Racist Nativism

Du 11 septembre aux extraterrestres, des camps de concentration américains à l'assassinat de Kennedy, cette thèse a pour objectif d'éclairer sous un angle sociopolitique les fondements, les mécanismes et les enjeux de la pensée conspirationniste aux États-Unis depuis la révolution jusqu'à nos jours. S'il ne s'agit pas de dresser un catalogue exhaustif de toutes les théories du complot en vogue, le but demeure de démontrer que le conspirationnisme est un véritable fait social aux États-Unis, un élément de culture politique et populaire. Cette thèse se propose alors d'étudier les rouages et les origines du conspirationnisme sous trois aspects différents et complémentaires qui forment un triangle. D'abord, sous l'angle factuel, c'est-à-dire en étudiant les thèses du complot relatives à un événement extraordinaire (9/11, assassinat de JFK, etc.). Ensuite, sous l'angle des acteurs du conspirationnisme : les leaders conspirationnistes (LaRouche, Icke, etc.), les citoyens enquêteurs et les boucs-émissaires (communistes, juifs, illuminatis, etc.). Enfin, sous l'angle culturel en mettant en perspective le conspirationnisme avec la culture américaine : l'anti-étatisme, la présence de mafias ou encore le cinéma de masse

From 9/11 to UFOs, from American concentration camps to the Kennedy's assassination, this dissertation aims to enlighten, through a sociopolitical analysis, the grounds, the mechanics and the goals of the conspiratorial thought in the United States since the Revolution. Even Though it is no question to draw an exhaustive catalog of each and every conspiracy theory, I would stress that conspiracism is part of the American political and popular culture. Then, this dissertation studies the origins and the developments of conspiracism through three complementary focuses. First, a factual approach which dwells on specific conspiracy theories such as the 9/11 attacks or the assassination of Kennedy. Secondly, I will come on the actors of conspiracism : the conspiracist leaders (LaRouche, Icke) the citizens sleuths and the scapegoats (Communists, Jews, Illuminatis). Finally, under a cultural angle, I will outlook conspiracism and the American culture of anti-statism, the presence of mafias or the role of mass-medias

Right-wing discourses and issues of belonging and collective identity in Europe’s political and public spheres are often analysed in terms of Islamophobia, racism and populism. While acknowledging the value of these concepts, Kešić and Duyvendak argue that these discourses can be better understood through the logic of nativism. Their article opens with a conceptual clarification of nativism, which they define as an intense opposition to an internal minority that is seen as a threat to the nation due to its ‘foreignness’. This is followed by the analysis of nativism’s three subtypes: secularist nativism, problematizing particularly Islam and Muslims; racial nativism, problematizing black minorities; and populist nativism, problematizing ‘native’ elites. The authors show that the logic of nativism offers the advantages of both analytical precision and scope. The article focuses on the Dutch case as a specific illustration of a broader European trend.

True-Born Englishman's a Contradiction, / In Speech an Irony, in Fact a Fiction." (1.372-3). 2 So says The True-Born Englishman, a satirical poem that by Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660-1731). Until recently, Defoe's early career as a poet has gone relatively ignored, perhaps because it reveals a Defoe living in the Restoration rather than the novel-dominated early eighteenth century. Written in heroic couplets and engaging with biblical allegories to discuss the English nation, The True-Born Englishman certainly shows the broad influence of Dryden's Absalom & Achitophel. Defoe biographers, moreover, have noted his admiration of Rochester and Milton, two men who deployed graphic language to expose the abuse of patriarchal power, another central theme of The True-Born Englishman. 3 Neither Milton nor Rochester, though, linked dysfunctional monarchy with a vexed English identity quite as directly the republican satirist Henry Neville (1619-1694), an idiosyncratic figure most remembered for his fictional travel narrative, The Isle of Pines. Published in its first complete edition in 1668, Neville's The Isle of Pines relates the discovery of a fictional island that has been settled by several English-speaking castaways. 4 Because of the text's frank discussions of polygamy, The Isle of Pines has been received somewhat uncritically by some as a light-hearted satire or "pornotopia." 5 Polygamy in The Isle, however, has serious consequences that expose the fictionality of legitimate descent that underwrote hereditary monarchy as well as the nativist system of national belonging. In this respect, The Isle of Pines anticipates Defoe's thesis in The True-Born Englishman (1701) that the principle of legitimate descent-central to Stuart royalism, ethnocentric

This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and
Authoritarianism: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right. Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a meta language in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, this special issue explores how anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism merge and inform one another in contemporary far-right discourses and politics on climate change. Focusing on the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues, a
broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right will be laid out. In doing so, this special issue aims at providing us with a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the contemporary far-right.

The early promises of a unified South Africa as a rainbow nation after its first democratic election in 1994 and a breakaway from minority rule, has certainly in its delivery, in the main, been forgotten, side-lined, faded or adjusted, 27 years on. A major part of the country’s centuries-old colonial history, Apartheid history and post-Apartheid/democratic
history have always been intertwined with race. In 1994, the democratically-elected tripartite alliance – the African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) – introduced
legislative measures to eradicate racism. One research participant for this book chapter (P4, Camissa, identifying as female) reflected on the promise:

“I was so excited that I was finally going to be considered a full human… at work, in the shops, on the road, when travelling… without the accompanying filters through which other people viewed me. I believed that there would be no more racism… I could get any job, if I was qualified for it. I could live anywhere, if I could afford it. I could go to
museums and restaurants with other people, if I paid for it. I could openly date and marry people from other races, if I was in love and inclined to do so. The stares would stop. The suspicion would stop. I could stop pretending… I could be me and be accepted for being me”.

In addition to scrapping the Apartheid legislation, an extensive policy and legal framework was developed to promote affirmative action in education, employment, sport and other areas of life, including a far-reaching programme of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE). B-BBEE has attempted to move diversity from being a political ideal to a practical business mandate. The belief in the end of racism in the nation, as well as the promise of a non-racial society, have endured in the minds of many citizens, however researchers and writers have, over the years, highlighted some of the enduring social, political and economic obstacles to the development of a mature, non-racial democracy in South Africa. These include low levels of industrialisation; poor public service delivery; ailing state-owned enterprises; widespread poverty; high levels of unemployment; violence; homelessness; weakened governance structures, particularly at municipality levels; considerable inequality in the distribution of wealth; skewed land
ownership; low skills levels of the majority of the population; and a low educational level of large segments of the population. These latter issues are not the substantive focus of this chapter however, as they have been extensively explored and written about in relation to race, and are still being written about by researchers and journalists alike. Instead, this chapter will seek to shine a light on the less-mentioned aspects of racism in South Africa, specifically the changing narratives and therefore outworking of racism, and the resulting psychological and behavioural effects on those who reside in the country.

In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna’s former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a ‘strict father’ and nurtured by a ‘self-sacrificing mother’, vis-à-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.

On 6 January 2021, an angry crowd stormed the United States Capitol. The insurrection was prompted by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his November election loss. The President claimed victory had been stolen through fraud, sought to persuade state election officials to falsify results, contemplated martial law, and partly financed and organised the mob that descended on Washington. Behind all this, Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ has torn a fissure through the Republican Party. While the immediate cause of the fissure was Trump’s post-election behaviour, it’s the result of a decades-long process by which the Grand Old Party (GOP) unshackled itself from its core conservative principles, as it harnessed itself to opposition and identity politics, exploited white low-income voters’ fears of cultural change and economic displacement, and embraced anti-democratic action. The upshot is that the political organisation formally known as the Republican Party became the Trump Party, a party that has more in common with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally than Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.