Radical Nationalism

There is an ever stronger interconnection between various forms of social anxieties, be they religious, political, national or even environmental and online forms of expression. People’s fears and resentments (along with hope) precipitate in mythical
narratives structured on the ancient oppositions of Good and Evil. Apocalyptic rhetoric represents the most crystallized form of verbal warfare against the evil forces (mundane or
supernatural). In the processes of secularization and globalization these narratives have somewhat lost their religious character, but at the same time penetrated new reaches of the
Irrational, and impregnated many beliefs and ideologies, from academic and philosophic heights down to popular mythology and urban legends. The easiest way for ancient sacral stories of antagonisms to get into the modern narratives was through symbols, mainly purported by visual signs. Although anxieties have always been present, showing certain patterns of rise and decrease, the electronic media of the past century have definitely
contributed both to the perpetuation of a higher tension and to the wide spreading of such story-bearing visual symbols. Today, the Internet offers an excellent hotbed for both processes mentioned above: not only through unidirectional web pages but also, or even better, through the self-organizing virtual net-communities. There are countless such groups, religious or ethno-political, each with its own symbolic iconography, but most of these signs are quasi universal, same as the stories they bear. I have chosen some Hungarian websites through which I wish to present these symbols and narratives at work, with a hint to their universal character.
Keywords: apocalypticizing rhetoric iconography, conspiracy theory, alternative historicism, xenophobia, topical Internet communities

This article sets out to demonstrate that considering Islamophobia as a form of racism prevents us from fully grasping the complexity of this phenomenon. The author contends that there are different types of Islamophobia and while some are racist, others are not. To argue this point, he draws on a conflict that was sparked within a Spanish extreme right party revolving around two different conceptions of the human being and society, one rooted in the völkisch tradition and the other in the Catholic tradition. By analysing the only book the leader of that party wrote, we see how these two conceptions engendered two different types of Islamophobia: one völkisch, the other Catholic. Both share the same vision of Islam as a vital "threat" to the "West", but they differ in their understanding of the foundations of the Muslim and European identities: racist versus religious perspectives.

Varför har vissa profiler inom den svenska väckelserörelsen börjat sprida uttryckligt nationalistiska idéer? Det spirande ömsesidiga förhållandet mellan delar av svensk frikyrklighet och den radikala nationalismen kan inte ses som ett enkelt randfenomen.