European Fascism Research Articles

“Peace Is Dangerous”: Toward a Du Boisian Theory of Colonial Post-fascism

This article asks: “How was the rhetoric of post or anti-fascism used to develop colonial projects in the inter and postwar period?” Through investigating the Du Bois archive, I answer this through producing a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. While many have written about the connections between European fascism and colonialism in theories of “colonial fascism,” a Du Boisian approach leads us to the concept of colonial post-fascism, demonstrating the array of colonial practices which were instigated in the name of world peace in the inter and postwar era. Colonial post-fascism is characterized by three processes that Du Bois wrote about. First, colonial post-fascism involves a bifurcation between colonial violence and peace, such that Western powers in the inter and postwar period could make commitments to world peace without interrogating the actions of their empires. Second, colonial post-fascism involves the process by which empires developed their imperial practices to rebuild from the effects of the war against fascism. Finally, colonial post-fascism involves the U.S. empire increasing its militarization, which developed in the fight against fascism, to secure colonial power under the rhetoric of maintaining world peace. This article makes several contributions. First, instead of highlighting the link between European fascism and colonialism, I demonstrate how colonialism shaped European post-fascism. Second, I contribute toward the project of undoing bifurcated histories of the West which elide discussions of colonial violence. Finally, I highlight how Du Bois’s involvement in the peace movement was not just activism, but also generative to social theory.

Atlantic Passage and the Fugitive Text

Abstract This essay intervenes in global histories of theory and exile modernism by developing fugitivity as a capacious lens for examining entangled histories of flight and artistic practice in the Atlantic world. I draw on theorist and poet Fred Moten’s theorization of the concept to foreground a missed encounter between fugitivity’s Antillean history and the communist writer Anna Seghers, whose escape from European fascism places her in a Martinique internment camp in 1941. After examining how fugitivity uneasily merges histories of Black struggle and art with a tradition of modernist antifascist writing, I proceed by closely reading Seghers’s novella on the Haitian revolution, Die Hochzeit von Haiti (1948). Seghers’s text, I argue, imagines fugitive struggle and marronage as a lawless, ‘deranged’ freedom. I show how the novella’s own historiographic and narrative framing redouble the efforts of its protagonists to regulate fugitive struggle via various forms of mastery, most notably: literacy.

Style over substance? The Blueshirts and transnational fascist culture

ABSTRACT The central debate over the Blueshirt movement has centred on whether the movement can be classified as fascist. The two most significant accounts of Blueshirtism, by Maurice Manning (1971) and Mike Cronin (1997) have largely avoided explicit comparisons between the Blueshirts and other European fascist movements. While John Newsinger (2001) has argued that the Blueshirts may be usefully compared to the British Blackshirts, and Fearghal McGarry (2005) has highlighted aspects of Eoin O’Duffy’s engagement with Italian Fascist ideas and practices, there is still more work to be done in exploring transnational links and possible comparisons between the Blueshirts and continental European fascist movements. This article argues that by interrogating the political culture of Blueshirtism, we can better understand its place within the spectrum of European fascisms. This article considers both the “high” and “low” aspects of Blueshirt culture. It examines the links between the Blueshirts and European fascist movements by analysing both political thought and political uniforms. By applying a transnational lens, we can thus gain a more holistic understanding of one of the most controversial political movements in modern Irish history.

Fascist Racism and Modernist Animals: Toward a Posthuman Sovereignty

This article reads modernist animals against the dominating strategies of fascist racism, examining the hierarchization of bodies along the human/nonhuman divide in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and Virginia Woolf’s Flush and how the animals in both works challenge the integrity of the human category. Through this analysis, these texts raise urgent biopolitical concerns regarding the regulation of life and the “properly” human, each deploying nonhuman animals in responses (pro and con) to mid-twentieth-century European fascism. Yet the nonhuman exceeds human representation, even as it comes to be constitutive of a humanity predicated on a sovereign distinction from and dominance over those who are dehumanized through mechanisms of race and species. This nonhumanization, I argue, also opens new forms of life, as the contamination of the human by its other that plays out in these authors’ modernist biopolitics reveals sovereign capacities that are distinctly posthuman.

Роль сетей крайне правых в культурной войне и международных отношениях в Европе

The author analyzes the internationalization of European far right civil societies as non-traditional political actors that engage in international relations creating ideological networks. The purpose of the article is to reveal the role of European fascist civil societies in international ideological activism as a response to a perceived cultural war against globalism and cultural Marxism of left internationalists. The article analyzes and comprehensively defines the issue of the cultural war in the West and describes the characteristics of Spanish fascist civil societies as non-traditional political actors exposing their perspective as cultural war revolutionaries. Attempts to create international far right networks by Spanish actors are studied based on the analysis of The Militant – The Cultural War, the manifesto published by the Spanish fascist civil society European Future in February 2023. A discourse analysis of this document exposes the ideological narratives of this group that can help to create a theoretical framework of the cultural war concept for European far right politics. The results demonstrate that European far right activists consider there is an ideological war against Marxists and other leftist groups. Activists of the European Future see themselves as far right revolutionaries capable of causing an ideological revolution in European democracies. The manifesto serves as a tool to call out to other European far right activists of the continent to join them. The results can contribute to future research of ideological extremism and European far right activism.

Vulgar, Crude, Foolish: Brecht, Teaching, Fascism

This essay examines some senses in which we might think of Brecht’s Marxism as vulgar, placing particular emphasis on his interest in the vulgar as vulgate: the teaching of practical knowledge in the common tongue. The essay then contrasts Brecht’s vulgar Marxism with his concept of crude thinking, arguing against Walter Benjamin’s influential interpretation of the concept to claim instead that if we examine how Brecht presents crude thinking in his 1934 Threepenny Novel, we see that for him, crude thinking is not something to be emulated and learned; it is ultimately fascist thinking. Yet precisely because it is an anomalous moment in his work, diametrically opposed to his vulgar Marxism, crude thinking also gives a glimpse of a different Brecht who would have recognized how European fascism has recapitulated European colonialism and reckoned more adequately with the psycho-political mechanisms and force of racialized identification and projection.

Lisette Model: Another Frankfurt School Photographer in New York

Abstract This essay examines the portrait work of the Austrian-American photographer Lisette Model, with a special focus on her representation of the American lumpenproletariat in the Reflections series, Model's first after coming to New York in 1938 as an Austrian-French Jewish émigré, and in her Bowery portrait series. Within the history of American postwar photography, Model stands as a salient figure, a pioneer who located and defined the issues, options, and contradictions of photography as an artistic practice in the “New York School of photography.” Model's rendering of her subjects as eccentric, fantastic, and spectacular in their expressions and emotions propelled the émigré photographer with meager experience into a central position in the making of mid-century American photography, both social-documentary and commercial. Moving beyond the localized context of postwar American photography in which Model's work has been largely investigated, this essay argues for an understanding of Model's New York portraits as being shaped and informed by the photographer's consideration of the crisis of history and the violence enacted by fascism in Europe, as well as the historical condition of exile. One of the essay's claims is that Model revitalized a kind of pleasurable violence, one that enacts a sense of excessive bodily dynamism, often to the point of self-destruction, on the bodies of the American lumpenproletariat at leisure, in order both to come to terms with the role of the lumpenproletariat as the central subject of fascist politics and aesthetics in the Old World and to put pressure on the conditions of the mass subject and mass politics in the New World.

THE LEGIONARY INSURGENCY OF JANUARY 1941 IN BUCHAREST – NEW ARCHIVE DISCLOSURES

In the literature of the interwar period and World War II, the severe divide between diverse political conservative trends, including authoritarian conservatism and right wing extremism, had been obvious for some time. In the historiography on the Legionary Rebellion in Romania, as it is frequently termed, of 21-23 January 1941, this perspective was disregarded, despite its considerably explanatory potential. This work takes a novel approach to this topic, analyzing with historical-archival arguments the great clash between two eminently incompatible organizations: one of the elites with authoritarian traditional leanings, and the other revolutionary, intolerant of the old hierarchies and inspired by European fascism, promoting national purification through violence and the annihilation of others. This research will reconsider some of the key notions and assumptions underpinnings the disputes and emphasize a sequence of critical decision-making activities based on unstudied Romanian Secret Service data1. Also, the work involves a critical analysis of the information regarding the legionary insurgency through the lens of interwar intelligence and their presentation to the readers, whether they are specialists or a history enthusiasts, both from a historical, analytical, and especially applied and exemplary perspective.

«Қазақтар Екінші дүниежүзілік соғыста: шетел архивтерінен жаңа құжаттар» (2018-2020 жж.) мемлекеттік гранты бойынша жаңа табыстар

The participation of Kazakhs in the movement of resistance in Europe is a glorious page of both Kazakh and European history. The study and use of archival documents that shed light on the participation of Kazakhs in the fight against fascism, on the fate of people who were captured by the fascists, the discovery of the burials of fallen heroes, the restoration of the names of people who were officially considered missing, is an important part of the formation and preservation of the historical memory of the Kazakh people. Complex interdisciplinary study of the problems of the participation of Kazakhs in the Second World War in European countries, is a priority task of the International Research Project “Kazakhs in the Second World War: new documents from foreign archives” under the leadership of a doctor of historical sciences, professor G.M. Mendikulova. In the article, documents about the participation of Kazakhs in the movement of resistance in Europe, identified by the authors in foreign archives, are analyzed. Thousands of Soviet people, prisoners of war and civilians, who were taken to the West by the fascists, ended up in camps, forced labor in Belgian mines, factories, and farms. However, many of them did not accept their participation. People entered into an unequal struggle with fascist invaders, escaped from concentration camps, created partisan detachments. They defeated the enemy together with European patriots. The testimonies of eyewitnesses, certificates, reports on the actions of partisan detachments, documents on losses and burials found in the archives allow to restore and make public the history of the exploits of Kazakhs who heroically fought against fascism in Europe

Political Mysticism and the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania. A Cognitive Approach

"Political Mysticism and the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania. A Cognitive Approach. The purpose of this article is to explore the public discourse of the Iron Guard, the often called “exotic” Romanian fascist movement. I will focus especially on the messianic figure of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the charismatic leader of the movement, and the long lasting fascination he has exerted in the Romanian public space for more than a century now. The approach taken here is based on Gilles Fauconnier’s and Mark Turner’s conceptual integration theory and it is an attempt to show how by blending various mental spaces, from religious elements to medieval historical characters and events, the movement managed to create a unique mix that seemed to set it apart from other European fascist movements. Its members were extremely young and, by all accounts, genuinely religious, even practicing a type of political „mysticism” that was rather uncommon elsewhere. Keywords: discourse, ideology, cognitive linguistics, mental space, conceptual integration, political religion "

James Joyce's Liebestod : Fascism as Civil War

Abstract: The ending of James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake rewrites the Liebestod , or love-death aria, at the end of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde . Joyce's parody of the Liebestod replaces the fascist myth of national redemption with endless cycles of love and suffering in history. The novel's circularity thereby forms a riposte to the redemption narrative in fascist politics. Joyce's composition and revision of Finnegans Wake from 1922, during the Irish Civil War, to 1939, when he left Paris ahead of the Nazi occupation, illustrate how he understood racial, sexual, and bourgeois desires in nationalism through an artistic trope like the Liebestod , and how he used it to narratively resist the seemingly teleological ascent of fascism in Europe. Further, civil war provides a model for parodying the ideology of racial supremacy by casting it as an attack on one's countrymen and kin.

Preemptive Impunity: The Constituent Power of Trump's Make America Great Again Movement

AbstractHow and why have freedom and social hierarchies and exclusions become fused in Trump's America? What causative factors can explain the emergence within twenty-first century US political culture of a movement notorious for its attacks on basic norms of tolerance, civility, and human decency? In their efforts to respond to such questions, prominent historians, political commentators, and theorists have correlated Trump's rise to political power in terms of his transmogrification of a large segment of the American populace into US liberal democracy's fascist totalitarian Other. While Trump's illiberal pronouncements and actions do indeed bear a resemblance to the political behavior of European fascists, the Americanness of Trump's conquest disposition might be better understood as his resurrection of an archaic variant of liberalism practiced by American settler colonists throughout the expansionist era of US history. How did President Trump persuade or provoke a broad swath of US citizens, who were for the most part accustomed to consider the principles and institutions of liberal democracy essential components of American democracy, to regard his settler conquest disposition as representatively American? What enabled Trump to advocate with preemptive impunity the demolition of liberal institutions and principles? How could he serve simultaneously as the president of the world's most powerful liberal democracy and leader of an insurrectionary movement of latter-day settler colonists? In an effort to address these questions, this essay engages Trump's March 23, 2011, endorsement of Birtherism; Trump's unauthorized transfer of power at the January 20, 2017, inauguration; Trump's August 12–15, 2017, statements about the Charlottesville protest; and Trump's role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection as distinct but interrelated moments in Trump's production of this settler-colonist conquest disposition.

The Good Neighbor policy and Colombia-United States relations

Relations between Colombia and the United States began the 20th century with the seizure of Panama, which opened a new stage in the Monroe Doctrine, that of the Big Stick. With the signing of the Urrutia-Thompson Treaty, the Colombian leadership accepted the facts, and a gigantic U.S. investment began in the 1920s. But the modernization of the country was amalgamated with the growing Latin American nationalism fed by the bad taste of the Big Stick, to which was added the Crisis of 1929 and the rise of fascism in Europe. This number of imponderables led the United States to propose a new deal towards the region, the Good Neighbor, which sought to strengthen economic and political ties with the region and with a mediumsized player, Colombia, where anti-American winds were notorious within a sector of the ruling elite.

Сравнительный анализ социокультурных истоков рок-музыки в СССР и США

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the sociocultural foundations of the emergence of rock music in the USA and the USSR. The aim of the study is to identify the genesis of rock music and to analyze its characteristics in the United States and the Soviet Union. The authors have shown that a significant factor influencing the birth of rock music in the United States was the post-war socio-economic conditions: the absence of destruction in the country's infrastructure, the concentration in the United States of scientists who had fled fascism in Europe, the orientation of the country's budget towards the socio-economic sector, the demographic explosion, the emergence of leisure time. The Soviet Union, which had suffered catastrophic human losses and destruction of industry because of the war, focused the budget on raising the national economy and strengthening the military-industrial complex, so the appearance of rock music in the USSR became possible only after a full economic recovery. Despite the initial copying and imitation of American rock music by Soviet performers, the authors of the article found differences both in the musical material (form - content) and in the ideological (consumerism - sacrifice) and teleological (commodity - mission) aspects of rock music. The results of the study may be useful for philosophers, cultural scientists, as well as teachers of secondary and higher educational institutions to demonstrate the identity of the Russian cultural path using the example of rock music.

“Just the Same as Fascism for Us”

Recent scholarship on fascism has largely centered on identifying the defining features of fascism to determine whether political figures and parties are fascist. These debates take European fascism as paradigmatic, thereby obscuring alternative traditions of antifascist theorizing that can shed new light on the contemporary ascendancy of fascism in the United States and elsewhere. This paper examines one such alternative in the antifascist thought and praxis of the Black Panther Party. Against the widespread claim that fascism could not happen in the United States, the Black Panther Party insisted that the United States had its own forms of fascism. We reconstruct the Panther’s concept of fascism as the generalization of racialized exclusion constitutive of American democracy and explore the antifascist practices to which this definition gave rise.

Radical Nationalist and Philo-Fascist Movements in Argentina in the 1930s

As in many Western countries, in Argentina in the interwar period, an influential right-wing radical movement arose, close in its ideological and political characteristics to European fascism. Initially, it was an intellectual movement that was able to form a political movement that took an important place in Argentine politics, the extreme expression of which was the military-civilian coup of J. F. Uriburu in 1930. In the ideological baggage of the philo-fascists there were theses about the totalitarian state, about the struggle against liberalism and democracy, about the corporate state structure, anti-imperialism and anti-Semitism. The peculiarity of Argentina was such a phenomenon as clero-fascism, a trend that arose from the union of nationalism and Catholic integrism under the banner of right-wing authoritarianism, philo-fascism and clericalism. An attempt to launch right-wing, corporatist reforms during the Uriburu dictatorship failed primarily because of the reluctance of the Argentine ruling elite to change the development model. As a result, philo-fascist groups and movements were pushed out of the political scene, marginalized, but at the same time they retained intellectual and social influence in the country, which was reflected in the following years with the advent of Peronism in the political life of Argentina.

Jewish Women, English Dress: From Kindertransport to Women in Uniform in Wartime England

The study of dress in relation to Jewish identity in England is critically understudied. Historic anxieties concerning the presence of Jews in England impacted the lives of many, refugees seeking asylum from fascist Europe in particular. Images from the snapshot collection of Lorraine Sulzbacher, a German Jewish refugee, are correlated with oral history testimonies from other Kindertransport refugees to explore the identity formation and integration of female Kindertransport refugees in England from 1939 to 1945. This article investigates how dress was used as a visual signifier of integration, and how both dress and photographic practices simultaneously created space for identity formation. It discusses the impact dress had on the formation of identity during the transition from girlhood to adulthood for female Kindertransport refugees. Additionally, this article examines how uniformed war work provided these young women opportunities to develop their identities as displaced European Jewish persons in Britain. This analysis of dress and photography posits that these refugees were a diaspora in formation.

Libido, Psychic Eugenics and Abnormality

Abstract This article attempts to resituate the Greek regime of 4th of August 1936 within the wider context of interwar fascism in Europe and address it as fascist ideology and practice. It does so by pointing to the ways in which the biomedical discourse on gender and sexuality was pivotal in Ioannis Metaxas’s project in terms of playing a crucial role in normalising ideas of racial, class, sexual and gender hierarchy. The article has two areas of focus. The first approaches the eugenic discourse developed in Greece and Europe under liberal governments. This relied on the premise that the mental or psychic disorders it accounted for, identified mainly among the lower classes, were diagnosed as diseases of the ‘libidinous libido’ when it came to criminality, poverty, strikes, psychic diseases and brutal deaths. The second area of focus reveals how, once trained to detect biological and psychical anomalies, Metaxas’s regime managed to perform something that now gives the impression of a magic trick: by waving the wand of psychiatric technocracy over a scene of profound economic inequality, it cultivated an authoritarian, patriarchal, biomedical discourse on psychic normality.

Bernard Bailyn Memorial Remarks October 25, 2020

Bernard Bailyn Memorial Remarks October 25, 2020

Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression

Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression