Reactionary riots on the streets of Dublin have revealed the threat of the far right in Ireland. The left and the labour movement must organise and mobilise to meet this menace head on. We must urgently build the forces of revolution.

　　Shocking scenes have rocked Dublin over the past week. Last Thursday, far-right goons – showing their true, putrid colours – used the stabbing of five people outside a school, including three children, to blame migrants and whip up mob violence.

　　These events must be a wake up call: the left and the labour movement have been caught napping. The gloves must come off in the fight against the far right.

　　This is an appeal: enough with the soft, ‘respectable’ methods that have done nothing to stem the rise of this rabble. The gardaí won’t stop them. The blueshirts won’t stop them. The working class is the only force that has the power to crush them, and an interest in doing so.

　　But we can only do that if we change our methods! We must confront and clear out this mob on the street, and deprive them of their false ‘anti-establishment’ credentials by creating a real, revolutionary alternative that can express the volcanic anger in Irish society.

　　Dublin saw a few hundred masked lumpen youth – with a small, far-right and fascist contingent at its core – rampaging through the city centre. They attacked passers by and gardaí; set fire to buses, Luas, and garda cars; and looted shops (including Foot Locker, not known until recently as a symbol of the ‘globalist cabal’).

　　And of course, for all their talk of being ‘Irish patriots’ and their deliberate confusing of banners with Ireland’s anti-imperialist Republican tradition, the mob’s social media cheerleaders have overwhelmingly been…pro-imperialist British and American ‘patriots’. As usual, the ‘patriotic’ Irish right takes succour from its big brothers abroad.

　　This is the genuine face of fascism. The aim of these animals is to liquidate the labour movement, and to murder and expel foreigners. But what is quite clear is that they represent a very small minority. These were no mass protests, and there is no imminent threat of a rise of fascism. Hyperbole to this effect, all too common on the left, achieves nothing.

　　They represent a real, physical threat to workers, migrants, and the left – and must be dealt with seriously. Enormous anti-racist mobilisations, the likes of which we have seen in the past year, have demonstrated the real balance of forces in society. But they have done nothing to demoralise and weaken the far right, as Thursday night’s events showed. Why is this?

　　Symbolic demonstrations of ‘unity’ in the face of ‘hate’ cannot expunge the far right. They will forever remain deaf to the Christian appeals of “turn the other cheek” and “love thy neighbour”. Like animals, they understand one language: the language they unleashed on Dublin city centre last night.

　　The only way to clear this far-right rabble away is by confrontation on the street through mass mobilisation.

　　Any weekend you choose, if you take a walk up O’Connell Street, you will find not one, but several far-right ‘protests’ ongoing. Only when the far right become accustomed to finding their tables overturned, their placards torn up, and their arses sore from encounters with mass counter-protests everywhere they go, will they slink once more – demoralised – into the holes from whence they came.

　　This is how the British Union of Fascists was crushed at the Battle of Cable Street by communists, socialists, trade unionists, dockers, Jews, and Irish immigrants in London’s East End in the 1930s. It was how the English Defence League was crushed in the past decade.

　　We repeat: the aim of the fascists is to liquidate the workers’ movement. They must be treated as a physical threat. This means that socialists, communists, republicans, and trade unionists must crush the poisonous seed of the far right before it can lay a root.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao、Deng Panyi

　　From:https://socialist.net/ireland-after-dublin-riot-crush-seed-of-far-right-before-it-takes-root/（2023-11-27）