JUSTICE MALALA: The global right wing is back, with Janusz Waluś as its poster child
Extract
The hate-filled, violence-loving far-right-wingers are coming. Well, actually, they are here. Perhaps they never went away.
Over the past few years far-right nationalism and racism have been on the resurgence throughout Europe. From Italy to Germany to Sweden through to the Ukraine, formations which just 25 years ago were reviled as not worthy of even being listened to are now kingmakers in coalition governments and, in some instances, are on the verge of being elected to the highest offices in their countries.
In the US the president has declared himself a “nationalist”, and right-wing nationalists close to him, such as his former adviser Steve Bannon, are so emboldened that they go on speaking tours to Europe and are hired by far-right leaders such as Hungary’s repressive Viktor Orban.
Twenty-five years ago right-wingers and racists across the globe were a fringe. When two of their own, the detestable Clive Derby-Lewis and the dissembling Janusz Waluś, murdered SACP leader Chris Hani in a desperate attempt to trigger a race war in our country they were shunned throughout the globe except for small pockets of right-wing diehards. Now they are lauded as heroes in Waluś’s native Poland. In fact, reported London’s The Observer newspaper last week, “Waluś has become a cult figure among right-wing Polish football fans, in particular, who frequently display banners at matches with his portrait and slogans such as ‘Free Janusz Waluś’ and ‘Stay Strong Brother’.” It reported further that “when football fans gathered at the Jasna Góra monastery in southwestern Poland, the country’s holiest shrine, for a ‘patriotic pilgrimage’ in January last year, a priest led the congregation in prayer for Waluś’s release. The National Radical Camp, the successor to a pre-Second World War P...
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