News and Letters Youth Column June 1998

Europe's youth set anti-racist example

by Kevin Michaels

The results of an April 26 election in Saxony-Anhalt, a state in eastern Germany, startled many who have overlooked or ignored the resurgence of the forces of the extreme Right since reunification of the country in 1989. A party called the German People's Union (DVU) captured 13% of the vote on a

platform of violent hostility towards immigrant labor, despite the fact that foreign-born people make up only two percent of the population of eastern Germany, and even less than that in Saxony-Anhalt itself. A disturbing element of the DVU's electoral success is that 27% of the voters who supported it are under the age of 30. Gerhard Frey, the DVU's leader, reacted to this by stating that "voting right-wing is part of youth culture, like techno [music] or skateboarding."

Emboldened by the vote results, a larger and more established far-right party, the National Party of Germany organized a large rally in the eastern city of Leipzig on May 1. Estimates of the turnout range from three to six thousand people. A small contingent of anti-racist demonstrators protesting the rally was set upon and beaten by police.

This phenomenon of large and violent right-wing organizations with a substantially young constituency is by no means limited to Germany, although that country alone saw 2,353 reported instances of racist attacks in 1996. Britain, the Scandinavian countries and the Czech Republic all have organized racist movements which encourage attacks on immigrants, Roma and Jews. Most menacing is France's National Front, the virulently anti-immigrant party which increasingly figures as an electoral threat which may overtake the "establishment" right-wing parties of that country.

Despite Gerhard Frey's assertion that the right has won Europe's youth, however, large and energetic organizations have risen to challenge these racists. Activists in the Republic of Ireland recently organized a nationwide mobilization on April 25 to protest their government's anti-immigrant policy. Marchers in Dublin, Cork and Limerick turned out. Radical youth in Slovakia and the Czech Republic have been active in the defense of Roma, who are often targeted for racist attacks. And in France, a direct challenge to the threat of the National Front exists in the form of Ras l'Front, a large youth organization created in part by the revolutionary left to combat the upsurge of racism and fascism.

These efforts of European anti-racist youth should serve as a model for a similar movement in North America, one that will combine aggressive confrontation of violent racists in the streets with the development and dissemination of the idea of a new society, free from racism. Since the breakup of the integrated organizations of the Civil Rights Movement era though, the former element, the street-fighting model, has predominated over the latter.

Without doubt, America's Klan movement is a terroristic one which has historically employed murder as its chief weapon. While its factions should be physically denied every venue they seek out to publicize their message, as activists succeeded in doing in Ann Arbor, Mich., on May 9 when the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were driven from the steps of City Hall, to neglect the task of developing the idea of what should replace existing racist society fails to put American civilization itself on trial.

This task should be the goal of North American anti-racists: to mount a thoroughgoing challenge to racism which attacks its integrality with capitalism itself. The growing ranks of prison solidarity and anti-police brutality activists can build such a movement, one such as European youth are developing, if they seek to unite theory and practice in the street, in their newspapers and leaflets and in the way in which they organize themselves on principles of democracy and racially integrated participation.


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