Fascists Among Us Page 10
The agonising victory of accelerationism only becomes appealing when it’s the only alternative to defeat. To truly fight fascism, we need to present something better. That need is urgent.
If Person X succeeds in recruiting an anonymous legion of imitators, many people will die. But his turn to terror stemmed from the inability of his cohort to build a viable fascist party — from, in other words, a political failure.
Other fascists might not fail. On the European continent, fascism already means something other than the tiny groups marching in Australia and the United States. In many countries there, fascists do march in the street. In some places, they even sit in parliament.
We are not facing a situation akin to Germany in 1933. Yet, for the first time in generations, a reprise of Germany in 1933 no longer seems completely ruled out.
As we’ve seen, fascism grows during crises, when a whole social layer, despairing at its prospects, embraces the idea of redemptive violence. In different circumstances, that violence needn’t look as overtly nihilistic as a random massacre.
The British poet Michael Rosen once wrote of the assumption that ‘fascism arrives in fancy dress/worn by grotesques and monsters’. This, he said, was wrong. As a mass phenomenon, fascism doesn’t wear the face of a rage killer. It doesn’t resemble Person X:
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you …29
We might also add to that list ‘save the environment’ since, throughout Europe, the far right increasingly talks about climate — and says the solution requires more borders and walls. With even progressives demanding the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’, it’s not hard to imagine circumstances in which authoritarian ‘emergency measures’ enjoy wide support.
Rosen warns that fascists don’t openly declare that they represent ‘militias, mass/ imprisonments, transportations, war and/ persecution’. Yet that’s a good description of the future that many commentators already predict if uncontrolled warming continues.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
Naomi Klein argues that it’s possible to think of climate change as not merely a threat but also as an opportunity, since any serious attempt to address the environmental crisis necessarily confronts many other social problems. The companies that pump pollutants into the environment simultaneously exploit their workforces; governments that clear forests also dispossess indigenous people.
‘As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend,’ Klein says, ‘we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up.’30
In many places, a new generation now talks not merely of ameliorating climate change, but also of a program for green employment, sustainable transport, public housing, and new infrastructure. The fight against the forces ruining the planet means, they say, fighting for improvements, for change, for progress — a panoply of measures to make the future better, rather than simply less worse.
The more we offer an alternative to environmental destruction — and to the society that unleashes such destruction — the more squalid and miserable fascism seems.
And that, perhaps, is how victims of Christchurch might be commemorated.
We cannot undo what was done. We cannot restore to life Ansi Alibava, Husna Ahmed, Haji-Daoud Nabi, Sayyad Milne, or the others killed by fascist hate. But, by building a better world, we might yet do them honour.
Acknowledgements
This project was assisted by the Cultural Fund of the Copyright Agency. It relied, in particular, on the brave research and activism of Andy Fleming. The following people provided invaluable feedback: Geoff Boucher, Giovanni Tiso, and Stephanie Convery.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Fergus Hunter, ‘The Internet: optimised for hate, terror and chaos’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 March 2019.
Bill Bostock, Kieran Corcoran, and Bryan Logan, ‘This Timeline of the Christchurch Mosque Terror Attacks Shows How New Zealand’s Deadliest Shooting Unfolded’, Business Insider, 19 March 2019.
‘We Shall Speak Their Names: remembering the victims of the Christchurch mosque shootings’, The Guardian, 21 March 2019.
Seth G Jones, ‘The Rise of Far-Right Extremism in the United States’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 7 November 2018.
Anti Defamation League, ‘Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2018’, January 2019.
Andy Fleming, @slackbastard, ‘Re #ChristchurchTerrorAttack. This img was shared by Nathan Sykes on his now closed blog. In it, Tom Sewell of The Lads Society states that the boys knew the killer and he’d been around since 2016. #antifa #auspol #FCKNZS #NewZealandMosqueAttack’, 27 March 2019
1 ‘AN ACTUAL FASCIST’
Brenton Tarrant, ‘The Great Replacement’, 2019, p. 15.
See Richard J. Evans, ‘Thank You, Dr Morell’, London Review of Books, 21 February 2013, p. 37.
Ashley Hoffman, ‘Godwin’s Law: what the creator thinks of Hitler comparisons’, Time, 29 June 2017.
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (Psychology Press, 1993), p. 26.
Umberto Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’, New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995.
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 218.
Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory: critical perspectives on fascist ideology (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 105.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Roger Eatwell, ‘Political Violence and Institutional Crisis in Interwar Southern Europe’, in Rethinking the Nature of Fascism: comparative perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 178.
Robert G.L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: the free corps movement in postwar Germany, 1918–1923 (Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 42.
George L. Mosse, ‘Introduction: The Genesis of Fascism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1.1 (1966), p. 17.
Tarrant, p. 34.
Tarrant, p. 73.
Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’!: fascists and fascism in Britain between the wars (Jonathan Cape, 2005), p. 120.
Nigel Jones, Mosley: Life & Times (Haus, 2004), p. 88.
Jones, p. 83.
Michael A. Spurr, ‘“Living the Blackshirt Life”: culture, community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940’, Contemporary European History, 12.3 (2003), 305–22 (p. 311).
Jones, p. 102.
Pugh, p. 157.
Pugh, p. 286.
Richard C. Thurlow, ‘The Guardian of the “Sacred Flame”: the failed political resurrection of Sir Oswald Mosley after 1945’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33.2 (1998), 241–54 (p. 250).
Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British fascism (Viking, 2006), p. 581.
Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the resurrection of British fascism after 1945 (I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 140.
2 ‘SWEEP IT ALL UP!’
Julian Borger, ‘Blogger Bares Rumsfeld’s Post 9/11 Orders’, The Guardian, 24 February 2006.
Neta C Crawford, ‘United States Budgetary Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars Through FY2019: $5.9 trillion spent and obligated’ (Watson Institute Inter
national and Public Affairs, Brown University, 2018).
Douglas Little, Us versus Them: the United States, radical Islam, and the rise of the green threat (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 13.
Tarrant, p. 3.
Tarrant, p. 15.
Henry Ford, The International Jew: the world’s foremost problem (CreateSpace Independent Publishing), p. 2.
David Noon, ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. Ford. Love, Adolf’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 July 2008.
Edward W. Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Cultural Critique, 1 (1985), 89–107 (p. 99).
Mattias Gardell, ‘Terror in the Norwegian Woods’, Overland Literary Journal, 2011, issue 205.
‘Murdoch Says Muslims Must Be Held Responsible for France Terror Attacks’, The Guardian, 10 January 2015.
Peter Hart, ‘Bill O’Reilly Explains the “Muslim Problem”’, FAIR, 20 May 2011; MPower Change, ‘86 Times Donald Trump Displayed or Promoted Islamophobia’, Medium, 19 April 2018.
‘K.K.K. Leader Admits Subsidizing Call for Boycott of Kosher Products’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 17 February 1966.
Alex Mann, ‘Why Are Some Australians Campaigning against Halal and What’s Its Effect?’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 20 November 2014.
Cory Bernardi, ‘For Australia’s Sake We Need to Ban the Burqa’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 May 2010.
Wajahat Ali and others, ‘Fear, Inc.: the roots of the Islamophobia network in America’, Center for American Progress, 26 August 2011 [accessed 25 April 2019].
Halima Kazem, ‘Funding Fear of Muslims: $206m went to promoting “hatred”, report finds’, The Guardian, 20 June 2016.
Hamid Dabashi, ‘Islamophobia, Liberal Zionism and Neoliberal Imperialism’, Alaraby, 17 November 2014 [accessed 30 April 2019].
Matt Carr, ‘You Are Now Entering Eurabia’, Race & Class, 48 (1), 2006, p. 7.
Mark Steyn, America Alone: the end of the world as we know it, Regnery, 2006, p. xvi.
Michael Brull, ‘2,891 Murdoch Media Stories Trashing Islam In A Single Year, Study Reveals’, New Matilda, 3 March 2018.
Tarrant, p. 3.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, ‘The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”’, New Yorker, 27 November 2017.
David B. Green, ‘This Day in Jewish History 1938: nations discuss jewish refugees, get nowhere, but then they hadn’t planned to’, Haaretz, 6 July 2015.
Hannah Arendt, Imperialism: part two of the origins of totalitarianism (Harvest, 1976), p. 149.
Williams.
Richard Spencer (ed), The Great Erasure: the reconstruction of white identity, Radix 1st edition (Washington Summit Publishers, 2012).
Michael Edison Hayden, ‘New Zealand Terrorist Manifesto Influenced by Far-Right Online Ecosystem, Hatewatch Finds’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 15 March 2019.
Alan Pyke, ‘The Dark History of the New Zealand Killer’s “Great Replacement”’, Think Progress, 15 March 2019.
Ted Hesson, ‘Five Ways Immigration System Changed After 9/11’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation News, 11 September 2012.
Sarah Gonzalez, ‘No One Expected Obama Would Deport More People Than Any Other U.S. President’, WNYC, 20 January 2017.
Marisa Franco and Carlos Garcia, ‘The Deportation Machine Obama Built for President Trump’, The Nation, 27 June 2016.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Translated by Joan Pinkham, (New York: MR, 1972), p. 35.
David A. Neiwert, The Eliminationists: how hate talk radicalized the American right (PoliPoint Press, 2009), p. 19.
Heather Digby Parton, ‘Ann Coulter Has Fallen from Grace — and the Reason Why Is Terrifying’, Salon, 29 June 2015.
David W. Moore, Gallup Inc, ‘Bush Job Approval Highest in Gallup History’, Gallup.com, 24 September 2001.
See Jeff Sparrow, Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right (Scribe, 2018).
‘Tea Party Canvass Results’, Washington Post, 24 October 2010.
Nina Burleigh, ‘Donald Trump and the FEMA Camps Crowd’, Newsweek, 19 August 2016; Caitlin Dickson, ‘Agenda 21: the UN conspiracy that just won’t die’, Daily Beast, 14 April 2014; Morgan Whitaker, ‘Where Anti-Obama Fanatics Get Their “Facts”’, MSNBC, 24 October 2013.
See Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin, National Populism: the revolt against liberal democracy (Pelican, 2018), p. 57. Note, though, Eatwell and Goodwin do not see national populism as racist.
3 ‘HAIL TRUMP!’
Martin Pengelly, ‘Word of the Year 2016: for Merriam-Webster, “surreal” trumps “fascism”’, The Guardian, 19 December 2016.
BBC News, 31 August 2016.
M.J. Lee, ‘Why Some Conservatives Say Donald Trump’s Talk Is Fascist’, CNN, 25 November 2015.
Max Ehrenfreund, ‘Why You Should Stop Calling Donald Trump a Fascist’, Washington Post, 4 December 2015; Jim Gilmore, ‘Trump’s Immigration Rhetoric Is “Fascist Talk”’, Buzzfeed News, 21 November 2015.
Jamelle Bouie, ‘Donald Trump Is a Fascist: it is the political label that best describes what the GOP front-runner has become’, Slate, 25 November 2015.
Chokshi Niraj, 2016. ‘Trump Accuses Clinton of Guiding Global Elite Against U.S. Working Class’, New York Times, 13 October 2016.
Steve Guest, ‘Trump: If A Protester Throws A Tomato At Me, “Knock The Crap Out Of Them”’, Daily Caller, 1 February 2016.
Chauncey DeVega, ‘Conservatism in the Age of Obama: Trump’s violent rhetoric against Hillary has been festering for years within the GOP’, Salon, 11 August 2016.
Joseph Goldstein, ‘Alt-Right Gathering Exults in Trump Election With Nazi-Era Salute’, New York Times, 20 November 2016.
David Greason, I Was a Teenage Fascist, (McPhee Gribble, 1994), p. 41.
Tarrant, p. 17.
T.K. Kim, ‘Hate Website Stormfront Sees Rapid Growth of Neo-Nazi Community’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 27 July 2015.
Eli Saslow, ‘Hate Groups’ Newest Target’, Washington Post, 22 June 2008.
Andrew Jakubowicz, ‘Alt_Right White Lite: trolling, hate speech and cyber racism on social media’, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: an interdisciplinary journal, 9.3 (2017), p. 41.
Dale Beran, ‘4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump’, Medium, 14 February 2017.
Mattathias Schwartz, ‘Malwebolence — The World of Web Trolling’, The New York Times, 3 August 2008.
Richard Seymour, ‘The Gamification of Fascism’, Patreon, 29 April 2019.
Luke O’Brien, ‘My Journey to the Center of the Alt-Right’, The Huffington Post, 3 November 2016.
Ashley Feinberg, ‘This Is The Daily Stormer’s Playbook’, Huffington Post, 14 December 2017.
O’Brien.
Ana Valens, ‘8chan Is at the Center of the Christchurch Mosque Shootings — and Its Roots Are in Gamergate’, The Daily Dot, 15 March 2019.
Joshua Green, ‘Inside the Secret, Strange Origins of Steve Bannon’s Nationalist Fantasia’, Vanity Fair, 17 July 2017.
Tina Nguyen, ‘Far-Right Trump Adviser Tied to Anti-Semitic Paramilitary Group’, Vanity Fair, 4 April 2017.
Spencer Sunshine, ‘A Guide to Who’s Coming to the Largest White Nationalist Rally in a Decade’, Political Research Associates, 10 August 2017.
Jane Coaston, ‘Trump’s New Defense of His Charlottesville Comments Is Incredibly False’, Vox, 26 April 2019.
Danny Katch, ‘The Sad Spectacle of “Sloppy Steve” Bannon’, Truthout, 14 January 2018.
Chris Schiano and Freddy Martinez, ‘Neo-Nazi Hipsters Identity Evropa Exposed In Discord Chat Leak’, Unicorn Riot, 6 March 2019.
Katie Mettler, ‘How A Black Man “Outsmarted” Neo-Nazi Group — And Became Their New Leader’, NDTV.com, Marc
h 2019.
Allie Contie, ‘A Prominent American Hate Group Just Collapsed Because of an Affair’, Vice, 15 March 2018.
Natasha Lennard, ‘Is Antifa Counterproductive? White Nationalist Richard Spencer Would Beg to Differ’, The Intercept, 17 March 2018.
Brett Barrouquere, ‘Where Are They Now? Some of the Key Players in Unite the Right Have Faded from the Scene over the Last Year’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 9 August 2018.
Susy Buchanan, ‘Showdown in Shelbyville: how old school white nationalists failed to deliver in Tennessee’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 31 October 2017.
Joshua Eaton, ‘Hundreds of Anti-Racist Protesters Swarm Tiny, Far-Right Rally in Boston’, Think Progress, 18 August 2018.
4 ‘SCREW YOUR OPTICS!’
Taly Krupkin, Amir Tibon, and Judy Maltz, ‘“Screw Your Optics, I’m Going In”: suspected white supremacist shooter behind Pittsburgh synagogue attack’, Haaretz, 28 October 2018.
Jane Coaston, ‘The Alt-Right Is Debating Whether to Try to Look Less Like Nazis’, Vox, 10 August 2018.
Will Carless and Aaron Sankin, ‘The Hate Report: the alt-right is a mess’, Reveal, 23 March 2018.
Brendan O’Connor, ‘The Fascist Right Is Bloodied and Soiled’, Splinter, 29 March 2018.
Tarrant, p. 18.
Tarrant, p. 6.
Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (Little, Brown and Company, 1977), p. 54.
Robert Evans, ‘Shitposting, Inspirational Terrorism, and the Christchurch Mosque Massacre’, Bellingcat, 15 March 2019.
Tarrant, p. 47.
Talia Lavin, ‘The Death of Fascist Irony’, New Republic, 20 March 2019.
Paul E. Mullen, ‘The Autogenic (Self-Generated) Massacre’, Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 22, 2004.
Bonnie Berkowitz, Denise Lu, and Chris Alcantara, ‘More Than 50 Years of U.S. Mass Shootings: the victims, sites, killers and weapons’, Washington Post, 5 June 2019.
Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan, ‘A Guide to Mass Shootings in America’, Mother Jones, 31 May 2019.
Thomas G. Bowers, Eric S. Holmes, and Ashley Rhom, ‘The Nature of Mass Murder and Autogenic Massacre’, Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 25.2 (2010), 59–66 (p. 62).