Fascism - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2021

The relationship between far-right political streams and fascism is a recurring topic in scientific literature. However, we find a low number of academic publications which try to create a framework for their similarities. This article uses Zeev Sternhell’s theory of fascism as a tool to measure different interpretations of fascism and the far right. According to its basic statement, there exists an anti-Enlightenment tradition in the Western world, which could serve as a substratum of these streams. This proves two points. Firstly, that there are several political groups which share a very similar political vision, even if their levels of aggression and radicalism are different. This is the reason why many neo-fascist, post-fascist, ‘populist’ and conservative parties have interchangeable rhetorical clichés and ideological patterns. Second, it shows that Western countries could successfully fight the rise of upcoming anti-democratic forces through strengthening the values of the Enlightenment-tradition.

This article analyses the role of ‘Skogler’ (Ángel Cortés Gracia), a photographer who worked for the insurgent Falangist forces in the city of Zaragoza, the capital of Aragón, from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Skogler’s strong and early ties to the fascist movement, going back years before the war, suggest a special profile of an individual who supported the Falangist party by means of visual propaganda and printed photographs. Most of the photographs selected for study here have never been published before. They were shot in the early days of the military uprising against the Republic and help give us a more accurate understanding of armed fascism in the Aragonese capital, which ultimately fell to the rebels. This paper is part of an ongoing research project and exhibition to analyse and describe the contents and physical characteristics of the Skogler Archive, composed of more than 3,500 negatives recovered in diverse chronological phases.

The Blueshirts have been one of the most contested and extensively researched subjects in twentieth-century Irish historiography. Debate has focused principally on the extent to which the movement should be understood as a fascist organisation, or as a spontaneous counter-reaction to the domestic political instability that followed Fianna Fáil’s victory in the 1932 general election. However, strikingly little attention has been devoted to tracing the intellectual origins of Blueshirtism in Irish nationalist and republican thought. This article rejects the dominant historiographical representation of the Blueshirts as an aberration in Irish political history and suggests that the movement can only be understood properly in continuity with the political thought of the pre-Civil War period. It is argued, additionally, that the more complex and differentiated ‘hybrid’ theories of ‘fascistization’ developed by scholars like David D. Roberts, António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis provide a useful comparative framework for understanding how nationalist intellectuals such as Michael Tierney, once steadfast in their commitment to the norms of parliamentary democracy, came to endorse a corporatist politics after being voted out of office.

By analysing the anti-feminist and misogynistic narratives in Anders Behring Breivik’s compendium 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, this article argues that Breivik’s counterjihadist worldview can be located both as a permutation of ‘generic fascism’ and as a form of nonegalitarian ‘identity politics’. First, the article reframes and reformulates Nancy Fraser’s concept of identity politics, as it sets Breivik’s ideology in relation to her theory of a ‘politics of recognition’, arguing that her theories – originally developed to analyse left-wing politics – can be used to identify how questions of identity are at the centre of the dynamics of Breivik’s far-right ideology. The article then goes on to demonstrate how Breivik’s misogynist narratives are plotted into a broader fascist conception of history, where the alleged feminised and Islamised present is described as an estrangement from a glorious past dominated by white, European men. As a result, Breivik’s futural palingenetic vision of a ‘European cultural renaissance’ is not only going to resurrect a white, homogenous, ‘Christian’ society, but also restore patriarchy.

This article analyses the conception of history or ‘regime of historicity’ structuring the ideology of the Norwegian fascist party, Nasjonal Samling (1933–1945). It highlights the value of the theory of palingenetic ultranationalism to the understanding of fascist temporality generically and specifically. Generically, because the findings show how Nasjonal Samling’s regime of historicity followed the same structure of revolution and eternity, decay and rebirth, as other fascist movements did. Specifically, because it also shows how Nasjonal Samling drew heavily on Norwegian national myths. The ideologues of ns recoded these myths, and integrated them into their own palingenetic, apocalyptic, and – after 1935 – antisemitic grand narratives. These crystallized in a triadic scheme, forming a fascist regime of historicity, structured around the myth of past greatness, followed by decadence, combined with a fantasy of a future revolutionary rebirth of the nation.

Fascism invites its adherents to be part of something greater than themselves, invoking their longing for honor and glory, passion and heroism. An important avenue for articulating its affective dimension is cultural production. This article investigates the role of violence and passion in contemporary Swedish-language fascist fiction. The protagonist is typically a young white man or woman who wakes up to the realities of the ongoing white genocide through being exposed to violent crime committed by racialized aliens protected by the System. Seeking revenge, the protagonist learns how to be a man or meets her hero, and is introduced to fascist ideology and the art of killing. Fascist literature identifies aggression and ethnical cleansing as altruistic acts of love. With its passionate celebration of violence, fascism hails the productivity of destructivity, and the life-bequeathing aspects of death, which is at the core of fascism’s urge for national rebirth.

This article sketches fascism’s ideological morphology under a post-fascist condition. It builds empirically on three years of ethnographic studies of the radical-nationalist podcast Motgift [Antidote], disclosing that (i) fascist multivocality characterizes and feeds the rhizomic structure of Swedish radical nationalism; (ii) fascist narration locates protagonists and antagonists in driving a plot of ‘genocide against the white race’; and (iii) fascist temporality reinforces ideas of a lost past and degenerated present – prompting a struggle for cultural rebirth and racial revival. The multivocality, narration, and temporality of Motgift illuminate the radical-nationalist politics at work under a post-fascist condition: the state of ideological reconfiguration pondering fascism’s historical downfall.

Scholars have recently begun advocating for the application of social movement theory in the analysis of the rise and development of fascist political entities. While representing a welcome effort to increase the theoretical depth in the analysis of fascism, the approach remains hampered by conceptual deficiencies. The author addresses some of these by the help of a critical discussion that problematises the often incoherent ways in which the concept of ‘movement’ is used when describing fascist political activity both within and across national borders. The analysis then turns to the application of social movement theory to the historical example of the Ustašas. While recent research on social movements has begun to explore the role and character of transnationalism, this case study analysis suggests that the lack of supra-national organisations during the period of ‘classic’ fascism prevented the emergence of a ‘transnational public space’ where fascist movements could have participated. The conclusion is that rather than acting and organising on a ‘transnational’ level, fascist entities appear to have limited themselves to state-based international ‘knowledge-transfer’ of a traditional type.