, if these are supposed to be Red Tories - Social Democrats - have the Conservatives made alliances with some of the ultra right parties in Eastern Europe.
Philip Hall said…
"Conservative Central Office insists it has no official links with the YBF and does not pay it for its services, but it strongly recommends activists attend Blaney's courses"

http://www.ybf.org.uk/

Trawl through this website to see how "moderate" the Red Tories really are.
DomzaNet said…
South Africa approached fascism in terms, not of the National Party simpliciter, but of the National Security Management System which attempted to integrating the political authority with the military, police and courts and the corporate monopolies in a single command and control structure. At that point, the situation where everything that was not compulsory was forbidden, was in sight, but was never quite reached, to a large extent because the bourgeoisie would not stomach it.

A "links-to" principle of politics isn't capable of defining fascism in these exact terms and misses the essential inefficiency of running capitalism as a command-and-control system. Fascism is not a "sustainable" way of running capitalism and is unpopular with real capitalists, who must have "free" workers that they can extract surplus value from in the way described in Marx's "Capital".

All of the fascist experiments of the 20th century were short-lived. Britain stood alone against the Nazis under a Tory - Churchill. In Britain every second adult that you meet is likely to be a Tory, and they are not very distinguishable from your average right-wing Labourite.

I think you are devaluing the term "fascist", for sectarian and not for class-analytical purposes.
Philip Hall said…
"running capitalism as a command-and-control system."

When I say link then I should say I suppose, the link between bourgoise social democratic government and fascism.

Why did the corporates support Hitler's rise to power in Germany? Who voted for Hitler and why did they do so? Who would they otherwise have voted for. Neither have you responded to my point about Allende.

If what you say is sufficient to define fascism adequately, and I am not sure that it does, then the link to capitalism is actually there in your definition.

But you don't make the link explicit enough. Fascism runs capitaism when capitalism can't run itself. Well how does it get there in the first place.

Sectarian purposes?
Philip Hall said…
Perhaps I would be wrong to make a direct comparison between right wing parties like the Conservatives and right wing dictatorships. But I'm not doing that, Im just pointing out that they are linked. One runs capitalism in the good times, the other is the last resort of capitalism.

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