The Germ of Hate Spreads in Russia

The terror attack on Moscow's main airport last week has fuelled the flames of xenophobia in Russia. The Kremlin isn't intervening to halt the trend that could cause deep rifts in the country's multiethnic society.

The wreckage at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport had hardly been removed before a young man in St. Petersburg had incorporated the attack into his election campaign.

Andrey Kuznetsov, a computer engineer with neatly parted brown hair, is campaigning for a seat in the regional parliament as a representative of the extreme right-wing party Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI). Kuznetsov wants to see guest workers that have come to St. Petersburg from Central Asia and the Caucasus expelled or at least required "to live in certain neighborhoods, so that they can be monitored more easily."

On Tuesday, the day after the suicide bombing at Domodedovo Airport, which has been traced to groups in the Caucasus, DPNI supporters protested in St. Petersburg's Kupchino neighborhood. One of the party's activists had been stabbed and wounded by an Azerbaijani.

"The war in the Caucasus has arrived in our cities," says Kuznetsov. "We send them money, and they send us terrorists." President Dmitry Medvedev's strategy of trying to pacify the region with billions in investment is a "bad joke," says Kuznetsov. "The experiences in Germany and France show that Muslims do not assimilate. We have to keep them out."

On the Brink of Disintegration?

The right-wing extremists' demands are also meeting with approval among ordinary citizens. A radical form of Islam is gaining the upper hand in the Caucasus. More than 40 percent of Russians favor the secession of the region. The number of attacks there has doubled within a year, and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians have fled to Russia. The wars the Kremlin waged in Chechnya and Georgia were in vain, and today the majority of Russians no longer want Chechens, Dagestanis, Ingush and Balkars as fellow citizens.

Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, terrorism is challenging not only Moscow's control of the Caucasus but also Russia's future as a multiethnic society. The country is home to more than 100 nationalities. Muslims make up 20 million of a population of 141 million, and seven million guest workers contribute to prosperity in Russia. In surveys, however, 36 percent of Moscow residents say that they feel "hatred" toward Chechens.

The writer Victor Erofeyev believes that "extreme nationalism is the germ that could lead to the country's disintegration." The nationalist-communist weekly newspaper Zavtra even sees a civil war on the horizon.

Last year, 37 people were reportedly killed in racist acts of violence against non-Russians. In October, the mayor of the town of Khotkovo near Moscow announced a "self-cleansing" campaign. Ironically, it was on the Day of National Unity that right-wing extremists set fire to a dormitory for foreigners and businesses fired all non-Slavic employees. In December, a radical mob staged a protest in front of the Kremlin, complete with Hitler salutes, and hunted down Muscovites with southern features -- all because a Russian football fan had been stabbed by people from the Caucasus. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin laid flowers at the grave of the victim and threatened to tighten immigration rules.

Playing with Xenophobia

A few days after Putin's appearance, the Moscow police chief announced that he intended "to examine whether liberal and democratic principles are truly compatible with the interests of the public." He wants to reintroduce the strict Soviet-era registration system, which significantly limited unrestricted movement around the country.

However, betting on the chauvinistic feelings of a deeply insecure nation has always been risky. In 2003, the Kremlin launched the nationalist Rodina (Motherland) Party, headed by the charismatic politician Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's current ambassador to NATO in Brussels. When Rodina promptly captured 9.2 percent of the vote, Kremlin planners dropped their support for the party because of its "xenophobia."

At the end of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin and the intelligence service created the LPDR, the party of nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, to lure away voters from the communists. Zhirinovsky has since become the vice-chairman of the Russian parliament. Four days before the airport bombing, Zhirinovsky was given several minutes of airtime on state-owned television to agitate against people from the Caucasus, calling them "those thieves and speculators who neither work nor learn anything." The ultranationalist his face beet-red, shouted into the microphone: "We shit on the Caucasus. We've been fed up with it for a long time."

Neither Medvedev nor Putin called Zhirinovsky to order.

Spiegel Online

Thanks to NewsHound for the heads-up

The BNP represents Britain's workers? They don't even represent basic British craftsmanship

I was born in the 70s and grew up in a tiny rural village. There was, I think, only one black kid in my primary school. One day, someone pushed him over and called him "blackjack". The headmaster called an impromptu assembly. It involved the entire school, and took place outdoors. No doubt: this was unusual.

We stood in military rows in the playground. I must have been about six, so I can't remember the words he used, but the substance stuck. He spoke with eerie, measured anger. He'd fought in the second world war, he told us. Our village had a memorial commemorating friends of his who had died. Many were relatives of ours. These villagers gave their lives fighting a regime that looked down on anyone "different", that tried to blame others for any problem they could find; a bullying, racist regime called "the Nazis". Millions of people had died thanks to their bigotry and prejudice. And he told us that anyone who picked on anyone else because they were "different' wasn't merely insulting the object of their derision, but insulting the headmaster himself, and his dead friends, and our dead relatives, the ones on the war memorial. And if he heard of anyone - anyone - using racist language again, they'd immediately get the slipper.

Corporal punishment was still alive and well, see. The slipper was his nuclear bomb.

It was the first time I was explicitly told that racism was unpleasant and it was a lesson served with a side order of patriot fries. Or rather, chips. Our headmaster had fought for his country, and for tolerance, all at once. That's what I understood it meant to be truly "British": to be polite, and civil and fair of mind. (And to occasionally wallop schoolkids with slippers, admittedly, but we'll overlook that, OK? We've moved on.)

But according to the BNP, I'm wrong. Being British is actually about feeling aggressed, mistrustful, overlooked, isolated, powerless, and petrified of "losing my identity". Britishness incorporates a propensity to look around me with jealous eyes, fuming over imaginary sums of money being doled out to child-molesting asylum-seekers by corrupt PC politicians who've lost touch with the common man - a common man who, coincidentally, happens to be white.

They're wrong, obviously. None of these qualities has anything whatsoever to do with being British, but everything to do with ugly nationalist politics. And ugly nationalist politics are popular all over the world. Just like Pringles. Every country has its own tiny enclave of frightened, disenfranchised, misguided souls clinging to their national flag, claiming they're the REAL patriots, saying everyone's out to get them. It's an international weakness. For the BNP to claim to be more British than the other British parties is as nonsensical as your dad suddenly claiming to have invented the beard.

The other day, the BNP had a political broadcast on the box. I wasn't in my beloved homeland at the time, but I heard about it, via internet chuckles of derision. Fellow geeky types tweeting about the poor production values. I looked it up on YouTube. Sure enough, it was badly made. No surprise there. Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they'd have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don't. They've got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.

But there's more to the advert's failure than its hideous use of colour schemes. Every aspect of it is bad. The framing is bad. The sound is bad. The script is bad. For all their talk about representing the Great British Worker, when it comes to promotional material, the BNP can't even represent the most basic British craftsmanship.

Nick Griffin's first line is "Don't turn it off!", which in terms of opening gambits is about as enticing as hearing someone shout "Try not to be sick!" immediately prior to intercourse. He goes on to claim that, "We're all angry about professional politicians with their snouts in the public trough." He's right, we are: so angry we're prepared to instantly forget all the occasions we've fiddled our own expenses, thereby enabling us to add a dash of undeserved self-righteousness to our existing justified anger.

But by referring to "professional politicians", Griffin is presumably suggesting we should elect amateurs instead. Maybe that's why the advert's so amateurish. Maybe that's why all the BNP representatives in the ad read their lines so clumsily, like DFS employees in a bank holiday sale commercial circa 1986, or recently revived chemical coma patients being forced to recite barcode numbers at gunpoint. It's deliberate incompetence. Don't vote for those nasty slick parties. Vote for a shoddy one! Never mind the extremism, feel the ineptitude.

Here's a fantasy. We - the decent British majority - spend years toiling in secret, creating a life-size replica of Britain in the middle of the Pacific. It's identical down to the tiniest blade of grass, or branch of Gregg's. And one night, while every member of the BNP is asleep, we whisk them via helicopter to this replica UK, this Backup Britain. Put them in replica beds in replica homes. Then we fly back home to watch the fun on CCTV.

For several weeks, they walk around, confused, but pleased. The weather's nice! More importantly, there are no black faces! Then the infrastructure breaks down and they start to starve, and there's no one to blame but themselves. And then someone with GPS on their phone works out what's happened, realises they've all become immigrants in their own land. Half of them go mad and start attacking each other. The rest desperately apply for asylum in Britain. The real Britain. The decent, tolerant Britain. The country you can be proud of.

Guardian

We must vote the BNP out of politics

Imagine an experiment to create fertile conditions for a far-right political party to thrive. You might start with an exhausted government. You would hang a pall of petty corruption over it - some systematic expenses fiddling, perhaps. Then you would throw in an economic crisis, high levels of immigration and a surge in unemployment. You would incubate the mix in a culture of contempt for mainstream politics.

No wonder Labour is worried about a surge in support for the British National party in local and European elections next month. As the Observer reports today, the ultra-nationalists look within reach of European parliamentary seats for the first time.

The BNP has often before hovered around the threshold of electoral breakthrough. The alarm is raised and the threat subsides. It is then argued that needless alarm advances the far-right cause; that the BNP thrives on publicity from panic-stricken liberals; that disapproval from Westminster burnishes their anti-establishment credentials; that they should be left to suffocate in media silence. That is not an option in the digital age. The BNP doesn't need mainstream media to get its message across. And it doesn't need any help persuading voters that their interests go unheeded by out-of-touch politicians in Westminster.

The BNP gets much more attention than other fringe parties because the doctrine of extreme nationalism is a nasty virus in the body politic. It cannot be ignored. It must be engaged and defeated.

That means raising the alarm to combat apathy. The proportional representation system in European elections means that tiny parties can do well out of a modest showing in a low overall turnout. Even a small increase in the numbers bothering to vote for other parties can put a cap on the far right's performance.

But the BNP also needs to be beaten with old-fashioned political argument. Its flimsy policies should be rebutted and its underlying motive - to foment fear and inter-racial tension - should be exposed. The BNP works hard to shed its skinhead image. Rule No 1 of its "language and concepts discipline manual" tells activists not to identify the party as "racist". Rule No 4 instructs them to obey the law. What kind of organisation needs to remind its members not to be thugs?

The BNP has traditionally submerged its "whites first" agenda in the language of economic opportunity. It has campaigned on crime, housing, education, jobs and links them all to immigration. It projects real policy concerns through a prism of race. That creates a tricky balancing act for local MPs who have to persuade voters that they are concerned about the problems without adopting the BNP's analysis of their cause.

It is true that many working-class white communities have fared badly under Labour. But that doesn't mean non-whites are winning at their expense. The idea that there is a fixed pool of success - that one person's gain is another's loss - is a basic fallacy in far-right thinking. But the BNP turns the shame of underachievement into an aggrieved sense of ethnic expropriation.

The same approach is now applied to the issue of MPs' expense claims. The public perception of a Westminster elite on the make allows the BNP to project itself as a party of anti-political outsiders. The race issue is thus submerged even deeper. But it is there. When the BNP claims to speak for "ordinary people" against the establishment, it still means "white people".

The best antidote to the far right would be a movement that aspires to represent everyone who feels disenfranchised, alienated, excluded, regardless of race; a movement that promotes solidarity among poorer voters instead of dividing them. It would speak with moral authority against a political system that looks, to many voters, grotesquely skewed in the interests of a narrow, wealthy elite.

That no Westminster party can credibly deliver such a message shames the government. It was once the job of the Labour Party.

Observer