Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right.

When the Berlin Wall crumbled, some Western foreign-policy mavens were quick to sound the trumpets and proclaim the end of history. Liberal democracy had supposedly notched an unequivocal victory, ushering in a new world order of clanging cash registers and busy voting booths. But such puerile predictions have been rudely rebuked by an upsurge of rabid nationalism and "ethnic cleansing" that is rapidly transforming the political landscape of Europe.

Ominous signs are abundant: the proliferation of skinhead gangs, an escalating pattern of violence directed at immigrants and asylum-seekers, vandalism targeting synagogues and mosques, anti-Semitic outbursts where few Jews reside, the growing electoral clout of far-Right political parties. All are manifestations of a neofascist revival that has gained considerable momentum since the end of the Cold War. Accentuated by the collapse of Soviet-bloc communism and the unification of Germany, the recrudescence of fascism constitutes one of the most dangerous and unsettling trends in Europe today.

Among the new books that shed light on aspects of this multifaceted phenomenon, most vivid is The New Reich by Michael Schmidt, a gutsy documentary filmmaker who managed to penetrate Germany's neo-Nazi underground and return with intimate portraits of its youthful leaders. A riveting narrative describes Schmidt's hair-raising adventure into the heart of his country's darkness, where at times it is difficult to distinguish between the attitudes of racist defectives fomenting terror on the streets and complacent German officials who wink at the perpetrators.

Assisted by the editors of Searchlight, Europe's preeminent antifascist magazine, Schmidt provides an inside look at the burgeoning neo-Nazi scene, including paramilitary camps that attract young militants throughout Europe. While stashing weapons for future use on the continent, a few hundred right-wing extremists from various countries have already cut their teeth fighting alongside Croatian soldiers in the former Yugoslavia. Other Nazis flocked to Baghdad to show their solidarity with Saddam Hussein when the United States began bombing Iraq at the outset of the 1991 Gulf war.

Schmidt highlights additional cross-border linkages among neofascists, who undertake annual pilgrimages to honor the likes of General Francisco Franco and Rudolf Hess. Some of the same folks make the rounds at international conferences that purport to debunk the "myth" of the Holocaust. At a closed gathering in Munich, for example, we find a top aide to Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, hobnobbing happily with ardent Hitlerites from Germany and Britain - despite Le Pen's claim that he has nothing to do with Nazis.

As Schmidt escorts us through Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Molln, Solingen, and other German cities recently scarred by hate, it becomes increasingly evident that the epidemic of violence engulfing the Fatherland cannot be passed off simply as a case of racist hormones run amok among restless youth, a kind of neo-Nazi wilding. Nor should it be dismissed merely as a momentary spasm while Germany adjusts to its role of post-Cold War superpower.

In a variety of ways, the government led by Chancellor Helmut Kohl is itself deeply implicated in Germany's alarming lurch to the right. Thus we learn from Schmidt that a number of today's neo-Nazi leaders were sprung from East German jails by infusions of West German cash earmarked to liberate "political prisoners." He also documents disturbing connections between neo-Nazis and German police, while drawing attention to blatant double standards in the legal system that favor right-wing extremists who attack foreigners.

And then there's the case of Far Right historian Alfred Schickel, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal of the Federal Republic of Germany for his efforts to combat "ignorance, prejudice, and disinformation." Schickel, it turns out, is a no-Holocaust liar who claims that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was a defensive measure. Kohl himself is reported to have given a book by a British Holocaust revisionist to his speech writer as a Christmas gift.

Schmidt does not suggest that any of this portends an imminent Nazi power grab. Rather, such incidents are all expressions of a deep-rooted culture of denial, a shared legacy that continues to haunt the Deutsche mob. And denial tends to be addictive, requiring constant doses to keep the guilty conscience away.

Denial flourished for a long time on both sides of the Berlin Wall. The neo-Nazi youth scene in East Germany prior to unification is discussed at length in Free to Hate, by Paul Hockenos, who has reported on Eastern Europe for In These Times and other news outlets. Hockenos provides the best English-language account of how a neofascist underground developed in the self-avowed antifascist state. Additional essays on Hungary, Rumania, the Czech Republic, and Poland drive home the point that nationalist and extreme Right forces in Eastern European countries wield far greater influence than in their Western counterparts.

"Back in 1990," Hockenos observes, "the greatest obstacle to democracy seemed to be the residual strength of the communist elites. No one imagined then that in just two short years the real threat would come from a new nationalist right."

Noting the ease with which many erstwhile communists became unabashed nationalists after the Cold War, Hockenos argues that "there exists a clear continuity in the values and political cultures of the Right and the communist systems."

In an effort to pump up their flagging legitimacy, communist regimes were not above utilizing nationalism and anti-Semitism to keep the masses in check by diverting economic resentments toward racial preoccupations. Similar strategies have proven effective in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Underpinning the current neofascist resurgence is the obsessive notion of an ethnically determined nationstate, whose members are bound together by the primacy of blood, lineage, and language - not by recognized international borders or a common legal code that applies equally to all citizens in a democratically inclined civic society.

Hockenos bolsters his well-crafted analysis with extensive interviews of leading East European rightists in and out of the halls of officialdom. Unfortunately, this hands-on approach is lacking in Walter Laqueur's Black Hundred, which examines a plethora of Russian extremist groups that run the gamut from monarchist to national socialist, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky's fast-rising neofascist party. A scholar associated with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Laqueur traces the historical antecedents that laid the groundwork for today's red-brown alliance of neo-Stalinists and conservative nationalists, who have emerged as the principal opposition to Boris Yeltsin and the so-called reformers. If there were ever a lose/lose situation, it's Russia today.

As it turns out, Zhirinovsky's political ravings were printed by Communist publishing houses in Soviet Russia, even though he rabble-roused against Communist ideology. But he is accorded only a few pages in Laqueur's academic exegesis, which emphasizes that the Soviet ruling elite - despite its internationalist pretensions - had long accommodated a National Bolshevik faction that fueled official anti-semitism emanating from the Kremlin. Sentiments propagated by radical rightists appealed to elements within the Soviet establishment, as well as among dissident groups.

The breakup of the U.S.S.R., says Laqueur, "was an enormous shock for the Russian Right and indeed for all Russian patriots, a time of despair and mourning." But at the same time, Zhirinovsky and his allies knew the moment was opportune for harnessing the rampant disillusion fostered by free-market fundamentalists posing as democrats. It would appear that time is on the side of the Russian fascists.

The rise of the extreme Right in the former Soviet Union is part of a larger groundswell of populist anger that is sweeping across Europe and North America. This has taken on many forms - Italian fascists gaining 47 per cent of the vote last year in Rome, Austrian anti-Semites topping the polls in Vienna, Flemish xenophobes winning hands down in Antwerp, Ross Perot preying on middle-class confusion in the United States, and the Reform Party doing the same in Canada.

Things are moving in the wrong direction very fast - so fast that much of the information presented in Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right, an uneven, text-bookish anthology, already seems dated. The selections on Western Europe are valuable insofar as they illuminate how various neofascist parties took shape over the years, adapting to a hostile political environment and testing different strategies.

Whereas these groups used to languish on the farther shores of politics, a combination of factors has suddenly propelled them into the mainstream. Immigrant-baiting is now standard political fare, Maastricht a dubious dream, and red-brown hybrids are popping up all over the place like mushrooms after rain. It almost makes one nostalgic for the Cold War.