Fascism - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2022

To better understand cross-border fascist solidarity, this article suggests a new conceptual framework revolving around the term ‘pan-fascism’ and its ‘paradox’. It argues that the existence or non-existence of a pan-fascist ‘paradox’ in the minds of historical fascists is a matter of optics, as it all depends on who is mobilizing the notion of fascist transnationalism. Because of such optical issues, which all must be unpacked historically, the conceptual framework of ‘pan-fascism’ does not offer a simple solution. It, rather, puts emphasis on a key question: how did certain fascists, at various moments in their lives, think about the possibility of fascist transnationalism? To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, this paper takes the work, thought, and practices of the French editors of Je suis partout as a case study, and demonstrates how they attempted to reconcile their commitment to French nationalism with fascist transnationalism.

This article recounts the neglected story of a group of radical-right intellectuals based in Montreal, who mobilized during the 1930s for the establishment of a new Canadian state. Inspired by Ukrainian ultraconservative thought, the Italian School of Elitism, and fascist corporatism, this diverse group founded an interwar movement called the Classocracy League of Canada. Their vision framed Canadian identity in Christian and European supremacist terms, while its leading members were engaged with other Canadian and transnational fascistic organizations, such as the Christian National Social Party and the Friends of National Spain. Although the Classocracy League of Canada remained ultimately marginal, its vision of racially restricted pluralism represented a novel form of exclusionary politics at the basis of which was fascist ideology.

This article seeks to exorcise some of fascism’s more haunting taxonomic horrors by focusing on the multiple ‘phantasmagorical’ aspects of comparative fascist studies which thwart attempts to achieve definitive resolutions of such nebulous and contested issues as its relationship to the radical right. It first considers the lasting traumatic effect on collective memories resulting from the catastrophic scale of inhumanity and casualties generated by the Third Reich and the war needed to destroy it. It argues that the dark psychological shadow cast by World War II, along with Marxist essentialism and the speculative component of all conceptualization, has made mapping the relationship between fascism and the contemporary radical right particularly fraught not just with ideological controversy but even subliminal psychological factors that subvert objectivity. It then suggests how the difficulties such issues pose to modelling the relationship can be overcome by the consistent application of widely agreed ideal types of the key phenomena to establish the intricacies of fascism’s morphological adaptation to postwar realities and its often subtle interactions with new non-fascist forms of right. On this basis a complex but comprehensible and heuristically researchable relationship between fascism and the radical right looms into view which is spectral in a sense that owes more to natural science than the supernatural.

The Exército de Libertação de Portugal [ELP; Portugal’s Liberation Army] was one of the most infamous clandestine organizations active during the Portuguese transition to democracy, bringing together far-right militants from the deposed authoritarian regime. This organization has been considered the most dangerous terrorist group fighting for the restoration of Estado Novo’s regime. This article aims to challenge this statement, recurrently defended by international historiography, through an in-depth case study of the ELP, which is assessed in its genesis, structuring, ideological identity, strategy and operative capacity, permeability to repression, and dissolution. This study is based on a qualitative methodology triangulating data dispersed in the existing scientific and journalistic literature with data collected, unprecedently, in private archives and through face-to-face interviews with former ELP militants. Therefore, this paper is of importance to scholarship on the Portuguese transition to democracy, but also on the role of the extreme right in other post-authoritarian contexts, and on political violence in processes of democratization.

While much academic effort has been devoted to exploring various aspects of right-wing extremist lone-actor terrorism, little attention has been devoted to establishing how the terrorists create meaning by locating themselves within a larger narration of history. This article tries to fill this gap, by analysing the conceptions of history and the historical narratives evoked in the manifestos that the right-wing extremist perpetrators uploaded online in relation to the terrorist attacks in Norway on July 22, 2011 and in Christchurch, New Zealand March 15, 2019. Employing a combination of discourse and narrative analysis, the article argues that a shared fascist ‘regime of historicity’ may be identified in the manifestos. Furthermore, it places the narratives found in the manifestos in relation to different right-wing extremist virtual communities.