The arrest and subsequent trials in the late 1980s/early 1990s did not change Stefano Delle Chiaie’s worldview. As soon as he was acquitted, he once again tried to assume a leadership position within Italy’s far-right. Thereby, he at first seemed to benefit from the decline and ultimate collapse of the Italian political system at the… Continue reading ““The Black Carlos”: The story of Italian right-wing terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie (Part IV: Delle Chiaie’s Revival)”
Violent language — even language that only gestures toward violence — creates its own effects and its own momentum, which it cannot always control. In February 1909, a strange new manifesto appeared, first in the Bologna-based Italian- language newspaper Gazzetta dell’ Emiliana, and then in French in Le Figaro. Readers of the declaration might have… Continue reading “When Angry Words Become Violent Actions”
The idea of European civilisation is repeatedly evoked by a range of different actors within radical right movements in the West. Paradoxically, whilst much of the European radical right is resistant to the European Union as a political project, many elements of radical right discourse return to the idea of Europe as a homogenous culture.… Continue reading “The Narrative of European Civilization within Radical Right Discourse”
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”
As Ronald Bush has pointed out, accounts 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 antecedent liberalism.’[1] Treatments of modernist ideology may indeed underplay this inheritance, not only from Mill’s On Liberty… Continue reading “The Anti-Democratic Faces of Modernism – Part One”
I teach modern literature, and I try and teach it with an eye to the political and social environments out of which it emerges. Two years ago, I introduced some extracts from Ezra Pound’s Radio Rome broadcasts into a university seminar discussion of modernist literature and politics. Students were, in turn, shocked, embarrassed and aghast… Continue reading “The Fascist in the Classroom: Teaching Pound, Race and Radical Right Politics”