Neo-Fascism

The international study of fascism has, over the last 25 years, experienced considerable consolidation. Inspired by influential theoretical publications of Roger D. Griffin and others, a new sub-discipline, “comparative fascist studies,” has emerged that proceeds from a largely common conceptualization of fascism. It explicitly includes and particularly promotes the cross-cultural, as well as inter-epochal investigation into ultra-nationalisms outside Central and Western Europe after the year 1945. The concepts, approaches and hypotheses of this new sub-discipline are well-suited to be applied to the study of inter-war and post-Soviet right-wing radicalism in Eastern Europe. However, before comprehensive classification and informative comparison becomes possible, the putative fascist phenomena of Eastern Europe need more thorough descriptive analysis, field research, and empirical investigation by researchers, in the region.

Review article on the books:
Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. By Charles Clover. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. By Mark Bassin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.
Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship. Edited by Marlene Laruelle. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir. By Anton Shekhovtsov. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017.

Accessible summary• The ideas and politics of British nationalism are highly topical at the moment. Issues of race and racism are key elements of this sort of fascist political movement. There are clear links between modern fascist parties and the wartime Nazis.• The history of mental health and psychiatric services shows up problems in how ethnic minorities have been treated.• The Holocaust offers examples of terrible treatment of people with mental health problems, including the active participation of nurses in programmes of sterilization and murder.• We can learn lessons from all of this that are relevant to today's nurses and ethical care.• We conclude that mental health nurses should be a visible part of the resistance to right-wing racist politics.• The ideas and politics of British nationalism are highly topical at the moment. Issues of race and racism are key elements of this sort of fascist political movement. There are clear links between modern fascist parties and the wartime Nazis.• The history of mental health and psychiatric services shows up problems in how ethnic minorities have been treated.• The Holocaust offers examples of terrible treatment of people with mental health problems, including the active participation of nurses in programmes of sterilization and murder.• We can learn lessons from all of this that are relevant to today's nurses and ethical care.• We conclude that mental health nurses should be a visible part of the resistance to right-wing racist politics.The ideas and politics of British nationalism are highly topical at the moment. Issues of race and racism are key elements of this sort of fascist political movement. There are clear links between modern fascist parties and the wartime Nazis.The history of mental health and psychiatric services shows up problems in how ethnic minorities have been treated.The Holocaust offers examples of terrible treatment of people with mental health problems, including the active participation of nurses in programmes of sterilization and murder.We can learn lessons from all of this that are relevant to today's nurses and ethical care.We conclude that mental health nurses should be a visible part of the resistance to right-wing racist politics.AbstractMental health nurses have a critical stake in resisting the right-wing ideology of British fascism. Particularly concerning is the contemporary effort of the British National Party (BNP) to gain credibility and electoral support by the strategic re-packaging of a racist and divisive political manifesto. Evidence that some public sector workers are affiliated with the BNP has relevance for nursing at a series of levels, not least the incompatibility of party membership with a requirement of the Professional Code to avoid discrimination. Progressive advances, though, need to account for deep rooted institutionalized racism in the discourse and practice of healthcare services. The anomalous treatment of black people within mental health services, alongside racial abuse experienced by ethnic minority staff, is discussed in relation to the concept of race as a powerful social category and construction. The murder of the mentally ill and learning disabled in Nazi Germany, as an adjunct of racial genocide, is presented as an extreme example where professional ethics was undermined by dominant political ideology. Finally, the complicity of medical and nursing staff in the state sanctioned, bureaucratic, killing that characterized the Holocaust is revisited in the context of ethical repositioning for contemporary practice and praxis.Mental health nurses have a critical stake in resisting the right-wing ideology of British fascism. Particularly concerning is the contemporary effort of the British National Party (BNP) to gain credibility and electoral support by the strategic re-packaging of a racist and divisive political manifesto. Evidence that some public sector workers are affiliated with the BNP has relevance for nursing at a series of levels, not least the incompatibility of party membership with a requirement of the Professional Code to avoid discrimination. Progressive advances, though, need to account for deep rooted institutionalized racism in the discourse and practice of healthcare services. The anomalous treatment of black people within mental health services, alongside racial abuse experienced by ethnic minority staff, is discussed in relation to the concept of race as a powerful social category and construction. The murder of the mentally ill and learning disabled in Nazi Germany, as an adjunct of racial genocide, is presented as an extreme example where professional ethics was undermined by dominant political ideology. Finally, the complicity of medical and nursing staff in the state sanctioned, bureaucratic, killing that characterized the Holocaust is revisited in the context of ethical repositioning for contemporary practice and praxis.

Extensive research exists in geography concerning racism and nationalism, yet there has been surprisingly little written on the far right, and even less on their anti-fascist opponents. In the context of a resurgent far right, this paper draws together disparate work on this topic within geography to investigate the possibilities for the development of anti-fascist geographies. While fascism and anti-fascism have been chronically under-researched in geography, I argue that there remains an insightful body of research in existence, and that geographers are well positioned to undertake substantial work on the subject. Three connecting dimensions of an anti-fascist geography are identified; namely, investigating not only racism but also the more-than-racist dimensions of the far right; their intersections with one another; and the development of anti-fascist rationalities in our scholarship. Through this discussion, I suggest that the field of anarchist geographies offers a useful framework for these tasks, not only for empirical study but also for developing agendas to embed anti-fascist principles into academic practices. By focusing in on the spatialities of far right and anti-fascist politics, political geographers can position themselves at the forefront of this important area of work.

Russian political thinker and, by his own words, geopolitician, Aleksandr Dugin, represents a comparatively new trend in the radical Russian nationalist thought. In the course of the 1990s, he introduced his own doctrine that was called Neo-Eurasianism. Despite the supposed reference to the interwar political movement of Eurasianists, Dugin's Neo-Eurasian nationalism was rooted in the political and cultural philosophy of the European New Right. Neo-Eurasianism is based on a quasi-geopolitical theory that juxtaposes the 'Atlanticist New World Order' (principally the US and the UK) against the Russia-oriented 'New Eurasian Order'. According to Dugin, the 'Atlanticist Order' is a homogenizing force that dilutes national and cultural diversity that is a core value for Eurasia. Taken for granted, Eurasia is perceived to suffer from a 'severe ethnic, biological and spiritual' crisis and is to undergo an 'organic cultural-ethnic process' under the leadership of Russia that will secure the preservation of Eurasian nations and their cultural traditions. Neo-Eurasianism, sacralized by Dugin and his followers in the form of a political religion, provides a clear break from narrow nationalism toward the New Right ethopluralist model. Many Neo-Eurasian themes find a broad response among Russian high-ranking politicians, philosophers, scores of university students, as well as numerous avant-garde artists and musicians. Already by the end of the 1990s, Neo-Eurasianism took on a respectable, academic guise and was drawn in to 'scientifically' support some anti-American and anti-British rhetoric of the Russian government.

Anarchist criminology has produced a strong critique of the system of criminal law, but has only recently started to theorize practical alternatives. The alternatives that it offers have been largely rooted in pacifism through the practice of restorative justice and deescalation of conflict. These models are generally effective so long as the individuals involved are committed to the process being applied. Ethnographic study of the anti-fascist movement in the United States demonstrates a potential model of anarchist response to threats of community and public safety in prefigurative subcultural spaces. The confrontational and violent tactics employed by militant anti-fascists serve as a form of policing based on anarchist principles of spontaneity, direct democracy, and direct action; and can serve as a starting point for theorizing proactive anarchist actions against individuals who threaten public safety and order.

This ar­ti­cle the­o­rizes con­tem­po­rary au­thor­i­tar­ian mo­bi­li­za­tion and its con­ti­nu­i­ties with lib­eral mo­der­ni­ty. It draws on the ge­ne­al­ogy of mod­ern prop­erty to sys­tem­at­i­cally in­te­grate two reg­is­ters that of­ten com­pete in ex­pla­na­tions of au­thor­i­tar­i­an­ism: ma­te­ri­al­ist an­aly­ses of the po­lit­ical econ­o­my, and ac­counts of rac­ism and sex­ism. Following in­ter­sec­tional fem­inist and race schol­ar­ship, it ar­gues that lib­eral cap­i­tal­ist so­ci­e­ties rely on in­built en­ti­tle­ments to group-based op­pres­sion, and that these op­pres­sive re­la­tions his­tor­i­cally took on a form anal­o­gous to prop­er­ty. This anal­ogy is not ac­ci­den­tal. Propertized op­pres­sion sup­ple­ments the prom­ise of self-own­er­ship that lib­er­al­ism rests up­on; and it com­pen­sates parts of the pop­u­la­tion for the ma­te­rial dis­pos­ses­sion on which cap­i­tal­ism thrives. At the pres­ent his­tor­i­cal con­junc­ture of for­mal le­gal equal­ity and neo­lib­eral ma­te­rial dis­pos­ses­sion, the logic of prop­erty is rep­li­cated in a new key. Neoauthoritarianism seeks to pro­tect em­bod­ied en­ti­tle­ments to ap­pro­pri­ate for se­lect groups, and to des­ig­nate oth­ers as dis­pos­able.

While caution, tactics and compromise characterised the political practice of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement in post-war Italy, a section of the Italian press took a less guarded approach to the 20-year regime (Fascism) and to fascism as a political idea (fascism). A lively debate began immediately after the death of Mussolini; Italians sympathetic to fascism opposed the new Italian republican settlement and their opinions were freely expressed in newspapers and magazines. Neo-fascism in Italy was represented by three main ideological currents (left-wing, moderate and right-wing), and this article gives an account of the different views of the issues of democracy and corporatism that were held by fascist loyalists. An extensive number of articles published in the period 1945–1953 are used as primary sources.

This paper examines the ways in which “ordinariness” can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the town in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilized by the Fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian town, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of Fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini’s ordinary rural upbringing was mobilized in the service of propagandizing his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the town’s first postwar mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini’s ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I assert that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of “the ordinary,” which sometimes tacitly assumes the existence of “the ordinary” as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that “the ordinary” may be the object of ethical labor, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labor, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.

Like Weimar Germany, contemporary Russia is home to fascist actors and widespread nationalism. But unlike interwar Germany, the party system in post-Soviet Russia is heavily manipulated and civil society remains underdeveloped. This means that fascists have not had a chance to use elections or to penetrate civil society in order to build up political support. The continuing presence of a resolutely authoritarian, yet non-fascist “national leader” (Vladimir Putin) keeps the country from becoming a liberal democracy but it also, for now, makes it less likely that the regime will become fascist.

This article argues for the analytical potentials of the concept of spontaneity in our effort to understand critically the socio-spatial dynamics of Athens, but especially the contemporary collective protest actions in the city. Such critical understanding emerges as a significant task given the current urgency to grasp the capitalist crisis and the collective reactions to it. However, taking into account the re-configuration of extreme-Right violence in the streets of Athens, the article attempts to revisit the Marxist dichotomy between spontaneity and non-spontaneity. Via an anthropological critique of this distinction, the paper suggests an additional point of focus beyond spontaneity.

This article studies post-war Italy’s forgetful attitude towards its Fascist past by interpreting a political measure, the Togliatti amnesty (1946), and 1950s film censorship as ‘institutionalised forms of (…) amnesia’ (Ricoeur 2004, 452). The amnesty, which erased the Fascists’ legal responsibility for war and political crimes, represented the first act of oblivion of the Republican political establishment, embodying a forgetful mindset that influenced Italian culture through institutional instruments like film censorship. In 1950s Italy, censorship acted as a further form of institutionalised amnesia aimed at erasing from films the traces of the compromising continuity between the Fascist past and the democratic present. The story of the making and unmaking of the Italian episode of I vinti by Michelangelo Antonioni is a meaningful example of this dynamic. Producers and government commissioners censored the plot and changed it from a story about a neo-fascist militant to one about a young bourgeois who smuggles cigarettes. However, Antonioni resisted the institutional imposition to forget by choosing locations where the material dimension of the landscape still embodied the Fascist legacy of the country.

This paper argues that one key characteristic of the new American populism is its orientation toward global military confrontation with “Islam.” The paper focuses on texts by Michael Anton, Stephen K. Bannon, including Bannon’s film Torchbearer (2016). Comparing their ideological work to Alexander Dugin’s writings on the global order, the authors organize the comparison around the contextual similarity between American and Russian rightwing thinkers.  There are substantive affinities, but more important is the similar relation between textual production and imperial context. We conclude by arguing that these new authoritarian movements and regimes combine coherent ideological projects with deliberately chaotic, even incoherent statements and interventions.

This essay reframes Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of the “banality of evil” in light of Eichmann’s mimetic psychology, which Arendt intuited but did not fully articulate. Rather than considering the banality of evil as symptomatic of Eichmann’s “inability to think,” the essay foregrounds the affective, contagious, and, in this sense, mimetic tendencies at play in Eichmann’s personality (from Latin, persona, theatrical mask). This move is instrumental to articulate a middle path between Arendt’s theoretical diagnostic of Eichmann as “terrifyingly normal” and Bettina Stangneth’s recent historical account of Eichmann as a “fanatical National Socialist.” My wager is that the ancient problematic of mimēsis (from Greek, mimos, mime) casts a new and original light on the psychic foundations of a type of evil that is as relevant to understand the psychology of fascism in the past century as its rising shadow in the present century.

In the early 1960s, the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was invited by neo-Nazi groups in Australia and Britain to come to their respective countries. On both occasions, the minister for immigration in Australia and the home secretary in Britain sought to deny Rockwell entry to the country on the grounds that he was not conducive to the public good and threatened disorder. This was done using the border control and visa system that existed in both countries, which allowed the government to exclude from entry certain individuals that were proponents of extreme or "dangerous" political ideologies. In the postwar period, explicit neo-Nazism was seen as a dangerous ideology and was grounds for exclusion of foreigners, even though domestic political parties espousing the same ideology were allowed to exist. Rockwell never came to Australia, but illicitly entered Britain via Ireland in 1962 before being deported, which highlighted potential problems for the British controlling passage across the Irish Sea. Rockwell's exclusion and deportation also became a touchpoint for future debates in British politics about the denial of entry and deportation of political figures. This article reveals that the Australian and British governments, while allowing far-right organisations to lawfully exist in their countries, also sought to ban the entry of foreign actors who espoused similar politics. This was due to concerns about potential public disorder and violence, but also allowed both governments to portray white supremacism and racial violence as foreign to their own countries.

This work analyzes the ideological war between American fascists and antifascists and the relation between the existence of an ideological consistency among the masses and the emergence of this type of conflict. The storming of the US Capitol in January 2021 by fascists and the activities of fascists and antifascists on social media serve as subjects for the analysis of this ideological war. The purpose of this work is to study literature on ideological wars and analyze how States encourage extremist ideologies based on their own ideological consistencies. The method employed to expose the ideological war is a content analysis of social media used by the Proud Boys and Atlanta Antifascists. The results show that the two competing ideologies cannot coexist peacefully in the same territory and at the same time. The State and the elites agree that the confrontation should end. This work can be useful for academics, policy makers and students working on the issue of fascist and extremist ideologies, as well as for developing ways to fight these ideologies by addressing their enablers.

Applying Roger Griffin’s methodological approach to generic fascism, the article analyses individual – socio-political, cultural and esoteric – themes within Dugin’s doctrine, treating them as elements of a larger integral concept of rebirth that constitutes the core of Neo-Eurasianism. The article highlights the highly syncretic nature of this ideological core, a direct result of the ‘mazeway resynthesis’ that has conditioned Dugin’s worldview. It argues that this process has been necessitated by his self-appointed task of envisioning a new stage of history beyond Russia’s present decadent and ‘liminoid’ situation, one that he sees only coming about as the result of a ‘geopolitical revolution’. The variant of Eurasionism that results has the function of a political religion containing a powerful palingenetic thrust towards a new Russia and new West. In conclusion, it is suggested that the new order aspired to by Dugin could only be realised by establishing a totalitarian regime.

Inspired by Walter Benjamin's concept of the " moment of danger, " this essay considers the contemporary return of the memory of fascism and Nazism among both far-right political movements and liberal and left critics of the right. We briefly sketch how memories and symbols derived from the fascist and National Socialist era, among other sources, help constitute new political subjects in our moment of danger, and we look extensively at responses to the election of Donald Trump and evaluate the way the invocation of the fascist era as memory and warning shapes versions of resistant remembrance. We argue that transnational memory studies needs to think more about the historical consciousness that buttresses contemporary far-right politics and about the potential memory politics that might oppose it.

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Artículo completo aquí: https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ARIS/article/view/72865

Resumen: Este trabajo recupera aportes de los teóricos de Frankfurt, principalmente Adorno y Horkheimer, para reflexionar en torno a las lógicas del fascismo y su articulación con el delirio. Dichos autores han sostenido una apuesta política al no hipostasiar la diferencia entre fenómenos como el nazismo Alemán y la industria cultural. Ambos fenómenos reproducirían una racionalidad al servicio del dominio, del rechazo a la diferencia y de la anulación de la reflexión individual. Este trabajo busca determinar aquellos rasgos de esta racionalidad que permiten vincularla con formas totalitarias en el conocimiento, en la experiencia sensible y en la organización política. Específicamente nos detendremos en el concepto de experiencia empobrecida, leyendo desde aquí cómo esta racionalidad puede conjugarse con elementos delirantes, aniquilando la mediación reflexiva individual y reaccionando con conductas totalitarias. Finalmente, lo contrastaremos con el concepto de experiencia de la obra de arte que permitirá pensar formas no violentas de sensibilidad y reflexión.

""Argentina’s Partisan Past is a study about the production, the spread and the use of understandings of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century Argentina. It analyses how nationalist views about what it meant to be Argentine were built into the country’s long drawn-out crisis of liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Eschewing the notion of any straightforward relationship between cultural customs, ideas and political practices, the study seeks to provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between popular culture, intellectuals and the state in the promotion, co-option and repression of conflicting narratives about the nation’s history. Particular attention is given to the conditions for the production and the political use of cultural goods, especially the writings of historians. The intimate linkage between history and politics, it is argued, helped Argentina’s partisan past of the period following independence to cast its shadow onto the middle decades of the twentieth century. This process is scrutinised within the framework of recent approaches to the study of nationalism, in an attempt to communicate the major scholarly debates of this field with the case of Argentina.

The book is written for both students of Argentine history and those interested in the ways in which nationalism has shaped our contemporary world.

Reviews:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8599787
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35047
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2012.00560_9.x/abstract""
http://hahr.dukejournals.org/content/93/1/146.full.pdf+html

Case occupate, sale concerti, “spazi non conformi”: luoghi dove far politica, volontariato e praticare il “fascismo sociale”  all’insegna di un’ibridazione simbolica che vede coesistere Mussolini e Che Guevara, Ezra Pound e Rino Gaetano, Julius Evola e Corto Maltese. Luoghi anche di auto-riconoscimento subculturale fatto di pub, letture selezionate, rock identitario, ma soprattutto opposizione ad un’estrema destra partitica descritta come autoreferenziale e stantia. È così che si presenta CasaPound Italia all’interno e all’esterno del proprio universo sociale e valoriale.
Attraverso un’inedita retorica del “Fascismo del Terzo Millennio”, CasaPound legge l’attuale crisi economica, politica e di partecipazione attraverso forme di attivismo deliberatamente alternative rispetto alla mobilitazione politica tradizionale della propria area. Categorie ideologiche ispirate al fascismo storico e rivitalizzate attraverso un connubio di idea-azione a cui non è estraneo l’uso della violenza hanno permesso al gruppo di far breccia tra le generazioni dei più giovani e le categorie sociali più colpite dalla crisi economica.

Questo volume analizza i percorsi di militanza, l’attivismo politico e le forme di mobilitazione di CasaPound Italia, ricostruendone le radici ideologiche e gli orizzonti valoriali, approfondendo il progetto identitario subculturale e discutendone le strategie politiche a livello nazionale ed europeo.
Un lavoro attento nato da interviste, conversazioni, partecipazione a riti collettivi, manifestazioni politiche del gruppo, che costituisce un contributo alla comprensione della natura politica dei nuovi fenomeni di coinvolgimento al tempo della crisi.

Revisori del volume: Prof. Marco Tarchi (UNIFI) e Dimitri Deliolanes (ERT, Grecia)

This article presents the concept of fascism and tries to demonstrate that the Bolsonaro Government and the social movement that supports that government are fascists, more precisely a particular species of the genre fascism. The article also makes a comparison between the original fascism of the first decades of the 20th century and contemporary Brazilian fascism.

During and after Ukraine’s celebrated Euromaydan (literally: European Square) Revolution of 2013–2014, a whole number of novel Ukrainian political and societal phenomena emerged. One of the most intriguing was the relatively spontaneous and government-supported emergence of volunteer armed units from late spring 2014 onwards, in connection with the start of Russia’s covert paramilitary intervention in Eastern Ukraine. Among the most widely noted of these initially irregular detachments was the “Azov” battalion or regiment, named after the Azov Sea, created, in May 2014, by an obscure lunatic fringe group of racist activists. This paper briefly sketches the origins of Azov, biographies of some of its founders, and particulars of its creation, without touching upon such issues as Azov’s military performance, later integration into the National Guard under Ukraine’s Ministry of Interior, and political development after 2014.

This article reconsiders the power of myth in light of the rise of neo-fascist or new fascist leaders who cast a shadow on the contemporary political scene. Taking its starting point from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s seminal essay, “The Nazi Myth,” the article offers a genealogy of the affective and infective power of myth rooted in the ancient problematic of mimesis. It argues that stepping back to texts central to the rise of the Nazi movement like Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the 20th Century can help us diagnose what Nietzsche calls the representational (or Apollonian) and affective (or Dionysian) power of mythic mimesis, a mimetic power that is currently reloaded by apprentice presidents with (new) fascist aspirations in need of unmasking operations.

Au cours des dernières années, les études sur l’Intégralisme brésilien (la principale initiative politique d’inspiration fasciste dans l’histoire politique brésilienne) ont fait des progrès remarquables. Cela a conduit à l’assimilation des débats résultants des études sur les fascismes transnationaux, tout comme s’est libéré de l’exclusivité des recherches autour de l’expérience institutionnelle de l’Action intégraliste brésilienne (1932‑1937). Le but de cet article est de fournir un portrait plus précis selon la singularité du néointégralisme, compris comme l’Intégralisme après la mort de Plínio Salgado (1975), en présentant les principales interprétations sur le thème, ainsi qu’en proposant une définition plus détaillée de la notion de « néointégralisme ».

There have been recurrent ideas in post-1945 far Right ideology in Britain concerning representations of culture. In common with the ideology of interwar generic fascism, a cultural 'crusade' was envisaged by post-war neo-Fascist ideologues. This chapter illustrates and critically examines the far Right's prescriptions for cultural 'renewal' through brief exploration of the texts of three neo-Fascist movements operating in the postwar British context: the Union Movement (UM), the National Front (NF), and the British National Party (BNP).