The term “far right” is one that regularly appears in the Irish media. Indeed, it seems to be the new term for “hush puppy Provo”, a phrase that crept into the public discourse back in the bad old days and was used to describe someone – journalist, politician or just people – who did not subscribe to the dominant, Dublin-based, narrative on the North: nationalists (of all hues) bad; unionists (of all hues) good.
Of course, in this case, “far right” is used to describe journalists, politicians or just people, who do not subscribe to the dominant, Dublin-based, narrative on immigration, for example. The “far right” are threatening, and violence will not be long coming in their wake, seems to be the message.
Political violence is undoubtedly something that we should all eschew. A handy rule of thumb is to do no harm to anyone. You really will feel the better for it in the long run. That said, it is odd how much media attention is given to the ‘threat’ of the “far right” when it is in fact the far left who have been putting bodies in graves over many decades.
Witness, for example, the recent arrest of Daniela Klette in Berlin, who is alleged to have been a member of the Red Army Faction, a German terror group who were active from the 1970s into the 1990s and which was also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group.
The arrest sparked a number of stories which reminded people of the group’s activties; 34 killed, bombings and robberies. It re-opened some old wounds and some forgotten, or ignored perhaps, history about the left and its penchant for violence.
Indeed, bringing the memory of this group out from forgettfulness also reminds us of the activities of another German terror group, the Revolutionary Cells, who were responsible for the hijacking of an airliner in 1976 and landing it in Entebbe, Uganda. That flight had many Israeli citizens on board and the Israeli government launched a rescue mission which ended in the deaths of German members of the Revolutionary Cells and Ugandan troops. The Israeli soldier who led that assault was one Yonatan Netanyahu and he was killed during the action. He was the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who is leading the assault on Hamas in Gaza, a group who are holding, once again, Israeli hostages.
Of course, you can also throw Italy’s Red Brigades into the mix for far-left violence; they killed around 50 people from the mid 1970s until the late 1980s and were not afraid of kidnapping, most infamously Aldo Moro, the Italian prime minister and, of course, bombings too.
You can add ETA in the Basque Country to the list and, of course, Ireland has provided more than enough examples of left-wing violence from the Provisional IRA, the INLA and, of course, the Official IRA.
(Was there a certain cachet amongst the Dublin intelligentsia that the Workers’ Party had enough shadowy connections to make you feel like a revolutionary but not so blatant that anyone was actually going to ask you to mind some guns? This writer vividly remembers one journalistic acquaintance in the 1990s, perfectly pleasant and no hard man by any stretch of the imagination, happily admitting that he joined the Workers’ Party knowing full well they had a paramilitary wing.)
What would constitute the far-right in Irish terms anyway? Loyalist paramilitaries, perhaps? But to write about those groups would involve asking some hard questions about the upper echelons of polite unionism back in the bad old days and, without doubt, hard questions of the British government too. Indeed, it might also involve asking some awkward questions of the Dublin media corps and its bias fadó fadó.
Or perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s activities? There are few northern nationalists, of whatever hue, who do not believe that there was a “shoot-to-kill” policy in operation for a number of years under her government. Then again, raising those sort of questions might move you from the ‘far-right’ bracket to the ‘conspiracy theorist’ one.
The attacks carried out by Anders Behring Brevik in Norway in 2011 were undoubtedly by the murderous far right but, horrific as those events were, they were the work of one man. There was no network of the sustained and organised level of the RAF, Red Brigades, ETA or IRA. Other bloody attacks in Western Europe in recent years have been linked to Islamic terrorism and not far-right militias.
Writing on the online site, The Conversation, about Klette’s arrest, Cardiff University academic, Claudia Hillebrand, noted that many of the killings carried out by the Red Army Faction had not yet been solved and families were still looking for more information about these events.
(That sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?)
Hillebrand concluded her article bluntly: “The RAF never managed to shake Germany’s democratic order in any seriousness but Klette’s case is a reminder that the story of far-left terrorism is not over, decades later. Culprits are still on the run and potentially still committing violent crimes to fund their existence – and many questions remain unanswered.”
A spectre is haunting Europe alright…