Wall Street Journal impressed by New Fascism. posted by Richard Seymour

The trend in European far right parties has for some time been to publicly abandon their traditional antisemitic stance, embrace Israel (since they never minded its racist repression of Arabs, only its status as 'the Jewish state'), and redirect the pogrom toward Muslims. The Wall Street Journal has noticed (link from Islamophobia Watch), and reports on developments in Belgium, where the far right Vlaams Belang is having an ideological facelift:

Younger party leaders, realizing their anti-Semitic taint was poison, began making pro-Israel overtures. And the party's tough-on-crime, hostile-to-Muslims stance began to attract a considerable share of the Jewish vote, particularly among Orthodox Antwerp Jews who felt increasingly vulnerable in the face of the city's hostile Muslim community. Today, Vlaams Belang is the largest single party in the country.

And don't think the WSJ is put off an otherwise fully subscribable neoconservative programme by the Muslim-bashing element. Oh no - the reporter goes on to fulminate about the terrible political correctness in Belgium that prevents the government from dealing with crime, which is the usual paranoid fascist rant. And he goes on:

Meanwhile, the real fascists in Belgium are gaining strength, largely protected from scrutiny by the country's "anti-racism" legislation. At Brussels's Imam Reza mosque, a preacher commemorated the 17th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini's death: "The enemies cannot extinguish the light of the Islamic Revolution." And in Molenbeek, the newspaper Het Volk published a study of the local Muslim population: The editor, Gunther Vanpraet, described the commune as "a breeding ground for thousands of Jihad candidates".

Wicked, naughty anti-racism legislation! The Muslims are the "real fascists", because a preacher chose to commemorate the Islamic Revolution (which, er, wasn't a fascist revolution) and because a racist newspaper editor made a racist comment. That is to say, the racist conclusions of racists are proof of the validity of those racist conclusions.

The WSJ has been the mouthpiece of the most comically reactionary segment of US capital for some years. In 2005, it reported that its readership profile was 60% top management, with an average income of $191,000, an average household net worth of $2.1 million, and an average age of 55. And, as it did not report, an average colour of white and an average gender of male. This isn't a tiny number of people: they have 712,000 paid subscribers: more than enough, if it came to it, to mount a coup I should think. Now, it's reasonably well-known that the actual news reporting in the paper is much more sane and realistic than the editorial department, which the news division sometimes characterises as "Nazis", with good reason. I should say the division of labour is roughly as follows: the news team gives the owners of America the information they need to make a killing; the editorial teams gives them the bigoted, moralistic, supremacist attitudes they require to make a killing. On this evidence, they're presently given to providing psychic fuel for putschist wing of the capitalist class. Because after all, the "real fascists" are the brown people.