Operation Paperclip has fueled neo-Nazi conspiracy theories regarding the CIA, espionage, and government smokescreens for decades. Operation Paperclip is the historical inspiration behind Hunters, a television series on Amazon Prime, depicting a ragtag band of Nazi hunters operating in New York in 1977, who discover that hundreds of Nazi war criminals are conspiring to establish… Continue reading “False flags, paperclips, and super spies: the secret Nazi origins of the CIA”
Trapped inside their houses during April 2020, a team of eighteen historians from around the world passed their time discussing how to define and study fascism. Fascism is famously difficult to define, although many eminent scholars have tried. As it turns out, it is even hard to work out how to tell its story. Trapped… Continue reading “Fascism was a Many Faceted Thing”
Since Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, many journalists have praised The Authoritarian Personality as a prophetic text that predicted the rise of fascism in the United States. On the seventieth anniversary of its publication, Andrew Woods reflects on The Authoritarian Personality’s approach to conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists in the radical right. Following the 2016… Continue reading “Revisiting the Authoritarian Personality: Conspiracy Theories and the Crank”
The radical populist right’s appeal to emotions has been one of the main reasons for its staying power over the span of more than four decades. The triumph of Nazism in the years following the election of 1933 that brought Adolf Hitler to power represents arguably the greatest human catastrophe of the 20th century —… Continue reading “When Emotion Trumps Dispassionate Politics”
Authoritarian leaders have historically fear-mongered and exploited public panics in order to exert more control over their countries. Sometimes it is okay to panic. Or at least, some situations demand radical solutions. But when you are up to your eyeballs in judgment against your neighbor for hoarding toilet paper or the government for jeopardizing your… Continue reading “How Fascists Have Used Panics To Consolidate Power”
In the second part of a mini-series on right-wing terror organizer, Stefano Delle Chiaie, Senior Fellow Dr Tobias Hof takes a look at his actions in Italy and South America – asking the questions about his influence and connectedness. Part 1 of this mini-series can can be found here. Losing Control: The “New Right” Once… Continue reading ““The Black Carlos”: The Story of Italian Right-Wing Terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie (Part II: Stefano Delle Chiaie and the “Black” International)”
The historical vision of the new man still animates many neo-fascist and neo-Nazi organizations that are rooted in the legacies of fascism. “The trenchocracy is the aristocracy of the trenches,” declared Benito Mussolini on the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia in December 1917. Reflecting on the new type of man emerging from the war, he… Continue reading “The New Man in Fascism Past and Present”
On December 7th 2019, Tom Newton Dunn, political editor of The Sun, published an editorial that promoted the conspiracy theories of the HIJACKED LABOUR (HL) project. Dunn praised the former intelligence officers behind HL for exhaustively charting Jeremy Corbyn’s “spider’s web of extensive contacts [that] stretch from Marxist intellectuals to militant groups and illegal terrorist… Continue reading “Off the Hook: How the HIJACKED LABOUR Conspiracy Theory Defends the Radical Right”
Within the radical right, men have always out-numbered women; I was one of those women for five years of my life. In 2012 I began disengaging from the extremist underground and I would love to be able to say that I made a clean break over night, however I would be lying through my teeth.… Continue reading “Personal reflections from a woman in the extremist underground”
Rome, 12 September 2019: Mourners are raising their arms in the Roman salute and singing the hymn of the former neo-fascist organization National Vanguard (Avanguardia Nazionale; AN) while a coffin is carried into the early medieval church San Lorenzo fuori le mura in Rome. Many have come to pay their last respects to their former… Continue reading ““The Black Carlos”: The Story of Italian Right-Wing Terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie”