the stench of fascism

[Hannah Bell]

There is a stench of fascism arising from the anti-immigrant, law-and-order measures being implemented by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Policies and methods which people had hoped were forever left behind in the 1930s and 1940s are being revived by the European bourgeoisie in an attempt to deal with the consequences of the global economic crisis.

There is no clearer example than the mass deportations of Roma, a population once targeted for extermination by the Nazis. They and their collaborators killed between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma. The French collaborationist Vichy authorities raided Roma communities and held their inhabitants in concentration camps such as Jargeau, near Orléans.

While European governments do not yet encourage anti-Semitism, in part due to popular awareness of the Holocaust, they encourage and exploit anti-Roma hatred.

Other measures proposed by Sarkozy also borrow directly from the legal arsenal of fascism. Having moved to ban the burqa, the government aims to strip French citizenship from naturalized citizens who clash with the police. It is also threatening parents of juvenile delinquents with jail time if their children violate restrictions placed upon them by the justice system.

The last time France revoked citizens’ nationality for non-capital crimes was under the Vichy regime, which took away 7,000 Jews’ citizenship. Holding families criminally responsible for actions of their members, the Nazis’ Sippenhaft policy, has been condemned as barbaric since the collapse of the Third Reich.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/pers-a25.shtml

[zbdent]

1. what cracks me up is how these people claim that the conditions are

similar to the times leading up to the Nazi rise in power.

What the "liberal media" seems to refuse to cover is the fact that they are the ones who would already supported the types of people and plans which were far more like the regime which took place in the 30s ...