"Fascism” is a term that should not be used lightly. But it is with horror today that we can note fascist rhetoric, and rhetoric edging dangerously close to it, being deployed by key members of the conservative right in Australia.

There have been multiple articles decrying the self-ruinous direction and moral debasement of the West; warning of the existence of fifth-columnist aliens intent on destroying an otherwise harmonious culture; and appeals for ever greater strengthening of the state apparatus, albeit couched in the language of freedom and democracy.

The Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, wrote on 21 November of the West’s “existential threat”. “Can a civilisation really sustain itself on the basis of an ideology of self-realisation and entitlement liberalism?”, he asked. “Western society is moving ever further away from the idea that anything beyond the individual can demand such sacrifice. The internal liberalism has never been more oppressive, while the ability to stand seriously against enemies is very much in question … If a society has lost strong beliefs, can it really excite the transcendent loyalty of its own citizens, or of people who join it through migration?”

Fascism clearly is not about to come to power in Australia, and conditions are nothing like those experienced in the inter-war years of the 20th century. But what we are witnessing is nevertheless a dangerous development. At least in terms of the content of what is being written about Muslims, it comparable to Third Reich propaganda against Jews.

Invoking the alien hordes

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes: “Exploiting pre-existing images and stereotypes, Nazi propagandists portrayed Jews as an ‘alien race’ that fed off the host nation, poisoned its culture, seized its economy, and enslaved its workers and farmers … Most notably, an exhibition entitled ‘The Eternal Jew’ … compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources.”

As an example, in February 1939, the Viennese newspaper Das Kleine Blatt, published a cartoon depicting Jewish rats being swept out of the house of the Third Reich and scratching at the locked door of democratic Europe, on which hangs a “closed” sign.

Britain’s second-largest circulation newspaper, the Daily Mail, on 17 November published an illustration bearing ominous similarity to Das Kleine Blatt’s outrage: shadowy figures accompanied by a plague of rats crossing into the European Union. The people clearly were racialised Muslims: silhouettes all with grossly enlarged noses and most with protruding chins; the two in the centre with scruffy beards, one carrying a rifle. Three steps behind him is a woman, her gigantic pointed beak protruding through a niqab, rendering her more penguin-like than human. Even the crying baby, who sits on the back of a character that could be mistaken for one of three witches of Macbeth, is not spared essentialist misrepresentation. In the foreground is a man carrying a prayer mat. It is an alien invasion.

Such a message has been repeated in the Australian press.

Harvard historian Nail Ferguson, in a 16 November piece published in the Australian, compared the current situation with the collapse of the Roman Empire, which another historian, Bryan Ward-Perkins, claims fell rapidly to “violent seizure … by barbarian invaders”. “As before”, Ferguson noted with alarm, “they have come from all over the imperial periphery – North Africa, the Levant, South Asia – but this time they have come in their millions, not in mere tens of thousands”. Paris, he said, has been “killed by complacency”.

The Sunday Herald Sun’s 15 November editorial said: “[T]here is a new strand of [Islamic] faith so virulent that it has almost become a mainstream force. The sad truth is that Islam is synonymous with terror …” Columnist Andrew Bolt said: “Muslim leaders here must vigorously reinterpret Islam to make it safe, and their refusal to do so makes them dangerously complicit … Muslim immigration must stop … we are in a war”.

The following day, in a piece published in two of Australia’s largest circulation newspapers, Melbourne’s Herald Sun and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Bolt wrote: “The most pressing truth is that Islam is dangerous in a multi-faith Western nation. And the more believers Islam commands in a country, the greater that threat”. Bolt attacked Europe’s leaders for being “weak and morally unsure” in allowing Muslim refugees to cross its borders.

Also on 16 November, Paul Sheehan in the country’s second largest circulation paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, criticised the Human Rights Commission for publishing a report that detailed how Muslims suffer harassment and discrimination, and the commissioner for writing, “All members of Australian society … should enjoy an assurance that they will be free from discrimination”. Sheehan responded: “[N]o government agency can argue that we are all entitled to an assurance that we will be free from discrimination … Society is awash with discrimination … It is the human condition”.

These pieces coincided with attacks on Australia’s grand mufti, Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, for suggesting that the causative factors of terrorism – “such as racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitisation, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention” – needed to be addressed. The Daily Telegraph ran a front page: “Sees no problem/Hears no concerns/Speaks no English”.

Bolt on 18 November accused: “He really did warn Australians to submit to Muslim demands or risk death … the Mufti failed to take any responsibility for reforming his faith … Isn’t he a measure of whether Islam is compatible with our multi-faith secular democracy? … [A]fter nearly two decades here [he] still won’t speak English in public”.

A state of nature

Leading Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher’s 1937 pamphlet The Jewish question in education, which was written as a school teaching guide, explained the more insidious ways of suggestive education to produce a culture of bigotry:

“The best subject for [indoctrinating children] naturally and easily is science. We see in nature that only similar creatures live together … When migratory birds leave for the south in the fall, starlings fly with starlings, storks with storks, swallows with swallows. Although they are all birds, each holds strictly to its kind … That is the way of nature.

“When these facts are explained in school, the time has to come when a boy or a girl stands up and says: ‘If that is the way it is in nature, it has to be the same with people. But our German people once allowed itself to be led by those of foreign race, the Jews’. To older students, one can explain that a male starling mates only with a female starling … That is the way nature is! … The children will see in the Nuremberg Laws nothing other than a return to the natural, to the divine, order.”

Today, we are seeing similar polemics drawing on nature to coax bigoted responses. Tim Blair’s piece, “A black and white way of dealing with bullies”, published in the Daily Telegraph on 20 April (Hitler’s birthday), as I wrote at the time, “is an allegory that embeds racist tropes in almost every sentence”. It was published directly beneath another article in which he advocated the assault of US Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau (“and his worthless kind”) because Trudeau argued against ridiculing oppressed groups. He said:

“Kookaburras and magpies generally get along reasonably well … The same cannot be said for magpies and your common myna, a disgusting introduced species … Mynas are smaller and more stupid than magpies, but they make up for their deficiencies by sheer weight of numbers. Once I left a batch of bread chunks out for a friendly magpie who was enjoying his feast when three mynas turned up and bullied him out of it.

“The magpie … decided to take revenge … The furious creature leapt from the antenna, took a couple of flaps to set its course, then folded its wings completely against its sides. Now it was more bullet than bird, and it was aimed straight at the ignorant pack of bread-stealing mynas. The collision, when it came, was awesome …

“Magpies better not try that these days … they’d probably be charged with hate crimes against immigrants.”

A rising far right

These instances of fascist or quasi-fascist commentary do not come in isolation.

In Europe anti-Muslim parties of the far and fascist right are on the offensive. In France, the fascist National Front is leading in the polls for the 2017 presidential elections and is expected to do well in regional elections in December. The Swedish Democrats, which has neo-Nazi links, is leading polls with more than 25 percent of the vote. The Swiss People’s Party is the largest in the Federal Assembly. The Danish People’s Party came second in elections this year. There are numerous others either in government or vying for power. Journalist and author Kevin Ovenden writes:

“The prime minister of Poland had already claimed that refugees bring disease. Alien people infecting the host population. A people-disease. Spoken by the head of a government in … Poland. Jobbik [Hungary] and the neo-Nazi right already talk of cleansing operations. So do the Greek police and Golden Dawn. That is also the idiom of police in Calais and in municipal council meetings in many parts of the continent.”

Republican US presidential candidate Ben Carson compared Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs”. The other frontrunner, Donald Trump, said that some mosques should be closed and that he would “absolutely” register all Muslim in a database if elected president. He didn’t rule out making them carry special religious identification and tracking them. At least 28 governors said (symbolically, as they have no power to enforce it) that they would refuse to allow Syrian refugees within their states’ borders.

The far right in Australia does not have a solid political vehicle, and the right of the Liberal Party has suffered a defeat with the deposing of Tony Abbott in recent months. Unlike the ascendant right in the Republican Party, the Liberal Party now is controlled by the moderates. It is clear that a number of Australian commentators want to turn that around by stoking a climate of bigotry, specifically against Muslims (but also against those who stand with them, people they decry as “apologists” or “appeasers”).

They want to push politics further toward the Tea Party and Trump right of the United Sates or the National Front and similar groups in Europe. The path they want to take us down is one that will end in violence against Muslims and their allies – on what scale is impossible to say, but the threat is real and right wing violence on any scale will be an abomination.

We stand with Muslims against these vicious polemics and any attacks they come under in the streets or in their places of worship. We will stand against the attempts of the conservative and far right to stoke and capitalise on anti-Muslim bigotry.