The results of last year’s federal election were a disappointment for Angela Merkel’s CDU. In the Free State of Saxony, however, it ended in a disaster of historic proportions. This was particularly painful, given Saxony’s importance for the CDU. After all, the CDU had continuously governed the state for the past 27 years. Its first… Continue reading “What’s the Matter with Saxony?”
In the late evening of 28 September 2015, in Bisara village near the town of Dadri, just 50 kilometres from Delhi, an angry mob of over 100 people, approached the house of 50 year-old farm worker, Mohammed Ikhlaq. The mob demanded to see the contents of his refrigerator and the family insisted that the meat… Continue reading “The Hindu Right in India, Lynchings and ‘Alternative Truth’”
In summer 2018, one of Germany’s longest radical right trials will come to an end. As almost all of the defence lawyers now have given their pleas, the trial of the National Socialist Underground, or NSU, a radical-right terrorist group uncovered in November 2011, will reach its verdict. Starting in 2013, this court case has… Continue reading “Democratic Deficits and Social Ramifications: Research on the NSU Court Case from the Viewpoint of Joint Plaintiff-Lawyers”
Earlier this week, Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone, two North American YouTubers popular with the alt-right met, with Aleksandr Dugin, a well-known Russian geopolitical theorist on the radical right. Dugin’s thinking “draws heavily on the post-war attempts to recover the fascist project,” in particular appropriating three themes “familiar” to this intellectual lineage: the organic nature… Continue reading “Reintroducing Dugin to the alt-right: Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone’s recent interview”
Three years to the day after the murder of nine black churchgoers by a Confederate enthusiast provoked a national reckoning with the symbols of the Old South, neo-Confederate ideology is alive and well in America. It’s true, of course, that in the aftermath of the Dylann Roof massacre, two Deep South states; cities including Memphis… Continue reading “Three Years After U.S. Massacre, Confederate Ideas Are Resurgent”
After protests in London following the imprisonment of far-right activist Tommy Robinson, William Allchorn examines the changing strategies of the UK’s fringe extreme-right groups in recent months, which include a concerning revival of street protest, mobilising around a narrative of victimisation. Last weekend (9 June), saw one of the most prominent far-right mobilisations of the… Continue reading “Tommy Robinson and the UK’s Post-EDL Far Right: How Extremists are Mobilising in Response to Online Restrictions and Developing a New ‘Victimisation’ Narrative”
Having worked in the probation service for over 16 years, I was always exposed, and privy, to the ugly realities of individual and collective drivers for the radical right. However, the punishment and rehabilitative ideal at a practitioner level was far different to that of building resilient communities and engaging civic society groups in my… Continue reading “The Many Faces of the Far Right”
The Hungarian political sphere has been nothing if not interesting in recent months – especially in terms of the old Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.” Events have also been anxiety-inducing of late, with new ideas and proposed bills coming thick and fast from parliament’s supermajority. April and May 2018 saw Orbán’s encouragement… Continue reading “Hungary’s Population Crisis: More Babies and Less Migrants”
It may seem counter-intuitive, but a vegetarian or even vegan diet is in no way incompatible with radical-right thinking. In her recent post for the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, Cynthia Miller Idriss rightly emphasizes the significance of physical bodies for the radical right, in past and present. While her stress is on… Continue reading “The Radical Right and the Meat-Free Diet”
Two Latin scholars made unusual headlines in summer 2016. Hans Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse had just published The Codex Fori Mussolini: A Latin Text of Italian Fascism: a translation and extended annotation of the 1,220-word Latin inscription praising ‘the Boss’. Reconstructed from several Roman libraries, the original text remains at the bottom of a 300-tonne modernist… Continue reading “Book Review: Catherine Paul’s (2016) ‘Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism’ – June 2018”