Just under two weeks before Election Day, Vice-President Kamala Harris also went there. In a televised speech, she declared that Donald Trump was even worse than a garden-variety fascist. “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler,” she said, “the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best.”

Fascism — especially its most radical form, Nazism — is still (just about) more than a political slur. For scholars, fascism signifies something historical, and something that still exists today. Few put Trump in this camp even after the doyen of fascism studies, Robert Paxton, quite remarkably changed his mind in 2021 after the chaos of January 6 “removed [his] objection to the fascist label.”

These are important voices. But they are mistaken.

Fascists know Trump isn’t one of them

Since 1919, fascists have wanted a “New Order.” One purified by blood (ideally of their enemies, but martyrdom works too). Fascism is aggressive and propagandistic. Manliness and violence are less needs than musts. This has been the case since Benito Mussolini launched the first “Italian fascist combat groups” (fasci italiani di combattimento) right after World War I. 

Above all, fascism is proudly of the revolutionary right — albeit with some leftist makeup. Anything truly left-of-center isn’t tedious; for them, it’s treasonous. 

Like liberals and socialists and every other ideology under the sun, fascists know their own. They are unequivocal: Trump is not one of them. And for once, they are right.

I should know, as I’m writing fascism’s first biography for Yale University Press.

Trump is no fascist, and certainly no Hitler. Instead, a better comparison is with Franz von Papen. Von Papen was Germany’s Chancellor the year before the Führer took power in 1933, heading a servile “cabinet of monocles.” (Remember those billionaires Rex Tillerson, Betsy DeVos and Steve Mnuchin?) Nazism’s leading chronicler today, Richard Evans, rightly called von Papen’s six-month rule a “coup.”

Fiddling while the country burned around him, von Papen reversed the ban on Hitler’s brownshirts, dissolved the government of Germany’s largest state (Prussia — imagine something like that happening to California) and also gave the Nazis access to the national radio network.

By that time, the Nazis didn’t much need the radio, having for several years enjoyed glowing media coverage provided by press magnate Alfred Hugenberg. That latter scenario has been replayed online, every day, ahead of November 5, 2024. 

But let’s go back to the future (and make it Part II, since the 1989 film’s Biff was explicitly modelled on Trump). 

Amongst fascists, believe it or not, there are different “faces.” One prominent face is what the UK government calls “self-directed terrorism,” as horrifically witnessed in Brazil as in Bratislava, New York and New Zealand. This last terrorist was succinct on Trump: 

Were/are you a supporter of Donald Trump? 

As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no. 

On this point, he spoke for fascists around the world.

American fascists see Trump as an opportunity

So what do American fascists actually think about Donald Trump?

The first answer is “multiple things.” But their differences can be simply summarized. The further to the extreme right these democracy undertakers are, the less likely they are to support him. In contrast, the closer to the mainstream they are, or aim to be, the more they are willing to forgive Trump’s supposed sins (having Jewish children, world-beating narcissism, playing the electoral “game” and an inconsistent embrace of white supremacy).

One American fascist put it simply: “If you support Donald Trump, you’re a cuckservative … This struggle requires and will be won by fanatics, not by reactionary, nostalgic cowards pining for the reform of a hostile system.” Trump could never be extreme and bloodthirsty enough for violent neo-Nazis.

Another key face of American fascism engages with elections, if grudgingly. Take Richard Spencer, the alt-right’s main mouthpiece, crowing after Trump’s 2016 victory that his more extreme supporters should “party like it’s 1933.” Within a year they were marching on Charlotteville with tiki torches, bellowing “Jews will not replace us!” 

From the chaos and murder that August 2017 weekend, one group rebranded around fascist symbols swaddled with Americana: the Patriot Front. They represent one of scores of political movements trying to break into the mainstream. In scenes recalling the Nazis’ “winter relief” (Winterhilfswerk) for the needy during the Depression, they were on the ground aiding in hurricane relief efforts in North Carolina and elsewhere. This was an open goal for them, as few others were doing that work.

Simply put, the Patriot Front finds Trump’s coattails big enough for them to ride. The 400-strong group complained only this month that Trump’s campaign was nicking their ideas. While they took a starkly different view of “Reclaim America” from Trump’s (“unwavering support for Israel, race-blind and unrestricted legal immigration” and so on), there could be no doubting their glee after identifying “Reclaim America” signage at a recent campaign rally. 

Like most US fascists, spanning the American Freedom Party to the American Nazi Party (and make no mistake, they exist in every American state today) electoral fascists have long seen in Trump a “real opportunity for people like white nationalists.” Unlike every decade since 1945, they may have a point in 2025.

The brainier fascists, finally, dub their project “metapolitics” (for them, a mind-shift must come before a political shift). Their line is broadly supportive. In 2015, one US fascist website-turned-publisher claimed that, while “Donald Trump is neither a Traditionalist nor a white nationalist, he is a threat to Jewish economic and social power in the world. For this reason, and only to the extent that Mr Trump sticks to his positions on deportations and limiting immigration, we might support his candidacy.”

Six years later — in the very month of Trump’s would-be coup on January 6, 2021 — that outlet’s boss, author of The White Nationalist Manifesto, said this: “You started something … if we win, historians looking back at the restoration of popular government [i.e., white supremacy] in America will say that it began with Donald Trump.” Amongst these would-be fascist aristocrats, “Trumpism” represents a tiny flame that needs more petrol — lots and lots more petrol.

Taken together, the pattern is undeniable. Except those at fascism’s most racist and terroristic end, fascists see in Trump opportunity. It is one they have not had for almost a century. Make no mistake, they plan to seize it. Expect violence and other tricks of the fascist trade in the coming months.

How can Americans respond?

What those who resist fascism do in response will be pivotal. As for the 2024 presidential cycle, immediate tasks are obvious: Yes, Trump needs to be defeated. But those welcoming him as a Trojan Horse-like possibility also must be counted, and countered. There is too little sign of that today.

Ultimately, Trump isn’t a fascist but fascism’s facilitator. When the Patriot Front — or the Proud Boys, or III Percenters, or any one of a number of wannabes — move from hundreds to thousands to even millions of supporters, only then will we realize that calling Trump “Hitler” or “fascist” was rash.

By then, of course, it would be far too late. It may feel like we are there now, but we aren’t. Fascism is much, much worse. Despite Harris’s well-intentioned warnings, overstating the problem helps only actual fascists. Between normalization and hyperbole, this is one judgment call vital to get right.

Seeing fascism aright has rarely been more important. Doing so means preparing for a long slog that may start in the US — but most certainly won’t end there. As the doomed Weimar Republic made plain, democracy is just so much spilled ink without democrats to defend it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Scholars, Fascists Agree: Trump’s Not a Fascist, but an Opportunity appeared first on Fair Observer.

Matthew explains that fascism today isn’t limited to its historically violent and militant expressions. Politicians like Donald Trump are seen as embracing a post-fascist type of politics, influencing both the Overton window and extremist ideologies.

At the same time, Matthew emphasizes the importance of understanding the spectrum of ideologies that exist between conservatism and fascism and the dangers of diluting the term “fascism.” The misuse and overuse of the term can lead to a loss of its historical significance and moral lessons. A critical, well-informed approach to contemporary events is necessary to avoid the dangers of historical amnesia.

Recent events in the US and Europe, notably the 2011 Norway attacks and other similar incidents, underscore the alarming rise of fascist terrorism. Matthew discusses the adaptive nature of this threat and its challenges in terms of identification and response.

Education and historical awareness are key to recognizing and combating extremist ideologies. We must beware politicization of education and the resulting impact on research and public understanding. Extremist narratives and literature drive the process of radicalization. Understanding the words and texts that inspire extremist actions is crucial in countering these dangerous ideologies.

Matthew also touches upon the need for a humanitarian approach, distinguishing between harmful right-wing populism and genuine threats to democracy and freedom. He emphasizes the importance of preparedness for potentially receiving asylum seekers fleeing fascist crackdowns.

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Fascism, Politics and Terrorism: Lessons From History With Matthew Feldman appeared first on Fair Observer.

Christianism: The Elephant in the Extremism Room

READ MORE

The Canadians are right to not be fooled. Nondescript and rarely captured on film since his last stint in prison ended in 1999, Mason is also the godfather of fascist terrorism. So just who is James Mason and why does an individual merit inclusion on a proscription list otherwise aimed at fascist groups? 

Siege Culture

By his own account, Mason has been a neo-Nazi for nearly 55 years now, joining George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party at the age of 14. Mason bounced around after Rockwell’s assassination in 1967, washing up in the short-lived American terroristic group National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) in the mid-1970s. In 1980, things took a turn for the weird when Mason embraced the imprisoned cult leader, Charles Manson, and split off from the existing neo-Nazi scene to establish Universal Order.

Among other curiosities, this tiny group argued that Charles Manson, of all people, fit the mold of a Nazi leader for the postwar American world. This would likely have been Mason’s tragicomic fate had he not also revived the NSLF’s publication, Siege, in 1980. 

Between August of that year and June 1986, Mason published comment pieces of roughly 1,000 words each in a monthly magazine, extending to more than 210 individual items. In 1992, the fascist ideologue Michael Moynihan edited and published Siege as a single volume. Although scarcely a best-seller, Siege clearly had its admirers. For one, the leader of WAR (White Aryan Resistance), the San Diegan Tom Metzger, was all ears.

Shortly after Siege was released, Metzger conducted several interviews with Mason on his television program, “Race and Reason.” Of especial interest to Metzger was Mason’s appropriation of the anarchists’ “propaganda of the deed” of the late 19^th and early 20^th century for right-wing extremists. Siege explicitly advocated this “lone-wolf terrorism,” with Mason preaching the virtues of so-called “one-man armies” and “lone eagles” fully three years before the better-known Louis Beam published (and republished online in 1992) his essay “Leaderless Resistance.”

In 2003, a second edition of Siege appeared, this time with added appendices and an internet-friendly format. One of these appendices included the transcript of a 1985 speech to Metzger’s WAR, which ended with the simple injunction that had made Mason infamous amongst the American neo-Nazi movement: “until the System is destroyed, by whatever means necessary, none of these fine plans will ever amount to anything more than a dream.” Turning this dream into a reality was the task of self-directed neo-Nazi terrorists, who have become, and will continue to be, a staple of 21^st-century political violence.

Yet Mason’s role as ideologue likely would have remained minimal and even subterranean had it not been for the emergence of the Iron March platform in 2011. Envisioned as a clearinghouse for fascist militancy, Iron March shared Mason’s view that only destruction of liberal democratic systems could create the space for fascism to emerge again — an emphatic rejection of political engagement and still less of building a movement. The moderators at Iron March gravitated to Mason’s uncompromising advocacy of lone-wolf terrorism, so much so that they published a first “revision” of Siege in June 2015. 

Just over two years later, in September 2017, a third edition of Siege was published under the Iron March imprint. It was identical to the 2015 version save for a new, 6-page preface by Mason, who had been located by members of one of the new neo-Nazi groups emerging from the Iron March forum, Atomwaffen Division (AWD). The latter celebrated Mason’s return to the neo-Nazi scene, and in 2017 secured Mason’s contributions to a website entitled Siege Culture. Mason ultimately wrote more than three dozen new pieces during 2017 and 2018 — before the website was taken down — in much the same style as his 1980s Siege writings. 

Neo-Nazi Gravitas

Mason’s neo-Nazi gravitas and willingness to rejoin the fray was a major boon to so-called accelerationist cells, which were growing in both number and militancy. For example, by early 2018, the acknowledged leader of these loosely organized groups, AWD, had no fewer than five alleged murders ascribed to its supporters. That year, an early study of Siege’s influence identified “33 extremist entities — 21 individuals and 12 organizations — with ties to Siege. Of these 21 individuals, nine have been involved in acts of violence, four have been involved in specific murders, and four have been involved in threats or acts of terrorism.”

This political violence extended far beyond AWD and the US. Other groups around the world were quick to franchise these branded terror cells, from the Antipodean Resistance in Australia, the Scrofa Division in Holland, the Sonnenkrieg Division (SKD) in the UK, and even the Feuerkrieg Division in Estonia, led by a 13-year-old boy known as the “Commander.”

While Iron March provided the means and opportunity for lone-actor terrorism, it is without doubt that Mason supplied, and still supplies, the motive. In fact, the dalliance between the neo-Nazi ideologue and a clearinghouse for fascist militancy was only consummated after the Iron March website was taken down in late 2017. In 2018, a fourth edition of Siege appeared, with nearly 200 pages of added material. Much of this material was explicit propaganda for AWD, SKD and others, including dozens of new images and threatening statements by now-imprisoned leaders of the Atomwaffen Division, Brandon Russell (aka “Odin”) and John Cameron Denton (aka “Rape”).

Put another way, the evolution of Siege, as both text and terroristic encouragement, in 2018 finally found its natural home with AWD and other accelerationists trying to help overthrow Western democracies. 

In the 30 months since, this wider Siege-inspired culture has continued to hone its tactics, including violent memes now dubbed “fashwave,” and advance a post-organizational ethos. Make no mistake, this neo-Nazi doctrine is reloading, not retreating. It is becoming younger and more militant by the day, particularly in light of COVID-19. At the time of writing, Siege culture is amongst the most pressing terror threats posed within liberal democracy, just as Mason giddily envisioned in 1980 in “Later on we’ll Conspire”:

“The lone wolf cannot be detected, cannot be prevented, and seldom can be traced. For his choice of targets he needs little more than the daily newspaper for suggestions and tips galore. … For his training the lone wolf needs only the U.S. military or any one of a hundred good manuals readily available through radical booksellers … His greatest concern must be to pick his target well so that his act may speak so clearly for itself that no member of White America can mistake its message.”

Make Sense of the World

Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

I agree to receive emails and other content from Fair Observer. I understand that I may repeal my consent at any time. You can review our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for further information..

This is the face of radical-right terror today. It will continue to persist so long as we — scholars, authorities and practitioners — continue to misunderstand lone-wolf terrorism and, just as troublingly, discount the dangers posed by Siege culture coming from either keyboard warriors or misguided youth. The voluntarism, vehement racism and social Darwinist “proof” of individual political violence as a pathway to what is increasingly called sainthood (Saint Tarrant and Saint Breivik memes are increasingly popular) are all gathering speed online despite attempts to take down this material. Siege’s bloody heyday is likely still ahead of us.

This would mean that more mangled bodies of innocents to come, and more terrorist convictions of would-be lone-actor terrorists, many teenagers. That suits James Mason just fine, for he is nothing if not an agent of destruction. The Canadians have it right: Both the man and the movement he inspired are immensely dangerous. Banning Mason is a start — and other countries concerned about radical-right terrorism should follow suit — while both Siege Culture and the wider movement it represents must be at the top of any counter-terrorism efforts. This terroristic movement will scarcely disband itself.

*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Godfather of Fascist Terrorism appeared first on Fair Observer.

Evangelical Blues, or How Supporting Trump Discredits Christianity

READ MORE

That is of course with good reason: On 9/11, nearly 3,000 people were brutally murdered by violent jihadi Islamists in the worst sub-state terrorist attack in history. But there is something that has long vexed me, in keeping with the New Testament injunction to take the “log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” I have referred to this phenomenon for more than a dozen years but have never had the opportunity to properly delineate what I think is again becoming an urgent subject matter, namely Christianism.

Perversion of Christianity

As I have written earlier, “Whereas religious politics, in a banal sense at least, may be observed wherever clerics become directly involved in politics, the term ‘Christianism’ is intended to denote a more radical, revolutionary approach to secular politics.” Christianism may have Christian connotations and indeed draw upon Christian language but, like Islamism, it is essentially appropriative. It allows an entirely secular Anders Behring Breivik (now known as Fjotolf Hansen) who murdered 77 in Norway on July 22, 2011, to term himself a “cultural Christian” — not on account of any metaphysical belief, but because he believed it was a useful framework with which to attack Muslims and Europe and, using an anti-Semitic dog whistle, “cultural Marxists.”

Christianism, therefore, is a secular doctrine that is different from, alternatively, evangelicalism, political Christianity and fundamentalism. Joas Wagemakers makes a similar claim about the distinction of Islamism from types of religious fundamentalism such as Salafism. This is a political ideology appropriating religion, not the other way around. But I would go further than Wagemakers does in describing Islamism as “a political application of Islam.” Instead, I would suggest that both violent and non-violent forms of Islamism, in their very nature, reject pluralism and advance a doctrine of supremacy that is the hallmark of extremism — whether ethnic, national or religious.

Moreover, it is precisely the political violence exemplified by the horrors unleashed by Breivik that Christianism is intended to denote. In short, this is a distinct, ideological perversion of Christianity that is, at the same time, distinct from older and more familiar forms of Christian nationalism and even from the theologically-based exclusion or persecution that has marred Christianity no less than other monotheistic faiths. One need not be a Christian to be a Christianist, nor is Christianism driven by the same impulse as the regrettably all too familiar instances of tribalism in Christian history.

It scarcely should need saying, but Islamism is an extremist perversion of one of our world’s leading faiths. As a revolutionary ideology born of the 20^th century, it can be directly traced from the interwar Muslim Brotherhood under Hasan al-Banna, for example, and the doctrines of Sayyid Qutb in postwar Egypt to the quasi-state terrorism of the Islamist death cult, Daesh. For all of its supposed medievalism, then, Islamism is a product, and not merely a rejection, of modernity.

A similar perspective can be taken on Christianism. So, first, a banal point: Believers have politics, just as do non-believers. For this reason, I am wary of constructions like “political Christianity” or “political Islam” for the same reason I’m only marginally less wary of constructions like “apolitical Christianity” or “apolitical Islam,” though I accept, of course, that different forms of hermeticism stretch across most faith traditions.

Thus, Christianism doesn’t refer to a form of Christian nationalism that is evident in the contemporary US (although not only there). One might observe the heart-breaking scenes in early April of Protestant loyalists rioting in Belfast with the frightening implications for the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, or indeed the conflict acting as the midwife for the long struggle over the six counties, the Great War. Throughout that conflict, scholars have clearly shown that both Protestant and Catholic confessions anointed or, better, armed their nations with justifications of a holy war. Christian churches’ injunctions to fight for God and nation is but one example of Christian nationalism, and there are countless others like it in the Christian tradition as there are in other faith traditions. It is far from new.

Sacrazlied Politics

This particular sense of Christian nationalism, likewise, has been extensively studied in the American context, with particular focus on white evangelicalism. In the compelling empirical account, “Taking America Back for God,” Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry conclude that “those who embrace Christian nationalism insist that the Christian God formed, favors and sustains the United States over and above the other nations in the world.” It is in this sense that Rogers Brubaker refers to adherents of Christianism in a 2017 article, whereby “Christianity is increasingly seen as their civilizational matrix, and as the matrix of a whole series of more specific ideas, attitudes, and practices, including human rights, tolerance, gender equality, and support for gay rights.”

Yet here too we may be seeing a case of old wine in new bottles, whereby reactionary and even tribal expressions of a faith — in this case Christianity — which seem to belong to a tradition that, in American terms, stretches from John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” to the televangelists of our day. Even cast in such civilizational terms, these forms of Christian tribalism are of a different stamp than the tradition I’d like to indicate. It is first and foremost ideological and emerged between the two world wars to afflict all three principal confessions in Europe: Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

To take but one example of from each of these confessions, consider first the Romanian Orthodox ideologue, Ion Moţa, a key leader of militant fascist mystics, the Legion of Archangel Michael. Just before he was killed by Republicans in what he understood as a holy war in Civil War Spain, Moţa declared: “No force, no love exists which is higher than that of the race (and can only be realized in the race), except for the force of Christ and love of him. We are defending Christianity in a foreign land, we are defending a force which wells up from the force of our people, and, spurred on by our love for the Cross, we are obeying here in Spain our love for the Romanian people.”

Underscoring that his views were scarcely marginal, a mortuary train carried Moţa’s body from the Spanish battlefield across Europe in winter 1937 into Bucharest, where he was received by hundreds of thousands of devotees, helping to nearly triple the mystical fascist party — the Romanian Iron Guard — membership to 272,000 by the end of that year. No doubt many of these supporters later took part in the earliest massacres during the wartime Holocaust, murdering more than 100,000 Jews in pogroms across Romania in 1940.

This form of sacralized politics was not limited either to the laity or to Orthodox fascists. In Nazi Germany, the regime initially supported the mistitled German Christians as an expression of what was termed “Positive Christianity” in the NSDAP program. Under Reichsbishop Heinrich Müller, the German Christians promoted the Führerprinzip in the country’s Protestant churches, aiming for complete coordination between a totalitarian state and a totalitarian church.

A picture of what this looked like can be glimpsed from these selections of Muller’s 1934 rendering of Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount”. Thus, “Blessed are the meek” becomes “Benevolence to him who bears his suffering manfully,” while “Blessed are the peacemakers” is mongered into “Benevolence to those who maintain peace with the members of the Volk.” Most sacrilegiously, the categorical “turning the other cheek” is turned to the following:  “I say to you: it is better, so to live with other members of your Volk that you get along with each other. Volk community is a high and sacred trust for which you must make sacrifice. Therefore come out to meet your opponent as far as you can before you completely fall out with him. If in his excitement your comrade hits you in the face, it is not always correct to hit him back.”

So far did this heresy go that the German Christians even sought the “liberation from the Old Testament with its cheap Jewish morality” by attempting to simply expunge it from the Bible. The genocidal analogue of this attempted erasure was the Holocaust, which was powered by what Saul Friedlander has aptly called “redemptive antisemitism.”

Clerical Fascism

Yet fighting a holy war against socialists in Spain or advocating genocide from the pulpit was not Christianist enough for the Independent State of Croatia, the Catholic wartime ally of Nazi Germany under the rule of the Ustasa, rightly described as “the most brutal and most sanguinary satellite regime in the Axis sphere of influence.” The Ustasa methods of killing were so sadistic that even the Nazi plenipotentiary based in Croatia recoiled. For instance, consider the words of Dionizije Juričev, the head of State Direction for Renewal, from October 22, 1941:

“In this country only Croats may live from now on, because it is a Croatian country. We know precisely what we will do with the people who do not convert. I have purged the whole surrounding area, from babies to seniors. If it is necessary, I will do that here, too, because today it is not a sin to kill even a seven-year-old child, if it is standing in the way of our Ustaša movement … Do not believe that I could not take a machine gun in hand just because I wear priest’s vestments. If it is necessary, I will eradicate everyone who is against the Ustaša.”

These words were targeted not only at the demonized victims of Nazism such as Jews, Roma and Sinti Travelers, but also at the Orthodox Serbs who were the largest victims of the Ustasa “policy of thirds” — kill one-third, expel one-third and forcibly convert one-third of their enemies. This sacrilege culminated in the only extermination center not directly run by the Nazi SS — the Jasenvocac camp, less than 100 miles from the Croatian capital Zagreb.

Jasenovac, where some 100,000 ethnic or religious victims were brutally murdered, was commanded by Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, a serving priest. Though he was later defrocked and ultimately hanged in 1946, both his wartime actions and the escape of so many of his allies on the Catholic “ratline” to South America, including the Ustasa leader, Ante Pavelic — who spent more than a dozen years hidden in Argentina after the war — suggests that, in much the same way that fascism could appeal to seduced conservatives, Christianism could also appeal to Christian tribalists.

The case of such priests during the fascist era led to the useful term “clerical fascism,” characterized as a hybrid between the Christian faith and fascism. Yet in a manner inverse to Christian nationalism, which can be entirely secular, clerical fascism suggests a phenomenon from, and within, Christian churches. With respect to Christianism in our (arguably) secularizing world, this would exclude self-described “cultural Christians” like Anders Breivik, whose 775,000-word manifesto is clear on his secular appropriation of Christianity for the purposes of attacking cultural Marxism.

So too with the civilizational frame adopted by conspiracist proponents of the “great replacement,” which alleges a Muslim plot to destroy Christian civilizations from within. The convicted terrorist Brenton Tarrant, the murderer of 51 Muslim worshippers at Friday prayers in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, was aimed at countering this so-called “white genocide,” itself a neo-Nazi term coined by the convicted race murderer David Lane (also notorious for popularizing the “14 words”: “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”). Like Breivik, Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto, “The Great Replacement,” specifically addresses itself to Christians:

“Let the fire of our repentance raise up the Holy War and the love of our brethren lead us into combat. Let our lives be stronger than

death to fight against the enemies of the Christian people.

ASK YOURSELF, WHAT WOULD POPE URBAN II DO?”

Pope Urban declared the First Crusade in 1095, opening one of the darkest chapters in Christian history.

Although modern and revolutionary, Christianism need not be defined as a theological stance. One can be agnostic on the issue of faith and still be a Christianist. More important is the Durkheimian religious behavior toward the sacred and the profane, which closely links clerical fascists with cultural Christians of Tarrant and Breivik’s stripe. This leads to the definition of Christianism as a modern, ideological appropriation of Christianity based upon a secular vision of redemption through political violence against perceived enemies.

Relevant Again

While it might be tempting to think that the era of fascism has left Christianism in our bloody past, this construction feels relevant again in the wake of the Capitol Hill insurrection earlier this year in Washington, DC. True, Identity Christians, the Army of God and many similar groups emerged after 1945, but these were tiny and fringe extremist movements. By contrast, what makes Christianism today the elephant in the room is precisely how widespread it appears to be developing in a new guise — and radicalizing.

In the US, for instance, according to recent polling reported by The New York Times, nearly “15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters.” That equates to some 50 million Americans. That this ideological crusade is “infecting” Christian churches, indeed conquering them, is borne out by a similar Axios report indicating that this virus stretches across confessions: “Hispanic Protestants (26%) and white evangelical Protestants (25%) were more likely to agree with the QAnon philosophies than other groups. (Black Protestants were 15%, white Catholics were 11% and white mainline Protestants were 10%.)”

We should not delude ourselves that this is, or will always be, a non-violent movement. Already, nearly 80 “conspiracy-motivated crimes” can be laid at the QAnon Christianists’ door — and that’s before ascribing to them a key role in the January 6 insurrection, also partly fomented by then-President Donald Trump. The fusion of QAnon with Christianity — an exemplary case of Christianism — is chillingly evidenced by a professionally shot video released this New Year’s Day, just days before the attempted coup in Washington. Even if this ideological call to battle ends with the canonical Lord’s Prayer familiar to Christians, salvation is emphatically this-worldly and focused on a “reborn” US in a manner quite familiar to scholars of fascism.

It is for this reason that Christianism is very much the elephant in the room. As such, it needs to be confronted and rejected both politically and theologically — first and foremost by Christians themselves. This repudiation would not simply be for the sake of the self-preservation of the faith in the face of its heretic form and not just for the protection of life that will be an increasing concern in the months and years to come. It is necessary because this is a syndrome not unfamiliar to other faiths but has yet to be named as such among mainstream Christian confessions.

We must not look away from this. Let us not go back to the genocidal years of clerical fascism in Europe, spawned by ideology and bloodlust, and let us stand tall against what is so obviously sacrilege. Both faith and civic duty command it. That is because, put in more familiar terms in William Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun,” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Christianism: The Elephant in the Extremism Room appeared first on Fair Observer.

The recent, unexpected election of Donald J. Trump to the US presidency has aroused widespread fear, anxiety and, not infrequently, derision on the part of political observers—both at home and abroad. Why?

At first, the answers seem obvious and straightforward. The president-elect is an amateur at politics, never having run for public office. He is a huckster and conman who bears a closer resemblance to P.T. Barnum than Dwight Eisenhower. Trump is also a notoriously thin-skinned bully and is unable to tolerate even mild criticism without recourse to vengefulness. He is also a sexist whose views on women often appear to approach lechery. Yet that is not the worst of it.

As far as his policy proposals are concerned, Trump appeals to a renewed nationalism, “America First”— itself first popularized by interwar fascists in the US, led by an earlier celebrity, Charles Lindbergh—aimed at limiting the country’s international engagements and curtailing free trade. On the domestic front, Trump aims to expel millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants and to prevent Muslims, or at least those from Arab countries, from being admitted altogether—he has used the term extreme vetting more recently. Beyond these commitments, or ostensible commitments, Trump’s outlook resembles traditional Republican views on the benefits of deregulation and lower tax rates domestically.

Fears and Anxieties

Basic to the fears and anxieties about Trump’s ascent to the presidency is his apparent endorsement of racial, religious and ethnic bigotry. His call to build a wall on the country’s southern border—to prevent Mexican immigrants from entering the country illegally—and his comments about radical Islamic terrorism between American shores has struck a major chord with resentful voters in many parts of the country.

Accordingly, Trump’s flirtation with white revanchism won him the enthusiastic support of David Duke, the longtime neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader, the current KKK itself and the loose aggregation of white nationalists, right-wing populists and anti-Semites who have recently attempted to rebrand themselves as the alt-right.

The latter generally perceives the white race as the only source of invention and creativity in the world. In their narrative, the US is threatened from other racial and/or religious groups who have gradually invaded and occupied the whites’ traditional European and North American homeland. The more conspiracy-minded activists among these white nationalists see American Jews as, once again, behind efforts to undermine American greatness and white leadership.

As evidence, radical (aka alt-)right ideologues like Richard Spencer cite the role of Jewish figures in the mainstream media, public radio and television; and in particular, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the leading social media websites. He and other white nationalist leaders stress the role of these key news outlets in undermining Trump’s presidential campaign. And, of course, they have a point. Every major big city newspaper around the country (save the Las Vegas Review-Journal, ironically enough, owned by Sheldon Adelson), including those with long-time Republican commitments, endorsed Hillary Clinton. The latter’s near-unanimous support from the country’s foreign policy establishment was widely publicized by the news outlets.

At the street level, such watchdog organizations as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), as well as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, have called attention to the rapid rise in hate crimes and acts of hate driven vandalism since Trump’s election. Swastikas have been painted on a variety of public buildings. Just 10 days after Trump won the Electoral College vote, reported hate incidents were nearing 900.

These developments have led some commentators to observe that Trump’s campaign expressed a thinly-veiled form of anti-Semitism in the country. For one, the appointment of Steve Bannon as a White House adviser appeared to strengthen the case for a new anti-Semitic tone in the Trump transition team and, therefore, incoming administration. Bannon, a well-known veteran of white nationalist and other far-right enterprises, has caused more than 100 US Congressmen to sign a petition demanding that Trump rescind the appointment. Even in these early days of astonishing Trump’s paramountcy, spines are stiffening.

The Red Herring

Whatever the truth about Trump’s sexist attitudes and his xenophobic expressions against Latinos and Muslims, the accusation of anti-Semitism does not conform to reality. This is largely a red herring.

President-elect Trump’s daughter Ivanka is a convert to Orthodox Judaism, a result of the fact that her husband, Jared Kushner, is a religiously-observant Jew. Moreover, Kushner, whose business background, like Trump’s, is in property development, has become a close adviser to the incoming president. He will likely remain in this position, or in one similar, after Trump takes office in January 2017.

Yet the story does not end with the Trump family. Trump has surrounded himself with a substantial list of Jewish business partners, legal advisers, upper echelon employees and campaign contributors. Here are some examples: Jason Greenblat, another Orthodox Jew, is Trump’s principal attorney. Another lawyer, David Friedman, handles Trump’s bankruptcy filings. Michael Cohen has served as a campaign spokesman and was recently called on to chair Trump’s council of economic advisers. Boris Epshteyn is also listed as a spokesman and senior adviser. Lewis Eisenberg chaired Trump’s victory committee. Major donors and fundraisers for the Trump presidential campaign included the hedge-fund manager and recently named treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the billionaire casino owner Adelson.

If we add to this list the fact that Trump spoke recently before a meeting of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and has advocated moving the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a position long-advocated by the Israeli far-right. In fact, Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has expressed a close friendship with the American president-elect. The claim he is an anti-Semite appears shaky.

Indeed, if there is some underlying conflict at work here it has to do with the Jewish community itself. Trump’s Jewish supporters and confidants are drawn largely from the world of business, investment banking and law and, especially, New York property development. Trump’s loudest and most visible critics have also tended be Jewish. But these academics, newspaper and blog reporters, columnists, magazine editors and writers occupy a completely different social and political milieu than Trump’s Jewish supporters.

What we appear to be witnessing then is not a conflict between anti-Semites and the principles of constitutional liberalism, but a sectarian struggle over American Jewish values.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: PapaBear

The post Heil the Trump Victory appeared first on Fair Observer.

In 2016 the different types of far-right extremism and its new, lowest-common denominator, anti-Muslim hate incidents, have taken leaps and bounds toward the mainstream. Many of those advancing what can be usefully called Islamoprejudice—rather than fear suggested by the term Islamophobia—clearly revel in offensive imagery and rhetoric or, at the very least, don’t care enough to see that racially or religiously stereotyping others offends fundamental liberal principles of tolerance.

This is an ugly business, but in dark times engaged citizens do not have the luxury of merely shielding eyes from ugliness. Instead, there is a greater need than ever to confront bigotry anywhere and everywhere it is found.

Exclusionary rhetoric is back in fashion, not only from the far right and what can be usefully called the “near right” in the tabloid press and at the fringes of mainstream politics. For example, only five years after anti-Muslim prejudice “passed the dinner-table test” in Britain in the words of Baroness Warsi, a Channel 4 news presenter can be abused without penalty by the country’s leading newspaper for wearing the hijab.

This comes at a time of increased hate crime for all minority groups in the UK: LGBT and disabled people, non-native Britons, the black and minority ethnic (BME) community and, most visibly today, hate incidents against Jews and Muslims. An attack on one of these groups must be construed as an attack on all everyone, and an attack on the very pillars of individual freedom.

Relevantly for our new age of President Trump, this is what the director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had to say yesterday about the suggested Muslim registry in the United States: “As Jews, we know what it means to be registered and tagged. As Jews, we know the righteous and just response.” He has justly pledged to register as a Muslim in solidarity should such an unconstitutional, counter-productive and hateful checks come to pass.

Hate Crimes Against Us All

Seen from this perspective, hate crimes are an assault upon all of us. Yet in Britain, hate attacks are on the rise by just about every indicator there is. National records for England and Wales showed an 18% spike in hate crimes in 2014/2015, and another spike of 19% last year, bringing the annual hate crimes to a vexing 62,518 recorded incidents by April 2016. Due to a persistent underreporting that, again, everyone must all do what we can to address, the real number is much, much higher—and getting worse. In the month following Brexit, a 41% spike in hate incidents were recorded, and levels of hate incidents remain as elevated as they are shameful.

Bearing this out is UK data analyzed over the last three years by the research unit I co-direct at Teesside University, the Centre for Fascist, Anti-fascist and Post-fascist Studies. A major strand of our work is the analysis of hate crimes, especially as it relates to the far-right and anti-Muslim attacks. The raw data is imperfect and, based on self-reporting, is not, and cannot be, a representative sample of the country as a whole. That said, these figures remain the most wide-ranging we have for the roughly 4% of the UK population that is Muslim.

Take the first figure (graph 1) from the 2012/13 total of 584 cases reported to Tell MAMA—an anti-Muslim-attacks reporting service launched by Faith Matters in spring 2012—in their first year of operation: Of the 130 hate crimes taking place offline, most took place on the street— meaning that it is likely many might be considered opportunistic attacks that may have been prompted by circumstance, context or swift radicalization.

While this is in keeping with our understanding of crime more broadly, the next figure (graphs 2 and 3) certainly isn’t: More women than men are victims in public, and most public victims were women wearing “visibly Muslim” clothing at the time of the attack. Put simply, hate crime overwhelmingly tends to be male on male, with the exception of anti-Muslim attacks, the majority of which are male on female. As usual, fully 78% of reported offline perpetrators were male.

Above all, our first report showed that 300 of the 434 reported online attacks had some kind of link to the far right—which excluded the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in this report—an English Defence League (EDL) hashtag, reference to the British National Party (BNP) or National Front, hotlink to the transnational counter-jihad website, and so on.

While some people minimize online incidents as merely keyboard warriors expressing unpopular opinions on social media, evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Nearly two-thirds of reported online hate attacks threatened offline action (graphs 4 and 5). This can extend to doxxing posts with personal information like a home address or details of family members to threats of real world violence.

Finally, our data from the first year suggests that far-right participation in anti-Muslim attacks is oversized—especially online. The organized far right in Britain remains comparatively small in terms of the population as a whole: less than 5% nationally. But offenders related to far-right groups account for four times this amount in offline attacks, and a staggering 14 times this amount for online attacks. This suggests that, especially online, there is a small, hard core of far-right offenders— perhaps serial or repeat offenders.

Cumulative Extremism

Our second report, released in July 2014, had a different emphasis: cumulative extremism. This term is used to refer to the cyclical ratcheting up of violent activity between opposing communities, with acts of violence perpetrated by a sub-group, however small, of a given community against members of another community, triggering acts of violent retribution.

This process is seen to be self-perpetuating, akin to a downward spiral, with each act of violence prompting a response that leads to further violence. In the 10 years since this term was coined, the idea of diametrically opposed groups goading each other into more extreme acts—most often in the scholarly literature referring to jihadi Islamist terrorists and far-right extremists—has become an important part of policy and community cohesion discussions.

Fair Observer provides you deep and diverse insights for free. Remember that we still have to pay for servers, website maintenance and much more. So, donate now to keep us free, fair and independent.

To date, the most detailed evidence to support the cumulative extremism thesis came in the wake of the appalling murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich by two Islamist terrorists on May 22, 2013. This led to four times more online and offline reports—a spike of 373% recorded in the Tell MAMA data—in the week after the attack than in the week beforehand. Hate incidents were highly elevated for months afterward—a significant and troubling finding (graph 6).

Nor was this only words, troubling as that is: In the three months after Rigby’s murder, Tell MAMA documented 34 anti-Muslim attacks on property, most notably in places of worship, ranging from graffiti to arson (graph 7). There were also 13 cases of extreme violence recorded, resulting in a victim’s hospitalization. Our second year, in short, suggested that anti-Muslim attacks were getting worse, not better.

Our final report covered the 12-month period between March 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015, with online hate incidents covering 402 of 548 attacks, or again about two-thirds of all reports to Tell MAMA. In keeping with our previous two reports, the majority of public attacks were perpetrated by white men against “visibly Muslim” women.

But we also added a degree of nuance to our previous analysis of cumulative extremism. In the case of Rigby, the aftermath of an outrageous daytime stabbing attack on an off-duty soldier in London was captured on a smartphone, and then swiftly disseminated around the world, with the murderers shown with still-bloody hands and unanimously associated with jihadi Islamist terrorism. While in terms of guilt attribution the incident had no relation to the nearly 3 million Muslims in Britain going about their daily business, this nonetheless added up to a perfect storm of elements leading to a sharp rise in anti-Muslim attacks, both online and in person.

Yet in terms of cumulative extremism, our findings suggest that crucial variations can exist. This is exemplified in the varied responses to apparent jihadi Islamist attacks recorded in the seven days following 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Copenhagen and Sydney. Briefly, the Paris attack on January 7, 2015 saw a mass shooting at the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, followed by a related anti-Semitic murders at a grocery store. In all, 17 victims were murdered and three gunmen killed; it so rocked France that millions took to the streets on 11 January, including dozens of European leaders assembling in Paris, under the banner “Je Suis Charlie.”

A month later, another jihadi Islamist terrorist assaulted a public event in Copenhagen, followed by a shooting outside the city’s Great Synagogue, which left a total of two dead and another five injured. Although similar to the Paris and Copenhagen attacks perpetrated by an adult male with a violent criminal past, with assailants ultimately killed by police, the circumstances of the 18-hour Sydney hostage standoff were somewhat different. There, while Man Haron Monis claimed ISIS affiliation, he was swiftly identified as having a history of mental illness and criminality, thus providing an alternative frame for the ongoing media coverage. Alongside the fact that Monis’s siege was less violent than that of Paris and Copenhagen it also seems important that the event broke on social media in the middle of the night in the UK (graph 8).

Role of the Media

This raises searching questions about the role of the media in mediating and framing news coverage that seems to be a vital pre-requisite for cumulative extremism. Acts of jihadi Islamist terrorism come to the attention of far-right groups via the “near right” media, filtering through a complex network of blogs, social media pages and forums before reaching their final audience. In turn, it may be that the severity of the cumulative extremism cycle is, in part, determined by the level and tone of mainstream media coverage.

Where media outlets might single-mindedly stress the jihadi Islamist, or even Muslim, nature of an attack, devoting significant coverage to this interpretation, a violent response is likely to be greater than in cases where the religious background of the attacker is downplayed, or rejected in favor of an alternative explanation—as with the Sydney attacks, where the attacker was identified as mentally unwell and with a violent criminal past.

Similarly, where a terror attack receives greater or more sustained media attention—as with the 60-hour, multisite coverage of the attacks in Paris in January 2015, or the domestic significance of Rigby’s murder in broad daylight in Britain’s capital—it is likely to generate a more hateful reaction than where the media offer lower levels of coverage as in Copenhagen and, especially, Sydney.

The dangers of uninformed rhetoric can be noxious indeed. Without doubt, the frame presented by some of the tabloids following these terrorist attacks sometimes carried bigoted messages. This fact was noted by an August 26, 2016 report on the UK by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in a section dedicated to “hate speech and hate crimes.”

International concern over the mainstreaming of racism and Islamoprejudice was still more explicitly spelled out in a lengthy study European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance, released on October 4, stating that “hate speech in some traditional media continues to be a serious problem, notably as concerns tabloid newspapers” in Britain, “including inflammatory anti-Muslim headlines” that “associate all Muslims with extremism and terrorism. As observed previously, this has led to a large increase in hate speech and violence against Muslims,” especially following ISIS-inspired attacks.

While it is naturally important for the media to present honest and impartial coverage, granting greater voice to more nuanced or alternative explanations of extremists’ motivations may do much to reduce the ferocity of the cumulative extremism backlash—ensuring that the wider Muslim population in the UK remains trusted, heard and protected.

And if this is the case with cumulative extremism, so too with “trigger” events more generally, which, as was made plain after Brexit and, more recently, the aftermath of Trump’s election, need not be a terrorist attack at all. We need to be especially vigilant in the wake of these events, which, if caught unaware and unprepared, can unleash the furies.

The post Islam and the Far Right: Is Bigotry Back? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Following the pusillanimous and gristly assassination of Jo Cox, member of Parliament for Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire, the subject of radicalization is prominent in British news once more. This ought not to surprise: The arrested and charged suspect, Thomas Mair, allegedly had a relationship with neo-Nazi movements stretching back to the 1990s and links to pro-apartheid groups going back still further. Even though dedicated academic units exist to examine radicalization, the concept is fundamentally debated amongst scholars and remains poorly understood amongst the general public.

The word fundamental is deliberate. Via the Latin radicalis, originating some seven centuries back, the term’s medieval pedigree had two central attributes: It was a philosophical term and carried with it positive or neutral—but not negative—connotations. In fact, radical has only really taken on a political hue in English over the last two centuries, and again usually was intended positively. Thus, in the early 19^th century, radical Liberals wanted to return to, and expand upon, the basis of political liberalism: individual rights and duties. It is really only this century, specifically after the 9/11 attacks and the alarming rise of jihadism in Europe and the US since then, that the term radicalization came to have a negative political connotation.

A Political Good

And yet, who is to say that radicalization is always, necessarily, a bad thing?

Radicalization clearly means different things to different people and, in current government thinking in the United Kingdom, is often separated into violent and nonviolent forms. More broadly, however, the word is typically defined today to include recourse to or endorsement of political violence, and often understood as a political stance incommensurate with “British values”—or at least those associated with democratization and liberal tolerance of others.

But again, that is a far cry from its cautiously positive usage as outside of the orthodox. To take only two examples from the last century, consider the first wave feminist movement at the start of the last century, or campaigners for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s. Vis-à-vis mainstream society these were radicalized campaigners. We might note that activists’ liberal political radicalization—essentially moves toward greater equality—in those cases was a political good, even an ethical good, set of actions underpinned by ideology.

Events like the above make one wonder if, like what we know of crime in general—that it is often opportunistic—radicalization might also be contextual or circumstantial.

What may be considered a pained skepticism regarding humanitarian interventions, for instance, was undoubtedly radicalized by the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq from March 2003. Is that a bad thing, or is it not what we understand by radicalization any longer? Accordingly, the first of three points is that being a radical has a long history, most of it quite different from current conceptions.

Toward the Margins

Likewise, given the “ization” appended to this onetime Latin and philosophical term, becoming a radical is invariably a process. It typically applies to an individual—think of Osama Bin Laden after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—but can also relate to an entire movement.

To use an American example, consider the already violent Ku Klux Klan during the civil rights era, which carried out scores of bombings in the later 1950s and early 1960s. But the term might be even further inflated to include a faith (say, Counter-Reformation Catholicism); ideology (such as Civil War Bolshevism); or country (think Khmer Rouge in Cambodia). These collectives, like individuals, start out putatively normal or mainstream but take a path toward the margins, toward an extreme.

Finally, to turn to a few brief examples that place this key point about timing. Processes obviously take time. But just how much time? As with the suspect in Jo Cox’s murder, sometimes that process of becoming radicalized can apparently extend over several years, or even longer.

Consider Neil Lewington, a right-wing extremist who turned his bedroom into a bomb factory. He was on the cusp of commencing a terrorist campaign in 2006, when he was caught by chance with viable explosive devices on his person. Apparently kept by his bedside since late 2001 were articles in the wake of 9/11 from the mainstream press. They were overwhelmingly focused upon the putative existential threat posed by Islamism. These hyperboles, it seems, were like the Ring of Sauron for Lewington, which ultimately consumed him, radicalizing him toward an imminent violence that was thwarted more by luck than design.

Still, by no means must radicalization take years. To take another historical example, consider US lynch mobs of black Americans before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If black people, usually men, rose above the station in which racist society made for them—through an interracial relationship, winning a local election and too much else besides—a posse of white murderers would swiftly set upon them. Black Americans were very publicly strung up, often to cheering crowds in the background. Were they already radicalized before such appalling crimes—ready just for a trigger to unleash these murderous impulses? Or did the process of radicalization happen spontaneously, after an event that could be as anodyne as the announcement of election results?

True Believers

Still another historical example of radicalization might be the mass murderers who took part in the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War. This month marks the 75th anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in history. It unleashed the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question, according to most scholars in the field. Only 13 months earlier, however, Heinrich Himmler, the prime mover of Nazi genocide, had stated that he could not countenance the removal of Jews via mass murder. In his own words from the May 25, 1940, “Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East”: “One rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people.”

Less than 400 days later he was urging the Nazis’ mobile killing units, called Einsatzgruppen, to speed up and expand their role: not to systematically kill only military-age Jewish men but women, the elderly and the SS’s preferred target—children. In today’s parlance, Himmler was, therefore, “radicalized” toward genocide between spring 1940 and summer 1941 and, in turn, helped to direct the radicalization of literally thousands of genocidaires contributing to the Nazi war of annihilation in central-eastern Europe.

But, of course, that was as part of an intrinsically extreme regime, one whose racist policies radicalized at this time. Accordingly, the question might become, Did the policies radicalize the man, Himmler, or did the man radicalize his Nazi policies, leading to the genocide of Jews in wartime Europe? Or, yet again, is it a mix of both zealous activists and a context or milieu that can push individuals toward more extreme, radical decisions?

To conclude with the aftermath of Operation Barbarossa, there is no doubt the descent from targeted killing to systematic genocide in the early summer of 1941 was undertaken by SS “true believers” who had been ideologically prepared by the Nazi regime over a process of months, even years. But even in this well-trodden path toward mass murder there were surely murderous or sadistic opportunists who took part in locally-organized, near-spontaneous pogroms, like the notorious Lithuanian savage, nicknamed the Death Dealer of Kovno. He and others who chose to commit pogroms against vulnerable and exposed Jews by beating them to death in public were, it is true, encouraged by the German occupiers in a time of total war.

It is a safe bet that war and occupation can contribute to the process of radicalization. But these murderers acted of their own volition; and here is the key point, the Death Dealer of Kovno and his disguising ilk probably made the decision to take part in the minutes or hours—or at the longest, days—before the opportunity arose to bludgeon to death those Jews huddled in the Kovno square on the morning of June 27, 1941, only five days after the Third Reich’s invasion.

Events like the above make one wonder if, like what we know of crime in general—that it is often opportunistic—radicalization might also be contextual or circumstantial. Given the chance, purveyors of extremism and violence can always be found or encouraged, whether already radicalized and needing merely a trigger, or via ready-made radicalization. Nor is it clear which is least conforming.

*[This article is based on remarks delivered at the University of Bournemouth’s “Dialogues in the Contemporary Social Sciences” series on June 22, 2016.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Anthony Correia / Shutterstock.com

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your donation is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a sponsor.

The post Radicalization in a Historical Context appeared first on Fair Observer.

Let us depart from a truism: Modern politics relies enormously upon shaping “the message” toward targeted groups and constituencies. Whether it’s the Labour Party’s “Controls on Immigration” or the Tories’ “blue collar cabinet,” on either side of the recent 2015 General Election in Britain, reaching beyond a core “base” of activists is now widely recognized as the key ingredient to political success. This is no less true of the radical right in Europe and the United States since 1945, albeit manifested in a much different way.

The issue is ultimately a simple one. Radical right activists have long tended to be racist or xenophobic, sympathetic to fascism and anti-Semitic deceptions like Holocaust denial. In post-war Europe and the US, these are scarcely vote-winners, meaning that the transnational radical right has had to go much further in manipulating “the message” than mere political triangulation—something perhaps better described as “fifth column discourse,” a radical right rhetoric that is sanitized in order to challenge liberal democracy from within.

Verbal Judo

Exemplifying this is the one-time openly neo-Nazi Nick Griffin, the recently-deposed leader of the British National Party (BNP)—to date the United Kingdom’s most electorally successful far-right party. He called this embrace of euphemistic language “verbal judo” in April 1999, shortly before taking over leadership of the neo-fascist party: “Of course, we must teach the truth to the hardcore … when it comes to influencing the public, forget about racial differences, genetics, Zionism, historical revisionism and so on … It’s time to use the weight of democracy’s own myths and expectations against it by side-stepping and using verbal judo techniques.”

This separation between “hardcore” fascists and “the public” was influentially posited in Cas Mudde’s landmark study from 2000, The Ideology of the Extreme Right, claiming that such groups typically have a more “moderate ‘frontstage’” intended for public consumption and “a radical ‘back-stage’” targeted at neo-fascist activists.

Applying this formula to the BNP as a whole under his so-called modernizing leadership, Griffin’s understanding of “verbal judo” was made abundantly clear exactly a decade later. In April 2009, a leaked internal document in the lead-up to the European elections in May was circulated, using the perfectly Orwellian title “BNP Language and Concepts Discipline Manual.”

Quite simply, when the first of your 13 rules is we are “not a ‘racist’ or ‘racial’ party,” it probably means that you are. Some of the other “rules” are equally telling in terms of this turn toward a euphemism, one that is seductive in deploying the language of inclusion and democracy for exclusionary and illiberal ends. For these radical right ideologues and movements, in short, leopards have not changed their spots so much as finding better cover in the post-war era.

Politically Impossible

In 1945, the scale of defeat of the Axis powers—and with it any support for fascism in Europe and the US—made that ideology unacceptably toxic. While long associated with violence and militarism, fascism swiftly became synonymous with savagery and extermination in the European and American mind. And for good reason: Some 50 million dead in Europe, 6 million of them Jews, systematically murdered in the Third Reich’s specially-constructed death chambers.

Put simply, the “classic fascism” of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini was so wholly discredited—and illegal in many places across Europe—so twinned with evil, that after World War II drawing upon that legacy was politically impossible. Some of the more intelligent members of the old guard realized that, at the very least, the outward trappings of fascism (the shirts and rallies, the overt anti-Semitism and revolutionary politics) needed to be consigned to sociopolitical oblivion.

Moving across the English Channel to France where, arguably, what became fascist ideology had been incubated by the likes of Georges Sorel or Charles Maurras’ Action Française before World War I, a new type of far-right politics emerged toward the end of the Cold War.

In keeping with this new shift of emphasis, in 1987 the leader of the Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, notoriously declared: “I’m not saying the gas chambers didn’t exist. I haven’t seen them myself … I believe it’s just a detail in the history of World War Two.” He was convicted in France and, later, in Germany for these and similar remarks, which he reiterated earlier this year. This was classic dog-whistle politics for the “hardcore.”

One explanation for his reiteration of this Holocaust revisionism is that his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who now leads the party he founded in 1972, has moved in a still more publicly moderate direction, shifting her focus (as has been common among the “new far-right” over the last generation) away from anti-Semitism and toward anti-Muslim prejudice and immigration.

As a result, Jean-Marie Le Pen was indefinitely suspended from the FN at the hands of his daughter—whom he has disowned, and who now leads one of the largest political parties in contemporary France, boasting of 23 members of the European Parliament (MEP) since last year.

As a general modus operandi, ideological deception could apply to radical right rhetoric generally. As with “classic fascism,” so too with anti-Semitism. For instance, commenting on the German far-right scene in 2002, a report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution maintained that hatred of Jews remained an “essential ideological ingredient of the far-right” in Germany, but with the following caveat: Although all relevant extreme right parties and factions work with anti-Semitic stereotypes, and anti-Jewish feeling is always present, no organization has hitherto placed the central focus of their propaganda on anti-Semitism. Recently, however, the use of anti-Semitic stereotypes has increased. Putative taboo-breakers could (unintentionally) break the “communication latency” down.

The New American Fascism

Let us now move across the Atlantic in order to consider a noxious pioneer of this communication latency, or what has been described above as front-stage euphemism and backstage extremism. It was by a man who famously declared in 1978 that “It is not necessary to wear brown shirts to be a fascist … it is not necessary to wear a swastika to be a fascist … It is not necessary to call oneself a fascist to be a fascist.  It is simply necessary to be one!”

© Shutterstock

This forms the fitting frontispiece to the 1989 exposé of this man, aptly titled Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. In 2003, Helen Gilbert described Lyndon LaRouche in similar terms: “There’s something strange and cultish about LaRouche—but it’s hard to figure out exactly what he’s up to. Much of his message appears to be innocuous, kooky, contradictory, esoteric or shamelessly inflammatory. But underneath the weirdness lies a far-right world view … LaRouche’s brand of politics both employs standard elements of fascism and revisions that may initially throw some people off track.”

As with the contemporary radical right more generally, this rhetorical throwing “some people off track” best comes into focus by taking the long view. There are a few characteristics of the LaRouche movement that merit highlighting here, especially in relation to reheated (neo-)fascism and Holocaust revisionism.

A first excerpt is taken from LaRouche’s New Solidarity journal in 1973, which is an example of pretty unreconstructed fascism: “America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry, and labor.”

By 1978, a vital year for LaRouche of increased contact with Willis Carto—a notorious anti-Semite and founder of the misleadingly-named Institute for Historical Review (IHR)—the anti-Semitic language had become somewhat more subtle:

“Even on a relative scale, what the Nazis did to Jewish victims was mild compared with the virtual extermination of gypsies and the butchery of Communists.  The point is that Adolf Hitler was put into power largely on the initiative of the Rothschilds, Warburgs and Oppenheimers, among other Jewish and non-Jewish financial interests centered in the City of London.

“… The ‘Holocaust’ simply proves that the failure of the Nuremberg tribunal to hang Hjalmar Schacht made the whole proceeding a travesty of justice. The murderers of the million and a half or more Jews who died in the “holocaust” are any group, Jewish or non-Jewish, which supported then or now the policies advocated by Felix Rohatyn or Milton Freidman. Either you, as a Jew, join with the U.S. Labor Party to stop Rohatyn, Friedman the Mont Pelerin Society now, or you are implicitly just as guilty of the death of millions of Jews as Adolf Hitler.”

The euphemistic techniques exemplified in this quotation are three-fold.

First, it attempts to deny central aspects of the Holocaust: to marginalize suffering, relativize guilt, question facts and shift blame away from the perpetrators of the Final Solution.

Second, it attempts to sanitize fascism by referring to one’s enemies as Nazis, fascists and so on (unless they join the LaRouche movement of course). Nazism’s crimes are thus both normalized and applied to perceived enemies.

Third, it uses individual Jews as anti-Semitic code: Reference to Rohatyn and Friedman, above, therefore, is a kind of metonymy for the Jewish people. In this way, anti-Semites deliberately disguise their attacks on Judaism by singling out “bad” Jews—wealthy or powerful individuals, political supporters of Zionism and, of course, anything relating to Israel (which is consistently portrayed in LaRouche propaganda as a neo-Nazi regime).

Doublespeak

As a result, actual fascist and Nazi actions—especially the Final Solution—are systematically trivialized. They return within the boundaries of normal human behavior. Additionally, enemies are vilified and demonized: They are the ones considered to be conspirators and mass murderers, embodiments of evil.  

© Shutterstock

Thus, Zionists were the real Nazis and fascists, and combating them was the task for a new generation of radical right activists. For LaRouche, an evil oligarchy lies at the root of the world’s problems: It is this needing to be attacked by LaRouche’s devoted followers.

Fast-forward a few decades, a couple of handfuls of failed Democratic presidential nominations, a fraud conviction and LaRouche is still at it. For this radical right ideologue, the world is thus divided into two—the enemy, characterized as implacably evil (the British monarchy, American politicians and their Jewish agents)—and the putative saviors of humanity, namely, LaRouche and his followers. Major world events like 9/11 are consequently viewed through the prism of a global conspiracy.

From 2003, consider LaRouche’s “War, Hitler and Cheney”: “That new Reichstag Fire of which I warned in that January 2001 address, actually came, less than nine months later, on Sept. 11, 2001. Like Hitler’s Reichstag fire of 1933, the Sept. 11, 2001 attack was exploited by Vice President Dick Cheney and such followers of the Nazi-like Professor Leo Strauss as Attorney-General John Ashcroft, to unleash an attempted step-wise, fascist takeover of the U.S.A. from within.”

Among a number of “symbolic” Jewish targets, Strauss is accused by LaRouche of supporting Hitler’s rise to power, of having been involved in 9/11 and of promoting genocide in the Middle East. As LaRouche put it a year later, Leo Strauss was responsible for America “[m]arching down the road toward self-inflicted hell.”

This suggests that it is the British, the Jews and their supporters who stand accused of being fascists and Nazis. And, of course, of that age-old chestnut of being monopolistic conspirators. It is not merely that LaRouche uses special language and redefinitions to hide direct references to the Jews. He deploys Jewish “sounding” names or stereotypical Jewish references to convey his underlying message. There is also a proliferation of obvious epithets and codes such as “usurer,” “cabalist,” “Venetian,” “locust” or “Babylonian.”

This may puzzle the uninitiated, but it strikes an unmistakable chord with contemporary anti-Semites. One instance of many can be discerned from Stormfront.org in 2009, today’s leading radical right website: LaRouche is “advocating our cause by using politically correct terms so as not be labeled an anti-Jew.” Through innuendo and, in particular, metonymy, LaRouche propaganda returns to blaming Jews for every problem facing the world.

When it comes to LaRouche, a familiar response is that he is unhinged, or so eccentric as to be laughable. That may be true for those of unfamiliar with such doublespeak. Yet as with the radical right doublespeak as a whole, it misses the wood through the trees.

For the radical right will not simply show the same face, with the same jackboots and salutes and manifestos of old. They too know their history. Hopefully the wise words of Umberto Eco ago will serve as a warning for us, going forward for the next generation: “A new fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude, can be born outside our country and imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names … It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.”

Life is not that simple.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Everett Historical / S-F / Shutterstock.com

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your donation is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a sponsor.

The post Doublespeak: Radical Right Rhetoric Today appeared first on Fair Observer.

Each year, I take a vote in my “The Third Reich, 1933-1945” module at Teesside University as to whether the subject of Holocaust denial should replace an existing lecture on the development of Nazism’s Final Solution – say, on the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau, or the actions of the Einsatzgruppen – those mobile killing squads following behind the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the Soviet Union (USSR) in June 1941. Nearly every year, my students overwhelmingly vote to ignore the subject. There are certainly good reasons for doing so, in fact: A close colleague researching the Holocaust understandably refuses to give any attention to Holocaust denial, since “it’s just an insult to both victims and history.”

I want to call this the “round earth” rejection of “Holocaust denial.” This was most aptly characterized by James Najarian, a wise interpreter of the various methods involved in denying the Holocaust: “Flat-earthers believe that the earth is flat and the United States space program is a hoax. This does not make the rest of us round-earthers; we don’t need a name for ourselves.”

In contrast, motivations for Holocaust denial, to this day, are overwhelmingly advanced for racist and ideological reasons, especially anti-Semitism and fascism. It is understandable, therefore, that many people feel passionately that there is no debate to have with deniers. The Holocaust took place, and spending even a second on the subject of Holocaust denial is simply a waste of time. True, there is indeed no benefit in debating whether the Holocaust “happened” with those who think, against the mountains of evidence, that it did not. Yet it does not follow that simply ignoring this phenomenon altogether is the best way forward.

Nazis Were the First Holocaust Deniers

Some of the techniques by Holocaust deniers are so ludicrous as to defy belief. And it is also true that we can group some Holocaust deniers alongside people who think the US space program was faked, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or who wear tin foil hats to protect the brain against radiation or mind control. This “tin foil hat brigade” are likely to see every major historical event as a conspiracy; some sort of inside job that helps to conveniently explain how bewildering – and how cruel – the real world can be.

But this is the least serious and least important of the forms Holocaust denial takes today. Most Holocaust deniers today accept that the world is round, and they try to find ways of occluding the accepted view of history. Some of the more dangerous forms of Holocaust denial, in fact, goes by the tag “Holocaust revisionism,” so as to appear moderate and convincing – as simply another “point of view” that everyone’s entitled to.

© Shutterstock

A correspondingly slick surface can be seen on professional websites and many books aiming for the look, scholarly apparatus and jargon of academic respectability. It is this more “intellectual” form of Holocaust denial – such as claiming that the gas chambers were merely a “detail of history,” as Jean-Marie Le Pen recently reaffirmed – that is illegal in most of the European Union today, including France, Germany and Austria, but not Britain.

The central underlying theme of anti-Jewish hatred takes us back to the wartime Holocaust: the most horrifying expression of anti-Semitic hatred, and of genocide, in history. Closely related, the first people to systematically deny the Shoah – the extermination of all of Europe’s Jews – were the Nazis and their collaborators. Elites in the Third Reich destroyed evidence, ranging from documents to crematoria; they exhumed and burned already-desecrated corpses; and they kept the existence of their so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” as great a secret as possible during the Second World War.

In tandem with the development of the historical Holocaust itself, therefore, Holocaust denial was employed in various by Holocaust perpetrators; that is, the Nazis and their collaborators during the war.

An Architect by Trade

An architect by trade, the 46-year-old Paul Blobel commanded the infamous Einsatzgruppe 4a in Ukraine that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Although Jews had been persecuted for the preceding eight years under the Third Reich, and many thousands of Polish Jews had already been killed since the onset of the Nazi occupation there from September 1939, the invasion of the USSR, code-named Operation Barbarossa, immediately marked a step-change in the targeting and mass murder of Jews.

At first, shooting thousands of Jewish men as partisans, soon the roving Einsatzgruppen began murdering tens of thousands of the elderly, women and children a month. In September 1941, Blobel organized the largest recorded murder in history to that date: the shooting of 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine just outside of Kiev, as meticulously documented in the Einsatzgruppen situation reports.

In order to conceal the growing scope of these activities in the east, the Nazi leadership looked for alternatives for mass shooting that would provide greater secrecy. In the closing months of 1941, new decisions were taken on what had moved from mass murder to systematically-planned genocide. On September 3, gassing with Zyklon B was tested at Auschwitz-Birkenau; from November 1, 1941, construction began on new extermination camps at Bełżec and Chełmno, with the latter starting to murder Jews by carbon monoxide on December 7, 1941, in occupied Poland.

These methods were derived from earlier programs to murder disabled people using reinforced gas vans; when the so-called “euthanasia program” was concluded in August 1941 – revealingly, due to a public outcry raised by Bishop von Galen – these secretive vans were sent to the Einsatzgruppe still operating behind the front lines. Paul Blobel’s Einsatzgruppen C Kommando received two of these gas vans in November 1941 and were the first to use them in the occupied east.

By the time of the infamous Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, which informed, coordinated and set to work the Third Reich’s different agencies of state in carrying out the genocide of all of Europe’s Jews under Nazi control, another so-called “problem” needed a “solution”: Tens of thousands of bodies buried in shallow graves were impossible to conceal and were poisoning water tables along from the Baltic in the north and the Balkans in the south.

© Shutterstock

In mid-1942, Blobel was put in charge of the exhumation and cremation of these bodies, under the code-name Sonderkommando 1005. Its job was to erase as much of the evidence of Nazi crimes as possible, extending to exhuming and burning bodies in open air pits. This involved grisly techniques to efficiently cover-up many Holocaust sites in central-eastern Europe; for example, Chełmno was partially-demolished, and Bełżec was completely destroyed, with a Ukrainian farming family placed on top to hide the minimum of 434,508 Jews murdered there in nine months.

The role played by Blobel, who was hanged in Germany in 1951 for his crimes, is horrifyingly instructive. He helped organize the mass shootings of Jews in the second half of 1941. In 1942, when more secretive extermination camps began operating, Blobel organized the removal of evidence of Nazi genocide and testified about his activities in the 1948 Einsatzgruppen trial.

The case of Paul Blobel provides clear evidence that Holocaust denial was undertaken by the very murderers themselves, in order to eliminate all traces of their unprecedented crimes. Holocaust denial, then, was originally deployed during World War II by the Nazis for self-serving, sanitizing and, above all, anti-Semitic reasons.

The Third Reich’s attempt to murder every European Jew under their control and, more relevantly, their systematic attempt to conceal this unparalleled crime, were both unsuccessful: millions of Jews survived the tyranny of the Third Reich. Holocaust deniers must contend with thousands of corresponding testimonies by perpetrators and victims alike, they must ignore tens of millions of pages of contemporaneous documents, and they must argue that both general understandings of history and generations of academic historians are deluded, deceitful or conspiratorial in their scholarship on the Holocaust.

Rhetoric of Denial 

To throw this point into some relief, we have but a handful of authentic sources about the Spanish Armada or the Great Fire of London in 1666 – the latter, for example, including less than a dozen accounts from that year, of which the diary by the parliamentarian Samuel Pepys is certainly the best known. Yet to my knowledge, no one has carbon-dated Pepys’ diaries for authenticity, forensically analyzed his handwriting for veracity, or produced a 250-page report on the diary’s legitimacy – as the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation felt compelled to do with Anne Frank’s diary in the 1980s. This was as largely a result of systematic forgery claims by well-known deniers such as Richard Harwood (aka Richard Verrall of Britain’s National Front, who wrote Did Six Million Really Die? in 1974), Ernst Zündel and, of course, the gold standard of these historical deceivers, David Irving.

Irving had long been a denier of the Holocaust, calling it an Allied “propaganda exercise” but posed as a reasonable, “revisionist” historian while doing so. He had an important fringe following in the 1980s and 1990s, especially among the far-right, when he sued Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt for libel after she claimed, in her 1993 Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, that Irving was a “dangerous spokesperson” for Holocaust denial.

A famous case in 1996 saw several historians of Nazism and the Holocaust testify in London for the defense, including the eminent historian, Richard Evans, who concluded: “The supposed evidence for the Nazis’ wartime mass murder of millions of Jews by gassing and other means, he claims, was fabricated after the war. He has referred repeatedly to the ‘Holocaust myth’ and the ‘Holocaust legend’ and has described himself as engaged in a ‘refutation of the Holocaust story.’”

After a four-month trial, it was found that “Irving had ‘significantly’ misrepresented, misconstrued, omitted, mistranslated, misread and applied double standards to the historical evidence in order to achieve his ideological presentation of history. Judge Gray also found that Irving was an ‘active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.'” For any reasonable person then, this most sophisticated of revisionists was shown to be a fraud who manipulated historical evidence for ideological ends.

© Shutterstock

Good Old Days of Holocaust Denial

Strangely enough, perhaps the second half of the 20^th century can be considered “the good old days,” when scholars and publishers alike simply disregarded far more sporadic deniers of the Holocaust. Well-beyond the watershed date of 1979 – when the first pseudo-academic institution was established to feature Holocaust “revisionism” in the US, Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review – such figures were either mocked or ignored; they were rarely treated seriously or as a danger (with Irving the major exception in Europe, and Zündel in Canada).

To cite Sir Richard Evans again, their writings were instead “mostly distributed by mail order,” and of a caliber that “seemed to belong in the world of sensational newspapers such as you could buy in American supermarkets, recounting the experiences of people who had been abducted by little green aliens or who had seen Elvis Presley still alive.”

In short, until about 20 years ago, Holocaust deniers were largely dismissed out of hand by historians and the wider public alike. But then again, this was before the rise of the Internet.

Perhaps by familiarizing ourselves with the central arguments and postwar history of Holocaust denial, however nauseating and noxious they may be, it is possible to discern the attempts by extremists to hide behind scholarly facades and seemingly informed arguments. Particularly with the communication possibilities offered by the Internet and social media, recognizing these weavers of deception for what they are, and indeed always have been, has never been so important as it is today.

One reason is obvious: On some search engines, typing in “Holocaust” as a keyword will bring up a denial site among the first pages of hits. This century, there is no doubt that we have entered Holocaust denial 2.0. Simple Holocaust denial slogans are used on Facebook and social media every day. Anyone can favorite or share a tweet that simply says #Holohoax. While this does not necessarily make that person a Holocaust denier, it is nonetheless hateful, and it is offensive. Online comments denying the Holocaust are often simply substitutes for hatred of Jews.

This can be seen in the Institute for Historical Review (the acronym IHR was deliberately chosen to mix it up with the University of London Institute for Historical Research), which is run by Mark Weber, who was an activist in the US neo-Nazi National Alliance, before launching their professional-looking website. Similar is the related, highly visible website Codoh – Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust – which hides behind the “intellectual freedom” “with regard to this one historical event called ‘Holocaust,’ which in turn will help advance the concept of intellectual freedom with regard to all historical events.”

As ever, the one event they choose to examine is always the Holocaust. The site’s founder, Bradley Smith, whose intended audience is college students, is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “someone [who] appears to recognize that his denial of the Holocaust itself contributes to anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence: In the company of fellow deniers, Smith even admits that he carefully constructs his campus speeches to minimize the possibility of disagreement with his ideas. In a lecture he gave at an April 2004 convention of the Institute for Historical Review and the neo-Nazi National Alliance, Smith said that his stump campus speech is constructed “as simpl[y] as possible … to set [the issues] up in a way that could not really be debated.”

That is hardly “free inquiry,” needless to say. A final example can be seen in the conspiracy website Solar General, touting itself as “The Most Controversial, Censored and Forbidden Web Site in the World.” It boasts a professional layout, highlighting the first three topics: “105 Questions on the Holocaust”; “Adolf Hitler: Life of a Leader”; and “Anne Frank Fraud” – which should tell you all you need to know about this hate-inspiring “Holocaust revisionist” website.

Leopards do not change their spots, even in the online jungle. While ignoring Holocaust denial is certainly preferable, the ubiquity of the Internet and social media makes that nearly impossible today. So we must call out and contest their vitriol, knowing that Holocaust denial is a ruse for an assault on the past in the name of racism and far-right values. While arguing with deniers themselves may be pointless, in this day and age, regrettably, trying to understand their motives and arguments is not.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Wiktord / GoneWithTheWind / Everett Historical / Gordon Gross / Shutterstock.com

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. Your donation is tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be a sponsor.

The post Practice and Practitioners of Holocaust Denial appeared first on Fair Observer.

Now, turning to other themes in The Secret Agent, these seem, equally, downplayed in critical discussion of the novel, yet central to debates about contemporary terrorism. With respect to the latter, three terrorist incidents in London over the last generation will serve as examples: David Copeland’s two-week bombing spree during April 1999 targeting ethnic minorities and homosexuals, which killed three people and wounded 139 more; the jihadi Islamist attacks that killed 52 Londoners and wounded more than 750 on July 7, 2005; and the Woolwich murder of Drummer Lee Rigby on May 22, 2013, by the recently sentenced Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale.

The latter have been described as a “lone wolf pack,” understood by Raffaello Pantucci as “small, isolated groups of individuals involved in terrorism,” whereby “some level of outside communication was apparent (mostly through the Internet), but at no point does it appear clear that the plotters were subject to the direction of outside forces.”

Lone Wolves

This naturally raises the definitional conundrum of what constitutes a “lone wolf.”

For one thing, the reinforcing, mutual incitement with multiple terrorists is much different than the psychological drive of an individual acting wholly alone. Like the understanding of “lone wolf packs” above, some of the broader definitions in this hotly contested area nonetheless imply that multiple people can carry out a “lone wolf” attack.

A quite recent example of this approach to lone-wolf terrorism was offered in a 128-word, mega-definition by the RAND analyst Jeffrey Simon’s 2013 book, Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat:

“Lone wolf terrorism is the use or threat of violence or nonviolent sabotage, including cyber-attacks, against government, society, business, the military (when the military is not an occupying force or involved in a war, insurgency, or state of hostilities), or any other target, by an individual acting alone or with minimal support from one or two other people (but not including actions during popular uprisings, riots, or violent protests), to further a political, social, religious, financial, or other related goals, or, when not having such an object, nevertheless has the same effect, or potential effect, upon government, society, business, or the military in terms of creating fear and/or disrupting daily life and/or causing government, society, business, or the military to react with heightened security and/or other responses.”

Problematically, in the definition offered above, natural disasters could be considered the greatest lone-wolf terrorist of all.

Indeed, in Simon’s problematic rendering, the events recounted in The Secret Agent would undoubtedly be considered a “lone-wolf attack.” Yet the only people logistically involved in masterminding the failed bombing of the Greenwich meridian were the mastermind, Mr. Vladimir; his paid agent, Mr. Verloc; and a bomb-maker unaware of the actual target, The Professor, who only knew that “it was going to be a demonstration against a building.”

It seems the Woolwich killers were radicalized as much by the online Inspire magazine put out by the al-Qaeda “franchise” as they were via British foreign policy or religious extremism strictu sensu. 

Based on testifying for Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) against what I have elsewhere called “self-activating terrorists,” my own approach to so-called “lone wolf terrorism” seeks to be much more narrow:

“…self-directed political or religious violence undertaken through the ‘terrorist attack cycle’ by individuals — typically perceived by its adherents to be an act of asymmetrical, propagandistic warfare — which derives from a variable amount of external influence and context (notably now online), rather than external command and control.”

This focuses squarely upon individual motives and capabilities (not least those powered by the Internet today), rather than ex post facto perceptions by governments or others.

It would certainly exclude the case of the Woolwich murderers, for instance, who were able to rely upon each other for support and murderous fortitude, even if the traditional, hierarchical structure of a terrorist group like the Red Army Faction or the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were absent.

Both trends contrast starkly with the case of Copeland in 1999, whose actions were individually planned, self-targeted, single-handedly weaponized, and personally undertaken. In short, he went through the aforementioned “terrorist cycle” alone, without direct logistical or moral support from anyone else — an exemplary case of lone-wolf terrorism.

Broadband Terrorism

Nonetheless, scholars agree that, even if he never divulged his plot to them, Copeland was radicalized by his involvement with the extreme right British National Party (BNP), which he joined in 1997, then led by the uncompromising neo-Nazi John Tyndall. He briefly acted as a steward for the BNP, before leaving for the more extreme National Socialist Movement (NSM) — ostensibly on account of the latter’s willingness to countenance illegal violence and paramilitary action.

Much of his bomb-making was sourced via the Internet, in one of the first cases of what I have elsewhere called “broadband terrorism” — a phenomenon now ubiquitous for terrorists of all stripes today.

Similarly, it seems the Woolwich killers were radicalized as much by the online Inspire magazine put out by the al-Qaeda “franchise” as they were via British foreign policy or religious extremism strictu sensu. But the so-called “London Nailbomber” and the “Woolwich butchers” did share one key aspect that is now at the forefront of studies of contemporary terrorism; namely, a radicalizing fraternity, or what is sometimes called in the academic literature a “community of support.”

These radicalizing fraternities are emphatically not involved in any aspects of the terrorist plot or attack. Instead, they are indirect motivators; ideological facilitators or, in the web-language of today — where the majority of this terrorist community of support now exists — “keyboard warriors.”

Still overlooked to date, Joseph Conrad gives an excellent account of just such a radicalizing fraternity in the third chapter of The Secret Agent, through a meeting of indolent and hypocritical anarchists gathering at Verloc’s home.

These anarchists, in turn, conformed to specific, well-established types: Alexander Ossipon was the criminal womanizer and charlatan, an “ex-medical student without a degree”; Michaelis, described in multiple passages as the “ticket-of-leave apostle”; and the aged “terrorist” and actor, Karl Yundt — a “moribund veteran of dynamite wars.” The trio was rounded out by the foreign agent and police informer, Adolf Verloc.

Negatively rendering this band of armchair revolutionaries, Conrad repeatedly notes that the former three of the former comprised the “more or less mysterious Red Committee [….] for the work of literary propaganda,” whose works were presumably later sold at Verloc’s bourgeois-cum-anarchist bookshop.

Simply put, Michaelis, Ossipon and Yundt bravely “talk the talk,” but refused on various grounds to “walk the walk.” In Conrad’s tale, tellingly, Yundt had “never in his life raised personally as much as his little finger against the social edifice.” Then, to ensure the reader grasps this hypocrisy:

“‘I have always dreamed’, he mouthed, fiercely, ‘of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the stain of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity – that’s what I would have liked to see.’”

In The Secret Agent, all three were taken by surprise by the explosion at Greenwich. None were in on the fictionalized bomb plot. Importantly, however, this trio of propagandists refusing the deed nevertheless helped to legitimize the murderous path ultimately undertaken by Verloc. For up until that pivotal point, it bears remembering:

“The part of Mr. Verloc in revolutionary politics having been to observe, he could not all at once, either in his own home or in larger assemblies, take the initiative of action. He had to be cautious.”

In this sense, Verloc’s radicalizing fraternity have their counterparts a century later in the neo-Nazis of the NSM, who fired the racist imagination of its regional organizer, David Copeland.

On July 7, 2005, a bomb exploded in a train en route to this station in London. Copyright © Shutterstock: All Rights Reserved

More recently, one could also look to the so-called counter-jihad movement, acting as Anders Behring Breivik’s own “wake-up call.” So too with those London bombers in 2005, who found their communities of support in jihadi Islamist narratives in so-called “al-Qaeda gyms” and indoctrination centers around Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Beeston in the northeast of England.

This would also embrace the al-Qaeda-affiliated, online Inspire magazine, which gave the gristly low-tech means to the two killers of Rigby in Woolwich last year. These ideological extremists may not be terrorists themselves but, as Conrad shows, were — and indeed, as scholarly literature on terrorism makes clear, remain — instrumental in normalizing acts of asymmetrical terrorist violence.

The Most Ardent of Revolutionaries

Yet Conrad’s greatest contribution to current controversies on terrorism might well be in terms of terrorist profiling. For it is neither The Professor who sets off the bomb, nor the hopelessly compromised Verloc. And it is certainly not the three anarchist wordsmiths. Instead, the bomb-carrier and, symbolically, only victim is Verloc’s “obedient” brother-in-law, the “delicately honest” Stevie. Yet some literature and mass media commentary on 21^st century terrorism persists in casting the practitioners of this violent tactic as modern-day Professor Moriarties; that is, as evil geniuses with dystopian imaginations. One study from 2012, Terrorist’s Creed, takes this academic tendency to the breaking point of essentialism, as highlighted by one revealing passage amongst many others:

“All terrorism, even separatist or irredentist struggles with a precise political goal, has a transcendent metapolitical dimension, and that however secular the mission is, it can be sacralized to the point of fanaticism and the suppression of empathy with victims in the name of ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’ […] all terrorist violence is both tactical and symbolic in its choice of target, since the destruction it carries out is by definition a message or ‘demonstration’ to a target audience, and that the psycho-dynamic process that enabled it to be carried out always involves an inner process of splitting the world into a Manichean struggle between good and evil.”

Were this the case, for example, how then does one explain John Gilbert Graham? Graham was responsible for the first mid-air bombing in 1955, which killed 44 people on board — among them the terrorist’s mother, targeted for her life insurance (which was, believe it or not, purchased at the airport). There are many similar cases like this amongst the 10,000+ cases of terrorism in the online Global Terrorism Database — invariably neglected in such hyper-theorized accounts.

Of course, it is true that some recruiters and radicalizers — like The Professor, son of a preacher in The Secret Agent – believe an ideologically-driven, symbolic terrorist attack could “open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious injustice of society.” And yet, writes Conrad:

“The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulse disguised into creeds. The Professor’s indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectively shattered except by some form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent – that was settled in his mind.”

In The Secret Agent, this “perfect anarchist” represents the life of the mind. Yet the actual bomber is quite literally embodied by the obedient, vulnerable Stevie. Conrad thus reminds us that many of these terrorists are quite the opposite of a mythic, ideological mastermind.

Correspondingly, recent research has shown that a high proportion of “lone-wolves” are in fact “lone nuts.” And this goes not only for self-directed terrorists. In her groundbreaking study, Terror in the Mind of God, Jessica Stern argues that a leading motive for terrorists is personal or social humiliation. Many are psychologically unwell or, quite simply, full of hate — or indeed some other base motive. Terrorists can come just as often, perhaps even mostly, in the form of Stevie.

At heart, as even Conrad suggested long ago, we should be concerned, but not over-securitized and paranoid, about the moderate threat of contemporary terrorism. In the end, terrorist motivations can be utopian or banal, and are more likely the stuff of modernist fiction than Hollywood blockbusters. Or, to reformulate this with reference to the one genuine, conflicted, pathetic “terrorist” of the novel, “our contemporary,” The Secret Agent: “Mr Verloc’s habits of mind […] were indolent and secret. They refrained from going to the bottom of facts and motives.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Images: Copyright © Shutterstock: Sue Robinson. All Rights Reserved

The post Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: Herald of Contemporary Terrorism? (Part 2/2) appeared first on Fair Observer.

The modernist author Joseph Conrad “can be read,” British philosopher John Gray provocatively argued, “as the first great political novelist of the twenty-first century.”

The case set out for this agonistic view in his 2002 “Joseph Conrad: Our Contemporary” departs from Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent, which is based upon an “actual terrorist attempt on the Royal Observatory in 1894, when a French anarchist accidentally blew himself up in Greenwich Park before reaching his target.” This is given a “darkly ironic vision” by Conrad, “whereby the symbols of trade and new technology have come under terrorist attack.”

Whether or not one agrees with Gray, The Secret Agent surely merits revisiting in the 21st century. In fact, in the three years following the September 11attacks and their unparalleled murderousness in non-state sponsored, or asymmetric, terrorism — notes Peter Lancelot Mallios, in the revealing collection Conrad in the 21st Century — The Secret Agent was “referenced over a hundred times in newspapers, magazines, and online journalistic resources across the world.”

Greenwich Bomb Outrage

In a historicizing essay from 1971, Norman Sherry convincingly established that The Secret Agent was based upon contemporaneous texts relating to what was called the Greenwich Bomb Outrage. Or, as Conrad put it in a letter of November 7, 1906, the novel “is based upon the inside knowledge of a certain event in the history of active anarchism.” This was based on the putative attack on the Greenwich Observatory by one Martial Bourdin, with a largely accurate “pattern of events and people immediately surrounding the disaster” — one unfolding in “substantially the same form in which Conrad was to present it in his novel.”

Sherry also finds that Conrad was reading several of the 25 or so anarchist publications appearing in London at the end of the 19th century — in fact, two of these, The Gong and The Torch, are mentioned on the opening page of The Secret Agent. Although given short shrift in Gray’s text, the point is that The Secret Agent is thus very much emplotted in a late 19th century act of terrorism that, both historically and in its subsequent fictional treatment by Conrad, may be construed as a strike against a symbolic target.

This would seem to chime with Conrad’s assertion in his prefatory Author’s Note:

“I really think that ‘The Secret Agent’ is a perfectly genuine piece of work. Even the purely artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all I felt I would have to say in scorn as well as in pity.”

Collecting an explosive device from a “credulous and self-indulgent” anarchist named The Professor, the “secret agent” in question — a bookshop owner and pornographer named Aldolf Verloc — then manipulates his brother-in-law, “the mentally retarded and hypersensitive Stevie.” The latter is then lured into attempting to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, a failure in which the unbeknownst bomber succeeds only in killing himself. 

Gray further, and incisively, holds that “Conrad’s scorn for revolutionaries is comprehensive and unremitting,” portraying them, despite their “utopian imagination,” as “vain, deluded and inherently criminal” — not unlike the “the suicide-warriors of al-Qaeda” who on 9/11 also “carried off a terrifying assault on the spirit of the age.”

In this, Gray is perfectly in accord with Conrad’s personal take on the novel; as in a letter to his friend, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, on January 14, 1907:

“I don’t think that I’ve been satirizing the revolutionary world. All these people are not revolutionaries — they are Shams. And as regards the Professor, I did not intend to make him despicable. He is incorruptible at any rate. In making him say ‘madness and despair — give me that for a lever and I will move the world’ I wanted to give him a note of perfect sincerity. At the worst he is a megalomaniac of an extreme type.”

“Joseph Conrad: Our Contemporary” is certainly in keeping with Conrad’s “Author’s Note” preceding the novel, which confesses to fictionalizing the “blood-stained inanity” and “absurd cruelty of the Greenwich Park explosion.” For this was “an outrage [that] could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way,” historically undertaken in 1894 by “half an idiot” whose “sister committed suicide afterwards” — a fair, if superficial, two-clause summary of The Secret Agent’s plot.

From Anarchism to Terrorism

As this suggests, Gray was largely right; for Conrad has many prescient things to say in The Secret Agent. But, in some measure, these things are different than those advanced in “Joseph Conrad: Our Contemporary.” Many of Conrad’s insights, in fact, feed quite directly into a number of debates on terrorism — from motivation to profile to urban targets.

To be sure, Gray touches upon the symbolism of the attackers in The Secret Agent — the global meridian at Greenwich Park. Of course, symbolic targets are scarcely new to our “postmodern” age, as shown by the outrages of 9/11, the 1995 bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, or further back, the assassination of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Terrorism is a frightening and baleful feature of the modern age.

So too in Conrad’s day — the first era of globalization — when anarchist attacks pulsed across Europe and the US. In a case championed by John Merriman as one that “arguably ignited the modern age of terrorism” — Émile Henry bombed the Café Terminus adjacent to the Gare Saint-Lazare in France on February 12, 1894, killing one and wounding 20. At his subsequent trial, the 21-year-old terrorist proclaimed:

“In the merciless war that we have declared on the bourgeoisie, we ask no mercy. We mete out death and we must face it. For that reason I await your verdict with indifference. I know that mine will not be the last head you will sever… You will add more names to the bloody roll call of our dead.”

These anarchist attacks were mainly directed against royal, bourgeois and economic targets, as with the assassination of King Umberto I of Italy in 1900. Or, 20 years later, when at least 33 people died and 200 were injured in the earliest recorded car bombing, symbolically targeting Wall Street in New York City. Yet Mario Buda, an anarchist widely seen as the most likely suspect, was never caught or tried, nor in fact ever seen again after September 16, 1920.

It bears remembering, therefore, that what is now understood as “lone wolf terrorism” — if not in the preparatory steps of what is now understood as the “Terrorist Cycle,” — was an essential feature of anarchist-inspired, urban terrorism at the turn of the 20th century.

Literary Nostradamus

On more interpretative matters, however, Gray is comparatively silent. For as literary scholars well know, a “symbol” only becomes symbolic when it is represented as such. In this sense, championing Conrad as a kind of “literary Nostradamus” (in Judith Shulevitz’s phrase) became, itself, symbolic as a kind of prophetic modernism after 9/11.

While that is telling in and of itself, Mallios draws attention to the trope of newspapers in the novel. It bears remembering that innovations in communications, printing and distribution, not to mention the rise of general literacy, at the end of the 19th century helped to create the period of so called “yellow journalism,” when sensationalist narratives — or, in Mallios’ view, hegemonic and coercive — dominated the front pages of mass-circulation newspapers.

This transformation was not lost upon Conrad, and it appears throughout The Secret Agent. The most significant of these instances occurs in the second chapter of the novel, in an exchange between the terrorist radicalizer working for a foreign government, Mr. Vladimir, and the “secret agent” in his paid employ, Mr. Verloc.

In directing Adolf Verloc to “earn his money” and “do something” — an “outrage” to be “directed against buildings, for instance” — it is notable that Vladimir’s main targets are not actually the buildings in themselves, but the terror created by mainstream newspapers via the expected, hysterical reporting of any symbolic strike. Dismissing assassinations of a head of state or bombings against religious or cultural institutions, Vladimir declares that these are:

“…no longer instructive as an object lesson in revolutionary anarchism. Every newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away… A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive.”

In giving his instructions to Verloc, Vladimir simply assumes that the press shapes public opinion. Put another way, in order to make the terrorist attack a symbolic one, it was essential for him that the nascent global media treated it as such. Hence his reason for targeting the “sacrosanct fetish” of the middle-classes, science:

“I defy the ingenuity of journalists to persuade their public that any given member of the proletariat can have a personal grievance against astronomy… And there are other advantages. The whole civilized world has heard of Greenwich… Go for the first meridian.”

The imperative to capture the mass media’s attention has only increased with time, and connects the rise of the mass media portrayed in The Secret Agent with some of the digital transformations of our day.

A recent example is the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Brevik, who unleashed his one-man war against “cultural Marxism” on July 22, 2011. I have argued elsewhere that Breivik’s murderous actions were a form of “terrorist PR,” bent on publicizing his online film and 1,500 page-plus manifesto, 2083: A Declaration of European Independence. Both were released literally hours before his symbolic bombing of Oslo’s government district and shooting spree at the Labour youth camp at the nearby island of Utoya. For who would have taken his rantings seriously before he killed 77 innocents — the vast majority of them children — beyond the fringe of right-wing extremists with whom he already associated?

To reformulate this argument, symbolic targets and the publicity they engender were motivating factors for terrorists in The Secret Agent. It is also something that may have become even more important for terrorism and its public reception over the intervening century.

*[Read the final part here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Image: Copyright © Shutterstock. All Rights Reserved

The post Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: Herald of Contemporary Terrorism? (Part 1/2) appeared first on Fair Observer.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland — a date when most scholars argue that, under the cover of total war, Nazism’s so-called “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” commenced.

Some, with good reason, date the onset of the Holocaust to Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power on January 30, 1933, or alternatively to the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws that legally stripped German Jews of citizenship in September 1935. Still others adjudge the onset of the Holocaust to be the systematic mass killing of Jews following the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, or even later with the Third Reich’s interagency streamlining of industrialized genocide, formally agreed at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. 

These and other considerations remain the stuff of historical debate, on the basis of shifting constructions of what the Holocaust entailed — such as, for instance, whether other groups, like Roma and Sinti travelers and the disabled, should be interpretatively included within the term.

But one thing all genuine students of the Shoah agree upon was that it happened, crushing the lives of some 6 million European Jews under the Nazis’ jackboots. Studying these events — explaining the trajectory of genocide, documenting and remembering them — is a valuable act that serves to remind humanity of its own, all too recent, nadir. There can be no doubt: the age of shameless barbarism returned to the heart of “civilized” Europe. Simply put, this series of casually-interrelated actions represents a caesura in human history.

“Euthanasia Program”

In stark contrast to Auschwitz-Birkenau, one central Holocaust site has not often been covered in historical literature. It has been overlooked for several reasons.

The death camp at Bełzec was the first site in history that was designed to kill human beings in an industrial manner and on an unparalleled scale. During the Second World War, the Third Reich deployed gassing and mass-cremation technologies in order to turn millions of victims into ash. In this sense, the Reich’s earliest extermination camp at Bełzec remains a low-water mark in human relations with one another. Internecine wars and savagery have always pockmarked human history. But never before had mass murder and modern technology come together to provide a purpose-built, self-contained, assembly-line operation for the destruction of an entire people.

Of the death camps, known collectively as “Operation Reinhardt,” Bełzec was the earliest constructed. It was joined by Sobibor and Treblinka later in 1942, and managed this genocidal process brutally, yet bureaucratically. In the months following Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR, mass shootings in the east had proven unsatisfactory and difficult to keep secret. Expertise and personnel were then engaged from an earlier gassing program, also using carbon monoxide gas, which had seen more than 72,000 people murdered over the preceding two years.

In a grisly process of trial and error, technicians from the euphemistically entitled “Euthanasia Program” — for these were anything but mercy killings — helped to develop mobile gas vans as well as the first stationary gas chambers for Jews from the Warthegau region, who were murdered in the converted palace at Chelmno.

By the end of 1941, with the construction of Bełzec about halfway completed, the Nazi leadership had decided upon a process of total destruction — one whereby European Jews would be gassed, pillaged and disposed of, preferably in a secluded place next to a main railway line in Nazi-occupied territory.

It was this method, built from scratch and further refined over the coming months, which was to be first “perfected” at Bełzec in June 1942. Victims were sometimes murdered at a rate of 5,000 persons a day or, in hermetically sealed chambers, the bodies piled into overcrowded trains before reaching their final destination, with their corpses pillaged for valuables after being gassed. Later the bodies were burned – these had been buried in mass graves at first, before trial and error made this more efficient – over an enormous human grill, also designed by the overseers of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, or SS.

This uniquely insidious project was directed primarily at the Jews of Europe. One of the very few survivors from Bełzec, an enslaved worker named Rudolf Reder — kept barely alive as a camp handyman prior to escaping — established as early as 1946 that “Bełzec served no other purpose than that of murdering Jews.” After witnessing thousands of his fellow Jews from Poland being sent to their deaths, some he knew well, Reder recalled:

“Words are inadequate to describe our state of mind and what we felt when we heard the terrible moans of those people and the cries of the children being murdered. Three times a day we saw people going nearly mad. Nor were we far from madness either. How we survived from one day to the next I cannot say, for we had no illusions. Little by little we too were dying, together with those thousands of people who, for a short while, went through an agony of hope. Apathetic and resigned to our fate, we felt neither hunger nor cold. We all waited our turn to die an inhuman death. Only when we heard the heart-rending cries of small children – ‘Mummy, mummy, but I have been a good boy’ and ‘Dark, dark’ – did we feel something.'”

This inhumanity was meted out to a minimum of 434,508 people at Bełzec, nearly all of them Polish Jews. According to a recent debate in the pages of East European Jewish Affairs, the real number is probably much higher — perhaps 600,000 Jews were murdered there, or even 800,000.

Who knows, for instance, how many unregistered trains, containing some 50 boxcars filled with thousands of terrified Jews, were diverted to Bełzec during the height of its activity in summer-autumn 1942. Affixing a precise number of victims is as impossible as imagining the individual fate of Jews suffocated at one of the principal charnel houses of the Holocaust — and indeed in human history — in Bełzec.

Operation Reinhardt

Notwithstanding this staggering reality, relatively little has been written to date on Bełzec by scholars in English. This is borne out by the scattered references to Bełzec in excellent studies on the Holocaust that have been recently published by Christopher Browning, Saul Friedländer and Peter Longerich.

One reason for this is the relatively stronger documentation left behind at other extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau — where more than a million Jews were killed, before the SS beat a hasty retreat from the advancing Soviet forces.

Another factor is clarified by the small number of survivors from Bełzec. Moreover, another reason is the sheer scale of the Final Solution, involving not only the gassing of Jews in their millions, but extended to further deaths through mass shooting, starvation and overwork. That is to say, even the most detailed and comprehensive accounts of the Holocaust have but scratched at the surface of Bełzec’s horrors.

An important exception to the limited Anglophone scholarship on Bełzec is provided by Yitzak Arad’s work on the Operation Reinhard camps. Published in 1987, his groundbreaking Bełzec, Sobibor and Treblinka added new insight into the day-to-day running of the camps comprising Operation Reinhard (sometimes the camps Chelmno and Majdenek are also included in this grouping).

Like the other two main Reinhard death camps at Sobibor and Treblinka, Bełzec comprised four groups of people: Jewish victims; a contingent of around 100 mass murderers (SS guards, Ukrainian auxiliaries and auxiliary administrative staff on site); Jews taken from transports to help with extermination process, who only lived a day or two; and so called Hofjuden (court Jews), who acted as tailors, carpenters and other skilled workers serving the camp personnel for a period of months before being murdered. 

Reder was only able to escape because he was in the latter category. For the murderers, in turn, deceit and speed were central to the process in order to blunt resistance and the chances of escape; this also “increased the killing capacity of the camp.”

Finally, one particularly chilling feature shared by all three death camps is raised by Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka: songs by orchestral musicians, often playing to drown out the screams of those murdered by gas or shooting. Arad writes:

“In Bełzec there was a small orchestra, which was used primarily during the transports and to entertain the SS men during their nights of drunkenness and debauchery. The orchestra was made up of six musician and usually played in the area between the gas chamber and the burial pits. The transfer of corpses from the gas chambers to the graves was done to the accompaniment of the orchestra.” 

The Holocaust in the Soviet Union is Arad’s most recent and ambitious account, which also sheds new light on the Operation Reinhard camps. He devotes a chapter to Bełzec here, emphasizing that deportations took place largely from the Polish region of Galicia in the General Government – an area first occupied by the USSR between September 1939 and June 1941 — lasting over a period of seven months.

Although the Bełzec death camp existed between mid-March and mid-December 1942, a six-week pause was undertaken to expand the killing facilities: six concrete gassing chambers were installed to murder as many as 2,000 Jews at a time. Thereafter, in the six months comprising the “big deportations” to Bełzec, more than 100,000 transported Jews could be murdered in the course of a single month.

Yet in spite of Arad’s exceptional contribution to understanding Bełzec, and the history of Operation Reinhard more generally, Dieter Pohl rightly maintained in a pivotal 2004 collection on historical interpretations of the Holocaust that the “three camps of the Aktion Reinhard, Bełzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, became, from the spring of 1942, the murder sites of almost half of Polish Jewry, but no scholarly camp monograph has yet been published.” 

This has been recently remedied with English-language studies in the cases of Sobibor and Treblinka, but not for the earliest of the Operation Reinhard camps, Bełzec.

In this sense alone, one independent scholar’s contribution to Holocaust studies is worthy of recognition. Over his years of privately-directed work, Chris Webb has collected a number of contemporaneous photographs from Bełzec — some of which are included in his self-published book, Bełzec: The Death Camp Laboratory. Relevant transcriptions from a wartime newsletter called the Polish Fortnightly Review; wartime diaries and subsequent memoirs’ excerpts from post-war testimony and trials; as well as sketches and reproductions of Bełzec, are also included in his recently published book. Intended for a general audience, both the selection and narrative are intended to give an overview, an impression, of Bełzec’s development and function. Images of the perpetrators are given prominent place — these few orchestrated the murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. 

The Duty, and Honor, of Remembrance

Drawing upon a leading Holocaust education website — H.E.A.R.T. — that he co-directs with Carmelo Lisciotto, Webb’s book provides details of Austro-German SS personnel at Bełzec, in addition to many of the Ukrainian and so-called volksdeutsche auxiliaries also serving in the extermination center.

These and other efforts have a very publicly-spirited effect. Amongst many others continuing to show us what actually happened less than a lifetime ago, Webb reminds his readers that, at Bełzec, the worst was perpetrated against defenseless Jewish victims, again and again.

Taken together, the patchwork of quotations, pictures, and testimony comprising his book serves to reinforce the impression that human depravity passed a certain threshold at that point in history. Quite simply Bełzec: The Death Camp Laboratory, and honorable works like it, collectively offer a glimpse of this abyss, when genocide was streamlined; administered and employed against enemies of the Third Reich for no other reason than that they were Jewish.

These and other findings are part of a lifetime’s dedication to making the Holocaust — and specifically the part played by the death camp at Bełzec in this process of genocide — better known to a wider audience. 

Such private and honorable endeavors are needed today more than ever. Despite the crafted idiocies and invariable ideological extremism of Holocaust deniers — cynically, mistakenly, referring to themselves as mere “revisionists” — the wartime Holocaust remains amongst the best-documented crimes of this, or any, historical period.

This is in spite of the Nazis’ attempts, late in the war, to cover up their genocide. In Bełzec, as with other sites of mass murder comprising Operation Reinhardt, this entailed razing the camp and placing a farm, replete with a Ukrainian family as a cover story, over the human remains of its pitiless existence.

That deniers take their cue from unsuccessful Nazi attempts to hide all evidence should be always borne in mind. For who denies the Norman Conquest in 1066, or the Boston Tea Party, and so on ad infinitum, for which far less evidence exists? The answer is none, for there is no sinister reason to do so. There is nothing to gain.

That is not the case with Holocaust deniers, who overwhelming seek to rehabilitate the public image of the Third Reich, to legitimize what has rightly been called eliminationist anti-Semitism. Long may their machinations continue to fail in the face of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony.  

As we commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 (the date of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau) each year, long may these events be remembered, as both human curse and warning against hatred in all its forms — including that invidiously seeking to deny our common past.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Image: Copyright ©    Shutterstock. All Rights Reserved

The post Remembering Belzec appeared first on Fair Observer.

“Sooner or later one must get old, agree to be judged, or sentenced … the uninterrupted seeking of truth, the decision to tell it when one sees it, on every level, and to live it, gives a meaning, a direction to one’s march.” Life a trial, acquittal reserved for saints; and all that could be realistically hoped in a world Betwixt and Between, a hung jury.

As Albert Camus wrote in the 1958 preface to that reprinted collection of essays (L'envers et l'endroit, sometimes translated as The Wrong Side and the Right Side) that he called a personal “testimony”: “I have doubtless never said that I was a just man. I have merely happened to say that we should try to be just, and also that such an ambition involved great toil and misery.” Invincibly honest, it is as if Camus lived his entire life under oath.

An Invincible Summer

This holiest of non-believers would have been 100 on November 7, 2013. He never reached half of that age, having died young, somehow fittingly, in a car crash that killed him near-instantaneously. As he sometimes noted, his tubercular lungs should have buried him long before 4 January, 1960.

Then again, his courageous activities for the French resistance a generation earlier surely merited a death sentence by the Nazi occupiers. A decade or so later, while speaking on behalf of innocent civilians in war-torn Algeria, saw both sides wishing him dead. Throughout, his self-assigned task was to serve (admittedly changing notions of) justice. To believe, even in the wintry depths of the Second World War, that “there are in men more things to admire than to despise.”

We are fortunate that his uncompromising life went on to 46, surrounded by death and deprivation though it often was, allowing him to publish his post-war accolades to the human spirit: The Plague (La Peste, 1947), The Rebel (L'homme révolté, 1951) and The Fall (La Chute, 1956). His lapidary prose, alive and kicking even in translation, has become a kind of Internet meme for good faith, for modest bravery: “Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever the difficulties the enterprise may present, I would like never to be unfaithful either to one or the other …. In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Although often bowdlerized and invariably stripped of context online, his phrasemaking points up an unassailable feature of Camus’s writing: cutting to the quick of the roiling passion that is humanity.

The First Man

Born into an impoverished family of pieds-noir settlers on the southern shores of his lifelong love, the Mediterranean, his father was killed in the Great War while Camus was in infancy. Both experiences, the colonial and the plague of war, were inscribed into nearly all of his works: literary, dramatic, philosophical and journalistic alike. His most autobiographical, The First Man (Le Premier Homme), was found in the boot of the crumpled car that ejected him like a womb.

Camus’s death was a near-allegory of his life, like that novel itself: unbowed in spite of all, incomplete – yet still better than most and, crucially, unwilling to compromise with the certainties and platitudes of compromised men and their crazily platitudinous times. Amongst a thicket of detractors, his work towers above those of lesser, and less humane, thinkers, too little remembered for its courage in the face of violence and ideological extremism. Camus demands a much wider readership for his perspicuity, his sensitivity to suffering, and his implacable striving for justice.

For Camus was a sane man living in crazy times. His inspiring body of work beautifully speaks to the latter still, especially his journalism and short prose. Nor were his political writings bereft of influence at the time – if too little so. Beyond the US, for example, the Western world has come to accept his trenchant critique of the death penalty in the unrivalled “Reflections on the Guillotine.” In ethically vexing times, few were as incisive or nuanced on the Sisyphean issues of the day – war and peace, communism and liberalism, poverty and greed – than he looks to be from the view of posterity. Still, he is not heard enough.

Between Hell and Reason

Long before news of a near catastrophic, four megaton accident over North Carolina in 1961, or more recent news of 1983 nuclear war game gone almost genodically awry, Camus was amongst the first to announce, in his 8 August, 1945 editorial, “On the Bombing of Hiroshima,” that “our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery … humanity is being offered its last chance.” That chance, “to choose definitively between hell and reason.”

If our suicidal species is to commemorate his bicentenary we would do well to heed his warning. For death can always be justified: from warfare in the name of peace to environmental degradation in the name of progress. Despite it all, and despite so much evidence to the contrary, Camus remained optimistic: “Men of good will refuse to despair and instead wish to maintain those values which will prevent our collective suicide.”

Consistent with his post-1945 stance, Camus he spoke on behalf of “men who refuse both to engage in terror and to endure it.” Denouncing a “fratricidal struggle” that erupted in Algeria in 1954 between 1.2 million long-settled colonizers and shamefully impoverished, second-class indigenes, Camus’s 1956 “Call for a Civilian Truce in Algeria” characteristically requested of both sides what was by then his life’s theme: “a simple appeal to your humanity … to accept a truce that would apply exclusively to innocent civilians.”

The failure of his crie de coeur, only a year before his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature, reduced him to a silence that has too often been mistaken for naivety or disengagement. It was neither, as Camus’s Algerian Chronicles and other recent works make plain. “Algeria is where I hurt at this moment, wrote this tubercular man in a letter at the time, “as others feel pain in their lungs.”

Rightly, this Algerian aspect of Camus’s life has received the lion’s share of attention this year. How he came to this position also merits retelling – not just for its worthy didacticism, but for the way in which it shaped his later life like the mark of Cain. “In every guilty man, there is an innocent part,” he wrote to his mentor, Jean Grenier, after this change: “This is what makes any absolute condemnation revolting.”

For the preceding thirty months had shifted, and indeed strengthened, his commitment to human justice, giving it an implacable and absolute character. Yet this defining turn remains too often downplayed in biographies. It was a moment when Camus admitted he was wrong, and later said as much publicly. It earned him opprobrium at the time, showing an intellectual bravery that is all but lacking in today’s ribald intellectual climate.

Best recounted in Alexandre de Gramont’s indispensible “Between Hell and Reason”: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper Combat, 1944-1947, this watershed concerns the genesis of Camus’s well-known dictum that “words are stronger than bullets.” This position was definitively staked out in his 30 November, 1946 Combat editorial: “I will never again be among those who, for whatever reasons, accommodate themselves to murder.”

The Purge Has Gone Awry

Strange as it may seem, it was not always thus for him. Following the liberation of Paris in August 1944, thousands of collaborators – from government officials to journalists to shaven-headed women alleged to have cavorted with German occupiers – had been treated to summary justice in courts, on French streets, sometimes by little better than lynch mobs. Under Camus’s yearlong directorship, Combat, then at the height of its resistance prestige, had advocated just such a purge.

Two months later he entered into a heated debate with the Catholic intellectual François Mauriac, who had appealed to Christian virtues of compassion and mercy. Piqued, Camus responded that the promise of a just post-war France “forces us to destroy a living part of this country in order that we may save its very soul.” In practice, this meant death sentences and executions by firing squads; in a word, legitimate murder.

Three days later, Camus noted that first official death sentence was handed down in Paris (against the collaborationist journalist Georges Suarez, who was executed on 9 November). Against Mauriac’s continued protestations, Camus doubled down; that Wednesday, 25 October 1944, he accused Mauriac of penning “unjust” accusations, for “not to destroy certain men would be to betray the good of the country.” He added: “These four years have forced us to harden something inside ourselves. Perhaps this is regrettable.”

Camus’s regrets multiplied with the bodies. By early 1945 he wrote an editorial titled “The purge has gone awry,” asserting “that now it is probably too late for justice to be done.” The just reckoning he had endorsed to a readership at the time in the hundreds of thousands had transformed, before his downcast eyes, into vengeance of the mob.

The purge had lasted too long, resulting in excess punishment for some, and undue clemency for others. “We see now that M. Muariac was right,” Camus concluded, “we are going to need charity.” This prompted a satirical riposte from Mauriac, “In Contempt of Charity” which, for the first time, Camus answered in his own name in Combat’s pages: “We refuse both the cries of hate that come at us from one side and the pleas of mercy that come at us from the other.”

Throughout his adult life, Camus could never accept Mauriac’s Christian beliefs, but he soon came to advocate, even spearhead, pleas of mercy. As from a cocoon, his view of justice was starting to transform.

Shattered With a Single Blow and Forever

Yet the decisive change in Camus happened, it seems, literally overnight. The high-profile trial of the writer and arch-collaborationist, Robert Brasillach, had commenced a week earlier, on 19 January, 1945. Another writer (and one-time collaborator), Marcel Aymé, sent Camus a petition for clemency on behalf of Brasillach. Did Camus hate such befouled men more than he hated the death penalty? The question kept him awake, apparently pacing through the night of 26-27 January. He signed the petition.

This decision, he wrote to Aymé the next day – in a personal capacity, rather than as Combat’s editor-in-chief – had nothing to do with Brasillach. His was a protest on behalf of humanity, metaphysically condemned to death. A notebook entry toward the still-unfinished La Peste from precisely these weeks is often quoted, if again usually decontextualized: “We should serve justice because our condition is unjust, increase happiness and joy because this world is unhappy. Similarly, we should sentence no one to death, since we have been sentenced to death ourselves.”

Later in that year, in an unsigned Combat editorial on 30 August, 1945, Camus asserted: “The purge in France is not only a failure but also a disgrace.” 

Over the course of a single, morally trying year, Camus had “flip-flopped.” But how many in the public sphere could admit, then or now, as he did to a convent of Dominican monks in a 1948 lecture entitled “The Unbeliever and Christians,” that “I have come to admit to myself and to admit publicly here that on the central issue of our argument, M. Mauriac was right and I was wrong”?

Nor did Camus simply move on. Henceforth, rejection of the death penalty would be unconditional and impassioned. It subsequently motivated a number of behind-the-scenes appeals, first in France, and then in his native Algeria. Equally, his moral volte-face underwrote a key change in his art. Whereas his earlier work had been concerned with suicide (The Myth of Sisyphus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942) and a kind of existential disengagement (The Stranger, L'Étranger, also translated as The Outsider, 1942), from 1945 his essays and fiction were taken with murder, with the individual’s place in society, and with speaking for the oppressed. Human life was always more important than justifiable murder. From then on, only the means of a venture could justify any ends worthy of the name, let alone command his fealty.

Although several of his friends had died, bloodily, under the plague of Nazi occupation, it took the execution of the traitor Robert Brasillach to make Camus become the profound enemy of death for which he is most remembered. It earned him few friends, and many enemies, at the time – especially amongst French communists whose “logic of history” accepted Stalinist purges and gulags in these years.

Implicitly taking aim at them when accepting his Nobel Prize, Camus argued that the writer’s true audience is not those “who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.” It is this secular saintliness that makes him, for me at least, The First Man, as inscribed in that unfinished masterpiece’s last sentence:

“He [Jacques Cormery, Camus’s fictional alter-ego], like a solitary and ever-shining blade of a sword, was destined to be shattered with a single blow and forever, an unalloyed passion for life confronting utter death; today he felt life, youth, people slipping away from him, without being able to hold on to any of them, left with the blind hope that this obscure force that for so many years had raised him above the daily routine, nourished him unstintingly, and been equal to the most difficult circumstances…”

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Image: Copyright © Shutterstock. All Rights Reserved

The post Albert Camus: A Centenary Commemoration appeared first on Fair Observer.

Perhaps modernism’s most recognizable American poet, Ezra Pound, became a leading propagandist for fascism – both during WWII and since. Given the shining poetic achievements of Robert Frost, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath and many others, the first contention will long remain debatable. Yet on the second point there can be little debate – as extensively shown by my recent book with Palgrave,  Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945. Reading like a Who’s Who of revolutionary nationalism and vicious anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s, Pound corresponded with a wide array of fascist elites in Britain, Italy and even Nazi Germany, all the while penning propaganda strategies, speeches and slogans targeting the western democracies and the USSR.

Liberty Is Not a Right

Pound had lived in Fascist Italy for nearly a decade – since 1924, increasingly impressed by the “continuing revolution” under Mussolini beginning with the October 1922 “March on Rome.” Yet it was Pound’s one and only meeting with Il Duce that cemented his conversion to what scholars term the “political faith” of fascism. This short meeting with “the Boss” was quickly immortalized in “Canto 41” of Pound’s life-work, The Cantos, itself started during WWI and still unfinished by the time of Woodstock. Following his audience with Mussolini on the ominous date of 30 January, 1933, Pound spent the next 10 days enchantedly writing Jefferson and/or Mussolini – tellingly subtitled L’Ideal Statale As I have Seen it – which viewed Il Duces’s political genius and will toward order as equivalent to that of Thomas Jefferson.

Thus, the distortions of ideological fanaticism were already taking effect: for Jefferson the exercise of liberty was a supreme political virtue; for Mussolini, the precise opposite obtained. For the latter’s was clearly not extremism in the defense of liberty, but unprecedented political violence in Italy defending a violent dictatorship. When it came to liberty, in fact, in the two plus years from writing to publishing Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound made Mussolini’s favored slogan on the matter his own: “Liberty is not a right, but a duty.” If that was scarcely a Jeffersonian sentiment, that was nothing compared what came next.

Fascist Italy’s rapacious invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 provided the initial context. In defense of what Pound fancifully compared to Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase, he declared in the overseas Fascist organ in London, the British-Italian Bulletin: “No man living has preserved the Peace of Europe as often as has Benito Mussolini.” This was penned even before the poison gas had settled in East Africa, in a double-sized Christmas special trumpeting his contribution across a banner on the front cover. A further 25 pro bono comment pieces were to follow over the ensuing months, until the journal folded – just shy of a year’s Fascist propaganda directed weekly at Britain – making the famous poet a leading contributor to this short-lived propaganda organ.

Blackshirts

If October 1936 witnessed the closure of Pound’s earliest explicit propaganda for fascist ideology, it also saw the onset of his work for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). The latter had recently changed its emblem to an encircled lightning flash, had changed its stance on Jews to open anti-Semitism, and had changed its name revealingly, to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (still shorthanded BUF). Prior to these changes, in fact, Pound had regarded the movement as too conservative, clarified across 16 letters to the BUF’s “Leader” between 1934 and 1940.

This too was notably consistent: Pound was typically in touch with key leaders in European and American fascist movements, typically urging greater radicalization. Added to the 26 texts for the British-Italian Bulletin from the preceding year, his first text for The Fascist Quarterly in October 1936 heralded nearly 40 more texts for the BUF in as many months – until, that is, the group’s leadership was interned following the Third Reich’s invasion of western Europe in May 1940.

During this time Pound continued to march in lockstep with BUF policy, as he had done with Fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, and as he would shortly do with the Axis war effort. His influence on BUF propaganda during the second half of the 1930s, moreover, was striking: his books were reviewed in their press, his economic views were adopted wholesale by the BUF, and some of Pound’s disciples even published with the movement’s journals and newspapers. To be sure, this cut both ways: in keeping with British and, after mid-1938, Italian fascists, Pound now unashamedly advanced a rabid form of biological anti-Semitism.

He offered unqualified praise for National Socialism in Germany, and even termed the turgid Mein Kampf a work “genius” – although it would be another four years before he read anything more than second-hand excerpts of Hitler’s autobiography. Yet there could be little doubt by this time: Pound was a devotee of the Axis on the eve of the most destructive war in history. Underscoring this fact were the appearance of swastikas concluding some of his more provocative letters by the late 1930s. It was an ominous sign of things to come.

Minculpop

During WWII, Ezra Pound used his best weapon, his words, to fight the Allies as a radio propagandist for Fascist Italy. In doing so, he all but suspended the composition of his epic poem, The Cantos, after 71 justly-celebrated sequences. Upon the Fascist regime’s belated entry into the European theatre of war in June 1940, Pound – who had now been resident in Italy for a generation – swiftly sought to aid the Axis war effort. Despite keeping him at arm’s length for several months, the Ministry of Popular Culture (Minculpop) finally acceded to his repeated requests. He was given the microphone to read his own scripts.

Pound started slowly in 1941, broadcasting only a handful of propaganda speeches – criticizing a Britain that he believed, along with other Axis propagandists, had fallen under Jewish control. It was the standard anti-Semitic line; one he would adhere to in an increasingly rapacious way. He likewise targeted American audiences, warning them to keep “the Jews” from pushing the country into the war. By the time of Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941 – Pound was appearing roughly every week for Anglophone audiences.

Over the next two years this would double, even triple. While academics have located several hundred radio items to date, the true number is, incredibly, actually closer to several thousand. The scale is as staggering as the content, and makes him amongst the most prolific wartime broadcasters in history. Thus, as Nazi Germany’s “turn toward the East” to wipe out the “Judeo-Bolshevik enemy” swiftly turned into a “war of annihilation,” Pound’s ideological commitment and the Axis need use of his talents both increased markedly.

Nor did Pound’s devotion flag with the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – a bombing he later termed a “pyrotechnic display.” In keeping with the unsatisfactory accounts of Pound’s wartime activities more broadly, a scholarly consensus has held that he “retired” from radio broadcasting at this time, in order to reconsider his options, given that his adoptive country was at war with the country of his birth.

In reality, no such thing occurred. Pound had no doubts about which side of the “ideological war, as he put it, between democracy and fascism he was serving. Yet he was canny enough to recognize that continuing his broadcasts placed him in jeopardy of treason charges. Accordingly, even before the official American entry into the European theatre of war on 10 December, Pound was recommending to his handlers that his broadcasts and speechwriting continue – only anonymized. This allowed him to actually redouble his activities for the Axis, virtually uninterrupted, during the remainder of WWII.

“Radio Treason”

All this activity was surprising enough. Yet Pound’s resolve hardened as the Italian war effort weakened noticeably during later 1941 and the first half of 1942. Aiding in his recommitment, quite remarkably, was Pound’s reading of Hitler’s “Propaganda and Organization” chapter from Mein Kampf in spring 1942. It is clear from his manuscripts and correspondence across the middle of 1942 that Pound responded enthusiastically to what Hitler called a “radical and exciting,” or “lively and combative” approach to propaganda.

Reading Mein Kampf also led, directly it seems, to Pound’s move toward forcefully recommending strategies for propaganda to Radio Rome – and indeed, Fascism’s Minculpop more generally – that seemed to channel many of Hitler’s ideas. These effectively deployed Hitler’s well-known theorem that emotion, especially hatred, proved of far greater propaganda effect than reason, balance, or probity.

With these attacks now squarely turned toward the US during 1942, the wartime government there moved to indict Pound (alongside seven other Americans broadcasting for the Axis) for “radio treason.” Underscoring the gravity of this decision, Department of Justice records indicate that no less a figure than President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated these proceedings on October 1, 1942 (this is contained in the first part of six freely-available, online files also containing telling extracts from Pound’s by-now FCC transcribed broadcast talks).

A day after Mussolini was deposed by the Fascist Grand Council, Pound was officially indicted by a specially empanelled Federal Grand Jury in Washington, D.C.– in absentia of course – on 26 July 1943. In the weeks to come, Rome was in chaos, and Mussolini in prison; for his part, Pound continued broadcasting for the Axis through the summer. With the Nazi occupation of northern Italy imminent, the Third Reich itself testified to the importance placed upon Pound’s broadcasting; a passport was apparently forged for him in an attempt to spirit him to Germany.

The Final Solution

Yet the final chapter in Pound’s wartime narrative would be written in occupied northern Italy, not Nazi Germany. The Duce was broken out of his mountaintop prison by SS commandos, and installed as the head of the collaborationist Salò Republic. This had prompted Pound to cross the frontlines out of Rome and head north with little else but a knapsack and his unflinching belief in the fascist cause. He joined the Fascist government, now reconstituted as the Italian Social Republic (RSI), in the autumn of 1943. It was at the same time that deportations of Italian Jews began. More than 90% of these Holocaust victims – more than 8,500 –  were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where all but a few were gassed upon arrival.

While he was unlikely to have known about the Nazis’ poorly-kept secret for Judeocide, the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” Pound clearly knew about the deportations from Rome and other transit centres; including, for example, some 300 Jews deported from Genoa, only 15 miles from his home in Rapallo. Far from rethinking his Axis activism, Pound’s response was to write to yet another leading functionary Alessandro Pavolini, a bloodthirsty radical and by then head of the Republican Fascist Party – and in the next year, also head of the murderous Black Brigades – recommending a law mandating booksellers in the Salò Republic to stock the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In the remaining 18 months of war and genocide in northern Italy, Pound continued to speak over the radio in Milan, extending his broadcasting languages to German and Italian as well as English, the latter for a program entitled “Jerry’s Front Calling” (Jerry being slang for the German army). He continued high-level contacts with RSI decision-makers during this last period of fanatical propaganda – whether to Mussolini, Pavolini or other elites, or ministries like the Office of Race and the re-founded Minculpop, operating from the shores of Lake Garda. He also returned to the Cantos, with his only two sequences written directly in Italian for the RSI. They were nakedly propagandistic, and published in some of the last regime newspapers to continue publishing by 1945.

In keeping with the emasculation of Fascist authority as the war drew to a close, Pound was simultaneously sending his radio speeches to authorities at the German consulate based in Milan. It seems this carried on until the second half of April 1945 – less than a fortnight until he was captured and interrogated by American FBI agents dispatched to war-torn Italy for that express purpose. After days of being held incommunicado, uncertain if he would be executed outright, Pound’s initial statements were unapologetic and, in his own words, voluntary. In a sad irony, his recorded assertions helped seal Pound’s incarceration for the next 13 years (thanks to his successful insanity plea), on the very day Europe had been liberated from Axis tyranny:“ Hitler and Mussolini were simple men from the country. I think that Hitler was a Saint, and wanted nothing for himself. I think that he was fooled into anti-Semitism and it ruined him. That was his mistake. When you see the “mess” that Italy gets into by “bumping off” Mussolini, you will see why someone could believe in some of his efforts.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Image: Copyright © Shutterstock. All Rights Reserved

The post Ezra Pound: Modernist Politics and Fascist Propaganda appeared first on Fair Observer.

In the aftermath of mass-casualty terrorist attacks by Islamist militants in the United States on 11 September 2001, Madrid on 11 March 2004, and London on 7 July 2005, the emergence of an illiberal anti-Muslim politics has offered a crucial hook for a new generation of radical right politicians – one also palpable in some sections the mainstream media and wider public. In 2005, Nick Griffin, the current chairman of the British National Party (BNP), urged party activists to turn away from an unhelpful anti-Semitism and embrace anti-Muslim politics in a telling attempt at populist, electoral-friendly campaigning: “With millions of our people desperately and very reasonably worried by the spread of Islam and its adherents, and with the mass media … playing ‘Islamophobic’ messages like a scratched CD, the proper choice of enemy needn’t be left to rocket scientists.”

Griffin was trying to distance the BNP from much of its earlier rhetoric, echoing the biological anti-Semitism between the wars so closely identified with “classical” fascist movements like Nazism or Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. In the place of “traditional” Judeophobic prejudice, the radical right has increasingly turned toward a “culturalist racism” of alleged implacable difference and identitarian conflict with European and American Muslims – one in many ways playing upon the same types of sensationalist phobias, casual discrimination and demonization as anti-Semitism did a century ago. This religious/cultural prejudice assumes that all Muslims are responsible for the actions of an extremist minority, and that Islam – not just jihadi Islamist violence, which all citizens of goodwill, of course, naturally oppose – is an “other” that cannot be accommodated within liberal democratic Europe or the US.

Without doubt, over the last generation, the more successful radical right ideologues and movements have been acutely sensitive to shifts in the political and cultural landscape. Aided by the aforementioned jihadi Islamist attacks on one hand, and by longer-term demographic change on the other, Europe and the US have played witness to degrees of collective prejudice and scapegoating wholly at variance with democratic egalitarianism and individual responsibility. This new intolerance, as the far right has quickly grasped, would be considered unacceptable if leveled against other historical “out-groups”: Jews, black people and so on (not including Roma and Sinti peoples, who still face discrimination to a shameful degree). Fanning these flames are windier sections of the reactionary media, which provide an issue that can be shared by ideologues and talking heads of all right-wing shades – “paleo-”, “neo-”, “far-”, and “extreme” alike.

In a perfect storm of populist prejudice, radical Islamist propaganda and radical right rhetoric have together attempted to turn the notion of a “clash of civilizations” into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It may even be that opposing extremes rely upon each other to validate their shared notion of a “clash of civilizations”. From this perspective, Roger Eatwell has reasonably detected a link between the rhetoric of radical right activists and jihadi Islamists contributing to a “cumulative extremism”, whereby “one form of extremism can feed off and magnify other forms”. In this way, the intertwined extremes from opposing illiberal camps seek to radicalize otherwise liberal-democratic populaces who reject both political violence and collective scapegoating – in all its forms – in favor of the clashing of supposedly hostile and monolithic civilizations.

To be sure, the most violent voice yet in this process of “cumulative extremism” has certainly been Anders Behring Breivik, whose attempt to start a “European Civil War” culminating with the end of Islam in Europe caused the deaths of 77 Norwegian innocents, mostly children, on 22 July 2011. Writing for the New York Review of Books in the wake of Breivik’s terrorist bombing and mass shootings, Malise Ruthven stressed that his anti-Muslim views are “shared by many on the right and some in Europe’s liberal mainstream.” Ruthven’s article, furthermore, highlights several of the wider similarities shared between both opposing, in some ways co-dependent, extremisms:

"Just as al-Qaeda represents an extreme, activist variant of political views held by a much wider constituency of Muslim radicals, most of whom would never consider crossing the boundary between thinking and action, so Breivik (judging from his manifesto) holds a broad range of positions common to what might be called the 'counter-jihadist' or 'paranoid right.' This is represented – among others – by Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller in the US, the controversial Dutch legislator Geert Wilders, and Bat Ye’or and Melanie Phillips in Britain."

Indeed, for the radical right this has become a signature issue. With the exception of a remaining hardcore of “traditional” biological racists tending toward varying shades of white supremacism, the different manifestations of the radical right – social movements, electoral parties, and, importantly, interconnected websites – have turned toward anti-Muslim prejudice as a core strategy for populist mobilization.

Consider the case of a February 2012 speech delivered by Paul Weston, chairman of the British Freedom Party (BFP). Launched eighteen months earlier, the BFP was seeking funding and visibility ahead of the UK’s May 2012 local elections. Weston correspondingly visited the US to glad-hand and deliver speeches – including one talk entitled “Turning Britain into Lebanon”. Fully signed up to the “clash of civilizations” thesis, Weston there warned of a “slide into civil war, tit for tat atrocities becoming progressively more vicious, before the entire country goes the way of Lebanon, or more recently Yugoslavia, which of course fractured along racial, tribal and religious lines.” Weston was referring, of course, to an assumed, monolithic Islamic faith he considered “worse than Nazism” – one that he believed was acting within, and against, Britain. He then concluded:

"I am going to fight for Britain, but there is no guarantee that Britain and Europe can be saved, and if we go, and America goes shortly thereafter, then so goes western Civilisation – the most humane, moral and decent civilisation in the history of mankind – to be replaced by Islam, the most barbaric, illiberal and totalitarian force of pathological cruelty that can only take the western world back to the dark ages."

Weston’s lecture was originally filmed and presented at the apartment of Laurence Auster, host of the “paleo-conservative” website and blog, View from the Right. The latter, a kind of twenty-first century John Birch Society for the online generation, essentially opposes multiculturalism in favor of return to “traditionalist” conservative values in the US – extending to, as per the epigraph of his September 2008 online collection of texts, “What to do about Islam”: “proposals for removing jihad and sharia supporters from America, restricting or prohibiting the practice of Islam in America, and containing and isolating Islam from the rest of the world, the policy I call Separationism.” More recent blog entries reiterate these views through, say, discussions on the usefulness or otherwise of nuclear attacks against Mecca and Medina, and the potential eventuality of killing Muslims in the west following the outbreak of a European “civil war”. Auster’s reactionary group, which aims to turn back the clock on non-white equality and multiculturalism, hosted Weston’s 23 February revealing speech on the “Islamic road that Europe finds itself on, particularly so Britain, which is almost on the point of no return – or perhaps no peaceful return.”          

A fortnight after Weston’s speech was delivered, it appeared on the single-issue Gates of Vienna website (their telling motto: “At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.”); and two weeks thereafter, also appeared on Andrew Brons’ Nationalist Unity Forum. Brons, one of two Members of European Parliament for the aforementioned BNP until his recent resignation (the other MEP being current party chairman Nick Griffin), had previously been a member of the National Socialist Movement in the 1960s, and later, from 1980, headed the neo-Nazi National Front before joining the BNP in 2005 and successfully standing in the Yorkshire and Humber region in June 2009. Unlike the “traditionalist” conservative Auster and the single-issue, Islamophobic Gates of Vienna, however, Brons’s website packages anti-Muslim prejudice as one among many themes in his radical-right electoral stable. In this way, ideological positions held by the illiberal right on starkly contrasting issues – ranging from white nationalism, revolution and political violence, to the importance of engaging with the electoral system in the first place – have been recently trumped by a congealing around anti-Muslim prejudice, which seeks to assault liberal democracy not from without, but within.

Shortly after returning from his trip to the US, BFP leader Paul Weston quickly formed an electoral alliance in April 2012 with the first explicitly anti-Muslim street organization in post-war Europe, the English Defence League. Likewise claiming to stand for liberal values against Islamist “totalitarianism” – remarkably, the group calls itself a “human rights organisation” – EDL joint-leaders Tommy Robinson (the pseudonym of currently-remanded Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and Kevin Carroll have been at the forefront of anti-Muslim politics since the launch of this “new far right” social movement in Spring 2009. While the EDL leadership seems to share neither the overt white supremacism of the BNP and other neo-fascist parties in Europe and the US, nor the backward-looking racism of Auster’s View from the Right, all three illiberal right factions advocate an anti-Muslim rhetoric only adding to an already troubling “cumulative extremism” in Britain, the US and across Europe. 

Following the alliance’s failure in the May 2012 local elections, the BFP-EDL’s other actions over 2012 bear this out the predominance of anti-Muslim politics for this radical right milieu; from a European “Counter-Jihad” demonstration in Aarhus (home of the newspaper publishing the inflammatory “Danish Cartoons” in 2006) on 31 March 2012, and still more ambitiously, the “First Worldwide Counter-Jihad Action” in Stockholm on 4 August 2012 (hosting Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and others; both events were poorly attended by radical right activists). That scapegoating provocations like the so-called “counter-jihad movement” have an effect in terms of “cumulative extremism” is similarly easy to identify: recently Islamist extremists targeted an English Defence League demonstration in Dewsbury during Summer 2012, hoping to attack EDL-BFP supporters with guns and improvised explosive devices. In this way, an illiberal descent into organized intolerance, long familiar to radical right ideologues and movements, has been reformulated as a “clash of civilizations” discourse targeting the Islamic faith as a whole – potentially contributing to radical right violence like Brieivk’s atrocities in Norway, as well as a “cumulative extremism” serving only to increase already-strained community tensions in Europe and the US.

*[An extended and fully referenced version of this article is available at Faith Matters.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

Image: Copyright © Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

The post The Radical Right, Anti-Muslim Politics, and “Cumulative Extremism” appeared first on Fair Observer.