Fascist Tendencies Research Articles

President Wonder Woman and Congresswoman Batgirl: the authoritarian Überfrau and democratic resilience in superheroine comics

ABSTRACT Comic books are important sites where norms related to gender, leadership, and democratic engagement are negotiated. In this essay, we examine two comic book depictions of women’s political leadership: Diana Prince/Wonder Woman’s stint as US president, published in 1944, and Barbara Gordon/Batgirl’s tenure as a member of US Congress, published between 1972 and 1980. We contrast Wonder Woman’s tale of democratic fragility and gendered conflict with a Batgirl narrative that promotes a more complex view of women’s political agency and subordinates superheroism to the strength of democratic community. We contend that Wonder Woman #7 reflects the fascist tendencies observed in other Golden Age comics and theorize Überfrau as a counterpart to Übermensch, rooted in an ostensible ethic of protection and authoritarian white femininity. Reading Wonder Woman #7 through the lens of the Überfrau reveals the contours of an antidemocratic white women’s authoritarianism that continues to resonate in twenty-first century politics. An antidote to the reactionary Überfrau is offered by Batgirl, who eschews the role of super savior and puts the responsibility for democratic health into voters’ hands. We conclude by examining how these contrasting visions of women’s political leadership are echoed by women politicians in contemporary political culture.

Educational Studies in Wartime: How War and Dictatorship influenced the Educational Theory of Philipp Abraham Kohnstamm (1875–1951)

Between the two World Wars, the Amsterdam physicist Philipp Abraham Kohnstamm (1 875–1951) became one of the founders of Dutch academic pedagogy. In the theory developed by Kohnstamm in the 1920s, the war played a significant role in the background. Kohnstamm’s philosophy of personalism was intended as a defense against fascist tendencies towards Gleichschaltung and dictatorship. With his educational ideas, Kohnstamm wanted to strenghten democratic citizenship and the emancipation of the lower classes. In the 1930s, Kohnstamm entered into a debate with National Socialism and emerged as a principled proponent of democracy and democratic education. As a German and Jew of origin, who later became Dutch and Christian, the rise of National Socialism strongly influenced Kohnstamm and it caused that he only finished three of the seven planned volumes of his magnum opus. In this paper, in which Kohnstamm’s resistance against war and dictatorship is further elaborated, the Dutch scholar is presented as a case of educational studies in wartime.

Relational antifascist education: Resisting neoliberal fascist productions

This essay argues that educational practices are uniquely situated to mobilize antifascist resistance. Contemporary fascism produces through macro- and micropolitical movements. The author looks to how educational practices make molecular fascist productions sensible. Educators can resist the molecular and micropolitical productions of fascist desires by creating and inviting complex relationships in educational practices and spaces. By making the complexity of each individual’s partial struggles sensible, educators resist the microfascist individualizations of contemporary capitalism operative in pedagogy. The development of capitalism into neoliberalism produces new fascisms not reducible to previous fascist iterations. Neoliberalism and fascism must be attended to in their complexities and differences in order to mobilize affective antifascist resistance. In conclusion, this essay argues for complex resistance to the differing fascist tendencies operative in neoliberal academic spaces and practices.

A study of Croatian-Australian identity and discrimination faced by Croatian-backed clubs in Australia’s elite football leagues

Since the 1960s, Croatian soccer clubs have been a notable feature of all major Australian cities, and a number of regional towns, with the highest-profile of these being Melbourne Croatia and Sydney Croatia, both of which played in Australia’s now defunct National Soccer League (NSL) (1977—2004). By being barred from the new A-League, from 2005-06, these clubs experienced marginalization and discrimination similar to that experienced by Irish-Catholic clubs in Scotland. The aims of this study are to explore both Croatian-Australian identity and discrimination through the lens of Melbourne and Sydney Croatia. The myths about the clubs’ alleged fascist tendencies are also explored. The fascist allegations have obscured the very real discrimination faced by these clubs and their supporters, given that the end of the NSL ‘removed’ both clubs from the national-league when ordinary relegation was not deserved. The article draws upon interviews with two Melbourne Croatia administrators and three leaders of the club’s ‘MCF’ ultras

‚Habsburgische Spuren‘ im Leben und Werk Paul Celans

"As was to be expected, the question of the meaning of ‘Habsburg’ for Paul Celan is complex. The place of its origin – Chernivtsi – belonged to Austro-Hungary until 1918, with the end of the First World War the city became Romanian, so Celan was – formally – born in Romania; later he experienced the temporary (1940/41) and long-term (from 1944) Sovietization of Bu-kovina. A (not only) biographical self-localization can be found in the so-called Bremer Rede (1958), in which the poet introduces himself as someone coming from an unknown landscape, a “province of the Habsburg monarchy that has now fallen victim to history.” Subsequently, the cultural structure of the Habsburg world retains for Celan – although born after the disintegra-tion of the multi-ethnic state – a sense of belonging. He understood “Kakanien” (Musil) as an integrative structure and thus as a counter-image to nationalistic and fascist tendencies, whose multilingual, transcultural and interdenominational elements influenced Celan’s works. In this context, ‘Habsburg’ can be read as a synonym for a cultural-literary affiliation that un-dermines (political) boundaries and dividing lines and thus forms a counter-image to the reality of the Cold War."

On the Ownership of the Means of Training: Domination, Asceticism, and Capacities of Resistance

Abstract: This article argues that asceticism—understood in the etymological sense of “training”—can productively be incorporated into analyses of politics. It is of particular use in thinking through questions of inequality and domination. I first theorize askesis as dynamogenic , that is, productive of (political and ethical) capacities. Using case studies of Ancient Athens and twentieth century India, I then analyze askesis as a tool for producing and resisting domination, and suggest the political importance of taking control of “the means of training.” I conclude with reflections on the significance of this framework for understanding neoliberal ethics and rising fascist tendencies.

The Fascists Are Coming! Teacher Education for When Right-Wing Activism Micro-Governs Classroom Practice

U.S. educational reform is often the harbinger of global demands on mathematics education practices globally. It behooves teacher education to ‘catch up’ on current trends, hopefully, to stave off the worst of the fascist tendencies of contemporary politics of education. Past foci on research-based ‘best practices’ and ‘mathematics for all’, grounded in liberal multiculturalism (confirming expectations from critical mathematics education scholarship), have become the targets of activists and politicians, turning once-exemplary teachers and their students into casualties. The four phases of currere are employed to study this phenomenon and to identify strategies and tactics for teacher education programs. The currere methodology indicates that the content of such programs must reduce time devoted to evidence and research-based practice in order to accommodate techniques and knowledge bases for the recognition of right-wing tactics, clowning, slogan parody, and political organizing. Teacher education must further place mathematics teachers’ embrace of expertise, authority, and neutrality within broader perspectives on the politics of education, organizational infrastructure strategies and tactics, resource curation, and personal safety planning. Teacher educators themselves must prepare responses to threats on their careers, lives, and families, and proactive ‘game plans’ for the development of new program curricula.

Polska dyplomacja wobec Związku Radzieckiego po przewrocie majowym

The May Coup did not initially bring about any major changes in Polish foreign policy, although the post-May governmental circles put a stronger emphasis on the Promethean idea and the concept of the Intermarium. In mutual relations between Warsaw and Moscow, a dialogue on the Polish-Soviet non-aggression treaty continued, as before 1926. The main point of contention was Warsaw's position on the necessity of concluding a Polish-Soviet non-aggression pact simultaneously with Moscow's analogous agreements with: Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania. The article presents the path to the agreement from the perspective of Warsaw, taking into account the changing international situation, including the rise of fascist tendencies in Europe, the threat of war and changes in the USSR's domestic policy. The agreement of 25 January 1932 and the non-agreement pact of 25 July that year between Poland and the USSR were the high points of mutually correct relations. Later years, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 17 September showed that Sanation diplomacy was unable to prevent Poland from losing its independence. Whether this catastrophe could have been prevented remains a matter of dispute.

Crisis, state of emergency and state terrorism: particularities of the dictatorship in Argentina (1976−1983)

In Argentina, the 1976 coup d’état was a change of political regime and not just a change of government, from one of democratic origin turned authoritarian to another with fascistic tendencies, since the constant amplification of the State of exception will constitute a structure of state power of fascist projection, whose central characteristics were the expansion of the repressive apparatus and the institutionalization of new branches of the State: the Detention and Extermination Centers and the Task Forces. The character of the regime, however, had a dense sedimentation that combined a complex axiology. The notion of exceptionality allows us to elaborate the problem from a stage prior to State terrorism and to observe how legal and political statutes, for example the exception, secrecy, and military intelligence in a framework of severe capitalist crisis, derived in authoritarian forms of democratic regime and were generating the conditions for the coup d’état. Once the last dictatorship occurred, the concept of exception gave us access to correlate the repressive model with the characteristics of the political regime.

A View on Kracauer’s Concept of Found Story Through People on Sunday (1930)

Gerçekçi kuramcılardan Siegfried Kracauer, sinemaya toplumbilimsel açıdan yaklaşan ilk kuramcılardandır. Caligari’den Hitler’e (1947, 2011a) eserinde Weimar dönemi sinemasını incelemiş ve Nazi Partisi iktidara gelmeden önce filmlerde faşist eğilimlerin simgelerinin görülebileceğini dile getirmiştir. Sinemanın toplumu gerçekçi biçimde yansıtması gerektiğini ifade eden Kracauer, fiziksel gerçekliğin sinemada ‘bulunmuş öykü’ (found story) ile yakalanabileceğini belirtmiştir. Bulunmuş öyküde, hayatın doğal akışının yakalanması, belirsizlik gibi unsurlar önem kazanmaktadır. Bulunmuş öykü, sinemada gerçekliğe ulaşmada işlevsel bir biçim olmasına rağmen toplumun gerçekliğini yansıtmada tek başına yeterli değildir. Naziler iktidara gelmeden hemen önceki yılların Berlin’ini belgeleyen, sıradan insanların kendi gündelik yaşamlarını canlandırdığı Bir Pazar Günü (1930, R. Siodmak, E. Ulmer) filmi, Weimar dönemi sineması içerisinde çekim koşulları, belgesel ve kurmaca arasında kurduğu köprü açısından ayrıksı bir yerde dururken, filmde bulunmuş öykü yapısı görülmektedir. Aynı zamanda, Kracauer’in Caligari’den Hitler’e (2011a) kitabında eleştirdiği Weimar dönemi sinemasının ürünü olmasıyla, eleştirel bir okumaya imkân tanımaktadır. Bu çalışmada, bulunmuş öykü yapısını, sinema ve toplum ilişkisi bağlamında incelemek amacıyla Bir Pazar Günü filmi toplumbilimsel yöntemle analiz edilmiştir. Kracauer’in Caligari’den Hitler’e (2011a) kitabında eleştirdiği film, yazarın Film Teorisi (2015) kitabında ideal film biçimi olarak öne sürdüğü bulunmuş öykü yapısını taşısa da, bu yapının toplumun, dönemin gerçeklerini aktarmada tek başına yeterli olmadığı ortaya koyulmuştur.

The aesthetic politics of fighting for black economic freedom: between militant socialism, fascism and bling-bling

ABSTRACT In its nine-year existence, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) consolidated itself as South Africa’s third-largest party, despite continuous, damaging denunciations of some of its key aspects. I argue that a highly aestheticised politics is key to understanding this persistence, necessitating a political-aesthetic reading. I especially focus on the EFF’s adoption of a militarised party aesthetic in its self-stylisation as a contemporary black liberation army, identifying six ways in which it serves to differentiate the party ideologically from its adversaries and manage its organisational challenges. I further examine how the EFF’s highly aestheticised and militarised politics might confirm recurrent criticisms of fascist tendencies. Based on Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of fascism, I consider the functioning of aestheticisation and militarisation as diversions from the EFF’s duplicitous commitment to revolutionary socialism. Being found too limited in engaging the aesthetic as a relatively autonomous dimension of politics, the Benjaminian reading is supplemented with one that takes the EFF leaders’ conspicuous display of material wealth to function as an important, unofficial party aesthetic rooted in black emancipatory politics. The EFF’s political aesthetics is thus conceptualised as a contradictory and perplexing, yet not ineffective mixture of a socialist-revolutionary and bling-bling aesthetic.

Apparatuses of Denunciation, Neoliberal Governmental Rationality, and the Potential for a Fascist Turn

Abstract This article explores the sociopolitical causes behind the proliferation of the apparatuses of denunciation in Turkey in the 2010s, and the escalation in the number of citizens denouncing their fellow citizens. These developments have taken place within an international context marked with the initiation of similar campaigns in core capitalist countries (e.g., the United States, United Kingdom) in the post-9/11 period mobilizing citizens to watch for suspicious behaviors that potentially signify “terrorist” activities. In Turkey, the Communication Center for the Office of the President, police hotlines/websites, community policing networks, neighborhood heads, the night-guard system, and legal statutes enabling denunciation are parts of these apparatuses. The article argues that the mechanisms of denunciation surfaced as part of the “security states” that emerged in the late 1990s under the dominance of neoliberal governmental rationality that encompasses components creating a fertile sociopolitical fabric both for the materialization of fascist tendencies and a preference for denunciation as a governmental technology. Accordingly, the apparatuses of denunciation in Turkey emerged at a point where the “security state” constructed by the Justice and Development Party government in its second term (2007–11) delivered a fascist turn within the context of the 2008 global financial crisis.

The Mind Reader

Are weak people more prone to follow an authoritarian? In this work of philosophical short fiction, the narrator tells the story of a man he knew in the 1970’s. In this remembered story, the narrator is a psychology student learning about the “F Test,” a test that supposedly allows you to gauge your fascist tendencies. He friend, a Vietnam Vet, disagrees with the simplicity of the test. To prove his point the friend talks to, and easily manipulates, a bohemian woman in the bar to change her life (for the better). The narrator watches and does nothing, but is horrified by how easily this happens. The incident ends their friendship.

The use of the topics and vocabulary of the Second World War in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict 2014-2020 (analysis of foreign historiography)

The object of research is the latest English literature of scientists and analysts in Western Europe and America, devoted to the problems of the information war waged by the Kremlin authorities against Ukraine. It is the problems, events of the Second World War, in the Russian-speaking academic space and the media that are still referred to only as the Great Patriotic War that became the leitmotif of these actions. Moreover, the history of the war is used precisely speculatively, that is, a careful selection of facts and conclusions is carried out, which are adjusted to certain conceptual foundations.
 Investigated problem. As a result of a critical analysis of the works of Western authors, the problem posed in this work is solved: to show the objectivity and evidence of the narratives of foreign authors on the biased presentation of the topics and vocabulary of World War II about the events in the East of Ukraine in 2014-2020.
 Main scientific results. The main scientific result of the study is the conclusion that Western scientists are deeply immersed in the vicissitudes of the conflict, debunking the biased evidence of Russian experts, fascist tendencies are imposed on the basis of false accusations of Ukraine, although such processes have not been recorded by any foreign analysts and observers. One of the stereotypes of Russian propaganda is the reproach for the massive "banderization" of the consciousness of citizens, but at the same time the face and activities of the leader of the OUN (b) are deliberately distorted. Modern studios of historians, diplomats, analysts of Western Europe, the USA, Canada are convincingly criticizing the political and ideological measures of Moscow aimed at discrediting the Ukrainian people. It is emphasized that the process of "nationalization" of history in Ukraine, especially during the Second World War by the Russian establishment, was used in a fraudulent way to tarnish the past of Ukraine. It was noted that, despite all the efforts of the Russian information and propaganda machine, Moscow fails to achieve the desire for results.
 Scope of practical application. The research results, which are innovative in nature, can be used in both cognitive and educational values.

Law‐Gospel theologies of a state of exception

AbstractWe address contemporary concerns with fascism by critically assessing the classic law/gospel relation in Lutheran theology. Karl Holl, founder of the Luther Renaissance in the early twentieth century, develops Luther's experience of the self under the divine wrath in terms that have affinity to what Carl Schmitt calls the “state of exception.” We examine similar non‐dialectical ways of relating law/gospel that nourish fascist tendencies on the right or left in North America.

On the Urgent Need to Re-Engage Classical Marxism

Humankind continues to face the two problems that have existed since the degeneration of the 1917 October Revolution that began in the mid-1920s. While it is experiencing enormous suffering caused by capitalism, there is also a crisis of anti-capitalist leadership. These two problems now cohabit with growing radicalization among sections of the working population and the youth, following the 2007 economic crisis; burgeoning threat of fascistic tendencies both within the state apparatuses and among the masses; and reformism among middle-class Marxist intellectuals (as well as among workers). In this global conjuncture, there is a need to return to the root of the Marxist agenda. This is the classical tradition, which includes the ideas of Marx and Engels and goes beyond their ideas. In this article, I offer an outline of that tradition.

Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms

Abstract This essay interrogates whether existent analytical tools remain adequate to identify and assess what is perceived as the revival of fascistic tendencies today, ultimately arguing that they are not. Fascism cannot be expected to assume the same forms it did a century ago. Class structures, resource distribution schemes, communication potentials, and modes of belonging and exclusion have undergone significant changes. To determine which of the traits of the contemporary power paradigm would foreground new fascistic tendencies, this essay first revisits some of the most crucial insights in Hannah Arendt's study of the origins of totalitarianism. Arendt's perspective is highly valuable in moving the discussion of fascism beyond the delineation of specific historical events toward a theory of fascist power. The point is to distill from Arendt's insights into the connections among imperialism, fascism, and totalitarianism a number of techniques of government that would enable us to repeat the gesture today, but this time within the biopolitics-security-neoliberalism nexus. The power paradigm that this essay (re)constructs is meant to contribute to identifying fascistic and totalitarian trends irrespective of ideological and historiographic differences.

Idyllic Visions of the Past and/or the Death Drive? Right-Wing Responses to a Crisis of Futurity: A review of Mathias Nilges, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future

Idyllic Visions of the Past and/or the Death Drive? Right-Wing Responses to a Crisis of FuturityA review of Mathias Nilges, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future Adam Dylan Hefty (bio) Nilges, Mathias. Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future. EPUB, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Something is different about time in late capitalism. Whatever this something is, it has intensified with the fall of 20th century communism, the increasing financialization of capital, and the return of anti-systemic, sometimes anti-capitalist social movements. In the pauses between the flashes of these movements, cynicism and hopelessness abound in the intellectual space where a left should be. The canard, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," has become a common sense, world-weary truism, while environmental, health, political, and economic stability melt away into a series of crises that render something that feels like an end of the world ever easier to imagine. The last two decades have seen a rising tide of right-wing forces ranging from nationalist governments, fascist street movements, militias and stochastic terrorism to decentralized conspiracy theories. Our moment in history feels all at once sped up, wrung out, in a series of real and spectacular crises, rapidly changing, profoundly stuck. In the last several years, a lively discussion has been taking place about the temporality of late capitalism in critical theory and radical political circles, beginning perhaps with Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep and Massimiliano Tomba's Marx's Temporalities. Some of this work, like Sami Khatib's The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time, has also turned to the Frankfurt School, particularly Benjamin and Bloch. This problem of the temporality of capital is an ongoing theme of Mathias Nilges's work in essays and in an edited volume, The Contemporaneity of Modernism. His 2019 book, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time without Future is a compelling contribution to this literature. Nilges straddles academic literary theory and a more popular engagement with the contemporary moment, theorizing the way our ability to imagine historical progress (or even a resolution of various quickening catastrophes) seems to be blocked. Nilges's work crosses disciplinary boundaries to engage discussions that have otherwise developed separately. The argument here crosses through Crary's expansive notion of the drives of capitalism that seem to speed up and compress the experience of time, left debates about the "end of history" following on and in opposition to Fukuyama, the question of imagining an end of capitalism, and debates about the politics of nostalgia. This poses a framework that brings together seemingly disparate aspects of the experience and politics of time in late capitalism. Nilges's conceptual map of late capitalist time and his unpacking of a Blochian mode of engagement with this moment are vital contributions of Right-Wing Culture. Bloch and nonsynchronism Nilges mobilizes Bloch to argue for an engagement with contemporary culture that understands fascist tendencies as coopting romantic, anti-capitalist instincts for a program that safeguards capitalism. Under different historical circumstances, these instincts could possibly turn in a different direction. Bloch is a somewhat underappreciated associate of the Frankfurt School; his work has seen neither the steady readership of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, nor a Benjamin-type "moment" – though interest has quickened enough that perhaps, the Bloch moment is happening now. Several of Bloch's works have not been translated into English, and common glosses emphasize his intellectual distance from other Frankfurt School thinkers. Nilges emphasizes Bloch's influence on and relationship with key aspects of Adorno's thought, especially the critical nature of Bloch's concept of utopia. One of Nilges's primary conceptual tools, unpacked in chapter 2, is Bloch's concept of nonsynchronism. Bloch uses nonsynchronism to analyze a "temporal plurality of the present" in which people in different social locations can have radically different experiences of the same moment. Subjects rendered as consumers in the information age may feel that we are lagging behind a rapidly advancing now that...

‘Mirrored in God’: Gramsci, Religion and Dalit Women Subalterns in South India

The Tamil Dalit Pentecostal conversion movement that has been active in Chennai’s slums and low-income settlements for the last four decades is also a political movement. It is, moreover, a women’s political movement. Normally both Dalits and women are ignored in India, they are considered people of no importance and irrelevant to the issues that grab the headlines. But it is important for us to recognize both the political nature and the importance of this Dalit women’s conversion movement, because we are at a time of great peril in India, where, as elsewhere, populist nationalism has swept an authoritarian leader to power and the fascist tendencies of an overbearing state are becoming increasingly obvious. In such a context Gramsci’s theorizations provide important suggestions for how to understand religio-cultural movements as political movements and how to evaluate both their importance and what they can teach us about the possibilities for religio-cultural-political resistance to authoritarian populism, and the crucial importance of low-income, low-status women in political processes of grassroots resistance.

Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion

Anxieties stemming from rising inequalities have led significant sections of the world’s population to reject democratic practices and place their trust in politicians with fascist tendencies who promise to wrest control of their destinies from elites. Ironically, elite interests, far from being threatened, are bolstered by the rise of fascism, as discredited democratic institutions can be dismantled with impunity. The emerging alliance between the neoliberal project and fascist politics is a phenomenon that the business and society scholarship is ill-equipped to confront as it remains trapped in the same neoliberal pro-elite paradigms that neglect meaningful attention to material (in)equality and focus instead on ensuring a minimum floor of rights required for subsistence. Neglecting the concentration of wealth among the elite, particularly in countries with historic legacies of inequalities based on race, caste, ethnicity, and religion, creates ideal conditions for the eruption of fascisms premised upon programmatic denial of the full range of civil rights to one or more sections of the population, so that even the floor minimum becomes impossible to achieve for all. This paper argues that corporate collusions with fascism can be challenged only by a commitment to redistribution of wealth and creating critical citizens and by generating knowledge that can question authority: in other words, scholarship must become a subversive activity.