Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Sun Dec 10, 2017 9:32 am

TW: Nazi-style bigotry in full effect

Christopher Cantwell Rails Against Jews And Albemarle County Officials In His First Post-Jail Interview

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Later on in the podcast Cantwell mentioned the fact that his discussions on race and IQ — saying for instance that “niggers are dumb and they steal, and that’s why they’re goin’ to jail and gettin’ shot by the police” — got him fired from Free Talk Live. He said this was “simple to understand,” but that he had greater difficulty with the JQ — or “Jewish Question”:

The thing with the Jews is a lot more complex, and it’s not as simple as — people have asked me about “Where do Jews come into this?” or whatever. And I’ve always had a difficult time answering the question. And now that I understand it better, giving them precise and short answers is gonna be even more difficult. Because it just seems like every aspect of their existence is that they are a fuckin’ parasite on white people. Like this is what they exist to fucking do.


In a much more measured tone, Peinovich explained that white nationalism as a political movement is an uphill battle — ironically comparing their situation to the Old Testament story of David and Goliath. Goliath, in this case, being a vast Jewish establishment that controls the media, corporations, the government, etc.

“We are the little guy, fighting a massive, oppressive bully and monster that is fucking us,” he complained. And this “monster” has managed to “garner the sympathy of a significant number of people” by painting white nationalists as the monsters.

“That,” Peinovich said, “is what we have to change. We’re not monsters, we’re not evil, we’re not bad people. We are simply fighting for ourselves against a massive, wealthy, powerful, and violent bully. And that’s the winning narrative.” In other words, the anti-Semites will try to paint themselves as the victims — average Americans who were just pushed too far.

He then accused Jewish people of lying about being the ones standing up to a bully, which is why he and fellow white nationalists are tarred with labels like “Nazi” and “KKK” — never mind his own website’s repeated use of Neo-Nazi iconography, racial slurs, and edgy jokes about stuffing Jews into ovens.

Please, forget that The Right Stuff once sold autographed oven mitts, pioneered the use of the triple parentheses, and frequently has the likes of David Duke and Kevin MacDonald as guests on its numerous podcasts. After all, Peinovich said that white nationalists need to “turn that [narrative] around. That’s our objective.”


https://angrywhitemen.org/2017/12/10/ch ... interview/
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 11, 2017 8:44 am

The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”

The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry.


By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, Richard Spencer, the thirty-nine-year-old white nationalist who has become the public face of the American alt-right, was sucker-punched by a protester while being interviewed on a street corner in Washington, D.C. A video of the incident went viral, but little attention was paid to what Spencer said on the clip. “I’m not a neo-Nazi,” he declared. “They kind of hate me, actually.” In order to deflect the frequent charge that he is a racist, he defines himself with the very term that Camus rejects: identitarian. The word sidesteps the question of racial superiority and co-opts the left’s inclusive language of diversity and its critique of forced assimilation in order to reclaim the right to difference—for whites.

Identitarianism is a distinctly French innovation. In 1968, in Nice, several dozen far-right activists created the Research and Study Group for European Civilization, better known by its French acronym, grece. The think tank eventually began promoting its ideas under the rubric the Nouvelle Droite, or the New Right. One of its founders, and its most influential member, was Alain de Benoist, a hermetic aristocrat and scholar who has written more than a hundred books. In “View from the Right” (1977), Benoist declared that he and other members of grece considered “the gradual homogenization of the world, advocated and realized by the two-thousand-year-old discourse of egalitarian ideology, to be an evil.”

The group expressed allegiance to “diversity” and “ethnopluralism”—terms that sound politically correct to American ears but had a different meaning in Benoist’s hands. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” (1999), he argued:

The true wealth of the world is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples. The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the Crusades); yesterday, to its political principles (colonialism); and today, to its economic and social model (development) or its moral principles (human rights). Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness.


From this vantage point, both globalized Communism and globalized capitalism are equally suspect, and a “citizen of the world” is an agent of imperialism. When Benoist writes that “humanity is irreducibly plural” and that “diversity is part of its very essence,” he is not supporting the idea of a melting pot but of diversity in isolation: all Frenchmen in one territory and all Moroccans in another. It is a nostalgic and aestheticized view of the world that shows little interest in the complex economic and political forces that provoke migration. Identitarianism is a lament against change made by people fortunate enough to have been granted, through the arbitrary circumstance of birth, citizenship in a wealthy liberal democracy.

Benoist’s peculiar definition of “diversity” has allowed him to take some unexpected positions. He simultaneously defends a Muslim immigrant’s right to wear the veil and opposes the immigration policies that allowed her to settle in France in the first place. In an e-mail, he told me that immigration constitutes an undeniably negative phenomenon, in part because it turns immigrants into victims, by erasing their roots. He continued, “The destiny of all the peoples of the Third World cannot be to establish themselves in the West.” In an interview in the early nineties with Le Monde, he declared that the best way to show solidarity with immigrants is by increasing trade with the Third World, so that developing countries can become “self-sufficient” enough to dissuade their citizens from seeking better lives elsewhere. These countries, he added, needed to find their own paths forward, and not follow the tyrannizing templates of the World Bank and the I.M.F.

Benoist told me that, in France’s Presidential election, in May, he voted not for Marine Le Pen but for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who shares his contempt for global capitalism. Benoist’s writing often echoes left-wing thinkers, especially the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote of “hegemony”—or the command that a regime can wield over a population by controlling its culture. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance,” Benoist argues that white Europeans should not just support restrictive immigration policies; they should oppose such diluting ideologies as multiculturalism and globalism, taking seriously “the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in the collective consciousness.” In a similar spirit, Benoist has promoted a gramscisme de droite—cultural opposition to the rampaging forces of Hollywood and multinational corporations. The French, he has said, should retain their unique traditions and not switch to “a diet of hamburgers.”

Despite Benoist’s affinity for some far-left candidates, “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” has become a revered text for the extreme right across Western Europe, in the U.S., and even in Russia. The crackpot Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who promotes the ethnopluralist doctrine “Eurasianism,” has flown to Paris to meet Benoist. “I consider him to be the foremost intellectual in Europe today,” Dugin told interviewers in 2012. Earlier this year, John Morgan, an editor of Counter-Currents, a white-nationalist publishing house based in San Francisco, posted an online essay about the indebtedness of the American alt-right to European thought. He described Benoist and grece’s achievement as “a towering edifice of thought unparalleled anywhere else on the Right since the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the Weimar era.”

Although Benoist claims not to be affiliated with the alt-right—or even to understand “what Richard Spencer can know or have learned from my thoughts”—he has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak at the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist group run by Spencer, and he has sat for long interviews with Jared Taylor, the founder of the virulently white-supremacist magazine American Renaissance. In one exchange, Taylor, who was educated in France, asked Benoist how he saw himself “as different from identitarians.” Benoist responded, “I am aware of race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the excessive importance that you do.” He went on, “I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. . . . Immigration is clearly a problem. It gives rise to much social pathologies. But our identity, the identity of the immigrants, all the identities in the world have a common enemy, and this common enemy is the system that destroys identities and differences everywhere. This system is the enemy, not the Other.”

Benoist may not be a dogmatic thinker, but, for white people who want to think explicitly in terms of culture and race, his work provides a lofty intellectual framework. These disciples, instead of calling for an “Islamic holocaust,” can argue that rootedness in one’s homeland matters, and that immigration, miscegenation, and the homogenizing forces of neoliberal market economies collude to obliterate identities that have taken shape over hundreds of years—just as relentless development has decimated the environment. Benoist’s romantic-sounding ideas can be cherry-picked and applied to local political resentments.

The writer Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent critic of the French far right, told me that such selective appropriations have given Benoist “a huge authority among white nationalists and Fascists everywhere in the world.” Glucksmann recently met me for coffee near his home, which is off the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, one of the most ethnically diverse thoroughfares in Paris. The Nouvelle Droite, Glucksmann argued, adopted a traditionally German, tribal way of conceiving identity, which the Germans themselves abandoned after the Second World War. The Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt argued that “all right is the right of a particular Volk.” In a 1932 essay, “The Concept of the Political,” he posed the question that still defines the right-wing mind-set: Who is a people’s friend, and who is an enemy? For Schmitt, to identify one’s enemies was to identify one’s inner self. In another essay, he wrote, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

The Nouvelle Droite was fractured, in the nineteen-nineties, by disagreements over what constituted the principal enemy of European identity. If the perceived danger was initially what Benoist described as “the ideology of sameness”—what many in France called the “Coca-Colonization” of the world—the growing presence of African and Arab immigrants caused some members of grece to rethink the essence of the conflict.

One of the group’s founders, Guillaume Faye, a journalist with a Ph.D. from Sciences-Po, split off and began releasing explicitly racist books. In a 1998 tract, “Archeofuturism,” he argued, “To be a nationalist today is to assign this concept its original etymological meaning, ‘to defend the native members of a people.’ ” The book, which appeared in English in 2010, argues that “European people” are “under threat” and must become “politically organized for their self-defense.” Faye assures native Frenchmen that their “sub-continental motherland” is “an organic and vital part of the common folk, whose natural and historical territory—whose fortress, I would say—extends from Brest to the Bering Strait.”

Faye, like Renaud Camus, is appalled by the dictates of modern statecraft, which define nationality in legal rather than ethnic terms. The liberal American writer Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in his recent book, “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” quotes Camus lamenting that “a veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture” could declare that she is just as French as an “indigenous” man who is “passionate for Roman churches, and for the verbal and syntactic delicacies of Montaigne and Rousseau, for Burgundy wines, for Proust, and whose family has lived for generations in the same valley.” What appalls Camus, Polakow-Suransky notes, is that “legally, if she has French nationality, she is completely correct.”

Faye’s work helps to explain the rupture that has emerged in many Western democracies between the mainstream right, which may support strict enforcement of immigration limits but does not inherently object to the presence of Muslims, and the alt-right, which portrays Muslim immigration as an existential threat. In this light, the growing admiration by Western conservatives for the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is easier to comprehend. Not only do thinkers like Faye admire Putin as an emblem of proudly heterosexual white masculinity; they fantasize that Russian military might will help create a “Eurosiberian” federation of white ethno-states. “The only hope for salvation in this dark age of ours,” Faye has declared, is “a protected and self-centered continental economic space” that is capable of “curbing the rise of Islam and demographic colonization from Africa and Asia.” In Faye’s 2016 book, “The Colonisation of Europe,” he writes, of Muslims in Europe, “No solution can be found unless a civil war breaks out.”

Such revolutionary right-wing talk has now migrated to America. In 2013, Steve Bannon, while he was turning Breitbart into the far right’s dominant media outlet, described himself as “a Leninist.” The reference didn’t seem like something a Republican voter would say, but it made sense to his intended audience: Bannon was signalling that the alt-right movement was prepared to hijack, or even raze, the state in pursuit of nationalist ends. (Bannon declined my request for an interview.) Richard Spencer told me, “I would say that the alt-right in the United States is radically un-conservative.” Whereas the American conservative movement celebrates “the eternal value of freedom and capitalism and the Constitution,” Spencer said, he and his followers were “willing to use socialism in order to protect our identity.” He added, “Many of the countries that lived under Soviet hegemony are actually far better off, in terms of having a protected identity, than Western Europe or the United States.”

Spencer said that “clearly racialist” writers such as Benoist and Faye were “central influences” on his own thinking as an identitarian. He first discovered the work of Nouvelle Droite figures in the pages of Telos, an American journal of political theory. Most identitarians have a less scholarly bent. In 2002, a right-wing French insurrectionary, Maxime Brunerie, shot at President Jacques Chirac as he rode down the Champs-Élysées; the political group that Brunerie was affiliated with, Unité Radicale, became known as part of the identitairemovement. In 2004, a group known as the Bloc Identitaire became notorious for distributing soup containing pork to the homeless, in order to exclude Muslims and Jews. It was the sort of puerile joke now associated with alt-right pranksters in America such as Milo Yiannopoulos.

Copycat groups began emerging across Europe. In 2009, a Swedish former mining executive, Daniel Friberg, founded, in Denmark, the publishing house Arktos, which is now the world’s largest distributor of far- and alt-right literature. The son of highly educated, left-leaning parents, Friberg grew up in a wealthy suburb of Gothenburg. He embraced right-wing thought after attending a diverse high school, which he described as overrun with crime. In 2016, he told the Daily Beast, “I had been taught to think multiculturalism was great, until I experienced it.”

Few European nations have changed as drastically or as quickly as Sweden. Since 1960, it has added one and a half million immigrants to its population, which is currently just under ten million; a nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, has become the country’s main opposition group. During this period, Friberg began to devour books on European identity—specifically, those of Benoist and Faye, whose key works impressed him as much as they impressed Richard Spencer. When Friberg launched Arktos, he acquired the rights to books by Benoist and Faye and had them translated into Swedish and English. Spencer told me that Arktos “was a very important development” in the international popularization of far-right identitarian thought.


More at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017 ... replace-us
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 14, 2017 8:09 am

11/12/2017
Text written for the panel debate "Right-wing mysogyny" at "Brøl, the many voices of feminism" organized by thte Women League in Norway (Oslo, October 28th. 2017)



Sonia Muñoz Llort

Anarcha-feminism against institutionalized misogyny, homophobia and transphobia in the right-wing populism

Right-wing populism is a political ideology, which combines right-wing politics and populist rhetoric and themes. In Europe, right-wing populism is an expression used to describe groups, politicians, and political parties generally known for their opposition to immigration, mostly from the Islamic world and, in most cases, euroscepticism. Right-wing populism in the Western world is generally, but not exclusively, associated with ideologies such as New Nationalism, anti-globalization, nativism, white supremacy protectionism as well as fear for diversity and opposition to immigration. Many authors and scholars see right-wing populism and extreme right-movements part of the same phenomenon.

Their rhetoric often consists of anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the socialistic system and speaking for the "common people". Their rhetoric and ideology though, have a narrow understanding of who common people are. When they refer to “common people”, it is white able heterosexual middle-class men as the norm. It is obvious that we can find women, known as femonationalists, being part of these movements regardless of their conservative and misogynist view against women, non-binary, gender fluid, intersex and trans persons since all of us are seen as subservient to men. This has surprisingly provoked very little criticism from the so called mainstream feminists in Europe and the Western in general. From an anarcha-feminist perspective, I am not going to use the concepts either of mainstream or majority feminism because both create an inherent hierarchy that is extremely negative for feminist movements and because it usually refers to straight middle-class Western able white women. We are a diversity of feminist groups with particular issues grounded in our different identities, while at the same time we share part of the struggles against oppression from common systems such as capitalism, the state or religion.

The last years has been clear that right-wing movements are increasing in presence and strength and with them, the danger of violence against several groups of people that do not match their exclusive description of “common people”. Particularly, women and other groups of people that do not identify as men are seen as inferior to men in their oppressive idea of social hierarchy, and gathering other factors to our identities are these movements a direct threat to the majority of society. They try to control us while they dehumanize us with their rhetoric canalized by authoritarian state-organized abuse, objectivizing our health and our bodies, demining our ideas and denying us our human rights.

Focusing in this natural exclusion of people in the core ideology of right-wing populistic movements, anarcha-feminism is a natural antagonist of right-wing populism. Anarcha-feminism is described to be an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-oppressive philosophy, with the goal of creating an "equal ground" between all genders. The term "anarcha-feminism" suggests the social freedom and liberty of women and other groups who does not define themselves as men, without needed dependence upon other groups or parties. Right-wing populism is nourished upon violent male authority represented by capital that grows at the expense of the oppressed who are not seen as common people.

The ideological clash is undeniable; the struggle for our freedom is inevitable. Furthermore, an awakening of anarcha-feminism might be the key needed in these uncertain times to regain our independence creating a new system and in order to achieve this; we must join other movements who share our struggle to end capitalism and authority in society in addition to share our aim to build a new system.

As I pointed before, from an anarcha-feministic point of view the criticism to the misogyny and phobia against other people with diverse gender identities and sexual orientations from the right-wing populism has been taken too lightly from Western white middle-class feminists. This is actually a very dangerous role to choose, letting silence take over under this threat and making me especially critical to this lack of commitment. The reason behind this silence might have several factors, being one of them the lack of consciousness of our white middle-class privileges and the consequently threat some feel of losing them when right-wing rhetoric has increased in the last years.

Acknowledging our privileges

White middle-class privileges are a reality we white feminists must acknowledge in order to change all the oppressive systems that surrounds us. Historically speaking, we like to see ourselves as pioneers in fighting for women’s rights giving this an intrinsically ethnocentric role in women’s struggle, being that the reason behind concepts such a mainstream or majority feminism. However, we are either majority nor pioneers. This rhetoric is part of our privileges, which has been sold by the tendency of empowerment among Western feminists. Empowerment does not challenge the structures at all, and even less destroys them in order of building new structures based on equality.

By instance, becoming a part of the system through taking leader roles in private enterprises or high political placements in the government does not bring automatic changes of the oppressive system. It actually seems to have the opposite effect, that women develop a Stockholm’s syndrome to capitalism and become unquestionable defenders of the system excluding most of the other groups that remain oppressed and invisibilized.

We just have to understand and admit that as white Western straight women some of us are, we have certain privileges that most of our human siblings in other parts of the world do not have. Moreover, it is through these privileges we also must have the responsibility to criticize and fight right-wing movements much louder that we have been doing until now. In addition to that, we must learn to respect, encourage and support other groups’ struggles opening our alliances in solidarity with any other group of people that it is excluded from the current vicious system. I must make perfectly clear that our role as feminists should be of allies to each other. Unfortunately, I often read comments, articles and such written by middle-class feminists that are completely biased by their good Samaritan attitudes towards women’s movements in lower classes and even other countries. This is a condescending imperialistic attitude we must be aware of, in order of getting rid of it completely because it creates a hierarchical difference between us and other feminist groups we do not neither want nor need because it is created and we need to deconstruct it.

This is one of our most dangerous bias, our unawareness about our own privileges. We must look carefully, recognize them and replace them. We cannot and must not try to lead other women’s and groups struggles. As middle-class Western feminists, we tend to be more heard and seen, while our brothers and sisters are invisible even though they deal with more complicated and deeper struggles that are results of centuries of abusive Western capitalistic system, which expanded through colonialism and capitalistic imperialism.

Acknowledging our middle-class white privileges might be the first step towards fighting the hierarchy within feministic groups that weaken our common fight. We are allies in the struggle, but every group knows how to organize and the tools needed to take responsibility for liberating themselves from the system. When right-wing populism try to divide us, we are going to organize in intersectional solidarity. Solidarity then, must be built upon respect for each other’s struggle, rhetoric and tools chosen to set us free. There is not one single universal solution to reach our common goal of building a new system based on equality and diversity, we have to support each other’s movements towards the creation of a new system.

White middle-class feminists must learn to step aside when it comes to setting goals and choosing methods in other social movements. We have to make a statement against misogyny and other gender-related phobias being conscious of encouraging and supporting diverse representation in society. Representation not as we wish to, but as other groups choose to. We can be allies, as others show us how and until what degree.

On everyday basis, I experience many of my fellow Western white middle-class feminists to be content with what our predecessors achieved, but not being aware that most of these achievements just enriched and uplifted us, a narrow minority. We must think as anarchists do, nobody is free until everybody is free. Though I might feel free, the threat of right-wing ideology is real because they violently increase our oppression. This increase in right-wing violence, both political and practical by fascistic and white supremacist movements, is deadly for many people. So the question remains, what does it take to organize feminists movements in solidarity against this common threat?

After being conscious acknowledging our privileges and other movement’s abilities to choose their own methods to fight oppression, we must join the struggle we endure across borders and beyond identities.

No borders, embrace diversity, share the struggle

In many cultures, we have developed concepts and labels to define ourselves. These linguistic tools are practical in order of getting to know ourselves, define our identity and be able to show and express ourselves to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, these same linguistic tools are abused to split us as human beings. They have been used to categorize, discriminate and create false differences between us besides; this is something right-wing movements misuse at a high degree in their misogynistic tactics.

Linguistic tools empower us as individuals but can be a burden for us as collectives. I think that the better we know ourselves, the clearer we can decide what goals we want to achieve and what tools and methods needed in order to do so.

Since right-wing movements are strongly ideologically based on nationalist homogeneity and protectionism, feminist movements must think thoroughly about the need of fighting against borders and the capitalistic system that are used to separate us. Volcano and Rogue explained intersectional anarcho-feminism in their article Insurrections at the intersections: feminism, intersectionality and anarchism as the concept where “we call for an end to all exploitation and oppression and this includes an end to class society. Liberal interpretations of intersectionality miss the uniqueness of class by viewing it as an identity and treating it as though it is the same as racism or sexism by tacking an “ism” onto the end. Eradicating capitalism means an end to class society; it means class war. Likewise, race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, age—the gamut of hierarchically-arranged social relations— are in their own ways unique. As anarchists, we might point those unique qualities out rather than leveling all of these social relations into a single framework.”

Right-wing movements want to create a false notion of difference and separation between us where we fight against each other, dividing us as groups making hierarchies based on identities, pretending we have no common goals because our diversity. But this is absolutely false.

Our struggle must be fought based on solidarity upon our differences. Differences between feministic groups are the intersectional strength that right-wing homogenous ideology fears. They know that if we work together in our common goals we can actually defeat the system that they hide behind. This is something many Native groups around the world have understood and some Western feminists have to work with. Their struggle is our struggle.
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 18, 2017 9:48 am

TW


Neo-Nazis Celebrate Christmas With A Song About Running Over ‘Trannies’ And ‘Dindus’

Image

On the December 15, 2017 episode of The Daily Shoah, the “Death Panel” celebrated the holidays with a discussion on “race realism” and a new parody song praising the actions of accused murderer James Fields Jr.

CONTINUE READING
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 18, 2017 11:50 am

Fascism Today Conversation Part 1: Interview with author Shane Burley

The problem with the term fascist is its heavy misuse, both as an epithet and from sincere mistakes. There are the mistakes of orthodox Marxism to frame fascism in terms of class compositions, one that misses ideological and cultural factors and the way that it morphs over time. There is also the problem of framing fascism only inside the geopolitics of interwar Europe, which essentially frames its defining features in politics that will not be repeated and necessarily makes fascism a threat of the past.

I side somewhat more slightly with scholar Roger Griffin and what is often called the “new consensus” that fascism, at least ideologically, makes up a form of what Griffin termed “palingenetic ultranationalism,” a nationalism born of myth and rebirth. I go ahead and frame fascism in my book on two axes: the belief in human inequality and the violent and mythological drive towards essential identity. This defines fascism as a belief in fixed identities that are unchosen and that human beings are unequal and society needs to remain stratified. I think this is a broad categorization that covers most occurrences of fascism, both in a revolutionary movement that takes state power and for an insurgent minority movement, but it is certainly not the whole picture. It takes further examination and comparison, but it is a starting point and a foundation for seeing how these movements form from a meta-political base, the space of idea that comes before politics.

When we look at the Alt Right in the U.S. or identitarianism in Europe, we see a battle for identity as an essential and fixed category, a traditionalism based on a mythic past, a violence rooted in warrior fetishism, and the fundamental belief in the need for social stratification based on a perceived natural hierarchy of human inequality. Without that, you do not have a fully formed fascist movement, but you may still have the kernels of fascism that some call proto-fascist.

What this sort of definition does is show how the seeds of fascism are often set across radical movements, even on the left. When the left uses essentializing narratives about race or gender, when the battle for greater equality is abandoned, or tradition and mythological origins are romanticized beyond cause, this creates the potential for what Alexander Reid Ross calls the “fascist creep.”


More at: http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2017/ ... art-1.html
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 22, 2017 11:43 pm

What Is Fascism? An Excerpt From "Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It"

Friday, December 22, 2017
By Shane Burley, AK Press | Book Excerpt


Image
Donald Trump, flanked by Republican lawmakers, celebrates Congress passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on the South Lawn of the White House on December 20, 2017, in Washington, DC. The tax bill is the first major legislative victory for the GOP-controlled Congress and Trump since he took office almost one year ago.


Inequality

Standing before the London Forum in 2012, Richard Spencer said that the defining characteristic of the Alt Right was inequality. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created unequal," he said, making a clear break with the foundational document of American political independence that the conservative movement clings to as their moral authority. For fascists across the board, the defining factor of their ideology is more than the conservative de-emphasis of equality: inequality, for them, is critical, crucial, and correct. They believe that people are of different abilities and skills, qualities and characteristics, and that those differences should be ranked vertically, not horizontally. How this inequality is interpreted often shifts between different schools of thought and political movements, but they often take antiquated notions about race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, body type, and other qualities to show that groups of people, defined in a myriad of ways, can be ranked as "better or worse." Even between those groups, such as inside of the "white race," people are not seen as fundamentally equal. Equality is a social lie that leads to an unhealthy society where the weak rule over the strong through democracy. In a properly stratified society an elite of some kind would have authority over the unwashed masses, though the way this authority plays out is so radically diffuse in contemporary fascism that there is no universally agreed upon blueprint. While identity is central to this constructed inequality, there is a heavy focus on analyzing and ranking abilities, from the size of biceps to the numbers generated from outdated IQ tests.

Populism

It is impossible to have fascism, either as a semi-coherent ideology or a movement, without some element of right-wing populism. This could take the form of anti-elitism, ranging from opposition to international banks to perceived tribal elites as is true in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. This anti-elitism plays into the revolutionary character of fascism, adds to its appeal to the working class, and is an attack on the left and the bourgeoisie. As will be mentioned later, this attack on elites is not an attack on elitism as such, as fascism, in the way we define it here, requires an elite caste of some sort. In the political sense, populism is the force by which hard fascist ideologues gain traction to move their political voice onto the national stage, often riding the same inspiring forces that the left does, such as labor issues, environmental catastrophe, and war. While this may seem a force used opportunistically by the ideological fascist contingent -- such as explicit neo-Nazis or the Alt Right -- there is an element of this right populism, the "common man against the elites," that is present even in the most reasoned and consistent fascist political thought, from the German Conservative Revolution to the French New Right. Fascism is particularly modern this way, even though it is a repudiation of that modernity, since it requires a mass movement and could not have been possible in an age before mass politics.

Identity

Identity is the second part of our proposed definition, in which I use the amorphous qualifier "essentialized." Identity is a crucial part of the fascist project, but it is primarily not a chosen identity. Instead, they argue, identity is something that moves far beyond nominal politics, social signifiers, and cultural attitudes. Identity can be something that echoes from deep in your past, the "story of your people," a national myth, a tribal uniform. This is why race has been the most common form of identity that fascists consider crucial and also underlines the importance that racism still has in Western society. For identity adherents, race informs their past, who they are related to, who they should have allegiance to, and it drives their personality, intelligence, and vices. Gender, in the same way, should also be seen as essential, and traditional gender roles are not social constructs but universal truths that dictate our path. To reject our racial and gender identities as guiding forces is then to reject nature. While fascism, as an invention of the modern world, has often relied on vulgar scientism to define these racial and gender arguments, there are spiritual and metaphysical ones that run parallel as well.

Inequality has to be pinpointed through identity: who you are, rather than what you do. You are a certain race, gender, and national ethnicity, and so those should define your place in a hierarchy and in the groups with which you have affinity. While race is often a major fault line for the boundaries of this identity, there are broader cultural-linguistic ethnocentrisms that can take hold of this, especially when a multicultural nation lacks any central history of monoracial uniformity.

Revolution

The term "revolution" shares the same troubling confluence of definitions, finding little commonality beyond the fact that it is a great "shuffling off" of the past. This is a good place for us to start and to suggest that we define revolution as any attempt to undermine, destroy, and replace fundamental social institutions. In the traditional -Marxist-Leninist understanding this meant the taking over of one class by the other, a forced proletarianization of the ruling classes, and a destruction (to a degree) of state infrastructure so a -counter-state can be built and run by -- and for -- the workers (in theory, at least, to increase equality). As J. Sakai says, the fascist revolutionary project is less about the fundamental change in the functions of society and more about how they can use those functions, or replacements, as a vessel for themselves.

By "revolutionary" the left has always meant overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist or communal or anarchist society. Fascism is not revolutionary in that sense, although it may use those words. Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself.


Fascists have less ideological consistency because no fascist thinker has created a grand hegemony in thought that defined the movement henceforth. Instead, we can comfortably say that fascism is a revolutionary project, but how that revolution plays out is fiercely debated. At the bare minimum, it is an undermining of the foundational ideas of Western democracy, rejecting the idea that the people, generally, can rule themselves. If the fascist project intends to see imperial state power as a mechanism for achieving their ends (inequality through essentialized identity), then it could have more in common with the Marxist-Leninist conception of revolution. In this case, it would be destroying the elements of the liberal state in order to further embody a state created to enforce tribal interests and inequality. For non-state fascists, whom I will get to later, it may mean a revolution to destroy the current order and make space for the creation of ethnocentric tribal communities that can then battle for hegemony (or trade, depending on who is in charge). Whatever the distinct vision, the fascist idea is radical; it wants to see systemic change. It does not just want to reinforce the tacit inequality and structural oppression that exists inside of capitalist states; it wants to build a society where inequality and bigotry are explicitly endorsed. This requires a complete reordering of society, even if it is simply giving in to ideas that have been implicit to Western colonialism and white supremacy for centuries.

Elitism

While the "führer" principle is part and parcel of a fascist movement, it can be leadership outside of state or party functions. This brings us back to the idea of institutionalized hierarchy, with an aristocratic elite forming in a variety of ways. In the work of -proto-fascist jurist and Nazi-sympathizer Carl Schmitt, liberal democracy must "suspend democracy" in order to continue the project of democracy. Figures of supreme importance move through liberal modern societies past its laws and regulations so as to prop up the illusion that mass rule is maintained, but if democracy were to remain pure, it would collapse under the weight of its own inherent inequalities. Fascism drops the illusion that extralegal authority needs to be banned and instead concludes that the actions of dominant figures should be done by virtue of their superior spirit rather than the mandate of the common man. The central idea here is that some people are superior and that a ruling caste must be established in all levels of social arrangement.

Cult of Tradition

From the fascist view of history, identities are only forged through the mythological belief that there is a tradition that must be returned to. In author Umberto Eco's quest to find the principles of "Eternal Fascism," he identifies the "Cult of Tradition" as the most essential quality of fascism, where a desire to return to a "tradition," which may or may not be true in the literal sense, is a reaction to modern developments like logic, science, or democracy. As we will see with the esoteric spiritual beliefs that color fascist movements, far-right authors like Julius Evola have outlined the idea that there is an underlying tradition of hierarchy inside all of the world's societies and religions. The belief that there is a tradition that must be reclaimed is essential to the revolutionary rightist mission. Fascism is a particularly modernist concept, one that attempts to take the ideas of industry, technology, and futurism, and apply a reactionary understanding of society to it. Fascists often see themselves as trying to reclaim something that is natural, normal, and ever-present throughout history. This means theorizing how a proper society works after all of the modern "degeneracies" are cast off.

The Colonization of the Left

While this is discussed more thoroughly below, one key element of a fascist project is the adoption of politics associated with the left. From deep ecological mysticism that motivated aspects of German nationalism through the takeover by the NSDAP to the anti-imperialist rhetoric of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, fascist ideologues need this left-right crossover in order to develop a "new synthesis" that does not play by the conventionally understood left-right political spectrum. This should more appropriately be seen as a right takeover of the left: the use of leftist political tactics and strategies to push the core right-wing meta-politics of inequality and essential identity. If the left uses "state socialism" to enforce equality, the tools of which are command economics and state intervention, then fascism will use a mirror of those state systems to sanctify inequality and tribal privilege. If the left uses anti-colonial struggle to confront the ongoing attack on indigenous communities, then the right will use parallel ideas like indigenous sovereignty and the reclamation of ethnic identity as an argument for white separatism and racial advocacy. While the left develops tools to meet certain larger goals, fascism uniformly attempts to capture those methods for far different results.

Violence and Authority


Violence is often cited as a defining feature of fascism, by combining the immediatist nihilism of Mussolini's early movement with the sober revelations of Nazi extermination plans into a coherent understanding. Violence is and remains a significant component of fascism, but much of this derives from the idea that the alienating effects of modernity must be smashed, and that mythic warrior societies show a path forward, especially for the veneration of "masculinity." It is this discontent with the pathological boredom of industrial capitalism that has historically created some of its broadest appeals to the left, as well as some of its most pernicious sacrifices of human life and dignity. At the same time, while political authoritarianism may not be a defining feature of fascism, the appeal to some sort of authority, from aristocratic rule to physical "Übermensch," is essential to guiding the unwashed masses.


More at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/4 ... -to-end-it
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Sun Dec 24, 2017 11:16 pm

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WHAT WE CAN EXPECT FROM THE ALT RIGHT IN 2018

Acts of Violence

There is a common dynamic to American white nationalism that is important to identify. White nationalism is unpopular on its own, so it often has to ally with slightly more moderate areas of conventional conservatism so that can mainstream its message on issues like immigration. As time goes on, the more moderate contingent of the coalition begins to turn on the radicals, blaming them for left attacks. This has happened in the past, and today this contingent is labeled the “Alt Light,” the nativist Civic Nationalists like Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern, and Ann Coulter. The betrayals hung heavy since the election of Trump, so Unite the Right on August 12th was the Alt Right’s chance to try and stand on its own away from the more centrist counter-parts. They were defining themselves to the right, including Klansman and neo-Nazis.

When that betrayal takes place, the radicals begin acting in desperation. Their organizing isn’t working, the general public rejects their message, and the motivating issues become even more bizarre, conspiratorial, and radical their focus in on their echo chamber. It is that equation that breeds acts of “seemingly random violence,” which is acts of racial terror that could have been predicted because of the stoking of fascist thought leaders. While the leadership, including people like Richard Spencer, would decry this violence as destructive to their aims, the rhetoric and ideology itself necessitates these acts of violence. This “Lone wolf” strategy has already begun with attacks by Alt Right figures on the fringes, the most obvious of these being James Alex Fields Jr. attack on protesters that causes multiple injuries and the death of activist Heather Heyer.

Even the infighting among actual white nationalists creates further instability, a factor that is ever present in the white nationalist movement. Are Jews the prime concern? What about Muslims? What do they do with queer members? All of these create critical problems for having any unity.

There is no reason to believe that these acts of violence are in decline, and as the situation becomes more severe for the Alt Right it will likely lead to more desperate acts of cruelty. Desperation on the far-right is what motivates colossal acts of terrorism, which is both terrifyingly predictable and obvious.

More at: https://antifascistnews.net/2017/12/24/ ... t-in-2018/
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 26, 2017 5:49 pm

The Man Who Gave White Nationalism A New Life

Fifty years ago, France lost a war while trying keep millions of Muslims French citizens. One French writer launched a movement to rethink “identity” in its aftermath, and helped reinvent nationalism for the 21st century.

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De Benoist’s views have changed a lot over his career, and he has written so extensively and in such dense prose that it can be hard to figure out what he believes today. (For English speakers, his challenge is complicated further by how little of his work has been translated.) He’s denounced racism but opposes integration. He rejects demands that immigrants assimilate or “remigrate” but laments “sometimes-brutal” changes they bring to European communities. He says identities change over time but wants them to be "strong." He disavows the alt-right but collaborates with some of the most prominent people associated with the movement.

Over the course of an afternoon, he grew frustrated with questions about how his ideas link to today’s politics, saying, “You treat the New Right as a political subject, but for us it is an intellectual subject.”

It wasn’t the far right that brought de Benoist’s writings to the United States. A left-wing journal called Telos, which was drawn to de Benoist’s critique of US foreign policy, first published his work in 1990s. Telos translated his Manifesto for a European Renaissance in 1999, in which he laid out a philosophy that has become known as “ethnopluralism” — arguing that all ethnic groups have a common interest in defending their “right to difference” and opposing all forces that threaten to erase boundaries between “strong identities.”

Whatever his intentions, this argument caught the eye of a new generation of white nationalists, in whose hands ethnopluralism became a kind of upside-down multiculturalism. They were not white supremacists, they claimed, but they believed that everyone was better off in a world where ethnicities were separate but — at least theoretically — equal.

De Benoist came of age following the war over independence for Algeria, which sparked a debate about whether Muslims could ever really be French, and whether France had made itself vulnerable by inviting them in.

After 130 years of French rule, Algeria had increasingly become part of the French republic, and Muslims increasingly a part of France. Algeria’s split from France in 1962 sparked tensions about whether French values could transcend differences of race, ethnicity, and religion. And the hundreds of thousands of Algerian residents — both ethnic Europeans and Muslims — who moved to France in its aftermath fueled a bitter debate over who could truly be French.

The New Right began as a cadre of young men once aligned with Nazis and fascists who believed these questions were life-and-death for the future of Europe. But they broke from the far right in the late ’60s, reinventing themselves as intellectuals, drawing on both the right and the left as they worked their way into mainstream debate.


Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/th ... umNAJPzG6#.
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:43 pm

Fascism Today: An Interview with Shane Burley

We recently chatted with Shane Burley about his new book Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It. Given the current political situation, both the book and Shane’s strategic suggestions are important for all of us to consider, debate, and expand upon.
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Q: I know that you’ve been at this a while. Could you give us some background, your previous efforts as an antifascist organizer and researcher?

A: This traces back many years for me, though I have to be honest in that my primary organizing work has been in labor and housing justice. Those who have done the hard work of antifascist organizing over the years often go unheard, so I tried to bring those voices into the book and my journalism.

Back when I lived in Eugene, Oregon, the University of Oregon started a forum that was bringing controversial speakers that were supposed to have “challenging” views. Most of these at the start were communist party organizers from decades past, deep green ecological types, and alternative science proponents, and many around the area were supportive of this project, and I and others would help to promote their events. They were especially active in Palestinian solidarity, despite being widely unpopular with certain student and faculty groups.

Then they brought a Holocaust Denier, then another, and another. The organization was the Pacifica Forum.The Southern Poverty Law Center, who tracks hate groups, now lists it as a white nationalist organization. They eventually became more and more public about their anti-Semitism, their allying with Third Positionist fascist projects, and were enthusiastically embraced by neo-Nazis of the area.

What made this transition so horrifying for so many nearby was that they really could not see it coming until it was fully formed, and even then the rhetoric was baffling. The pathway the Pacifica Forum took to full fledged fascist politics was not through the traditional path of far-right conservative Americana. Instead, it really sidestepped through popular areas of the left, including anti-capitalism, international solidarity, anti-war politics, and environmentalism. Our protest actions, small at first and led by local synagogues, did little to shut down the organization, which continued for years until finally petering out.

A couple of years later, in 2011, a community organization I had worked with in Rochester, New York began an organizing plan to confront an incoming appearance of David Irving. Irving is the most famous Holocaust Denier in the world, starting out as a mainstream, yet far-right wing, historian who slowly shifted his public opinion to one that sees the major claims of Holocaust historians as a hoax. Irving, who has served time in places like Austria for hate speech, now has to have private events when promoting his books, which he was having in the neighboring Syracuse, New York. While we were only able to get the final hotel location hours before the event started, our actions to have the hotel intervene were met with little concern. Even though the meeting hall was packed full of open neo-Nazis and KKK members, no one seemed concerned. This was exactly the response organizers often got from much of the left when forming antifascist committees to confront public neo-Nazi shows or organizations on the fringes of the GOP, which were then trying to move into mainstream discourse through the Tea Party phenomenon. The idea was repeated to us over and over, that fascism was no longer the real issue, global capitalism, neoliberalism, American imperialism, environmental destruction, and all the normal oppressions of the status quo were important. Fascism was unstable reactionary mass politics, something a capitalist class would never allow again.

In preparing for those actions, I was focusing in on researching the growth of white nationalist projects like the American Third Position Party (now the American Freedom Party). I stumbled on a podcast named Vanguard Radio with a young and articulate host, Richard Spencer. His website AlternativeRight.com was unfamiliar to many of us, and from first glance it might even look like some type of leftist publication. Criticisms of capitalism. Heavy focus on paganism. Environmental treatises. We have had the “suit and tie Nazi” types for years, but this was a step further away from the American white nationalist political program. They were taking inspiration from the academic fascists in the European New Right and the “identitarian” street movement pushing against Muslims and immigrants in France. They were taking the language of post-colonialism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism and the like for making a philosophically fascist argument, stating that humans were unequal, that democracy was the rule of the weak over the strong, and that we needed to rediscover identity. While it seemed as if this Alternative Right could never have currency in the U.S., I got a feeling that, given the right circumstances, this new brand of fascist politics, which really attempted to create a philosophical foundation and a whole “meta-politics,” could have legs. It was in 2015 when we saw the return of “white identity politics” and Trumpism that the foundation was laid, and we finally saw what a mass fascist movement could look like in the U.S. One that did not try to hide from its politics, but embraced the most horrifying positions openly.

Q: Related to that, what do you see as the relationship between research and organizing, and more specifically, the relationship you intend/hope for between Fascism Today and the struggle against fascism.

A: One of the real key issues that has kept many mass movement from being able to see and confront fascists when they are still a minority is the inability to see them as they are. First, they look for old signifiers and behaviors, ones that are usually of generations past. There are still certainly more traditional neo-Nazis and KKK organizations in the U.S., all of which are growing, but if you are looking for that iconography you are going to miss the movements that are actually taking the lead and have the potential for mass recruitment and political action. Fascism is a shifting political force, one that keeps its focus on inequality, identity, violence, and mass action across times and cultures, but how it manifests is markedly different. What we can do with research is to set a clearer understanding of how these movements work, how they manifest, and what their strategies are.

Second, it is important to see antifascism in the same way, to see the struggles of today in continuity to the battle against fascism starting in interwar Europe. Antifascists today do not need to reinvent the wheel in every case, and there is a long history of organizing that draws from the entire network of revolutionary organizing. It is critical to dig up that history and make it ready and accessible so that organizing today can keep those lessons fresh in tactical decisions.

The focus of Trump and the Alt Right on painting the media as “fake news” has created a reflexive move on the left to uniformly defend journalism as the counter-balance to the far-right’s mobilization. While the media should be defended openly, there is no reason to believe that great journalism and well researched books will end fascism. The only thing that actually has the capacity to end fascism as a genocidal wave is organizing, the ability of people to come together in solidarity and to enact practical plans to confront it. This is why the notion that symbolic action at a complete distance from mobilizing white nationalists is so stale, it is us together that is able to defeat their attempts as growth. Education and agitation mean nothing without organizing, and so it is important for the work of research and media creation to be tied back into practical organizing work because without that it remains mere academic exercise.

Q: One thing your book makes very clear is that today’s fascism takes many forms. As you just noted, this makes it hard for people to get their heads around it conceptually. Given the broad range your book covers, could you describe the boundaries as you see them? What should and shouldn’t be referred to as fascism? What unites the disparate forces? And how does all this differ from our grandparents’ fascism?

A: I choose a kind of sparse definition for fascism, one that attempts to bring together a range of movements that are incredibly different. The axis here is the belief in human inequality, the defense of some type of immobile hierarchy, and the belief in essentialized identity, identities that are fixed and define who you are. Violence, mass politics, mythology, and romanticism are all a part of this as well, and are manifested in a range of ways.

What draws the seemingly disparate movements together is those core ideas about hierarchy, identity, and the mythologized resurrection of the past. For interwar European fascism, it played out through authoritarian political parties infected with reckless imperial visions and genocidal rage. Italy, Germany, Romania, Austria, Spain, and others all had their own particulars, ones that linked up their own history of domination and nationalism, but each came back to those core attributes. You could also see it in the non-white world in Imperial Japan, where the principles of national identity, “eternal” hierarchy through the Emperor’s decree, and the violent rebirth at play in the Pacific Theater.

After World War II, how fascists saw themselves and how they behaved changed dramatically. Fascist political projects coded their language and went after broader themes, choosing to instead stoke nativist feelings rather than the kind of vicious and explicit kind of racial victimization that institutions like the NSDAP [ National Socialist German Workers' Party,] did in the 1930s. More than this, they turned towards meta-politics, the attempt to shift culture as the basis and precursor for political change.

This idea arises from a whole history of “Idealist” philosophy, where ideas themselves change history rather than material circumstances, as well as by interpreting Gramscian Marxism, emphasizing the importance of “cultural struggle.” For most of the West, open white nationalism is still considered frightening and disgusting. While entrenched white supremacy is a constant feature of these countries, it is implicit to the systems of power. If open, explicit white supremacy, meaning open proclamations of white superiority and preference, become popularized, there would be a common revulsion. This is what we are seeing today with the Alt Right where, though it has seen dramatic growth, the vast majority of the public is horrified. Therefore, if they want to actually bring about a world in which white nationalist politics become the standard, then they have to change the underlying values that motivate those politics. This means creating a romantic reimagining of Europe’s history and value, calling into question the idea that “all men are created equal,” challenging the democratic notion that “every cook can govern,” and to reframe history as the struggle between essential identities, usually races and ethnicities. Once those values replace the values of the left, the politics shift with dramatic swiftness, and so that is largely the frame they have taken on.

This has meant that their points of struggle have expanded far beyond what Hitler could have imagined. Music, art, philosophy, academics, sports culture, spirituality, have all been touched, and a counter-narrative and counter-culture is being pushed in each different facet of human communality. At the same time they are using wedge issues and the anger of working class disenfranchisement to create a populist wave that can be utilized as a Trojan Horse for more explicit fascism. This is the danger of the Trumpian populism that took over in 2015-16, as well as the rise of populist parties and project in Europe like UKIP in the U.K. and Marine Le Pen and the Front Nationale in France.

In the U.S., the cultural struggle has dominated since our two-party system really disallows the kind of insurgent far-right parties that we have seen for decades in Europe, like the Austrian Freedom Party or the now-defunct British National Party. Instead, these movements don’t look toward dissident politicians for their leadership. They go online and find a culture that has created its own internal jargon and queues on web forums, where the leaders are web-celebrities ranting on social media. This is how someone like Richard Spencer was able to become an iconic figure for their movement having never written a book, taught a class, or held office.


Continues at: http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress. ... ne-burley/
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 28, 2017 1:19 pm

Thanks to Trump, white supremacists had a big year in 2017

In March, media outlets helped bring far-right troll and noted rape apologist Mike Cernovich to mainstream attention. CBS featured an interview with Cernovich during a 60 Minutes segment about the ecosystem of fake news, which served to help mainstream his radical agenda. The segment failed to hold Cernovich accountable for his history of racist and misogynistic rhetoric, his encouragement of harassment, and his promotion of numerous conspiracy theories, including “Pizzagate.” Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel wrote that CBS failed to realize the interview “would simultaneously give [Cernovich] mainstream validation and the ability to criticize the program for a shallow understanding of the pro-Trump media ecosystem.”


More at: https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2 ... 017/218902
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Tue Jan 16, 2018 9:51 pm

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4323 ... en-fascism

As the "Alt-Right" Strays From Its Roots, Will It Turn to Open Fascism?

Tuesday, January 16, 2018
By Shane Burley


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Mike Enoch stands with white nationalist Richard Spencer, who popularized the term "alt-right," as he speaks during a press conference at the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts on October 19, 2017, in Gainesville, Florida.

On October 7, 2017, around 50 people from far-right organizations like Identity Evropa and the National Policy Institute returned to Charlottesville, Virginia: the site of the confrontation that brought together a thousand white supremacists from around the country and left one protester dead. As the torches again lit up the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, the appearance of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer was a stark reminder of the new status quo. After the death of activist Heather Heyer, Spencer and his ilk were even less welcome in Charlottesville than they were before, yet they returned, reveling in their status as hated outsiders.

Spencer, who coined the term "alt-right" and has set its tone and image since 2010, had always tried to shuffle off the ugly image of the US's white nationalist history. Instead, he was taking his cues from the European "identitarian" movement and spoke of building a "meta-politic": a set of ideas that would help to manifest his vision of a traditionalist "Ethnostate" for white people.

Since 2015, the rise of Trump and the entry of the "alt-right" into the public lexicon, Spencer has consistently brought his "elite" movement further into the gutter. While he had built the original AlternativeRight.com on disgraced European philosophers, racist paleoconservatives, fringe economists and alternative spiritual leaders, as his movement moved from the "big tent," it began to lose the core that it had used to change the public's perception of fascist politics. As we move into 2018, the "alt-right" has been hit on multiple fronts, as platforms reject their presence and a mass movement forms to repudiate them, and so they have headed into a period of what could rightly be termed "decadence." Traditionally, this means a period of decline and decay, one where the essential core of their movement has been lost, and they are returning to the blatant viciousness that has defined white nationalism, as opposed to the more cloaked variety.

Reclaiming White Settler Colonialism

The defining ideas of the "alt-right" came from what is known as the European New Right (ENR). Founded by French philosopher Alain de Benoist and established through the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) and associated journals, they wanted to use the popular New Left politics of the 1960s to reinvigorate a far-right racist, nationalist vision for Europe. Using the argumentation found in anti-imperialist and "third-worldist" circles of the time, they argued for an "Ethno-pluralist" politic that saw a "nationalism for all peoples" as the solution to the degenerating effects of globalized commodity capitalism. Instead of the internationalist and egalitarian vision of the New Left politics they appropriated, they wanted to see a deep relativism, to have cultures kept separate from cosmopolitan influence with the understanding that different peoples were too different in skills and temperament to abide by each other's rules and customs. The founding principle here was an opposition to egalitarianism, primarily on the belief that human beings were not equal, either as individuals or as groups. The primary segment of this was racial, and by using the decolonization rhetoric, they could argue that white Europeans were facing colonization by globalism and had to join up with other liberation movements that they could reframe through ethnic nationalism.

The primary philosophical thread that the ENR came from is known as "Third Positionism," in which fascists use leftist politics in a strange synthesis of the left and the right. Anti-capitalism, environmentalism, post-colonialism, antiwar politics and the like have all been appropriated heavily in white nationalist circles, so much so that they have seen crossover between the left and the far-right in a number of movements since the 1960s. It was from this tradition that Spencer and the "alt-right" hailed, arguing in support of movements in the Global South to reject capitalist development and in favor of non-communist forms of anti-capitalism. It was these principles they used to buck off accusations of white supremacy, saying that instead of "ruling over non-whites," they simply want to return to their ethnic roots and live an "indigenous" form of life. This has played out in more contemporary times as the "alt-right's" support for North Korean nationalism, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad or the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Since 2015, the dominant discourse on the "alt-right" has shifted away from that type of Third Positionist synthesis and in favor of straightforwardly angry bigotry, focusing on vicious racial jokes, slurs and harassment. The Daily Shoah -- the most popular white nationalist podcast today, which receives tens of thousands of downloads a month -- made a brand out of using "shock jock" rhetoric for white nationalists. In common "alt-right" fashion, their culture of one-upmanship has made the most violent racial discussions commonplace, often talking about genocide, calling Black people subhuman and proposing Jews as the enemy. The neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer took this to another level, blogging multiple times a day in rants filled with racist rage.

As this trend took over, and the trolls on sites like 4Chan and Twitter took hold of the movement, they moved steadily away from the academic veneer that Spencer had held. Any false notion that this is a movement that is "not about hate" and instead simply about identity has been dashed by their own statements.

Spencer, for his part, has joined in completely. While AlternativeRight.com and the Radix Journal -- leading "alt-right" publications run by Richard Spencer -- tried to keep his racial separatism "intellectual," his new AltRight.com shot directly for the gutter. The publication now, which looks a lot more like The Daily Stormer than one of GRECE's journals, is the modern equivalent of the White Aryan Resistance's newspaper, which was filled with racist cartoons and accusations of conspiracy. Spencer's public speeches, which were once toned from academic conferences and filled with well-researched dramatics, are now opportunities to simply mock the crowd, framed by laughter and cruel insults.

Genocide

One of the key arguments made by the "alt-right" for years was that it was completely and totally against racial conflict; rather, they said, it was modern multicultural society that made conflict inevitable. Instead, the "alt-right" took the old-fashioned segregationist motto of "stop the hate, separate" and argued that racial separatism would be healthy for all people. Nationalism, they argued, was for all people, often coined as "Ethno-pluralism." They tried to pretend a great deal of sympathy for First Nations people, arguing that we needed to avoid this type of racial colonialism. While that rhetoric is still formally used in many of their publications and public arguments, it is quickly disappearing from the dominant public "alt-right" discourse.

The Right Stuff, the website that hosts The Daily Shoah, recently ran a blog post arguing that the most appropriate action for white nationalists would be to kill all Black people in Africa so that they could use the continent for "living space." "Extermination of the brown hordes in their homelands could give vast new territories to us. They are ours for the taking," it read, arguing that racial struggle is inevitable and that, as nature predicts, often the superior species will wipe out the inferior.

The Daily Shoah has created a financial infrastructure so it can employ a few staff people regularly, including Mike Enoch, who lost his job after his identity was revealed to be a six-figure software developer in Manhattan with a Jewish wife. One of their other regular hosts, who goes by the pseudonym "Jayoh," has referred to himself openly as an "exterminationist." He believes nationalists would have to actively exterminate Black Africans, who, he says, would eventually enter into white nations and corrupt them.

While many on the "alt-right" would fail to go as far as openly arguing for the extermination of billions of people, they are reclaiming a colonial sense of themselves. Spencer's rhetoric has changed from the idea of isolated tribal states to envisioning the white Ethnostate as a great empire. This fulfills what he says is white people's "Faustian spirit," the internal drive to explore and conquer. Spencer's own "Alt Right Politics" podcast regularly celebrates European colonialism and expansionism, discussing colonialism as something that is a sum benefit for the colonized. He refers to Indigenous tribes as "humiliated peoples" who he does not want to become; therefore, he says, white Europeans must win this racial conflict. While previously "alt- righters" would have argued that ruling over others was an unnecessary evil and that they instead wanted "nationalism for all peoples," the idea that non-whites need to be controlled by whites is again gaining popularity, even if many of the thought leaders would deny this when pressed.

Street Action

The next move for the "alt-right" was to go from the world of internet chatter and private conferences into street activism. The "alt-right's" ideas were not developed through active struggle; they were instead built through echo chamber dialogue. This has made their organizations generally unskilled in activism. Instead of trying to organize and agitate on issues, using public clashes as opportunities for radicalization, they do what they have discussed in their conferences: They simply want to get at white populations to shift their consciousness towards racist "in group" and "out group" thinking.

Their step into street activism has been by and large a failure, with almost every public appearance being shut down entirely. The only opportunities they had were by uniting with their slightly more moderate "crossover" figures in what has been called the "alt-light." This is the group of "independent Trumpists" and those aligned with publications like Rebel Media and Breitbart who, while sharing their style and many of their immediate policy aims, refuse to get on board with full-tilt white nationalism. While they had some success in collaborating at the "free-speech" rallies that started in Berkeley, they were inevitably betrayed by this contingent and left on their own.

The "alt-right" helped to catalyze this split, angered over the inability of "alt-light" people like Mike Cernovich or Alex Jones to get on board with open fascism. "Alt-right" leaders thought that they had grown large enough riding on the coattails of these Trump supporters that they could still lead a large following when they broke free. That was the intent of the August 12, 2017, "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, which was intended to show that the "alt-right" had become a mass movement. Instead, they had to phone in hundreds of more traditional white nationalist types, including KKK organizations, skinhead gangs and the National Socialist Movement. In the end, the "alt-right" and its organizations and media outlets were just another branch of the US white nationalist movement, like Stormfront or the Aryan Nations. Their branding effort was a failure.

Dual Power

The primary avenue that the "alt-right" utilized was, until recently, web 2.0 platforms, where they had equal footing with major media and political figures. Anyone could post on 4Chan, and an internet celebrity could eclipse a sitting US senator in Twitter followers. Podcasts, web hosting, social media and video broadcasting had been heavily democratized, and the "alt-right" was, in a sense, the price that was paid. In that world, they were able to amplify a white nationalist message far beyond what they were capable of in times restricted to basement-printed newspapers and Xeroxed flyers.

Since the "alt right" has intensified its rhetoric and headed into violent street action, the country has further revolted against it. With poor media coverage and dog-whistle memedom, it was hard for average people to catch on to the "alt-right's" explicit fascism, but it has now been fully revealed, and there is a collective revulsion taking place. After the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, media and web hosting companies went on a tirade of mass platform denial for the "alt-right." Major "alt-right" publications and figures lost their websites -- many permanently -- as well as social media accounts, podcast hosting, email services, YouTube channels, payment systems and even dating websites. The recent Twitter "Terms of Service update" was another blow, closing dozens of far-right accounts simultaneously.

In response, they began creating their own infrastructure. Patreon, the payment platform that allowed people to pay publications or individuals monthly donations, was replaced by Hatreon, a similar service that did not ban users for neo-Nazi associations. Gab was presented as a "free-speech" alternative to Twitter, and had "alt-right" accounts flood its servers when announced. Many websites, including the white nationalist podcast The Daily Shoah and AltRight.com, began limiting their content to paid subscribers, all in the effort to create a financial infrastructure as "alt-right" figures were fired from their jobs and banned from the mainstream internet. As this all happened, their reach was further limited. Hatreon did not work as promised, no one outside of the "alt-right" ventured to Gab, and with their content behind paywalls, they lost their audience. Simply put, the "alt-right's" alternative internet was subpar, and they are slipping from the public conversation.

The coming months will show exactly how much the "alt-right" has been limited by the web platform denial and their own infrastructural incompetence, and attacks on net neutrality will only further limit their ability to create their own media community.

Fascism in the Age of Dinosaurs


The "alt-right" was, in and of itself, an attempt to save white nationalism from the dregs of history, where it had been placed through years of vacant terrorist acts, buffoonish behavior and the mass resistance from anti-fascist organizations. The European New Right, from which it received its earliest inspiration, was an effort to bring the right back into the culture, to avoid the failures of French nationalism seen during the waning years of Algerian colonialism, and to save fascist philosophy from its disrepute. The "alt-right's" expansion was due to its quality of quick adaptation to new technology, political climates and social mores.

We are hitting a period of heavy decline for the "alt-right," and the second half of 2017 has been a sequence of critical hits against it. However, this is not a prediction of its irrelevance and failure. Instead, it is simply a sign of the cracks in the coalition, the points of rupture that can be exploited and widened.

Fascism has always been about reinvention, and without a dynamic opposition, it will just find a way to repackage itself to the same constituencies from which it has drawn in the past.
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 17, 2018 1:05 pm

NEO-NAZI WEBSITE DAILY STORMER IS ‘DESIGNED TO TARGET CHILDREN' AS YOUNG AS 11 FOR RADICALIZATION, EDITOR CLAIMS
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Members of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) rally near City Hall on April 17, 2010 in Los Angeles, California.

Anglin’s remark was part of a discussion about how memes are used by neo-Nazis to “indoctrinate” children into sharing their beliefs. Cantwell later took a call from a boy claiming to be 14 years old. The boy praised Anglin, 33, and Cantwell, 37, as being influential on him, adding: “I’m sitting next to a bookshelf with Mein Kampf,” referring to the autobiography of Adolf Hitler. Cantwell seemed to grow nervous while talking to the boy, asserting that the show was meant only for entertainment, but Anglin quickly embraced the listener.

"[White] men naturally want this,” he boasted. “Our goal has to be to give this [ideology] to teenagers and even before teenagers.”

Anglin, who in addition to praising terrorists has repeatedly promoted violence against young women and girls, used the opportunity to boast how he had targeted young children for recruitment into hate groups.

“Did that kid say he was 14? You've got this coming up now. Over the next five years, you're going to see an entire generation coming into their 20s that are on board with all of this,” Anglin bragged about his neo-Nazi beliefs. “When you think about the number of listens and hits that we get...we have created a movement among the youth that we're not even able gauge the size of."

Daily Stormer essentially serves as the homepage of the anti-Semitic alt-right movement, which has been linked to a number of violent crimes in recent months. It regularly posts propagandistic lies about the genocide of the Jewish people during World War II, claiming no such thing ever happened. The site has also posted rants from Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer appearing to call for the wholesale slaughter of Jewish people. Keegan Hankes, an intelligence analyst with Southern Poverty Law Center, told Newsweek that Auernheimer was likely “fully aware” of what he was doing in calling for violence. “I think he’s being quite sincere about these things,” he added. Auernheimer could not be reached for comment.

Anglin declined an opportunity to comment for this article, but Cantwell told Newsweek: “I wish I had read Mein Kampf [at age 14]—my life would have turned out better.” Cantwell is currently under house arrest in Virginia on two felony charges for allegedly using tear gas and pepper spray at the Charlottesville rally.

The idea of neo-Nazis recruiting disaffected 11-year-olds—who are legally too young to see recent Star Wars films in the theater without supervision—may leave some feeling disgusted, but targeting children for hate groups is nothing new, according to Elisa Hategan, the author of Race Traitor, a memoir of her life inside of a hate movement. Hategan, who is now 43, became a poster child for Heritage Front, Canada’s largest white supremacist group, at the age of 16.


http://www.newsweek.com/website-daily-s ... ims-782401




American Dream » Sat Nov 18, 2017 11:58 am wrote:
Andrew Anglin Can’t Stop Kvetching Over His ‘Atlantic’ Profile

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The Atlantic recently published an article for its December 2017 issue on Andrew Anglin, the Neo-Nazi founder of The Daily Stormer.

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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 22, 2018 8:24 pm

2017 (Worst) Person Of The Year

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Time for the third annual award for the person or persons who had the biggest negative impact on the country last year.


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