*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- The Fight Around "No Platform For Fascists" In Britain- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard", Number 952, dated February 12, 2010,article,"Britain: Fascists Feed On Labor Party Racism".

Markin comment:

It is always important for communist militants to get the position being polemicized in favor of here, "No Platform For Fascists", right. On some issues there is, even within our narrower communist perspective of driving the class struggle forward, more than one possible right way to look at the situation. This is not one of them. We have nothing to "debate" with the para-military thugs, or rather we will "debate" them in the streets when, and if, the time comes. One of the most painful, and dearly bought, lessons that we have learned from the communist struggles of the 20th century is that this rabble has to be stopped in the egg. While almost everyone, including communists, prefers to work in a democratic environment we are are under no obligation to defend the rights of fascists to do anything. One of the problems in the United States, and this comment extends to Britain as well, is that we have lived in a relatively democratic society for so long that we have gotten "soft" around some of these issues of who our enemies are, and what they will do to us if they ever get a chance. We must not give the fascists that chance.

I will invoke a little personal history here to make a point. I do not know if it was some working class instinct, or just growing up in a place in society where the working poor and the lumpen elements from whom the fascists recruits their "shock troops" intersected but I have always had a visceral hatred for the fascists. Even when I was nothing but an up-and-coming young liberal politico on the make I always disagreed with the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) so-called absolute defense of free speech that also encompassed the rights of fascists to that privilege. The most graphic example of that in my youth was their defense of George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazis, to spew his garbage. Later, during the 1970s the ACLU went on to disgrace themselves further by defending the right of fascists to march through heavily Jewish, heavily Holocaust survivor Skokie, Illinois. My blood still runs cold just thinking of that even today. And if anyone needs any further reminder of what we are are up against- Remember Germany 1933(and 1923, for that matter, when Hitler first raised his head and the German revolution that could have changed things around failed to materialize paving his way forward), Remember Greensboro, North Carolina 1979, and Remember our slogan-Never Again! "No Platform For Fascists"!