Séamas O'Reilly: Appeasing the far-right won't placate them — they'll just want the next cruelty
Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
I studied German in school and there was nothing I enjoyed better than the oral essays; a speech I could prepare in advance so my grammar and syntax wouldn’t be so obviously terrible, delivered on pre-agreed themes like German history or culture.
The only one that’s ever stuck with me was on the history of Fanta, the popular fizzy orange drink, invented in Nazi Germany.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Coca-Cola was the most popular drink in the Reich, but by 1941, Coke’s head office in Atlanta was forced to withhold the necessary ingredients once America entered the war.
So, Coca-Cola Germany split off and retooled its factories to make a new beverage formed from beet sugar, whey, and apple peels from the cider industry.
The resulting cloudy liquid was said to have a fruity taste, an ancestor to the orangey flavour we now know and love, because that was the easiest for them to synthesise without anything else to go on.
This struck me as self-evidently true, even then. While rival colas can never truly get close to the specific flavour of Coke, the difference between the various fizzy orange copycats from large conglomerates to supermarket own brands is negligible.
And yet, Fanta persists, its global success due to canny marketing of a cheap product, elevated from its peers by a respectability that obscured its horrifying past, while still being the same stuff you’ve seen a million times elsewhere.
It’s Netflix using an algorithm to determine your need to watch more shows about women who go missing; it’s Facebook proliferating AI imagery of Jesus made from shrimp because its circle of shut-ins and spam bots will respond to them; and it’s politicians telling you that all of your problems, in healthcare, housing, and social cohesion, are due to immigrants.
This week, Britain’s Labour government announced it would be barring tens of thousands of asylum seekers from becoming citizens if they arrived in the country via small boats, their most draconian move yet in attempting to tackle the advancing popularity of Nigel Farage’s rabidly anti-immigrant Reform party, who now sit one point above the government in the polls.
The move has been wildly condemned, even by Labour MPs, and lambasted by lawyers as a flagrant breach of international law.
It has also done little to impress the sorts of people it was surely intended to ameliorate, perhaps because the kind of people who would happily vote for Nigel Farage are unlikely to be swayed by such posturing from Labour’s Keir Starmer, a man, and a party, that they despise.
Let’s be clear about one thing: Placing all the ills of society on immigrants — or LGBTQ+ people, or Muslims, or Travellers, or whoever else is the ‘other’ you select — is easy.
It’s morally repulsive and ideologically vacuous, yes, but the fact that it is easy is what grants it its recurring power.
The last decade has seen the same simple scheme play out across the globe; parties like Reform — and smaller anti-migrant factions present in Ireland — point to the ruins currently being wrought by modern capitalism in health, education, housing and social cohesion, and blame it on foreigners.
Vitally, this isn’t just easy, it’s cheap. After all, promising voters that all their problems are the fault of people poorer and more desperate than them, costs nothing. And when something is cheap and easy, it has a tendency to spread.
You’re the sensible centrist government watching this take place.
The far right pulls off votes to independents and fringe parties from you, the very sensible moderates whose managerial capitalism has actually caused the degradation they ascribe to foreigners.
But they’re small enough in number that you dismiss them, and continue with the self-same policies which actually impact their voters’ lives.
Next time, they do well enough that you take notice. It is at this point you enter the spiral that has redrawn the electoral map of the Western world for the past decade.
You say you recognise ‘legitimate concerns’ and take a tougher line on, say, refugees.
You accept the far right’s entirely false premise that immigrants increase crime, that the housing crisis is due to migrants rather than your own bad policies, or that foreigners are swamping the health service, rather than holding it up with their bare hands in the face of your own drastic underfunding of the system.
And you become less popular. You, the sensible moderate, continue to slide in the polls against the very parties whose policies you were trying to steal.
A sizeable number of your own base are appalled, and you have failed to impress a single racist.
Because everywhere, from France to Germany to the Netherlands to the UK, as with Fanta and its supermarket imitators, it turns out people prefer the original to the copy.
You’ve driven away your traditional base, while sanitising the racism of the far right for low information voters, who now consider them more reasonable.
You have moved the sensible middle position toward the far right — where you now stand, boxed in, by the ghouls you’ve just baptised as moderates.
And the slide continues. Because you cannot placate these people. You cannot reach an end.
Round up every refugee in camps and they’ll want the next cruelty.
Their concerns are not about society, the economy or public safety, they’re an ever-moving target of fear and hatred that cannot be sated, it has to be challenged.
And now it’s too late, because you thought that you — and you alone! — would be the first centrist to steal the fascist’s lunch by agreeing with them rather than fighting them with every fibre of your being.
You can’t rebadge xenophobia.
Scratch the label on any sensible moderate trying to make it respectable, and you’ll only find the self-same sickly brew, with the self-same inevitable conclusion, and the self-same horrifying past.
