In late August, the east German city of Chemnitz startled observers from all over the world. On 26 August 2018, 35 yr.old German Daniel H. was stabbed to death after a quarrel had escalated at a city festival in Chemnitz (Saxony). Shortly afterwards, the police arrested two asylum seekers from Syria and Iraq as… Continue reading “Scenes of ‘civil war’? Radical right narratives on Chemnitz”
Germany to the Germans! Foreigners out” was the central slogan of the racist riots in the city of Rostock in 1992. For around three days, neo-Nazis controlled the streets in the plattenbau district of Lichtenhagen where the central registration for asylum-seekers (as well as a housing block of Vietnamese contract workers) were situated. With stones… Continue reading “The truth lies in Chemnitz?”
Last month, For Britain – Anne Marie Waters’ post UKIP political party – held its conference in Liverpool. One of those speaking at the conference was the former reality TV contestant, Katie Hopkins. Speaking alongside Ingrid Carlqvist – a Swedish anti-Muslim writer who has previously denied the Holocaust – Hopkins told the gathered delegates, “I’m… Continue reading “Katie Hopkins: ‘celebrity’ extremist of the radical right?”
Over the course of the year, far-right groups in Quebec appear to have been systematically attempting to intimidate journalists and academics who focus on their activities. In May, half a dozen masked members of Atalante, a group which advocates openly for a “renaissance of the neo-French in Quebec,” gained entry to the Montreal newsroom of… Continue reading “When the Radical Right Shows Up”
The right-wing populist perpetuum mobile Like many others, appalled by what I find extremely dubious and divisive rhetoric in disarming the credibility of independent testimony from Holocaust survivors, I started a petition against Teodorescu’s editorials. Its main aim was to make the owners of GP (the media house Stampen AB, Stena Finans and other lesser… Continue reading “Holocaust survivors in Sweden– the ‘straw men’ for the radical right (Part 2)”
‘Our adversaries have forced us into an existential fight about the survival of our culture and our nation. There are only two choices: victory or death.’ –Mattias Karlsson of the radical right Swedish Democrats, Facebook comments on the outcome of the Swedish national elections 9 September 2018. Following Sweden’s national elections on 9 September, tensions… Continue reading “Holocaust survivors in Sweden– the ‘straw men’ for the radical right (Part 1)”
The October 2018 issue of The Atlantic , the venerable American monthly, is titled “Is Democracy Dying?” and contains a series of articles which, by and large, answer this question in the affirmative. Their authors though come to the rescue by suggesting ways the demise of democracy might be prevented. These accounts of democratic decline… Continue reading “Sound an Alarm?”
Current leader of UKIP, Gerard Batten, announced recently that he would be taking the party in a new, ‘populist’ direction. Batten defines populism (rather simply but also ambiguously) as ‘policies that are popular with voters’. In their latest manifesto, however, the party’s stance on a range of issues – from the NHS to Brexit, immigration, and prisons policy – suggests not… Continue reading “Towards a new ‘populist’ party? UKIP’s interim manifesto and the future of the UK radical right”
GUILD SOCIALISM AND ‘POST-LIBERALISM’ Eliot and Pound of course have been attacked for their bad politics; both were close to Hulme, and Hulme and Pound were deeply involved in the New Age journal, the radical socialist paper that provided a platform for many early modernists. This venue seems to have been a seed-bed for a… Continue reading “The Anti-Democratic Faces of Modernism – Part Two”
In his admiring review of Rebecca Beasley’s Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (2007), Ronald Bush adds one caveat: this exemplary study of the ‘ideological alignment between the oppositional practices of imagism, “anti-democratic” forms of “individualism,” and anarchism’, may ‘[miss] a beat… by not considering the similarly “anti-democratic” features of John Stuart Mill’s… Continue reading “The Anti-Democratic Faces of Modernism – Part One”