Howie reports from Africa: Fascism Lives -- And Not Just In The Old Confederacy

When we think of the South, we think of backward, poorly educated states filled with narrow-minded bigots, obsessed with primitive superstitions based on Bronze Age fears... like Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, the racist and reactionary places that voted Bush into office, still support him and voted for McCain last month. But other countries have their problems with their own Souths. The most backward and reactionary part of Germany, for example, home of the Nazi Party and Hitler's original power base-- a kind of European Texas-- is Bavaria.

Today I woke up to a TV report about how the strong neo-Nazi party in Bavaria, no further right than our own Georgia or Oklahoma GOP, may be banned because of increasing violence reminiscent of the early 1930s. A hard-line police chief who offers no leeway for extremists was stabbed at his home Monday night, and now pressure is mounting to ban the German right-wingers.

A not-unrelated bit of news came out of Russia, the other country with a hugely resurgent neo-Nazi party. Oddly enough, it came in the form of an art prize! Aleksei Beliayev-Guintovt is a thuggish, no-talent polemicist for GOP-style politics in Russia. His crude nationalistic propaganda has nothing to do with art-- in terms of Truth and Beauty-- whatsoever but yesterday he won the Kandinsky Prize, Russia's top contemporary art award. Except for his far right followers, virtually the entire audience stood and booed when he was given the prize (which includes around $50,000).

I watched an interview with him afterwards, and he was a typically defiant right-wing jackass, vowing to glofify the Motherland. I guess we can hope he sticks to his paints and brushes and doesn't venture the way of an Austrian painter whose ideas have been such a tremendous inspiration for so many fearful, violent bigots all over the world, most recently demonstrated in a run-off election in Georgia.