By
New Worker correspondent
THE
CAMPAIGNING group Queers Against the Cuts last Friday was host to a packed
meeting at Clapham Library in south London on the Rise of Fascism in Europe and
its impact on the LGBT community.
The
meeting focussed on the effects of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1920s
and 1930s and its impact on Berlin’s vibrant gay community and the current rise
of fascism in Europe – and especially Greece – and the impact this is having on
gay rights.
Speeches
were interspersed with readings from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Diaries by
David Sharkey.
Speakers included Rachel Newton and Colin
Wilson, who gave an account of events at the end of the Weimar Republic in
Germany.
A speaker from the Greek social democrat group
Syriza, Demetrius, spoke at length on the impact of the draconian austerity
cuts in Greece and how this has led to an upsurge of the extreme right wing in
the shape of the Golden Dawn movement.
Since the European Union, the IMF and the
World Bank are at the root of Greece’s economic woes there has been a retreat
into narrow nationalism and propaganda praising the traditional Greek culture,
the Greek family, and at its centre the traditional macho Greek male.
Homosexuality is rarely discussed and as
educational and health institutions are crumbling the impact on the LGBT
community is massive.
What now passes for a national health system
has stopped supplying retroviral drugs to people with HIV – effectively
abandoning them to die.
But
the increasing violent attacks on immigrant communities from Albania and
Bulgaria along with attacks on the lesbian and gay communities are drawing them
together in mutual self-defence.
The
overall message from the meeting was that it is dangerous for LGBTQ groups to
do nothing or to bury their heads in cultural events.
They
need to engage with all other communities under attack and to become actively
involved in combatting the cuts and the fascists.
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