British fascism,fascist culture,British culture

ABSTRACT

In reading British fascism as a cultural phenomenon, historians have started to chart the cultural products and visions of British fascists during the interwar and post-war periods. Such analysis has tended to focus on fascists’ discourse on culture (particularly the ways that they position liberalism and modernism as degenerate), or on the cultural texts of fascists/fascism in the form of, inter alia, literature, music, dress and art. George Mosse goes as far as to argue that it is only through a cultural interpretation of fascism that we can come to understand the movement ‘from the inside out’. However, the notion of fascist culture is contentious, and not simply because the meanings of both ‘fascism’ and ‘culture’ are highly contested. Eschewing Mosse’s invitation to interpret fascism as culture, Richardson nevertheless argues that ‘the cultural’ can be understood as one approach to fascism. In this article, Richardson discusses six ways into a critical cultural analysis of the continuing presence of fascist political projects, focusing in particular on the British variant.     

‘Playing for fascism’: sportsmanship,antisemitism and the British Union of Fascists

Taking recent developments in the study of fascism as a cultural system as a starting point, Spurr examines the interrelationship between notions of race, sportsmanship and Britishness in the subculture of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). More specifically, by focusing on the BUF’s understandings of Britishness and sportsmanship, he highlights the self-reflexive qualities of the movement’s subculture in which a fascist world-view shaped not only explicitly political programmes but also the ways in which this variant of European fascism mirrored particularly English modes of defining national identity and cultural difference in the rhetoric of sportsmanship. In addition, Spurr outlines one of the many ways that this fascist culture shaped social practice in the fascist community, so reflecting an assumption that fascism was as much a lived experience as it was a world of ideas and political philosophy. In so doing, he examines the implications of the BUF’s distinctly English notion of sportsmanship for its followers’ self-definition as Britons, and how this understanding functioned in the construction of the counter-image of the Sporting Jew. As a metaphor, while seemingly rather innocuous, this characterization of the Jew enabled Mosleyites to express a multilayered critique of Jews in a manner that encapsulated their wider ideological concerns and in an idiom readily recognized in the wider context of British inter-war culture. In adopting this approach, Spurr rejects suggestions that the BUF mimicked Nazi models of antisemitism and moves beyond revisionist historiography’s concern with origins and forms to explore the cultural functions of racism in the movement’s subculture.     

Apoliteic music: Neo-Folk,Martial Industrial and ‘metapolitical fascism’

ABSTRACT

Shekhovtsov suggests that there are two types of radical right-wing music that are cultural reflections of the two different political strategies that fascism was forced to adopt in the ‘hostile’ conditions of the post-war period. While White Noise music is explicitly designed to inspire racially or politically motivated violence and is seen as part and parcel of the revolutionary ultra-nationalist subculture, he suggests that ‘metapolitical fascism’ has its own cultural reflection in the domain of sound, namely, apoliteic music. This is a type of music whose ideological message contains obvious or veiled references to the core elements of fascism but is simultaneously detached from any practical attempts to realize these elements through political activity. Apoliteic music neither promotes outright violence nor is publicly related to the activities of radical right-wing political organizations or parties. Nor can it be seen as a means of direct recruitment to any political tendency. Shekhovtsov's article focuses on this type of music, and the thesis is tested by examining bands and artists that work in such musical genres as Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial, whose roots lie in cultural revolutionary and national folk traditions.     

Antisemitic Europe and the ‘Third Way’: The Ideas of Maurice Bardèche

Abstract

Maurice Bardèche is an important neo-fascist writer whose ideas derive from those of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach. After 1945 he argued that right-wing thought had been ghettoized and even imprisoned by a post-Nuremberg liberal political establishment. In the face of a US military and cultural occupation of Western Europe and an encroaching Communist Soviet menace, Bardèche argued for a united European ‘third force’ to confront these two enemies. His dream was of a fascist-ruled Europe that would regenerate and defend the continent and the West against Communism and liberalism. Organic and idealist fascist states, without the faults of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, would implement a moral revolution, bolster economic affairs and prevent Europe being swamped by foreign goods, such as Asian electronics. He regretted Europe's membership of NATO and its being sucked into Cold War conflicts in the Middle East and in support of Israel. Europe's and fascism's enemies were blamed for all their ills, and a Jewish conspiracy was blamed for its campaign against the world whether in the guise of US financial power or through its control of Bolshevism, the latter being judged responsible for terrorism and subversion in the developing world. Bardèche was purely a warrior of the pen, and was important primarily for providing a link between fascism and neo-fascism and a training ground for new fascist writers in his journal Défense de l'Occident.     

Revitalizing and de-territorializing fascism in the 1950s: the extreme right in France and Italy,and the pan-national (‘European’) imaginary

ABSTRACT

In this article Mammone explores a still relatively neglected story in the history of post-war neo-fascism, notably the attempts by some French and Italian right-wing extremists to revitalize fascist ideology after the war by means of two interconnected strategies, namely, radicalization (rejection of the democratic system) and ‘de-territorialization’ (in the sense of converting narrow fascist nationalism into pan-European nationalism). Mammone describes these project(s), as well as the influence of thinkers such as Julius Evola and Maurice Bardèche, and their location in the wider ideological context of the extreme right in the 1950s. The immediate outcome of this ‘de-territorialized fascism’ was the creation of an extreme-right international association, the Mouvement Social Européen, in which French and Italian activists played a central role. Mammone breaks new ground regarding the non-national dimension of extreme-right thought, a topic too often studied within the boundaries of a given geographical territory and nationalist ideological landscape. By utilizing a transnational framework, he also shows the continuous connections and interactions between the Italian and the French extreme rights.     

Pan-European thought in British fascism: the International Third Position and the Alliance for Peace and Freedom

Shaffer’s article explores pan-Europeanism in post-war British fascism by examining the International Third Position (ITP) and the Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF). More marginal than the National Front and the British National Party, these groups never sought electoral influence or attracted a noteworthy membership. However, the ITP and the APF served as an important expression of extremist thought after the National Front and British National Party suffered from declining support. Both notably involved Nick Griffin and Roberto Fiore—who played significant roles in post-war fascism—although their involvement has not been explored in detail. By examining their activities, Shaffer argues that the pan-Europeanism of the ITP and the APF represented an evolution of British fascism that focused on foreign audiences and non-electoral goals. Despite containing elements of pan-Europeanist thought that existed in the NF and the BNP, they sought a purer and more exclusive objective with a strictly international focus.     

‘Rivers of Blood’ and Britain's Far Right

This article examines the impact of Enoch Powell's speech on Britain's numerous right‐wing fringe groups and their response—in particular, that of the National Front, who benefitted the most from Powell's intervention on race and for a brief moment became Britain's fourth political party. It begins by looking at the growth of post‐World War II British fascism and how its emphasis switched from anti‐Semitism to anti‐colonial immigration. Throughout the piece, the relationship between Britain's far right and the Conservative party is examined to show how Powell inadvertently blurred the lines between the two. The article concludes with the 1979 general election victory of Margaret Thatcher who, by adopting Powellite themes but in more measured tones, destroyed the National Front's dream of an electoral breakthrough.     

A fascist Trojan horse: Maurice Bardegraceche,fascism and authoritarian socialism

Maurice Bardegraveche was an important neo-fascist writer whose ideas derived from those of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach. Bardegraveche was a neo-fascist of the pen, and he used his journal Deacutefense de lposOccident to provide a link between fascism and neo-fascism in an attempt to resurrect the 'purity' of fascism in his post-1945 critique of West European history. Barnes addresses how Bardegraveche utilized a concept of 'authoritarian fascism', present in some old fascisms, to rehabilitate Europe. Bardegraveche commenced by analysing the faults of pre-war fascism and located many of his ideas in the work of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. He wanted to replace liberal democracy with an organic regime, both social and economic, but within a hierarchical framework. He opposed bourgeois society and advocated a corporate state of national solidarity. However, he believed that any new civilization must be aesthetic and move away from an insect-like industrialism in order to achieve a society based on peasant virtues. Bardèche appeared to be a utopian fascist, an anti-modernist. Barnes analyses his attack on capitalism, its feudalistic nature and the power of money, which he thought could only be opposed by fascist socialism and an ordered society. Bardèche located his variant of socialism within the context of the fascist philosophies of Drieu la Rochelle, Benito Mussolini, Jos Antonio, Corneliu Codreanu, Oswald Mosley and Jacques Doriot. He condemned political and economic liberalism and the class struggle. He wanted national capital to be protected and thought economic dependence relied on national independence. He believed economic power was held in too few hands and advocated a corporate state. Bardegraveche proves, essentially, to be a utopian, transcendental fascist.     

Religious toleration in black Africa

In the wake of electoral failure and continual fragmentation, the leadership of the British National Front is searching for respectability. David Baker argues that the ideas of A. K. Chesterton form the model for the NF's new approach, ideas that are part of a native fascist tradition and not derived from the ‘German socialism’ of Gregor and Otto Strasser.     

The fascist who would be king: Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk

ABSTRACT

Macklin and Fowlie explore the political life of Count Potocki de Montalk, a poet, pagan and pretender to the Polish throne. Count Potocki is perhaps most famous as a minor cause célèbre among London’s literary intelligentsia after his imprisonment for obscene libel in 1932. Historians, when they consider him at all, often discount him, viewing him as little more than a colourful eccentric, a view reinforced by Stephanie de Montalk’s fascinating biography of the man, which appeared in 2001. Eccentric he most certainly was. However, as this article demonstrates, Potocki also played a key role as an enabler of fascist and extreme right-wing activism through the services he provided myriad groups as a printer of their literature, a career that spanned the interwar and post-war periods. The article examines how his preposterous pursuit of the Polish Crown, coupled with the innate elitism this engendered, led him to reject egalitarianism and democracy and embrace fascism. While the Spanish Civil War saw an outpouring of literature from his literary contemporaries in support of the Spanish Republic, Potocki responded by establishing The Right Review as a mouthpiece for his own personal mélange of monarchism and fascism. Utilizing newly released security service files combined with archival research in the newly deposited Searchlight archive at Northampton University, this article pays closer attention to the political side of Potocki’s activities than has hitherto been the case, particularly his wartime publishing activities. This includes his anti-Soviet pamphlet on the Katyn massacre, which caused great vexation in government circles for fear of the harm Potocki’s (correct) accusations might do to relations with Britain’s crucial wartime ally. The authors conclude with a detailed examination of the role Potocki played in post-war National Socialist networks, for both personal and political ends, not least of which was his continued efforts to further his claim to the Polish throne, which he never ceased to believe was his by divine right.     

Subs and PSYOPs: The 1982 Swedish Submarine Intrusions

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was believed to have targeted Sweden by sending submarines into Swedish archipelagos and naval bases, which forced Prime Minister Olof Palme to terminate his ambitious foreign policy. The ‘imminent Soviet threat’ changed Swedish public opinion drastically. Twenty years later, statements made by the responsible US and UK leaders, including then US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and then UK Navy Minister Keith Speed, show that these operations were run by US and British submarines testing Swedish coastal defences. Then US Secretary of Navy John Lehman and the Swedish Secretary of the Submarine Inquiry, Mathias Mossberg, indicate that these operations were also deception operations and psychological operations. Swedish former defence ministers have said that ‘it was wrong to point to the Soviet Union’, indicating that the more visible submarines may have been from the West. Ralf Lillbacka's article in Intelligence and National Security in 2010 does not take this information into consideration. The technical evidence we now have is proof of Western submarines operating in Swedish archipelagos. This evidence confirms the statements made by responsible leaders.     

The National-Bolshevik Party and Arctogaia: two neo-fascist groupuscules in the post-Soviet political space

Mathyl examines two representatives of the Russian groupuscular right-Arctogaia and the National-Bolskevik Party-and their emergence after the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991, in the context of the radicalization of Russian nationalism that took place during the inter-Russian power struggle of 1992-3. The ideological arsenal of these groups consists principally of a politico-historical reconciliation between western (neo-)fascism and authoritarian nationalist Russian and Soviet traditions, in which those traditions are intensified and synthesized into a new kind of 'national Bolshevism'. The success of neo-fascist groupuscules demonstrates how potentially explosive the fascist diagnosis of the status quo can behaving been preserved virtually intact since 1945-when it meets with a new situation of high political instability and is employed in intensive political propaganda, as was the case in post-perestroika Russia. Following the nationalists' military defeat in October 1993, the Russian groupuscular right attempted both to maintain the revolutionary impetus and, through a variety of cultural-political activities, to contribute to the gradual enlargement of the nationalist-imperialist project, thereby demonstrating its close connection to the New Right and its strategy of struggling for cultural hegemony. Since the end of the 1990s, there has been, within the groupuscular right, both an increasingly apparent ideological transfer from East to West, and evidence of the growing influence of national Bolshevism on western third-positionist groups.     

Inversion,Paradox, and Liberal Disintegration: Towards a Conceptual Framework of Trumpism

This article puts forward a provisional framework, at best, of Trumpism, in order to explore some of the potential political, social, cultural, and global implications of it. In particular, this article explores Trumpism’s discursive ambiguity: how Trumpism appears to be one thing (for example, populist), and then appears to be another (for example, elitist). The framework draws from a wide-range of reputable journalism and scholarly literature, but notably borrows from Sheldon Wolin’s theory of “inverted totalitarianism,” specifically Wolin’s use of “inverted” to compensate for Trumpism’s ambiguity. In so doing, this article moves Wolin’s thesis forward as it relates to Trumpism. In the final analysis, the question is not whether Trumpism is fascist (yes, it is) or how similar it is to Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism. Instead, Trumpism compels us to confront whether the United States has, to some degree, always been fascist, and what does that inverted American-style fascism look like?     

Evola's interpretation of fascism and moral responsibility

ABSTRACT

The ideological influence that several right-wing radical thinkers exercised on the Norwegian ‘lone wolf’ terrorist Anders Behring Breivik raises the question of how far a writer can be held responsible for acts of terrorism s/he may have influenced. Italian history provides a vital lesson in this respect: namely, the role played by the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola in the crucial passage from Fascism to neo-fascism. After reviewing Evola's ideological development, Wolff then analyses Evola's influence on a young generation of neo-fascists in Italy. Another relevant topic is the ideological continuity between Fascism and neo-fascism identified here, as centred on Evola's view of ‘general fascism’ as the Traditional right.     

Barack Obama and the American island of the colour blind

ABSTRACT

Kuryla maps a metaphorical American island of the colour blind—in law, public rhetoric and culture—in the process locating the first black president of the United States on it, evaluating the claim that his presidency represents a colour-blind or post-racial politics. Barack Obama rejects colour blindness as a fact in the present yet gestures to its ‘better history’ (his modern transposing of Lincoln's ‘better angels’) while refusing any theoretical resolution of the idea. Obama, in public pronouncements and by sheer fact of his being and his biography, reveals the epistemic irony of the colour-blind idea, its persistence amid the conditions of its impossibility.     

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory

Abstract

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—‘intuitions’ and ‘concepts’—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct ‘logics’ with different forms of ‘negation’. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it. This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically     

The decontamination of German history: Jürgen Habermas and the ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany

The ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany was opened by the non-historian Habermas who sought to expose what he saw as a ‘scandalous’ revision of aspects of the history of German fascism on the part of leading conservative historians like Nolte, Hillgruber and Stürmer. Habermas sees this revisionism in the wider context of the perceived need to foster a new German nationalism as a means of legitimation. The attempt to decontaminate German history would seem to derive from the need to resist the demands for political realignment in West Germany and to establish a strong pedigree of German anti-communism which takes in National Socialism and its membership of the Anti-Comintern Pact as well as West Germany's membership of NATO. Habermas's critique of conservative historians and the non-rational assumptions of their philosophy of history is essentially linked to his critique of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault and his identification of a common paralyzing influence on discourse.     

Lost Imperium: the European Liberation Front (1949-54)

In 1947, just two years after the fall of Nazi Germany, an American expatriate living in Ireland named Francis Parker Yockey wrote Imperium, a massive tome that advanced a new strategy for post-war European fascism. Yockey insisted that fascists abandon their narrow nationalist viewpoint and, instead, fight for a new European-wide fascist empire, which he dubbed the 'Imperium'. In 1948 Yockey and his closest collaborators left Oswald Mosley's Union Movement and founded the European Liberation Front (ELF), a British-based groupuscule that lasted until 1954. Rejecting the possibility of building a mass fascist movement in post-war Europe, the ELF defined its primary task as ideological: namely, the advancement of the 'Imperium' idea inside the ranks of Europe's 'fascist elite'. The ELF soon ran into stiff opposition from Mosley over Yockey's controversial identification of the United States, and not the Soviet Union, as Europe's 'main enemy'. The ELF also met with fierce resistance from Hitler worshippers inside the British right like Arnold Leese, who rejected the ELF's emphasis on 'culture' over 'race'. Despite the ELF's relatively brief existence as a groupuscule, its introduction of a new kind of 'Eurofascist' thinking has recently led to its rediscovery by contemporary European New Rightists now searching for a new political strategy following both the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the world's sole 'superpower'.     

The (im)plausibility of racism in Europe: policy frameworks on discrimination and integration

ABSTRACT

Rodríguez Maeso and Araújo analyse the reproduction of a dominant understanding of racism in policy discourses of integration and discrimination used by monitoring agencies in Portuguese and European Union (EU) institutional contexts. More specifically, they question the political concern over racism and discrimination vis-à-vis the idea of Europe ‘becoming increasingly diverse’ and the need to gather ‘evidence’ of discrimination. To that end, they examine periodic reports issued by EU monitoring agencies since the 1990s—paying specific attention to reporting on school segregation of Roma pupils in Portugal—and national integration policies and initiatives that, since the 2000s, have targeted mainly Roma and black families and youth. They argue that the dominant discourse of integration and cultural diversity conceives of racism as external to European political culture, and as a ‘factor’ of the ‘conflictive nature’ of social interactions in ethnoracially heterogeneous settings. This paves the way for calls for the ‘strengthening of social cohesion’—on the assumption that policy initiatives need to act on the ‘characteristics’ of so-called ‘vulnerable’ populations—whereas institutional arrangements and everyday practices remain unchallenged.     

The Love That Dare Not Speak its Name? George W. Bush: State and Nation Building in Afghanistan, 2001–2

George W. Bush was an unlikely statebuilder. This controversial activity—one that he and many others persistently referred to as ‘nation building’—held little appeal for America's 43rd president. He did, however, learn to appreciate Charles Krauthammer's axiom that ‘no sane person opposes nation building in places that count’. This article posits that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, a more nuanced reading of the evidence shows that Bush rapidly and fairly consistently adopted something that resembled statebuilding, even if he was reluctant to acknowledge this in public. Bush's early decisions in Afghanistan merit a second look, not least because they pivot on a U-turn that established the foundations for a lengthy broad spectrum commitment that would last more than ten years.