Is it possible to engage with the radical right without inadvertently supporting its intolerant ideology? In 1939, a Book of the Month Club (a US-based literary subscription service) edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published “for the political understanding of the American people.” As indicated in the pamphlet insert, the edition was sponsored for… Continue reading “The Ethics of Consuming Fascism”
Back in November 2018, restrictions on reporting on five people convicted of belonging to the banned National Action, a violent radical right movement, were lifted. Among them were Mikko Vehvilainen, a Finnish-born veteran of Afghanistan still serving in the British Army at the time of his arrest, and Alexander Deakin, the unemployed Midlands organiser of… Continue reading “On Cupboards”
After 1975, the remnants of Franco’s Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista were scattered across Spain, and found minimal support – despite attempts to consolidate power during the early years of the democracy. Numerous political parties aspired to claim the Falange as their own over the next forty years—most simply disappearing. In… Continue reading “Spain First: The Return of the Falange”
Where left-leaning observers warn of a return of totalitarian nationalism, the far right warns of the return of socialist and communist totalitarian politics. With the rise of populist and far-right politics in Europe and beyond, the fear of the return of totalitarian politics has equally intensified. Comparisons with the rise of fascism in the 1920s… Continue reading “The Far Right Imagines a Totalitarian Other”
The recent trial of Oxfordshire-based neo-Nazi couple Adam Thomas and Claudia Patatas, who were both found guilty of being members of the banned terrorist group National Action, has once again plunged the extreme right into the headlines in Britain. Patatas, 38, and Thomas, 22, have become easy targets for tabloid sensationalism. These are fanatics who… Continue reading “The National Action Trial, Nazi Fetishism, and the Neo-folk Conundrum”
The Britons are probably the most significant British racists you’ve never heard of. Through their publishing efforts, The Britons kept an English translation of infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in print from their founding in 1919 to their final demise in 1975. Usually appearing as mere background characters in general texts on British… Continue reading “Book Review – Nick Toczek, Haters, Baiters and Would-Be Dictators: Anti-Semitism and the UK Far Right, Oxon: Routledge, 2016.”
Fascism isn’t new to Latin America, and neither is the radical right. Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer, is the newly elected President of Brazil and one of the most right-wing politicians in power in Latin America in decades. He thus joins the radical right-wing surge of politicians around the globe from Presidents Orbán (Hungary)… Continue reading “Brazil’s Bolsonaro Is The Latest Incarnation Of The Radical Right In Latin America”
For anyone paying attention, the radical right is on the march. Recent years have been more favorable to their fortunes than at any time since the end of World War Two. True, much of this is driven by demographic change in western Europe and the US, and elsewhere; by appalling acts of terrorism that rightly… Continue reading “Paging Mr Aaronovitch: The Radical Right doesn’t need any more help from the mainstream”
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”