If you watched the feature on Reclaim Australia on Channel 7’s Sunday program the other week, you could be forgiven for thinking Australia’s far right are a bunch of harmless concerned citizens. They’re not.

Blair Cottrell, a key organiser of the recent protests, is an out-and-out Nazi. Not just a run of the mill fascist, but an actual admirer of Adolf Hitler. According to a (since deleted) Facebook post by Cottrell, “There should be a picture of this man in every classroom and every school, and his book should be issued to every student annually”.

Cottrell is a rabid anti-Semite. His rhetoric comes straight from the playbook of 1930s European fascism. Jews, he claims, “infiltrate and subvert entire generations of other nations in a bid for world power” and are “a much deadlier enemy than the violent Islamic pillagers, who just kill and maim openly”.

Some say that Cottrell and his ilk’s views are marginal, so they don’t pose any real threat.

It is true there is next to no chance that a mass right wing movement could be built in Australia today based on Hitler-admiring anti-Semitism. But Reclaim Australia, the United Patriots Front, and the motley crew of other shadowy organisations that have come out of the woodwork in recent months, don’t recruit to their cause by singing the virtues of Mein Kampf.

There is nothing surprising about this. Fascist movements have always promulgated an extreme version of the prevailing right wing conservative opinion. In the 1930s, that meant anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and support for “strong leaders” like Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. The mainstream of the Australian establishment embraced all of this. Bob Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party who went on to be Australia’s longest serving prime minister, openly expressed his admiration for Hitler before the war.

Today, however, Nazi Germany is held up as the epitome of radical evil – a convenient means to absolve the rest of the imperial powers of responsibility for the atrocities heaped upon Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and avoid discussion of the fact that fascism was embraced by ruling classes well beyond the borders of the Axis powers. And anti-Semitism has been transformed from the ideological common sense of Western bourgeois society into a slander thrown at those on the left who support the national rights of the Palestinians.

Modern fascism has adapted to this reality. Anti-Semitism still has a hold among the more ideological fascists, but Muslims, not Jews, are now the primary target. In Europe today, fascist groups carry Israeli flags on demonstrations. Hitler is, for the most part, disavowed. And in Australia, the far right even claims it is not racist. Its slogan, “Islam is not a race”, explicitly utilises the liberal, secularist critiques of Islam made popular by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Blair Cottrell’s love of Hitler may put him on the loony tunes fringe, but his embrace of militant anti-Islamic bigotry could not be more mainstream. Most of the time there is little to distinguish between the front page of the Daily Telegraph, or the rantings of Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine, and the kind of filth that is expressed on the Facebook pages of the United Patriots Front.

The mainstream conservative right that supported Tony Abbott to the death are a minority of society. But they are a big minority. And what makes the far right activists that have emerged this year dangerous is that they are making a concerted attempt to translate a broad reactionary sentiment into a violent movement on the streets.

The last time there was a serious chance of this happening was during the late 1990s, with the rise to prominence of Pauline Hanson. As a parliamentarian with close links to the right of the Liberal Party, she was a much more significant political force than anything Reclaim Australia or its offshoots have thus far proven to be. Various fascist and neo-Nazi groups tried to jump on the Hanson bandwagon, but both they and she were eventually pushed back, in no small part because of protests by thousands of people outside Hanson’s public meetings.

But while Reclaim Australia and its offshoots have less social weight than Hanson, they are much more focused on building a movement on the streets, and their leaders are, unlike Hanson, not just right wing populists but hardcore fascists.

When you combine that with the fact that the ground for a mass racist movement has been well and truly tilled by more than a decade of media beat ups, security scares and mainstream ideological warfare against Muslims, you have the real potential for dangerous developments. In the more immediate term, the deposing of Tony Abbott has left the right bitter and spoiling for a fight.

This doesn’t mean we are about to see a mass far right movement in Australia. But recent experience, particularly in Europe, indicates what can happen if the far right manages to build support among a serious minority and has the capacity to mobilise on the streets. Violent attacks on immigrants, Muslims, and in some cases the left, have started to become the norm in a number of European countries.

Stopping the far right before it becomes a real social force is both imperative and possible. In Melbourne, Reclaim Australia and the United Patriots Front have had three attempts at major demonstrations this year. In every instance they were significantly outnumbered by left wing and anti-racist counter-protesters, and either driven off the streets or forced to hold what they could of their rally behind heavily reinforced police lines.

These anti-racist mobilisations were important in exposing the fascist core of the anti-Islam rallies, demoralising their leaders and making it hard for them to cohere their softer supporters.

But in the last two months the United Patriots Front has held two demonstrations in the Victorian regional city of Bendigo, attaching itself to the existing racist campaign against the construction of a mosque. While significant numbers mobilised to counter them, these events were nothing like the humiliating defeat the racists suffered when they tried to rally in Melbourne. As a result the UPF has been able to regroup, in spite of various internal fights over who among them gets to be Fuhrer.

Reclaim Australia has called for nationwide protests on Sunday 22 November. Anti-racist organisations have already called counter-rallies in most cities. These need to be significant protests. Up until now, the core of the counter-protests has been made up of socialists and anarchists. This now needs to be broadened out considerably.

Everyone on the left needs to take responsibility for preventing the far right from gaining a foothold on our streets.