NGO-Left and Antifa Models

At the Saturday’s gathering of the “antifascists” in Belgrade, even according to the reports by the friendly media, there was no more than several hundred of participants.1 The most visible were representatives of the nominally Left parties: Nenad Čanak (League of Social Democrats), Žarko Korać (Social Democratic Union), Srđan Milivojević (Democratic Party, a member of the Socialist International), etc. There were also representatives of the gay community, with their rainbow-colored flag and speakers. The third category of participants were young anarchists, or rather, the anarcho-syndicalists.

All of them were guarded by the 2,500 police officers — three policemen per one demonstrator. Thus, our “anarchists” and “leftists” have enjoyed the security a police baton had provided them with.

“I have always been a leftist and believed in something undefined, echoing of feminism, anarchism,” writes a VIP female activist on a B92 blog, adding ecstatically for the minister of police: “Thinking is always dangerous if it’s insufficiently free and emotional. So, let me risk: how did Dačić turn so well and have gotten organized from Sloba’s [late President Milošević] boy to a real antifascist that he is?”

The answer is simple: that “Sloba’s boy” had entered the government with “progressive Euro-left” and was immediately transformed into a good uncle-policeman protecting our NGO-Left, anarchists and gay activists from the evil Nazis.

This whole parade was a good illustration of all the social hypocrisy and ideological poverty of this part of the NGO sector. Paradoxically, members of our rich and spoiled NGO elite are convinced that they are the real, authentic Left. According to the research conducted by Mladen Lazić among the NGO activists in 2004, there are three times more of those who believe they are leftists among them, than those who are declared right-wingers. At the same time, those who claim to be the “extreme Left” in the NGO sector are seven times more numerous than among the “regular” Serbian population. The best of all is that all those grand “leftists” are in 84,4 percent of cases financed from the foreign funds, as reported by Lazić. If we know that most of these funds are being filled from the budget of Western governments (U.S. first and foremost), then the picture of our NGO-Left becomes more complete. The Left wing financed by the US government, as the main lever of the world capitalist system — a true leftist position, without a doubt!

One should also bear in mind that class composition of Serbian NGOs, as determined by Lazić, shows that our “leftists” are precisely the children of the socialist upper middle class and that, by their education and income, they too belong to an upper middle class.

I once traveled to a round table forum with a director of one of our well-known NGOs. (He, by the way, is dead-seriously thinking he’s a leftist, even though the annual budget of his NGO of 1.1 million euros is mainly being filled from the foreign, crypto-state funds). The radio played the song Children of the Pyrenees. “This song reminds me of the childhood and trips on ‘Galeb’ [Tito's luxurious ship],” he said to me nostalgically. Yes, his father was an ambassador.

Later, the conversation turned to a female director of another well-known NGO. “I know her from the childhood,” he said. “Our families often spent summer vacations on Brioni [Tito's island, turned into an exclusive, luxury summer resort].” Yes, and her father was a renowned army general.

In such a milieu consisting of socialist diplomats and generals, the Leftism was always a pleasant salon distraction and another reason for youthful boasts at student parties.

Today too, however, the leftism serves the same virtual purpose, supplying in addition a little bit of self-esteem between the two visits to Washington and Brussels’ cashiers. (Just like the “anarcho-syndicalism” today in Serbia which, viewed by the family origin of their young leaders, apparently serves only for the entertainment of the children of rich managers and textbook capitalists).

The pseudo-Left and NGO-Left phenomenon exists in the West, too. Over there, a number of “Left” NGOs are filling their funds precisely thanks to the major capitalist companies. For example, American corporations are giving the entire fifteen times more money for financing the “Left” NGOs, than to those on the Right. Why, if that is a “class contradiction”?

First of all, this is a payment of a certain extortion fee to those who, by their nominal ideology, could threaten the interests of the corporation and its public image. Therefore, the NGO-Left, as well as the nominal political party Left, is being encouraged by the rich donations to entertain itself with the topics generally harmless for the system, such as threats to the gay rights, the rights of feminists and animals. That is far better than to have someone seriously probe the problems dangerous for the system, such as totalitarian control the governments and corporations are establishing over citizens, in the shape of a widespread media manipulation or the rapid increase in material inequality in society.

Even more significant is the need for large corporations to continue knocking down the wages of the local well-organized trade union work force. In fact, most of the “Left” NGOs are advocating the ideology of “multiculturalism”, which encourages the preservation of non-integrated oasis’s of immigrants in local society. In turn, those oasis’s enable and encourage rapid arrival of the new, cheap labor force. In United States, for example, illegal and temporary immigrants represent 44.7% of workers in the fishing and agriculture industry, and 26.1% of workers in building industry. The ideology of “multiculturalism”, imposed by the NGOs and the media moguls as the ruling ideology, ensures that the French or British worker is no longer allowed to say anything against the influx of these proletarians from Africa and Asia. Because, if they do so, they will immediately be labeled “racists”, “fascists” or at least “right-wingers”.

In this way, the NGO-Left has led to a certain degeneration of the classical Left movement in the West. Left at the time of Marx fought for the world revolution, which would cure the suffering of Biblical proportions that existed at that time in Europe. In Marx’s time, thousands of children were still working in British mines and textile factories. One boy-worker in Marx’s “Capital” says: “I am 13 years old. Last winter, we worked from 6 am to 9 pm, and the one before that, [we worked] until 10 pm. Last winter I cried almost every night, because my feet hurt so much.” And a father of one boy-worker says: “I had this habit to carry this boy of mine, when he was 7 years old, there and back when it snowed… he usually worked for 16 hours. I would often kneel to feed him while he stood by the machine, because he was not allowed to interrupt or stop working.”

At that time, the Left in the West wanted to stop all that horrific suffering of thousands of families which lived in the nearest neighborhood. Hard working and diligent people, devoted to their families, suffered in misery and they couldn’t improve their situation no matter how long and hard they worked. Marx was embittered by the ruling class’s insensitivity. He was enraged by the too slow improvement of the position of even the smallest and least protected, the working children. Western Left at that time sincerely sympathized with the tears of the children in Scottish mines or in Manchester spinning mills. Its ideal was a worker, a self-sacrificing father of the family who works hard to bring bread to his household, and who is fighting a difficult union struggle to free his children and his wife of a slavish labor. In this sense, and regardless of our political orientation, the Left of that era must be credited as honorable, manly and deserving of every respect.

The Left couldn’t be disrespected at the time of Lenin and Stalin either. With courage and personal risk, it fought for power or to preserve power. It, too, was very cruel. It didn’t care too much for the tear of a rural or urban child, as long as it thought his parents are the “enemies of the Revolution”. But at least it has been doing all that believing that soon there will no longer be any reason for anyone’s tears. It believed in the great ideal of the World Revolution, the end of all suffering and the beginning of the empire of freedom. Its ideal was a party worker, a communist: solid, experienced fighter, merciless towards the class enemy, but — in rare moments of rest — caring and loving to his wife and household members. That Left, especially at the time of Stalin and Mao, was indeed cruel. One could condemn it. One could call it brutal. But one has to respect it nevertheless, because of its grand ideals, because of its self-constraint and because of its readiness for the ultimate personal sacrifice.

The NGO-Left today, however, is exempt from all the major social or historical goals. Gone is the rhetoric of revolution or building the new, different society. The class, political and trade union struggle for workers and all the other lower segments of society has been replaced by the jurist and media struggle for the discriminated sexual minorities and endangered animals. Instead of a red flag in the callous-filled hand of a metal worker, a rainbow-colored flag is being waved in their gatherings today, held by a maniquired hand of some gay activist. The ideological carrier of that pseudo-Left is a well-off member of an upper middle class, employed in marketing, IT tech-support or in the entertainment industry.

All of their “leftist” engagement consists mainly of squad-ing on the Internet in the free time, of cursing Bush under a pseudonym, and uploading a music recording of Bandiera Rossa. The whole terror of their deprivation, against which they protest the most, is in the fact that gay couples cannot get married in church, adopt children, or enter schools to initiate the students into the secrets of their “sexual choice”. A child’s tear is now important only if it’s the consequence of domestic violence, for example, a slap of a heterosexual father (i.e. a terror of a patriarchal male who should immediately have his child taken away and given for an adoption to a nice and tolerant same-sex “partner pair”).

But, regardless of it being all tender and sensitive (so much so that even “anti-fascism” sounds somehow too rough to it, and it prefers the urbanely pleasant-sounding term “antifa”, as if it’s a movement against the “Fa” deodorant), this pseudo-Left is no less totalitarian and violent than the one from the Stalin era. The only difference is that, as soon as it is given an opportunity to determine the rules of the game, it doesn’t force the politically incorrect individuals to the camps, but Gleichschaltungs the language and uses the media to marginalize the unwanted thoughts and people. Even Marx is “too harsh” for it, because he uses the “hate speech and discrimination against the ethnic and racial minorities”. Thus, it castigates Marx for expressing his condemnation of the military units in service of the bourgeois in a politically incorrect term of the “capitalist gypsy gangs.” It also bashes Marx for not using a politically correct vocabulary, since the slogan “Proletarians of all countries unite!” in a politically correct language should be “Proletarianesses and proletarians of all countries unite!”

We have seen one such example of a pseudo-Left at the Saturday “antifa” gathering. Naturally, all of it was the cosmetic, posturing anti-fascism. Because, if the real fascist gangs were standing face-to-face with these antifa-models, like in Germany in the twenties and thirties, if there were the hordes of the real Nazis, armed with batons and metal bars, our “fighters and fighteresses” would hardly dare poke their heads out in Belgrade streets. Such gangs, of course, are not confronted by a frail hand waving the rainbow-colored flag, but a big heavy hand used to carrying the red flag with which it strikes the bully thirsting for blood. But this is how our “Leftist” and “anarchist”, surrounded by the three policemen each, bravely stepped out to an empty square, bravely waved twice or three times his little flag in front of the B92 camera, bravely shot a few of the squawky slogans, and then, self-satisfied, went to write another brave B92 blog and another brave NGO report à la: “Did we ever show them!” and “No Pasaran!”

But, God forbid there really was fascism in Serbia. If the poor Serbia were defended only by those “sensitive” NGO-Leftist and antifa models, fascists would have sit on our necks long time ago. Fortunately, Serbia and its freedom does not depend on them. The guarantor of that freedom are all the men and women who may not know how to post Bandiera Rossa to the Internet forums and Face Books, but they know how to think, how to love their families and their country. They and their hands, accustomed to real work, would stop that bloody flood, if it were to threaten us ever again.

Until then, stop puffing up and masquerading. This country doesn’t need your skits, your acting and your “antifa” sneering. What it needs is the serious thought about the ways of rescue and the serious efforts to achieve that. And you, our “sensitive” antifa comrades, were probably never too keen on one or the other.