Recent issi_crws_wp items

Saving Heroism in the Online Sphere: The Heroic in Far-Right Internet Memes

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While the far right is usually associated with an actively practiced hero worship, the relationship of new right-wing movements to the heroic remains undertheorized. This paper seeks to fill this void arguing that far-right online internet meme culture is marked by an ambivalent relationship to heroism, which stands in contrast to the serious, unambiguous take on heroism in “traditional” Nazi and neo-Nazi propaganda: In the context of the Great Meme War, a (partly) self-ironic approach to the desire for heroism can be observed, which, as I argue, serves to immunise the heroic in view of its feared loss/absence in the online sphere.

TUMOR: The (Dis)organization of the Right-Wing Opposition against Mexico’s ‘Fourth Transformation’

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mexico’s current government, led by president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (December 2018-November 2024), launched a program of major overhaul of the country’s governance named “The Fourth Transformation (4T)”. While the reform agenda is largely supported by the masses, these measures have met a strong, multifaceted and relentless reaction from the social and political interests being affected, couched in a right-wing discourse. This opposition, carried out either by individual actors or by coalitions of organized interests, has been sarcastically dubbed TUMOR (“Todos unidos contra Morena”, All United against Morena, the party in power) by 4T supporters.

This article aims at mapping and analyzing the right-wing movement of resistance to the 4T, identifying its main individual and collective actors, their strategies and their international allies. It tests the hypothesis suggested in Kevin Middlebrook’s theory about conservatism and the right in Latin America:...

Politics and Silenced Power of Eleanor Dulles: ‘Good Old Girl’ and ‘Great Woman’ History: From New Deal ‘Left’ to Cold War ‘Right’

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Politics and Silenced Power of Eleanor Dulles: ‘Good Old Girl’ and ‘Great Woman’ History: From New Deal ‘Left’ to Cold War ‘Right’

Culture and Belonging in the USA: Multiracial Organizing on the Contemporary Far Right

Mon, 7 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In a moment of rising nationalism, examining the particular glue that mobilizes people becomes important. In the US, many have rightfully pointed out that White nationalism is on the rise, a movement that seeks to create an all-White nation-state. But, not all far-right organizations in the U.S. are ideologically White nationalist or overtly racist. The Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys, two far-right organizations which have gained prominence in the post “Unite the Right Rally” period, boast multiracial membership and often repurpose antiracist language against their opponents. Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys lead demonstrations against the Left, Antifa, “social justice” advocates and the #Metoo movement, and have gained a following particularly in the Pacific Northwest and California. Through examining the history of far-right multiracial organizing, particularly in the 1990s anti-government militia movements, this paper seeks to contextualize this contemporary trend within a historical...

Digital Fascism: Challenges for the Open Society in Times of Social Media

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This paper takes up the assumption that social media offers a beneficial terrain for the far right to undermine open societies. Identifying perceptions of imperilment as the central impetus for the far right to justify illiberal politics, it analyzes how such perceptions are boosted under the digital condition. This contextualization is essential for our understanding of digital fascism: a highly fluid and ambivalent variant of fascism that lacks a clear organizational center as the digitally networked masses are the engine of their own manipulation. To substantiate this concept, we relate structures of social media to far-right agency in social media. Concretely, we show how the techniques of dramatic storytelling, gaslighting and metric manipulation correspond with the functioning of social media that catalyzes the amplification of fears, the diffusion of post-truth and the logic of numbers. Based on this, we argue that a new perspective on fascism is needed, since digital fascism...

My Girlfriend Became Neo-Nazi: The Right's Presence and Activity in the Internet

Thu, 23 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This paper discusses the role that the right’s presence on the internet has played in this ideology’s rise to popularity and its successful attempts at winning elections. It highlights the main messages that specialized websites and the public chat groups available over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram spread around selected issues, such as climate change, immigration, gay rights, and race in Canada; in an attempt to determine the direction that they want to give to public debate on those matters.

Based on the case study of the spring 2019 provincial elections in Alberta, Canada, I test the hypothesis that the frequency and radical features of messaging distributed by right-wing websites and chat groups in social media increase around election times, as an expression of a sustained and successful effort at influencing the vote along their ideological direction.

Convening Remarks presented by Lawrence Rosenthal at the Inaugural Conference on Right-Wing Studies, UC Berkeley: The Nationalist Internation

Thu, 23 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal, Founder and Chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, offered convening remarks at the opening of the Inaugural Conference on Right-Wing Studies, April 25-27, 2019, University of Cailfornia, Berkeley. In his remarks, Rosenthal proposes the concept of the Nationalist International to explain the shared identity of right-wing actors today.

Remarks presented by Joseph Lowndes on the Opening Keynote Panel of the Inaugural Conference on Right-Wing Studies, UC Berkeley

Tue, 7 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Joseph Lowndes, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, presented remarks as part of the opening keynote panel ("Perspectives on the Far-Right Insurgency: Latin America, Europe and the U.S.") of the Inaugural Conference on Right-Wing Studies, April 25-27, 2019. In his remarks, Lowndes places the current situation in the U.S. in the context of the history of U.S. right-wing extremism, suggesting both the continuity and the novelty of where we are today.

The Right Wing in the Brazilian 2013 Cycle of Protests

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to investigate the narratives of the right-wing protestors that were present in June 2013 cycle of protest about their participation in it and some of the following interpretations and actions they had after that, especially regarding the pro-impeachment cycle, which started on the end of 2014. The aim is to have a closer look at the right-wing protestors in the 2013 cycle of protests to understand who they were, what were their practices and what principles guided them during that time. The, the paper is divided on three sections, besides its introduction and conclusion, as listed: (i) the presentation of June 2013 protests and its relations to contemporary forms of collective action; (ii) the analysis of the interviews made with 16 right-wing demonstrators in Belo Horizonte, systematizing their narratives in the concepts of actors, practices and grammars; (iii) the interviewees understandings of these protests in their lives and the impacts related to the pro-impeachment...

Treason, Treachery and Pro-Nazi Activities by the British Ruling Classes During World War Two

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

How deeply did sympathy for German fascism run in the British establishment in World War Two; and to what extent were pro-Hitler members of the British political and military ruling classes willing to betray their country to the Nazi regime and its Axis allies ? Drawing on primary source material contained in previously-classified MI5 and Government files, this paper adduces evidence that, contrary to the conventional history of a country united in opposition to Hitler, right-wing British MPs, Peers and senior figures in the military clandestinely worked – individually and collectively – to hasten a German victory, and to supplant the elected British Government with a pro-Nazi puppet regime. The activities of this ‘Fifth Column’ included espionage, sabotage, unlawful private attempts to broker peace deals between Germany and Britain, sending military and political intelligence to Berlin, and plans to launch armed fascist coups d’état on London’s streets.

The...

Equal before God, and God Alone: Cultural Fundamentalism, (Anti-)Egalitarianism and Christian Rhetoric in Nativist Discourse from Austria and the US

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the use of Christian rhetoric by nativists in Austria and in the US in the 21^st century. Based on a frame analysis of right-wing ephemera, it shows that while the Austrian Freedom Party has increasingly made use of religious allusions since 2005, it references Christianity as a cultural marker rather than as a faith. Ethnicity and culture are found to play a bigger role in Austrian nativist discourse than in the US, where the faith and value dimensions emerge as more prominent. The article describes different manoeuvres nativists perform to reconcile their policies – and the use of Christian rhetoric in this context – with Christian ethics (egalitarianism, hospitality imperative, etc.). Some of these manoeuvres are qualified as manifestations of cultural fundamentalism (Verena Stolcke), including the presentation of segregation as God's will, opposing immigration in the very name of a diligently reframed ‘neighbour love’, and blanket definitions...

Modern American Conservatisms: Science, Activism and Political Identity in an Age of Fracture

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

From 1981-2005 creationist legal strategy underwent a transformation that belied several foundational conservative attitudes towards postmodernism and epistemological relativism. The upshot of a series of developments in the philosophy and historiography of science, as well as in the United States Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence, this shift constituted a radical break with wide-spread conservative resistance in post-World War Two America to any philosophy that held truth to be somehow sociological or culturally “constructed.” The historical—intellectual and cultural—context within which this change in legal strategy took place is the subject of this thesis. So too, of course, are the conservatives that affected it.

In many ways this is an intellectual history. Ideas here, however, are treated as historical phenomena, not tidy abstractions. My goal in this thesis is to historicize, rather than provide a history, of conservative ideology and identity...

Turkey and the Kurds -- From War to Reconciliation?

Thu, 26 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The social, economic, and political situations of Kurdistan and other areas in which Kurds live have changed drastically during the last decades. The Kurds are now almost totally autonomous in Northern Iraq, building state institutions in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and democratic autonomy in Northwest Kurdistan (eastern Anatolia). Politically, until the 1990s, Kurds were dominated and contentious players; today they are key players in the Near East. This paper considers Kurdish interactions with regional powers - Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria - and ‘disputed boundaries’, and the role of self-determination, autonomy and federalism in solving the Kurdish Question. Within the current context marked by political upheaval of the Kurds in some areas of Kurdistan and the continued repression of Kurds in other areas, I examine the potential for federal solutions to solve the Kurdish Question by giving Kurds regional autonomy within the state boundaries of Turkey.

Where Appalachia Went Right: White Masculinities, Nature, and Pro-Coal Politics in an Era of Climate Change

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In 2000, West Virginia’s electoral votes went for George W. Bush, one of the few times that West Virginia went for anyone but a Democrat after Franklin Delano Roosevelt. More unusual was that in 2000 the southern counties – the coalfields – had a majority voting for the Republican candidate, if by a small margin. That margin has only grown in the Obama elections, while, for the first time, Republican state representatives are being elected to coalfield districts. To understand the electoral transition this thesis looks to a concurrent trend in the Appalachian coalfields: the rise of “pro-coal” political mobilizations. What appears to be grassroots support for the coal industry, a claim this work argues has some validity, has overtaken the cultural and political landscape of the central Appalachian coalfields. This work relies on ethnographic data from the last four years that the author collected as an activist first, then as an undergraduate researcher, to examine the intersection...

The American Freedom Party: White Nationalist Politics and the Fight for Mainstream Access, Civil Rights Era to Present

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Using a diachronic perspective, this paper explores American white nationalist political parties from the mid-twentieth century to present day and their attempts at securing national votes. The parties included are the National States Rights Party, The Populist Party, and the American Freedom Party. While maintaining the central focus on the contemporary American Freedom Party, the major differences in political strategy between the parties are analyzed. Through examination and comparison of the parties’ changes in self-presentation, the societal shift from old racism to new racism becomes evident. The analysis also uncovers a continual change in the understanding of race in American politics within the same time frame.