Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Thu May 03, 2018 6:39 am

The New Man of 4chan

ANGELA NAGLE

Image


On men’s rights sites and in some geeky subcultures, “beta male” is a common term of identification, one of both belonging and self-mockery. It has become a popular meme on 4chan’s recreationally obnoxious /b/ board, a precursor to /r9k/ that produced hacker collectives such as Anonymous while also incubating scores of anti-feminist online attacks in recent years. Know Your Meme records the earliest use of the term “beta uprising” in 2011, on the men’s rights movement blog Fight for Justice. From around 2013, the beta-male uprising was a regular topic among 4chan users; it encompassed elaborate fantasies of revenge against attractive women, macho jocks, and other “normies” with majority tastes and attitudes.

The post alleged to be Harper-Mercer’s school shooting alert came with an image of Pepe the Frog, a character lifted from the Matt Furie comic strip Boy’s Club, angrily brandishing a gun. This, too, was a trope of the beta rebellion: in his original cartoon form, Pepe was a sad sack, prone to bouts of humiliation. But as his froggy visage got meme-fied on 4chan, he took on a distinctly more menacing aspect. Pepe became a favorite icon of last-straw ranters spewing extreme misogyny, racism, and vengefulness. Much to the irritation of geeks, Pepe also became popular among normies, which is why you can find videos on YouTube of angry Pepe in a red rage accompanied by variations of the male scream, “Normies! Get the fuck off my board!”

Overwrought digital threats and confrontational online rhetoric are nearly as old as the Internet itself. Posters on 4chan/b/’s more transgressive threads regularly claim that they are about to do terrible things to themselves and others.



More at: http://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Fri May 04, 2018 11:56 am

From Gary Lachman:


I’ve also just received a commission from my US publisher, Tarcher Penguin, now Tarcher Perigee, for Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. The book will look at the influence ‘mental science’ and ‘positive thinking’ has had on Trump’s rise to power, and will explore the links between the new ‘alt.right’ movement within the political far right and the political philosophy of the Italian esotericist Julius Evola. I will also look at the influence Alexandr Dugin, a radical political theorist influenced by Evola, ‘chaos magick’ and Martin Heidegger, has on the Russian President Vladimir Putin. In different ways both Trump and Putin seek to destabilize the west and reshape the political and economic map of Europe. With this in mind I will look at the possible connection – if any – between the European Union and a strange political philosophy that began in the late nineteenth century and according to some reports had a hidden but effective influence on European politics. This is what is known as Synarchy, the complete opposite of anarchy. Anarchy means no government; Synarchy means total government. I write about Synarchy in Politics and the Occult and Dark Star Rising will pick up my account of the occult influence on modern politics from where I left it in 2008.


https://garylachman.co.uk/2016/12/25/me ... -new-year/
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Fri May 04, 2018 11:01 pm

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168748

What Do Trumpism, Bannonism, Putinism, Orbánism, Erdoğanism, Xiism, Modiism, and Duterteism Have in Common?

by Ronald Beiner
Ronald Beiner is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and author of Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right.

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For generations, intellectuals of the left have assumed that Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger belong to them. Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, wrote: “Nietzsche’s colossal political failure is attested to by the facts that the Right, which was his only hope that his teaching would have its proper effect, has utterly disappeared, and he himself was tainted in its ugly last gasp, while today virtually every Nietzschean, as well as Heideggerian, is a leftist.” I’m not sure whether that sentence was ever fully true, but it’s certainly not true today. Steve Bannon, the rabble-rousing populist and alt-right enabler who Donald Trump shockingly brought into the White House, said the following to a gathering of the Front National in March: “every day, we get stronger and they get weaker…. History is on our side.” Can we be completely sure that this is wrong?

As the far right returns to the scene, so do worries about the possible ideological relevance of vehemently anti-liberal and anti-egalitarian thinkers like Nietzsche (and Heidegger). Consider two writers of the radical right who have been warmly embraced by the contemporary alt-right: Julius Evola and Alexander Dugin. Evola, the monocled baron, Italian exponent of über-fascism, the inspirer of black terrorism in Italy, and an explicit disciple of Nietzsche, articulated a vision of caste-based Nietzschean neo-aristocracy. Charles Clover, in an illuminating recent book, writes that Evola “believed that war was a form of therapy, leading mankind into a higher form of spiritual existence.” Dugin presents himself as a Russian right-Heideggerian and is published by two white-nationalist presses (Arktos and Richard Spencer’s Radix). In April, 2014, he was asked on Russian TV: “Is there a philosophical quote that is especially dear to you?” Dugin responded: “Yes: man is something that should be overcome.” Dugin didn’t specify the source of this “especially dear” quote, but anyone with any acquaintance with Thus Spoke Zarathustra knows that it’s Nietzsche. In the same interview, Dugin stated: “The essence of the human being is to be a soldier.” There are texts in which Dugin presents himself as a prophet of a “new aeon” that “will be cruel and paradoxical,” involving slavery, “the renewal of archaic sacredness,” and “a cosmic rampage of the Superhuman.” He celebrates “hierarchical, vertical, ‘heroic,’ and ‘Spartan’ values.” Such views capture quite well why the thinkers expressing these views are committed, in a faithfully Nietzschean spirit, to the root-and-branch rejection of the horizon of life embodied in liberal, bourgeois, egalitarian societies.

Since the Enlightenment, there has been a line of important thinkers for whom life in liberal modernity is felt to be profoundly dehumanizing. Thinkers in this category include, but are not limited to, Joseph de Maistre, Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger. For such thinkers, liberal modernity is so humanly degrading that one ought to (if one could) undo the French Revolution and its egalitarianism, traceable ultimately back to the Protestant Reformation. For all of them, hierarchy and rootedness is more morally compelling than equality and individual liberty; democracy is seen as diminishing our humanity rather than elevating it.

We are unlikely to understand why fascism is still kicking around in the 21st century unless we are able to grasp why certain intellectuals of the early twentieth century gravitated towards fascism, namely, on account of a grim preoccupation with the perceived soullessness of modernity, and a resolve to embrace any politics, however extreme, that seemed to them to promise “spiritual renewal,” to quote Heidegger. For these thinkers (and their contemporary adherents), liberalism, egalitarianism, and democracy are a recipe for absolute deracination, and hence for a profound contraction of the human spirit, which presumably is what Heidegger had in mind when he spoke of spiritual renewal.

For the political-philosophical tradition within which Nietzsche and Heidegger stand, the French Revolution inaugurates a moral universe where authority resides with the herd, not with the shepherd, with the mass (the “They”), not with the elite, and as a consequence, ultimately the whole experience of life spirals down into unbearable shallowness and meaninglessness. Ferdinand Mount, in a recent New York Review of Books essay on Goethe, correctly writes that Nietzsche viewed Goethe as an anticipation of the culture of the Übermensch for which Nietzsche yearned because “only Goethe had treated the French Revolution and the doctrine of equality with the disgust they deserved.”

All of this might have seemed irrelevant during the seventy years (roughly: 1945-2015) when fascism was utterly discredited. It doesn’t seem irrelevant today. On the contrary, liberal democracy seems to be increasingly on the defensive. Today we have Trumpism and Bannonism in the U.S.; Putinism in Russia; Orbánism in Hungary; Erdoğanism in Turkey; Xiism in China; Modiism in India; Duterteism in the Philippines. Admittedly, none of these leaders are as bad as Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin. But at the same time, none of them are reliable guardians of liberal democracy. Roger Cohen has just published a New York Times op-ed on the rise of quasi-authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland in which he quotes a former Polish Foreign Minister’s expression of disdain toward “those who believe history is headed inevitably toward ‘a new mixture of cultures and races, a world made up of cyclists and vegetarians, who only use renewable energy.’ ” The project of populist nationalists in Poland and Hungary is to defend what they take to be European Christian civilization from such pathetic wimps. This, one should not fail to recognize, is a 21st-century version of Nietzsche’s story about the last men.

Bannon sought to encapsulate the new Zeitgeist with a memorable line: “We are witnessing the birth of a new political order.” We have to take with deadly seriousness the possibility that this is actually the case. And as I argue in my new book, Dangerous Minds, intellectuals need to be far more alert than they have been in the past to possible philosophical sources of the newly assertive far right.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Sun May 06, 2018 7:42 am

What do incels, fascists and terrorists have in common? Violent misogyny

In 1977, Klaus Theweleit published a book in which he sought to understand the germination of fascism in interwar Germany. His method was to study the fantasy life of that era’s conservative revolutionaries, by reading the diaries, novels and letters of the men who joined the Freikorps militias, and fought against insurgent communists during the early days of the Weimar Republic.

Early on, the Freikorps – largely made up of the demobilised German soldiers who had lost the first world war – fought battles and carried out massacres of civilians in the Weimar Republic’s name. They also played a part in destabilising that same republic with assassinations, border skirmishes, and direct participation in attempted coups. The Freikorps are generally understood as a precursor to the Nazi party’s paramilitary force, the SA, which many of them would eventually join. Those who did aided the republic’s passage into a genocidal dictatorship.

Translated from German into English as “Male Fantasies”, Theweleit’s expansive book shows us how misogyny is at the root of fascism. In the writings of “soldier males”, as he calls them, we see women sorted into two types – the “white”, sexless, patriotic “sister” on the one hand, and the sexualised, threatening “red” woman on the other. In the latter category the young men put any women who they found discomfiting: prostitutes, the sexually active, proletarian women, the communist women who fought them, and Jewish women.

According to Theweleit, the reasons they wanted to destroy these women were not just, or not simply political. The women were understood as a threatening “other”, and they embodied the mens’ fears, including female sexuality, and the fecund multiplicity of life itself.

In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches. The solider male felt that he could only guarantee “his own survival, his self-preservation and self-regeneration”, through acts of violence against such women. (Another way of maintaining their fragile sense of self is by slotting themselves into enveloping external structures like the armed forces or fascist youth organisations.)

Can we not draw a straight line from the witch to the sensuous Jewish woman?
Klaus Theweleit


In the soldier males’ journals we see them taking great pleasure, and building fraternal camaraderie, by murdering women, pairs of lovers and leftists of all genders. We also see that many of them cannot reconcile acts of physical love with the nature of their own desires. When it came to these men, their murderous acts and their sexual problems were not coincidental, they were interrelated.

In explaining how, Theweleit takes exception with the left’s then-dominant explanation of fascism – that it was a result of pure irrationality, or repressed homosexuality. Some said it could be countered by the left mounting a renewed defence of progress and reason, or by beefing up alternative institutions that mirrored those of the fascists.

For Theweleit, this misses the central dynamic that propels the fascist male towards violence. Fascism derives its power from channelling the protean, potentially liberating force of human desire towards hatred, distorting it into a desire for death and blood. All of its institutions, its rituals, and the (male) bonds it promotes are bent to this purpose. We cannot beat fascists by aping their structures, any more than we can hope to rationally persuade them. The problem goes deeper.

On this theme, he says that classical fascism was not as distinct as we might want it to be from the culture surrounding it. It is not a departure from European history, but an intensification of some of its more pervasive traits.

At one point he asks, “Can we not draw a straight line from the witch to the sensuous Jewish woman? Is the persecution of the sensuous woman not a permanent reality, one that is not economic in origin, but which derives from the specific social organisation of gender relations in patriarchal Europe?”

Later, more succinctly, he comments that his soldier males are “equivalent to the tip of the patriarchal iceberg, but it’s what lies beneath the surface that really makes the water cold”.

Fascism, then, is an exacerbation, a more militant extension, of the patriarchal relationships between men and women that have persisted for centuries. It is a worsening of the fantasies, the violence, the misshapen desires that the whole system of gender relationships that have long pertained in European societies and those in the new world that are descended from them. Rather than a thing, which is categorically distinct from other social and political systems, fascism is a process, which can easily recur, and wherein we can see men, and groups of men, who have commenced the journey.


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... t-misogyny
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Fri May 11, 2018 8:02 am

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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Thu May 24, 2018 8:43 am

Why Do People Fight for Their Servitude as If It Were Their Salvation?

Asad Haider traces Spinoza’s question through the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and Stuart Hall, and argues that to make politics possible again we need to abandon the position of moral and political purity that can only rely on superstition.

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Perhaps the most puzzling and and disconcerting question in political philosophy is the one that was posed by Spinoza in his Theological-Political Treatise: why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation? In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously traced Spinoza’s question to Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. As they put it, “the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike.”

Spinoza refused to answer this question at the level of consciousness. Instead, he proposed that the “sad passions” which accompany servitude should be understood in terms of the material forces which diminish our power to act. It is only by entering into composition with other bodies, by adding our powers to theirs, that we can know the joy of acting. So when the corporeal constraints imposed by tyranny make us unable to act, we are susceptible to superstition, and so our impotence appears in our imaginations as the result of our own will.

Superstition is something like what Karl Marx will much later describe as ideology, and which Louis Althusser will famously merge with the argument of the appendix to book 1 of the Ethics, in which Spinoza wrote: “men believe that they are free, precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and desires; yet concerning the causes that have determined them to desire and will they do not think, not even dream about, because they are ignorant of them.”

Ideology, then, is the field in which the material institutions and practices of the state are represented in an imaginary form. We are led to superstition when we believe the prophets, who insist that they have perceived the truth through revelation. It takes hold in our imaginations because our bodies are limited, and cannot form knowledge of nature without the practice of reason. Tyranny, which has an interest in keeping us ignorant, is the material relation which is represented in the imagination as superstition.

However, this ignorance cannot explain the existence of tyranny and servitude. What Deleuze and Guattari found so profound in Reich’s analysis was his refusal “to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism.” The masses were “not innocent dupes,” but rather, “under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”

This long lineage of political thought speaks to a wholly contemporary problem, of distinguishing between collectivities which compose themselves into emancipatory mass movements, or mobs which serve to reinforce existing powers. This is the problem that Étienne Balibar, in his Masses, Classes, Ideas, has summed up in the phrase, “fear of the masses.” The phrase is meant in two senses: “It is the fear that the masses feel. But it is also the fear that the masses inspire in whoever is placed in the position of governing or acting politically, hence in the state as such.”

However, at the same time, Spinoza seems to present us with the possibility of a multitude which can govern itself. The ethical life is one which operates according to reason and overcomes the sad passions that prevent us from acting. Superstition is the barrier to this, and it is entirely social. All people have the capacity for reason, which they are prevented from exercising because tyranny keeps them in a state of ignorance. But there is no natural basis for the belief that only the select few are capable of governing. As Deleuze proposed in his 1968 study of Spinoza, living an ethical life requires extricating oneself “from chance encounters and the concatenation of sad passions, to organize good encounters,” which combine the relations that agree with one’s nature and form a “reasonable association,” in order to be “affected with joy.”

In Trump, we are confronted with a tyrant who seeks to actively maintain his own ignorance, not just that of the multitude. But criticizing Trump is too easy and frankly, self-congratulatory. And explaining Trump in terms of the ignorance of the American voter is an unsatisfactory explanation which remains purely at the level of the imagination.

In an earlier instance of an alarming electoral swing to the right, Stuart Hall presented an attempt at explaining the rise of Margaret Thatcher. As Hall said of the “authoritarian populism” of Thatcher in his foundational esay “The Great Moving Right Show”: “Its success and effectivity do not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions – and yet is able to represent them within a logic of discourse which pulls them systematically into line with policies and class strategies of the right.”

Today we too often fail to follow this insight, and instead lapse into a moral critique based on a metaphysical theory of power. The prevailing liberal analysis of the changing political landscape refuses to confront the material basis of superstition. Instead, it operates entirely on the model of revelation. There are those of us to whom the truth has been revealed. We prophets are all either located in universities or have shows on MSNBC. And unlike the multitude of the Midwest, we are fit to govern. To appeal to this multitude with reason is not simply fruitless, it is morally wrong, because the multitude is racist and backwards.

Perhaps Hall was able to reject such false explanations because his work in cultural studies, even before the groundbreaking turn that was the theory of authoritarian populism, was based on an appreciation of ordinary life – popular culture. He saw, as Spinoza did, that in the common notions of the multitude there is greater wisdom than in prophecy.

Today’s left has failed in a way that is even more shameful. In the place of practicing politics, of attempting to find new compositions of the multitude, we have opted for the sad passions of social media. In other words, we have accepted the philosophy of Trump. Instead of politics, we engage in chatter. And it is a sad chatter, whose prevailing form is denunciation. The practice of denunciation debases the multitude. In the place of action, it accepts hatred, which merely externalizes the sadness of passivity; in the place of agency, it accepts fear, and pleads for security; in place of the collective democratic subject, it accepts the superstitious mob.

Superstitious mobs can only serve tyrants, as Spinoza knew well. We now face a new theocracy of our own making, one which through the chatter of social media decomposes our powers and makes politics impossible. It is incumbent upon us to make politics possible again, and this requires us to abandon the position of moral and political purity that can only rely on superstition.


https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3844-w ... -salvation
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 16, 2018 7:50 am

There’s a resurgence of far-right groups in Italy and they’re inspired by Putin

"The Italian right is passing from mobilization to techniques of public intimidation."

JUSTIN SALHANI
DEC 20, 2017, 2:07 PM


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ITALY'S NEO-FASCIST FORZA NUOVA LEADER ROBERTO FIORE SPEAKS DURING A PRESS CONFERENCE, IN COMO, ITALY, SATURDAY, DEC. 9, 2017

MILAN, ITALY — A dozen masked men in Rome attacked Italian daily La Republicca earlier this month, in a show of renewed confidence by a neofascist element that Italy has long struggled to suppress. The faceless men threw flares at the media outlet’s office — which also houses the publisher L’Espresso Group and a magazine by the same name — and declared “war” on the paper’s publisher.

The attack is just the latest in a stream of fascist actions that often target society’s most vulnerable. The incidents harken back to the dark day’s of Italian fascism.

“The Italian right is passing from mobilization to techniques of public intimidation. The recent attacks on the important media outlets La Repubblica and L’Espresso mimic those of the original squadrists who assaulted socialist, liberal, and Catholic newspaper headquarters and their printers,” Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, told ThinkProgress. “The fragmented left and a public that does not want to come to terms with the crimes of Italian Fascism are a recipe for the right’s further growth.”

Shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump took the oath of office, a slew of characters emerged from the far-right fringe of Europe’s political spectrum and stood for national elections. Some expected Trump’s election to bolster a global wave of far right-wing populism. This was shortly after the United Kingdom voted for Brexit, after all. Election defeats in the Netherlands, France, and Germany returned a sense of normality to the fragility of the European Union — at least temporarily.

The threat of far-right fringe groups, though, was not to win elections to lead European nations, but to push their agendas into the mainstream and make their parties widely accepted.

Germany, in particular, has seen rising popularity for the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party. Austria avoided electing a president from a party founded by former Nazis, but then proceeded to form the only government in western Europe with a far-right presence.

And in Italy, a country in which fascism never really went away, the far right is not only politically active but attempting to smash the political norms of liberal democracy.

Ben Ghiat realized this firsthand when a piece she wrote in The New Yorker about Italy’s standing fascist monuments was met with days of social media trolling.

“I woke up to find myself trending in Italy and not in a good way … every newspaper published sarcastic and highly critical articles about me and the piece, and I was besieged by hundreds of trolls on every platform,” she said. “It was crazy, the volume of trolls was so high that my Facebook Messenger would not load for days.”

The spectrum of Italy’s right wing is vast. Closest to the center is the Forza Italia party of former premier Silvio Berlusconi. The 81-year-old’s past governments included members of avowedly neofascist parties. He’s also seeking to overturn a ban on running for the premiership in order to retake power over the peninsula.

Further to the right is the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim Lega Nord, led by Matteo Salvini. The Lega Nord enjoys more support in Italy’s north and once advocated for a separate state, but is now trying to make inroads in Italy’s southern regions by targeting immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.

“Extreme right-wing and xenophobic tendencies have been for decades a constant and broadly accepted element of Italian political life,” Matteo Garavoglia, nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, told ThinkProgress.

The latest attack on the media offices garnered widespread condemnation from the political mainstream, including from Salvini. More surprisingly, though, another neofascist group called Casa Pound also condemned the attack. Casa Pound, a nativist group named after the fascist American poet Ezra Pound, caused concern after winning a municipal election seat in the Roman suburb of Ostia last month. Following the election victory, the group’s partisans sometimes made brazen displays of support for the fascist party and leadership of Benito Mussolini.

Local media in Italy claims that the far right behind such attacks are funded by Russia and other like-minded movements in Europe. Reports that neofascist groups are forming a European network, with Russian President Vladimir Putin pulling the strings, are often suggestive and hard to substantiate. But there are definite links between anti-immigrant and nativist right-wing groups around the continent.

The attack on La Republicca was accredited to the Forza Nuova (FN), a small, avowedly fascist group. The FN’s leader is Roberto Fiore, who self identifies as an anti-capitalist, anti-communist, Catholic fascist with 11 children. Fiore derives much of his ideology from Julius Evola — a fascist whose ideology has been cited by Steve Bannon. In the 1980s, Fiore fled Italy to the United Kingdom after police found explosives and weapons at an FN office. While in exile, Fiore built connections to Nick Griffin, then leader of the xenophobic British National Party — a group whose leaders allegedly have connections to the Kremlin.

“What is certain is that the Italian extreme right is strongly fascinated by the figure of Putin and his way of managing power in Russia, as well as by other radical right leaders in eastern Europe,” Pietro Castelli Gattinara, author of the book The Politics of Migration in Italy: Perspectives on Local Debates and Party, told ThinkProgress via email.

“There is also evidence that some neofascist militants have participated in riots and violence at the time of the Ukrainian crisis, in cooperation with Russian and Ukrainian extremists and militias. Besides that, the extreme right is currently embedded in a dense transnational network, so that actors in Italy are often taking part in joint events with their Greek (e.g. Golden Dawn) or French counterparts (e.g. Les Identitaires),” Castelli Gattinara said.


Continues: https://thinkprogress.org/italys-far-ri ... 0acc1da53/
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:12 am

Fascism in Italy: The hipster fascists trying to bring
Mussolini back into the mainstream



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3x-ge4w46E
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Thu Jul 12, 2018 9:35 am

Migrants were welcome before a murder, and an election

By Jason Horowitz
8 July 2018 — 1:41pm


Macerata: At the end of his shooting rampage as police closed in, Luca Traini climbed the steps of a fascist-era monument, wrapped himself in an Italian flag and straightened his arm in a fascist salute.

He had shot and wounded six African migrants — from Ghana, Mali and Nigeria — in this medieval city near the Adriatic Sea to avenge the dismemberment of a young Italian woman, allegedly by a Nigerian drug dealer. In his mind, he was a patriot.

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Luca Traini, who is accused of having shot several people in Macerata, Italy, on February 3.

In the university, founded in 1290, left-wing students warned that a group of hard-right students were espousing the works of Julius Evola, the spiritual and intellectual godfather of Italian fascists and Italy's post-fascist terrorists.

They said students were attempting to form chapters for hard-right groups such as Forza Nuova, which in October attempted to re-enact Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome.

Martina Borra, a local leader of Forza Nuova, is a friend of Traini, who has been charged with racially motivated attempted murder. He has admitted to the shootings but claimed temporary insanity and is on trial. Borra said he had many local supporters.

"If you ask most people about Luca Traini, they will tell you, 'He did well, but he should have killed them.'" She added that Italy owed him a debt of gratitude for "having revealed a problem" — and she seemed unbothered that none of the victims were thought to be drug dealers.


https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/mig ... 4zq89.html
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Thu Jul 19, 2018 4:17 am

http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... rt-ii.html

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

There Really Is Life After Hate Part II

On May 1, ARC published an article by a young woman who had been able to get out of the racist movement. Since that time she has been working diligently to help deradicalize others who are entangled in this world but are looking for ways to get out, prevent marginal youths from getting involved in the first place, and educating others regarding the dangers posed by racist groups and individuals. She had actually contacted ARC back in 2016 to discuss the changes that have occurred in her life and to discuss what she has done to make amends. She has submitted a second article which ARC is now publishing which deals with her personal experience as a woman in the movement. I hope that this will constitute an ongoing series:

Since leaving the far-right, I remember their wild claims that feminism has allegedly destroyed women and pushed this so-called agenda on young kids. The narratives were not very well backed up; just before I left that lifestyle behind me, I couldn't find one moment in my past where feminism was forced on me or did any harm to me.

I grew up in a traditional type family setting where my Dad worked full time and my Mom was dependent on him. It seemed inevitable that as a female, I will have kids someday. I wasn't thrilled by the prospect how ever; I had absolutely no interest in children.

My family was very strict and old fashioned. My grandfather in particular had a serious hate- on for gay people and had no problem verbalizing these opinions to my sibling and I. We were only young kids at the time and I had a secret that I didn't dare come forward with back then; I'm bisexual. The rejection I felt as a result caused a lot anger and made me feel completely alone.

As time progressed, I was shamed by my grandfather for the fact I carried more weight on me then most other girls my age. I heard some down right nasty comments directed at me such as "you're not going to get a boyfriend if you look like that" and "we should keep the food away from you". From a teenagers perspective, this sent me a toxic message that I only mattered for these things. To say it was degrading is an understatement.

I was recruited into the far- right in my late teens. The anti- feminist narratives were not introduced to me immediately though. At first I enjoyed the movement because it seemed like everything I wasn't allowed to do as a kid; act like a lunatic. It also gave me that sense of importance and belonging I never felt I had before.

Later on, I was at one of the other members houses one night for drinks and he told me in conversation that "there was no way in hell I would be fighting on the front lines for the sake of white power; that isn't the woman's role". He fed me a good story about how women are happier in their alleged natural habitat (the home) and anything beyond that is a product of feminism, thus damaging women and the white race.

I let go of the skin-byrd image; I traded in the combat boots, suspenders and jacket for skin tight jeans, knee high leather boots and make up. The guys in the movement told me that it was more ideal for their women to dress well as it makes the movement look more attractive.

On the outside I pulled it off okay, but on the inside I didn't feel like myself.There was an occasion where I questioned this relationship between the traditional family unit and the white power movement. My boyfriend at the time was preparing to be involved in a targeted attack against a group of black guys at a bar. He too fantasized about having a family within these restrictive ideas. I asked him "so if you have kids, how do you plan on explaining the bruises from a fist fight to them?" He didn't have a super clear answer to that, just more propaganda and justification. I was thinking to myself that if a parent came home after a fist fight and a child had to see that, how would that impact the child?

As time went on, more pushy comments were thrown at me about breeding white kids. As much as I played the old school gender role bit, I would often pause when the topic of children came up.

I was having some issues with mental health at the time. Traumatic memories started to surface from the less then pleasant experiences I had as a result of being affiliated with extremism. I clearly set verbal boundaries about this in front of my partner and the other group members; it was not an appropriate time to think about having children at the age of 22 while being emotionally distressed by past trauma. The response would often be something to the degree of "that's no excuse not to have kids", and more ignorant comments of "just get over it and don't drop the baby".

I couldn't resist looking broader at this scenario; if this group claimed to be in defence and in favour of the future of white people, should they not care that my health could impact a child? If they are all about protecting and caring for white women, why were they suggesting that my health be put on the back burner?

Needless to say these narratives gradually stopped making sense to me. When I took the time to look at my own childhood, I remember I was often put down by others due to my clothing choices, weight and my disconnect with what I knew as femininity back then. When I recalled how this gender roles stuff was introduced to me within the movement, I remembered back to some of those comments and saw similarities. Shaming was a seed that had already been planted into my head, it was a behaviour that I was used to seeing. It happened to me during childhood and it was happening to me during my time in the movement.

I won't pretend that life became immediately easy shortly after I decided to drop out of the movement. Because of the constant negativity I heard and encountered, it messed up my perspective for a significant amount of time after. If I saw a woman with a baby, I would remember all the shaming I was taught. I had a few friends at the time who were mothers and I found it hard to connect with them. I probably lost a few friendships over this too. I eventually got to know some really cool people who have children; they were more then supportive of me in the positive things I was doing, and vice versa. I saw how a healthy relationship works between two people through getting to know them; it was all about equality, communication and compromise. They never once judged me for my choices and I'll always be grateful to them for that.

If it isn't already painfully obvious, the far- right is actually what did psychological damage to me, not feminism. I spent 5 years in hatred, pretending to be something I wasn't.

I've been contacted by my old friends a few times and most of their accusations are how they think feminism converted me out of their movement; I work in the construction industry now and it says that on my Facebook page. Reality is that I wanted a better life, I wanted to be genuine, I wanted real friends and healthy relationships. I have all those things now and if that makes me a traitor, a snowflake or a feminist in their eyes, that's fine.
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 23, 2018 9:52 am

Desperately seeking socialism: why the Soviet Union’s left-wing dissidents matter today

The “New Cold War” is the subject of the most politically compelling of the essays in this book by the Russian socialist Ilya Budraitskis. He wrote it in the summer of 2014, as Russian troops streamed into eastern Ukraine to fight alongside the Russian-armed militia of the separatist “people’s republics”, and the Russian ultra-nationalists, mercenaries and volunteers who joined them.

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August 1968, Prague.

At that time, the existence of a “New Cold War” was already being treated in public discourse as an “obvious and indisputable fact”, Budraitskis argues — but “the production of rhetoric has run way ahead of the reality”.

To question the assumptions behind the rhetoric further, Budraitskis considers the character of the original Cold War, i.e. between the Soviet bloc and the western powers between the end of the Second World War and 1991, in the essay “Intellectuals and the Cold War”. As he writes, the Cold War was a set of “principles of the world order”, construed by ruling elites and then confirmed in intellectual discourse and in the everyday activity of masses of people.

The reality of continuous psychological mobilisation, and the nerve-straining expectation of global military conflict, as apprehended by society as a whole, became a means of existence, reproduced over the course of two generations, in which loyalty to beliefs was combined with fear and a feeling of helplessness before fate.

This proposition, that the Cold War was essentially a means of social control, in which masses of people were systematically deprived of agency, certainly works for me. I wondered whether Budraitskis knows of the attempts, made during the Cold War on the “western” side of the divide, to analyse this central aspect of it — for example, the work of Hillel Ticktin and others in the early issues of the socialist journal Critique (from 1973). Here, Ticktin wrote on the political economy of the Soviet Union, interpreting it in the context of world capitalism.

Today, the Cold War’s binary ideological constraints live on, Budraitskis argues. “The trauma of choice between hostile camps has still today not been overcome”. As an example, he quotes the reactions to Russia’s participation in the war in eastern Ukraine by, on one hand, Alexander Dugin, the extreme right-wing Russian “Eurasianist”, and, on the other, the American historian Timothy Snyder. (See here and here.)

It is undeniable that elite-controlled public forums have increasingly been dominated by the two-sided, one-dimensional discourse of the Cold War. For Dugin, the military conflict in eastern Ukraine amounted to “the return of Russia to history”. For Snyder, it was confirmation that Ukraine had finally to recognise that it was part of Europe. Dugin’s anti-Europe and Snyder’s Europe leave no room for a third way, Budraitskis asserts gloomily.

On this at least, I feel more optimistic. It is undeniable that elite-controlled public forums have increasingly been dominated by the two-sided, one-dimensional discourse of the Cold War. On the “left”, this false dichotomy has been reflected in “geopolitical” stances that base themselves on the relative qualities of imperialist blocs, and deny agency to, or sideline, society generally and social movements particularly. But those social movements exist, and there are voices in the intelligentsia that reflect them.


Excerpted from: http://newpol.org/content/desperately-s ... tter-today





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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Sat Jul 28, 2018 8:16 am

Popular Feminism: Gendered Mass Violence

By Sarah Banet-Weiser

JULY 27, 2018



This is the fourth installment in a bi-monthly column that will explore some of the different cultural facets of popular feminism, the #MeToo movement, and the contemporary cultural awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace and in daily life. These essays are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to point up the ways the current environment is responding to gender dynamics, sex, and power.

¤

MAYBE YOU’VE SEEN this somewhere: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” The quote is attributed to the acclaimed author Margaret Atwood, and in the contemporary context of popular feminism, it is viral wallpaper. It makes an appearance in the second season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. One finds it on Pinterest and Tumblr pages, on Instagram, in Twitter hashtags. Popular feminism has its fair share of memes, motivational phrases, and humorous quips, but some seem to have more resonance than others.

It is likely the second part of Atwood’s quote that explains its high visibility, because it throws a light on the fact that women are disproportionately victims of domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault. I think, however, we need to pay attention to the link between the two statements: all too often, men kill women for laughing at them.

A woman’s laughter, when directed at a man, is a dangerous thing: it is, as Atwood points out, the worst injury she can inflict. It signals autonomy, emasculation, rejection. A woman’s laughter can reveal the precarity of masculine power, the way in which this power relies upon institutional upkeep and constant validation. For an increasing number of men, the response to this revelation is a desperate assertion of power through violence. Enter the “incels,” an online community of self-identifying “involuntarily celibate” heterosexual males, members of which have been responsible for at least five mass murders.

In fact, sexual rejection is just one of the ways in which popular misogyny imagines men to be injured by women. Men are seen to be denied rights because women have gained them; men are no longer confident because women are more confident; men have lost jobs because women have entered (however slowly) into previously male-dominated realms. But for some men, sexual rejection is the most visceral blow; they feel that they are entitled to sex, and that the fulfillment of this entitlement is what makes them men in the first place. A women’s laughter is a concrete manifestation of sexual rejection, and the injury it causes demands a response.

The response is often a supportive discourse of capacity. “Men’s rights” organizations and other forms of popular misogyny dedicate themselves to restoring the capacity of men, to recuperating traditional heteronormative masculinity and the patriarchy itself. In its most basic form, this capacity is simply the power to do something, to exercise force, to eliminate the source of injury. In these cases, acts of violence become means of “coping” with or responding to injury.


Continues: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pop ... -violence/
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Wed Aug 01, 2018 7:05 am

https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/201 ... 8-mrr-423/

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Political upsurge vs ideological decay: “What’s Left?”
August 2018, MRR #423


Metaphors are powerful. Metaphors are poetry disguised as prose. People who use metaphors claim they’re a shortcut to truth and meaning.

Last month I used the biological metaphor of species complex to tease out additional structure and definition of the usual Left/Right political compass. In the process I promised to cover various social contexts in given historical periods that illustrate increased Left/Right political conversions and crossovers but instead managed to drop yet another metaphor by using Mao’s metaphor with politics and war. From the 1960s war on poverty and the 1970s war on drugs to the 21st century wars on terrorism and the truth, the metaphor of war has been much used and abused. Instead, I’ll use another metaphor from Mao to “put politics in command” in coming to terms with political change, conversion, and crossover socially and historically. In the process, I will renege on my previous promise by severely limiting the scope of this inquiry to the rise of and interplay between the New Left and the New Right.

Karl Marx wrote “[c]onstant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones” in arguing that the French 1789 Revolution was the first bourgeois revolution of the capitalist era. The notion that capitalism was born of revolution and continues through constant revolution—economically, politically, and socially—has been challenged by Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner who trace its origins back to the “peaceful” agriculture revolution of England in the 1700s. Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, in turn, trace the kernel of capitalism all the way back to 1250 and the Mediterranean Venetian/Genoese commercial empires. But while capitalism’s genesis and initial features are in dispute, the constantly replicating, ever expanding, relentlessly revolutionizing reality of capitalism—from its embryonic beginnings to the present world capitalist system—is not.

Today, we live in an all-encompassing capitalist world. But socialism in one form or another arose to oppose capitalism roughly from 1820 onwards, with the concerted Communist challenge lasting from 1917 to 1991. The division of the world into two contending camps—capitalist vs socialist—was problematic all along. The left of the Left argued that social democracy was only state liberalism, that Leninism was merely state capitalism, and that both were not actual alternatives to capitalism. Further, a non-aligned movement of countries arose after the second World War to challenge the notion of a bipolar either/or world based on two competing power blocs. By the 1960s the rise of the New Left joined divisions on the Left, splits within socialism, and non-capitalist/non-Marxist options vying for recognition.

The seemingly intractable Cold War standoff between “the Free World” (which wasn’t free) and “the Communist Bloc” (which wasn’t communist) allowed a New Left to effloresce worldwide. In the United States, white college students of liberal, radical, and sometimes Marxist political bent formed organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The New Left was directly powered by the motors of the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, and ran in dual-engine-mode alongside the hippie youth counterculture throughout the 1960s. It had no unified intent—whether criticizing orthodox Marxist and labor union movements, furthering and revitalizing the Left’s historic goals, or creating an entirely novel, unique Left—but its vitality and energy generated a plethora of corollary social movements, from the Black, women’s and gay movements to various Third World solidarity movements and the ecology movement. Anarchism revived from the dead, Trotskyism came in from the fringes, and Maoism found prominence via the New Communist Movement.

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Forming, changing, revising, or reversing one’s politics in those heady days when political boundaries were rapidly expanding and highly fluid—or non-existent—was common, and often meant rapid-fire crossovers or conversions. Last column I mentioned Murray Bookchin who started out as a Stalinist, became a Trotskyist, and ended up an influential anarchist communist. More telling was the political journey of Karl Hess. As Barry Goldwater’s speech writer in 1964, he was widely credited for the famous Goldwater line, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Eventually he became a left anarchist, joined SDS and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), championed back-to-the-land and intentional urban communities, and promoted appropriate technologies and left-right libertarian unity.

The New Left reached its pinnacle in 1968, which Mark Kurlansky rightly called “the year that rocked the world.” “To some, 1968 was the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generation gap; avant-garde theater; the upsurge of the women’s movement; and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.” To this add the student/worker uprising in Paris of May/June, 1968. But 1968 simultaneously witnessed the failure of the New Left, starting with the collapse of SDS itself. For all the hype that Paris 1968 was a near-revolution inspired by the Situationists, Mouvement Communiste points out that for the most part French workers passed on the rioting to sit passively watching their TVs in a vindication of the persuasive Madison Avenue power of the Spectacle.

The recuperative powers of capitalism proved far greater. The cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s were often profoundly individualistic, even libertine, something that capitalism easily coopted. This was something more than that 1968’s rebellious youth “had lost politically but they had won culturally and maybe even spiritually.” (John Lichfield; “Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!: Paris, May 1968,” The Independent, 9/23/08) “[S]ince 1968, the West had grown not only more prosperous but more sybaritic and self-absorbed” as a consequence of the New Left’s cultural successes. “The ‘bourgeois triumphalism’ of the Thatcher (and Blair) era, the greed is good ethos and our materialistic individualism might just have had their roots 40 years back.” (Geoffrey Wheatcroft; “It was fun, but 1968’s legacy was mixed,” Guardian Weekly, 9/5/08) The year 1968 may have changed the world, but after “the revolution that wasn’t,” most everybody went back to their normal lives and conventional jobs.

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Finally comes the power of out-and-out reaction, starting with Nixon and culminating with the neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher. It’s not by coincidence that the neofascist Ordre Noveau and the New Right Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) emerged in France in 1968. The latter, founded by Alain de Benoist, demonstrated what Kevin Coogan wrote in Dreamer of the Day that: “periods of ideological decay often breed strange new variants, such as the ‘Red-Brown alliance’ in the former Soviet Union, which do not easily fit into conventional political-science categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’.” And make no mistake, the 1970s and 1980s were a period of profound ideological decay.

The Right retrenched and regrouped after 1968, not only halting the surge of the Left—both Old and New—but eventually gaining unquestioned ascendence while presiding over the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the dispersal of the political Left, and the contraction of the labor movement. The European New Right (nouvelle droite/ENR) was minuscule compared to the rest of the Right however, and it certainly was microscopic compared to the New Left to which de Benoist grandiosely juxtoposed his efforts. While the 1960s were a worldwide political and cultural phenomenon, de Benoist fantasized about the “metapolitics” of “culture wars” and “right-wing Gramscianism.” To Fascism’s organic hierarchies, militarism, anti-egalitarianism, and elitism, de Benoist tacked on a faux revolutionary élan, “the right to difference,” and a Europe of a hundred ethnic flags, then called it all groundbreaking. It was his claim to a sui generis fascism-by-euphemism in the ENR that succeeded in seducing the by-then jaded American New Left academic journal Telos.

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Telos started publishing in May, 1968, and was committed to non-conformist critical political theory, analyzing all manner of neo-Marxist, anarchist, New Left, and Frankfurt School debates. But by the early 1990s, with the sorry state of “real existing socialism” and the disappointments engendered by its failures—or worse—its successes, coupled to the Left’s need for intellectual schema plus its desire for the “next big thing” in the form of new political paradigms, the disillusioned neo-Marxists and anarchists of Telos jumped at the chance of engaging with the ENR in debating de Benoist’s bright shiny bullshit. The discussion was initiated enthusiastically by the ENR and fueled by an American anti-intellectual populism, resulting in an ENR-Telos rapprochement by 1999. Telos became the most prominent crossover to the dark side, switching from once vigorous New Left to ever necrotic New Right.

In times of radical social change, political change is vibrant and vital. In times of reactionary social decay, political change is deformed and grotesque.



[This analysis of the ENR-Telos political dance owes much to Tamir Bar-on’s Where have all the fascists gone?]
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Re: Fight Club, Evola and Secret Societies

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 07, 2018 2:17 pm

An Afternoon With Portland’s ‘Multiracial’ Far Right

To broaden their appeal, some right-wing groups are ditching overt racism for their version of diversity.

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They’re also shifting from ethnically defined nationalism to a version that purports to target outsiders based on their legal status, not the color of their skin. Significantly, the presence of people of color in this coalition allows Gibson and the Proud Boys to “prove” that they aren’t racists at all.

Gibson, for starters, identifies as Japanese American; his deputy, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, is American Samoan. Both vehemently deny that either the Patriot Prayer or the Proud Boys are white-supremacist organizations—though local anti-fascist and anti-racist organizers have identified neo-Nazis and other organized white supremacists in their midst. One masked Proud Boy present on Saturday, who said his name was John, told me that anyone in their crew who expressed racist views would be stomped out—but “not literally,” he quickly added.

But for every masked John, there’s a “General Graybeard”—an older man who, on Saturday, led members of the “Freedom Crew” and “Hiwaymen,” two patriot groups from Arkansas, wearing tactical gear and bearing shields emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag. He explained that the imagery was about honoring the South’s history. “We fly it so people know it’s not racist,” the self-proclaimed general explained. “It’s about heritage. It’s about the Constitution.”

When I asked masked John whether he accepted this explanation, he shrugged. “I gotta take that at face value,” he said.

“We’re here to support the Constitution of the United States of America, which is all about free speech and being able to assemble peaceably and talking about the things that we support,” a Patriot Prayer supporter also named John told me. What exactly those things are proved more difficult to articulate: “It’s a call to action. We believe this is a time to act in our country.” The second John kept gesturing at Lionel, a recent immigrant from Cameroon, to prove his point.

“I believe in peace, freedom, and everything else,” Lionel concurred. “Me, I’m black. We are also human. We have our voice too.”

While the majority of uniformed and armored Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer affiliates on Saturday were white, a half-dozen people of color (including Lionel) were happy to explain what brought them to the Freedom March. One 40-year-old black man named James first started supporting Joey Gibson about a year ago. “I admire people like Martin Luther King when they fought for civil rights and stuff like that,” he said. “These guys, they look like they’re taking a stand, and I want to take a stand with them.”

“There are no white supremacists here,” James told me. “I get nothing but love. White supremacists don’t let minorities into their ranks.”

And about those Confederate battle flags? “All it represents is the Southern states. It’s just a flag,” he said.

The left, he continued, was being paid by George Soros to spread disinformation. “I’m not getting paid for this. I’m here of my own accord. We’re a diverse group,” he continued. “We’re all Trump supporters.”

Leonor Ferris, a 75-year-old immigrant from Colombia, laughed when I asked about the accusations of white supremacists in Patriot Prayer’s midst. “I’m a Latina! How could they be white supremacists?” she asked. “Look at my skin! I’m not a white supremacist. I love people. I love every color.” Ferris was not the only one to treat my questions as preposterous. “Do I look like a white supremacist to you?” Will Johnson, the black owner of a small videography business, asked me. “I got dreadlocks!”

Johnson went on to claim that Hillary Clinton is so pro-abortion that she supports killing newborn children. “The liberal media—which is against this country, which is the enemy of the American people—they covered it up, because they don’t want people to know,” he said.

Enrique Tarrio, president of the Proud Boys’ Miami chapter, told me that he has visited with members in Portland, Austin, New York, North Carolina, and Georgia. “Not once have I dealt with race,” he said. “We have a diversity problem in our Proud Boys Miami chapter—which is that we don’t have enough white people.” His Instagram account, which includes group photos of the chapter’s mostly white members, suggests otherwise.

“I’ve got my ‘Made in Mexico’ tattoo. I go out with these people. There’s no white supremacists here. They just want to protect their country,” Fernando, a 36-year-old Mexican immigrant who works in a warehouse, told me. “Every country should have people like that. If you fight for your country, no matter which country it is, the world will be strong. There will be no suppression, no corruption.”

Patriot Prayer’s ultranationalism comes out most vigorously when its supporters talk about immigration. “We do need a wall,” Johnson, the black videographer, said. “We have walls in our homes. The elitists have walls around their neighborhoods—gated communities. But they don’t want to do one for those of us who don’t have that.”

James, the black scrap-metal worker, echoed this sentiment: “You came here illegally, you break the law, you gonna be punished.”

As an immigrant herself, Leonor Ferris understood the desire to come to the United States. “America is the leader of the good countries. Freedom, you know? That’s what I believe in,” she told me. However: “We are used to certain things. I’m very clean and very picky. I don’t want people that come here that trash the streets,” she continued. “I see people trashing the country. And not only that, they’re dirty—the germs and everything.”

Nearly everyone at Saturday’s Freedom March seemed as worried about the threat of the rising American left as they were about immigrants. “We don’t want communists,” Ferris told me. “I came here legally and I don’t want to see what happened to Venezuela.” She continued: “The only thing communism brings is poverty. They can’t even eat over there. They don’t have nothing in Venezuela. I used to go to Venezuela to go shopping—beautiful stores.”

Toese, Gibson’s deputy, and several others sported T-shirts, manufactured by a white nationalist clothing company called Right Wing Death Squads, reading “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong,” referring to the Chilean dictator under whose rule tens of thousands of socialists and other dissidents were murdered and tortured. “Make Communists Afraid of Rotary Aircraft Again,” read the back of the shirt (Pinochet’s soldiers were notorious for throwing enemies of the regime out of helicopters).

Small-business values were what drew the Cuban-American Enrique Tarrio to the Proud Boys in the first place. Most of the Miami chapter’s members run their own companies, he told me, and one of the fraternity’s primary tenets is “Glorifying the Entrepreneur.”

“My family came from a communist country,” Tarrio said. “The only way to true freedom is entrepreneurship.” Then he invited me to follow him on Instagram. There’s a link to his company’s website—and posts about killing communists.


https://www.thenation.com/article/after ... far-right/
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