This is a document I submitted for the bulletin of the last IS Network conference. It is partially based on a post I wrote a few months ago.
I. The EDL may be finished, its method of street demonstrations having run out of steam according to its former orange eminence, Tommy Robinson. The scattered forces of the far right may be declining - if still resourceful, still too numerous, still dangerous. However sanguine our assumptions on this point may be, though, the wider situation is as toxic as it has ever been, fertile ground for a more effective populist-racist formation. The strong performance of UKIP demonstrates this potential. This new organisation Robinson intends to form with his wooden double act, Kevin Carroll, backed by his comprador allies, the state-sponsored ex-Islamist Qilliam Foundation, will surely seek to plough the same terrain.
II. The EDL was formed in 2009, fusing a number of heterogeneous energies. In one sense, it was a belated expression of a certain type of ‘war on terror’ politics, defending good old British boys against Anjem Choudary’s coffin-botherers. In another, it represented a perverse reanimation of Ulster Loyalism in the English context - the slogan ‘no surrender’ being taken straight from the death squads of the dear six counties. But it also represented the failure of New Labour’s ‘Britishness’ project. Having English, Scottish and Welsh defence leagues was not merely a function of basing the organisation on football casuals and thus deferring to the national division of teams. It underlined just how the axis of xenophobic nationalism had shifted. It also very effectively drew upon and organised the popular mytheme of ‘the white working class’ - supposedly ignored by liberal elites, abused by multicultural politicians, and oppressed by political correctness. This ideology initially began to be articulated under New Labour, and represented a right-ward shift within the Blairite section of the ideological-state apparatuses. But as with so much material that begins life as part of a neoliberal triangulation strategy, it was far more potent in the hands of bovver boys. At the core of it, of course, is the EDL’s contention that Islam is ‘extremist’, that it wages a genocidal war on all Christians, and as such represents an enemy within ‘Christian’ or ‘Western civilisation’. The spread of this style of thinking, conspiracism, is linked to the rise of political paranoia in an increasingly competitive, dog-eat-dog social world. At any rate, this interpellation of ‘culture’ - or a racialised conception of culture - into the political terrain of post-credit crunch Britain achieved one very salient effect. It articulated the concrete experiences of decline - relative national, imperialist decline; economic decline; the declining living standards of workers and a section of the middle class - within a single narrative of resentment structured by Islamophobia. The EDL’s narrative obliquely ‘mentioned’ real social facts, and provided a schema through which supporters could live their relationship to those facts. And of course, it mobilised those supporters to address the ostensible ‘cause’ of those facts in what was at first a highly effective strategy of street mobilisations with football casuals at their core.
III. This immediately posed a unique kind of challenge to traditional anti-fascist strategy in the UK, as the pivot on which a wider anti-racist politics turned. The logic went something like this: fascists are both the most dangerous spearhead of racist reaction and potentially its weakest point. We can and should mobilise the broadest possible unity against the far right; in doing so we have to challenge their racism and we can force our allies in this fight to adopt a more consistently anti-racist position. Of course, even where we do not succeed in this wider objective, a conjunctural defeat for fascism is no small thing. However, the EDL, for all that it knowingly drew in significant strata of the old far right, never became a fascist organisation. This is why the formulations from the SWP and UAF were, some slips notwithstanding, generally very careful: for example, the EDL was “a racist organisation with Nazis at its core”. It resembled a fascist organisation in some respects. For example, its emphasis on control of the streets. Or, its forms of alcohol-greased, macho solidarity, its rabble-paramilitarism. Or, its focus on visual communication and symbolism invoking a cod national mythology (the crusades). Or, finally, the fitful tendencies of the EDL leadership to try to broaden its range of targets (to include students, for example) so that its counter-subversive activities begin to vaguely resemble traditional fascist anticommunism. Yet, it did not become a fascist organisation dedicated to the overthrow of parliamentary democracy and the smashing of workers organisations. In its overall make-up, its strategy, its ideological orientation, it was closer to Geert Wilders, a populist-rightist on the far right of liberal democracy, than to Nick Griffin. And the existence of such an ambiguous, ‘contradictory’, hybrid formation posed, as I say, a challenge to the anti-fascist strategy. The tactical response of antifascists, sensible in its way, was to treat the EDL as a kind of fascism-in-becoming. Since fascism was its telos, it had to be dealt with as would any fascist organisation operating in the same way: broad antifascist coalitions harnessed, where possible, to a strategy of militant confrontation led by the radical wing of the antifascist movement. This usefully limited the EDL’s physical advances, in part by forcing the police to adopt different containment strategies, and among other factors it helped prevent their demonstrations from acquiring a certain critical mass. However, this was only ever useful as a holding response. The underlying problem was that the EDL were building on ideologies that were profoundly mainstream. This is why the media, and certain politicians, can often be found treating the EDL as if they were merely misguided and pursuing counterproductive strategies. And a strategy of harassing the EDL without also doing work on the underlying political and ideological ground could only ever yield short term results.
IV. The fight against racism is a long-term fight that has to be conducted on many different levels. It is not just a question of winning immediate political battles - a glorious victory in Walthamstow or whatever. The tempo of political struggles is extremely rapid, and the half-life of a particular struggle can be very brief indeed. But these struggles are fought on a terrain formed by years of cultural and ideological work, between forces shaped by that same work over a long duration. The tempo of cultural and ideological battles is, compared to political fights, glacial. But just because there are no immediate successes in these fronts doesn't mean they are of no value - they are absolutely central. The intense racist backlash around the English riots, or that following the Woolwich killing, was not inevitable. Such episodes take place on the basis of efforts by diverse forces to elaborate new racist ideologies over a long period.
V. We cannot fight the EDL without also combatting the other major forces of racism in society. The EDL would be nothing without the tabloids, the police, the neoliberal parties in parliament, and so on. The ideologies which legitimise the EDL's actions or at least render them as explicable reactions to extreme provocation, originate in Whitehall, the BBC, the press, parliament and the business funders of reaction. And to defeat those forces we need a different range of tactics. The EDL is primarily based on street violence, so the onus is on counter-mobilisation and self-defence. The same tactics could not be deployed against UKIP, the Murdoch press, or the Home Office. I don't propose a smorgasbord of alternative tactics here; I merely highlight the need for something more than counter-mobilisations.
VI. There is no future in attempting to collapse anti-racism into anti-austerity struggles. Such attempts represent a strain of workerism, and have emerged from some surprising quarters - including Alexis Tsipras. Racism does not simply emerge as a displaced form of despair over deprivation or insecurity. Its development and spread may be accelerated by profound political crisis, the breakdown of authority, crises of overproduction, financial collapses, and so on. As I have suggested, one of the things that EDL racism organises is the experience of certain social classes in the context of crisis and decline. And certainly, as a consequence, the struggles over the capitalist crisis and its resolution have a relationship to the struggle against racism: this means that initiatives such as Left Unity and the People's Assembly should take anti-racism seriously as a semi-autonomous component of their broader strategy. But to understand the relationship between racism, economic crisis and emerging political subjectivities requires an analysis light years ahead of the lingering 'capitalist crisis = hard times = racism' model.
VII. There can likewise be no attempt to collapse anti-racism into the antiwar movement, such as it is. That is no less reductive. For example, the analyses of the Woolwich killing that attempt to ascribe it to the 'war on terror', and therefore to orient analysis primarily toward antiwar activism, strike me as unconvincing. Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale certainly seem to have responded to the context of the 'war on terror', and to have explained their actions in that context. But the processes through which they decided to join the most marginal and militant of Islamist sects in the first place are likely to be rooted in the daily processes of British capitalism. We need to fight and win that argument: that Britain is a profoundly racist and unjust society in which black people are humiliated and deprived in all sorts of highly visible ways. More generally, the forces of racist reaction in our society are not monomaniacally obsessed with the categories of the ‘war on terror’. UKIP, for example, is Islamophopic, but just as importantly it is anti-immigrant and xenophobically anti-European. There is a rich brew of bigotries fusing together in provincial, parochial England, and their specific relationship to the daily workings of capitalism must be grasped as well as their imbrication with imperialist violence.
VIII. It's been obvious for a while, and it is more obvious now. One cannot segment off different types of racism as if they are completely separate; they are mutually reinforcing. The rise in Islamophobia, as we saw during the riots, and as is becoming clear from the intriguing raciologies arising from the Woolwich killing - the EDL speaker in Newcastle urged his audience to "send the black cunts back" - is not exclusive of a long-term regeneration of other types of racism. Indeed, Islamophobia's role as the dominant form of culturalist racism permits the rehabilitation of the discredited elements of racial essentialism, while at the same time articulating them in a new form. What this means is not simply that Islamophobia is simply a cover for 'traditional' types of racism. It used to be argued that it was merely a way of being racist toward Pakistanis. No, current forms of racism do not simply reanimate older forms. As Stuart Hall put it, "Racism is always historically specific. Though it may draw on the cultural traces deposited by previous historical phases, it always takes on specific forms. It arises out of present - not past - conditions, its effects are specific to the present organisation of society, to the present unfolding of its dynamic political and cultural processes - not simply to its repressed past." The current forms of racism refer to and organise current antagonisms, expressed in complex political struggles, from the 2001 riots to the 2012 riots. And there is something very specific about Islamophobia and its content - the obsession with religious identities, with the amateurish hermeneutics of the Quran, and so on - something very current. The point is not that Islamophobia is a cover, but rather that there is a convergence in the techniques of racialisation, the political forces involved, and the ideational content involved in the types of racism in Britain today. I think this means that it would a political mistake to try to identify one type of racism as the 'respectable racism' and simply campaign against that - the tendency is for racism in general to be made 'more respectable', and therefore we need a multi-pronged assault on racism in general.
Richard Seymour
Labels: 'british values', 'extremism, 'race', british state, edl, english defence league, islamophobia, New Category, racism, racists
I contributed a chapter to the excellent ebook,
On Utoya, which I strongly recommend you read and digest before taking the mainstream media too seriously on the Breivik verdict. I have the editors' permission to post up a version of the article I wrote, making the case that Breivik signifies the emergence of a specifically 21st Century fascism. What I'm posting here is the unedited, unexpurgated version, warts and all.
Breivik’s 21st Century Fascist
Manifesto
Richard Seymour
Introduction: new model
fascism
2083: A European Declaration of Independence is the product of
intense disillusionment. Its author, the
son of professional parents, a loser on the stock market and a failed
businessman, resembles nothing so much as the “exasperated petty bourgeois”
identified by Leon Trotsky
as the seed of Hitlerism. Whence the
exasperation of Anders Behring Breivik?
By his ‘own’ account,
it arises from the moral and social decline of European nation-states in the
post-war era. A family from the 1950s
that was able to visit a European city in the 2000s, he maintains, would
encounter a landscape of crime, homosexuality and pornography. “Were they able, our 1950s family would head
back to the 1950s as fast as they could, with a gripping horror story to
tell”. (p 21) The continent has somehow lost its “cultural
self-confidence” (Breivik’s definition of nationalism, p 13), leading to an
accommodation with Muslim immigrants who will have “demographically
overwhelmed” Europe within “a few decades” if “a sufficient level of resistance
is not developed”. (p 17)
Breivik’s brief, as he sees
it, is to anatomise the causes of Europe’s decline and vulnerability to Muslim
takeover, and provide “patriots” with the information necessary to organise
both political and military resistance. 2083 is a patchwork of polemic,
autobiography, plagiarised materials, weapons instructions, military strategy,
and historical excursions, most of it only loosely fitting together. The resulting text is a manifesto for a
peculiarly 21st Century form of fascism. In saying this, I mean not merely that
Breivik is advocating a violent rightist putsch, though he is. Long sections deal with the use of weapons of
mass destruction such as anthrax and nuclear bombs against “cultural Marxists”
and other “Category A and B traitors” (pp 960-73), and the “systematical and
organized executions of multiculturalist traitors” (p 1436). Breivik specifies the strategic value of
military targets in Europe by reference to their Muslim population, and urges
priority assaults on left-wing political meetings, media outlets, Muslim
gatherings, and so on. But the attempt
to take power through armed attacks on opponents is a classic feature of
fascism. What is distinctive here is the
particular set of ideological articulations that make this a fascism far more
adequate to 21st Century circumstances than the tenets of extant
neo-Nazi groups. It reminds us that
fascism in the 2000s will not simply be a Third Reich re-enactment.
In making this claim, I have
to tread carefully. The great historian
of fascism and Vichy France, Robert Paxton, has argued that it is no accident
that there is no Fascist Manifesto, as fascism possesses no coherent ideology
or philosophical system. Fascists have
shared neither assumptions, nor enemies.
European fascists were often hostile to Christianity, for example, but
this was not true of Franco or Petain.
Similarly, while fascists from the northwest and east of Europe directed
their most deadly ire against Jews, Mediterranean fascists were far more
conspicuous in their hostility to the Left and colonized peoples. At the same time, fascists have rarely elaborated
a programme and stuck to it. Mussolini’s
1919 programme promised sweeping social change, from the eight hour day to
workers' involvement in industrial management. The 'Twenty-Five Points' of the
Nazis in 1920 boasted hostility to all forms of non-artisanal capitalism. In
neither case did the programmes prefigure the regimes, both of which involved
coalition with conservative elites.
In general, the core ideas of
fascism seem to differ little from those of reactionaries of other stripes,
leaving it in doubt whether there can be a specifically fascist credo. Arguably, what is distinctive about fascist
ideas is less their substance than the contexts in which they are deployed. Moreover, the historian Dave Renton has
pointed out the difficulties arising from attempts to identify a fascist
ideational core. These tend to take the
statements of fascists about themselves at face value, and as a consequence
fail to anticipate the actual conduct of fascists when in power, and ultimately
suffer from the same incoherence that fascist ideology itself suffers from.
Even so, much recent
scholarship on fascism has been concerned, as the sociologist Michael Mann put
it, to take fascist ideology seriously.
Mann describes fascism as a “movement of high ideals”, able to offer
seemingly plausible solutions to social problems. To ignore fascist beliefs, says Mann, is to
view fascism “from outside”, and thus gain only a partial understanding of it. Indeed, taking fascist ideology seriously
need not mean treating fascist self-descriptions uncritically. For example, Breivik is by his own account a
democrat, and an anti-fascist. Taking
this claim seriously entails understanding what it means in his world-view, not
accepting it at face value. Therefore,
despite some reservations about Mann’s approach,
we shall take his advice and consider in detail the specific articulation of
ideas and actions commended by Breivik’s sprawling pronunciamento.
As we will see, the burden of
Breivik’s argument involves a recitation of standard reactionary complaints –
multiculturalism, Islam, political correctness, leftists and the European Union
all conspire to degrade the nation and abridge its sovereignty. What makes these complaints into a fascist diatribe
is their specific articulation. The
political theorist Ernesto Laclau argued that the character of an ideology is
determined less by its specific contents than by its “articulating
principle”. None of
the ideas of fascism are distinctive to it – this is why it has been called a
“scavenger ideology”, appropriating dis-embedded elements from other
ideological traditions. These elements
are capable of being appropriated because they possess “certain common nuclei
of meaning,” which can be “connotatively linked to diverse
ideological-articulatory domains”. Yet,
fascism is a distinctive ideology and
behaviour. And the “articulating
principle” that quilts these heterogeneous elements is precisely that point at
which ideology becomes practise: the call for a mass, extra-parliamentary
movement of the right to take power through violence against opponents. At any rate, this is the approach I will now
take in examining each element in Breivik’s doctrine.
Islamophobia: Muslims as the
‘Other’ of the nation
The pressing threat to
European nationhood in Breivik’s testimony, as we have seen, is the Muslim
problem. “Islam is NOT a race,” Breivik
insists, so “patriots” should not “make this war about race or ethnicity.” But his argument about racist language is
strategic, rather than moral. “You have
to keep in mind,” he says, “that most people in Western Europe have been
systematically indoctrinated for the last 4-5 decades. ... internal filters
against these words [“race war”, “ZOG” and “kill all the Jews”] are all
hardcoded into the base thought patterns of a majority of Europeans through
decades of multiculturalist indoctrination”.
(pp 679-80) Thus, the focus on
Islam as the major enemy of the nation brings with it the convenience of
allowing one to avoid politically toxic ‘race’ language.
Yet, he does allow that a religious
faith can be the basis for a cultural bloc, or civilization. For example: “Myself and many more like me do
not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do
however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral
platform. This makes us Christian.” It
is for this reason that he seeks the preservation and strengthening of “the
Church and European Christendom in general” by “awarding it more political
influence”. (p 1309) Christianity is in this reading a potentially
resistant cultural bloc underpinning European civilization; Islam is its
Other. Such civilizational, culturalist
discourses have been validated by the ‘war on terror’, during which the ideas
of Samuel Huntington and Robert Kaplan (both cited in Breivik’s text) enjoyed a
spike in popularity.
And if Islam is “not a race”,
Breivik attributes to it essential characteristics which make it, in his words,
“more than a religion”. Citing the
Serbian-American rightist, Serge Trifkovic, he argues that “Since its early
beginning in Muhammad’s lifetime it has also been a geo political project and a
system of government and a political ideology.”
Citing Robert Spencer, the founder of Jihad Watch, he finds that Islam is a “political and social system”. And citing Walid Shoebat, a fraudulent
‘expert’ on Islam whose dubious finances and false claims to be a former PLO
militant have been exposed on CNN, he discovers Islam to be a “form of
government first, THEN a personal application”, an “imperialist system” that
completely controls the lives of believers.
In the context of the ‘war on terror’, such thinking has gained a mass
audience, and its logic ultimately leads to Geert Wilder’s assertion that Islam
is a “cult” rather than a religion: a worldly, materialist social doctrine in
devotional get-up. Thus, Breivik asserts that it is “a historical fact” that
Islam has always been “an overtly militant and aggressive cult”. (pp 109-10 & 151)
Not only does Islam seek to
achieve complete control over its believers in this view, but it also seeks to
kill and enslave the non-believers.
Thus, again quoting Robert Spencer, 2083
warns: “we have very clear instructions from Muhammad that it is the
responsibility of every Muslim to meet the unbelievers on the battlefield to
invite them either to accept Islam or to accept second class Dhimmi status in
the Islamic state.” (p 113) Indeed, this
is not just the view of right-wing hate-mongers, but also of liberal atheist
writers such as Sam Harris, who maintains: “the basic thrust of the doctrine is
undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and
conquer the world”. It follows from this that it would be
impossible to live alongside very many Muslims, without oneself suffering
subjugation or death. “As soon as Islam
reaches a few percent [of the population],” Breivik asserts, “it begins to show
signs of chauvinism which is the essence of any fascist, racist and
imperialistic ideology.” (p 1404) Thus,
Islam is not merely a religion, but a cult, a complete totalitarian social and
political doctrine, an imperialist ideology and ultimately “fascist”. In this reading, Breivik would be the
“anti-fascist”.
Unsurprisingly, the mere
physical presence of Muslims is considered a state of war. Breivik alerts readers to the “demographic”
situation, which has been “falsified by multiculturalists”. “Europe is under siege by Islam. It is under
demographical siege,” he explains. By
2070, the age at which he expects his right-wing revolution to mature and begin
to bear fruit, the Muslim population of the UK will have reached 38%. In Norway, the figure will be identical. In Germany, it will be 50%, and in France it
will be 70%. Russia, with a 72% Muslim
population, will be the most ‘Islamified’.
(pp 575-6) The resulting
situation for those living in these countries will be one of ‘dhimmitude’,
which Breivik translates as ‘slavery’.
In a passage excerpted from the Blogger ‘Fjordman’, 2083 explains: “all non-Muslims will live with a constant,
internalised fear of saying or doing anything that could insult Muslims, which
would immediately set off physical attacks against them and their children.
This state of constant fear is called dhimmitude.”
Breivik is not innovating
here. His culturalist racism has been
the dominant form of racist reaction since Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’
speech. And his representation of Islam
draws on a network of counter-jihadist websites and writers, from the Israeli
website MEMRI to Jihadwatch, Little Green
Footballs, Frontpagemag, and various
right-wing pundits such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer (both co-founders
of Stop the Islamization of America), Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Bernard Lewis,
Samuel Huntington, and Martin Kramer.
Indeed, as with previous segments of the manifesto, some of these
passages consist of material simply copied wholesale from The Weekly Standard, Frontpagemag
and Islamophobic blogs. But also
striking is just how much he depends upon perfectly mainstream news outlets –
not just Fox News, but the BBC, for example.
His ruminations about the demographics of Islam in Europe are redolent
not of Nazi pamphlets but of mainstream conservative writers such as Mark Steyn
and Christopher Caldwell. This adverts
to a problem with the mainstream media’s coverage of Islam, which has been more
than adequately documented elsewhere.
Racism toward Muslims, resting
as it does on essentialist stereotyping about a diverse population practising
diverse interpretations (or none at all) of Islam, has been normalised by the
‘war on terror’. But if the global
situation thus ordained since 2001 has identified Islam as the Other of the
West, with the far right capitalising heavily on this shift, this has had
ramifications regarding fascist enunciations of another, kindred form of
racism.
Antisemitism: the National
Jew vs the International Jew
A common trope in anti-Semitic
ideology plays the ‘good Jew’ off against the ‘bad Jew’. So it is with Breivik who re-states in his
own language a distinction notoriously made by Winston Churchill, between the
‘National Jew’ and the ‘International Jew’.
In a 1920 article, ‘Zionism vs Bolshevism: A struggle for the Soul of
the Jewish People’, Churchill had explained the difference between “Good and
Bad Jews”. The good Jews were those ‘National Jews’ who, while practising their
faith, exhibited undivided loyalty to their nation of habitat. In contrast, the ‘International Jew’ who
showed no such fidelity, or was disloyal, or revolutionary, was a bad Jew. For Churchill, Zionism was to be endorsed, as
the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in British Mandate Palestine would serve
the interests of both Jews and the British Empire, and siphon Jewish energies
away from revolutionary projects.
So it is for Breivik, who
distinguishes between “loyal” and “disloyal” Jews. The former are Zionists, and thus
nationalists, the latter anti-Zionists and cultural Marxists. In this respect, he poses the question of whether
Hitler’s anti-Semitism was rational:
“Were the majority of the German and
European Jews disloyal? Yes, at least the so called liberal Jews, similar to
the liberal Jews today that opposes nationalism/Zionism and supports
multiculturalism. Jews that support multiculturalism today are as much of a
threat to Israel and Zionism (Israeli nationalism) as they are to us. So let us
fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all
anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists. Conservative
Jews were loyal to Europe and should have been rewarded. Instead, [Hitler] just
targeted them all.” (p 1167)
Breivik’s objection to Hitler,
then, is that he was indiscriminate in his punishment of Jewish disloyalty,
when only “the majority” were disloyal.
The implication is that only the latter should have been “targeted”. This is not so much Holocaust denial, as
Holocaust affirmation. And in Breivik’s
treatment, even loyal Jews are better disposed of in some far away land:
“[Hitler] could have easily worked out an
agreement with the UK and France to liberate the ancient Jewish Christian lands
with the purpose of giving the Jews back their ancestral lands ... The UK and
France would perhaps even contribute to such a campaign in an effort to support
European reconciliation. The deportation of the Jews from Germany wouldn't be
popular but eventually, the Jewish people would regard Hitler as a hero because
he returned the Holy land to them.” (p
1167)
The second principle objection to Hitler, then, is that he did not
simply ethnically cleanse the Jews from Germany in the cause of Zionism. For Breivik is fanatically pro-Zionist,
seeing in them the ‘good Jews’ that nationalists can work with. While most, approximately 75% of European and
American Jews are “disloyal” today - being “multiculturalist (nation-wrecking)
Jews” – only 50% of Israeli Jews are “disloyal”. This “shows very clearly that we must embrace
the remaining loyal Jews as brothers rather than repeating the mistake of the
NSDAP.” This is a vital strategic point
for Breivik, who maintains that in Western Europe, only the UK and France have
a “Jewish problem” – in contrast to the US which, due to its relatively high
Jewish population, “actually has a very considerable Jewish problem”. (p 1167)
Breivik’s embrace of Zionism
puts him at odds with many fascists and neo-Nazis, but he is not out on a limb
among his fraternity. For several years
now, far right groups in Europe have been gravitating toward a pro-Israel
position. Geert Wilders, though not a
fascist, represents a strain of radical right opinion that is pro-Israel. Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean Marie Le Pen
and leader of the fascist Front National (FN) in France, argues that the FN has
always been “Zionistic”. The BNP’s legal
officer, Lee Barnes, gave full-throated supported to Israel’s 2006 invasion of
Lebanon: “I support Israel 100% in their dispute with Hezbollah ... I hope they
wipe Hezbollah off the Lebanese map and bomb them until they leave large greasy
craters in the cities where their Islamic extremist cantons of terror once
stood.” The BNP declared itself
“prudently” on Israel’s side, for reasons of “national interest”: Israel was
part of a “Western, if not European” civilization whose opponents were “trying
to conquer the world and subject it to their religion”. An article on the BNP’s website explained
that the party had cast off “the leg-irons of conspiracy theories and the
thinly veiled anti-Semitism which has held this party back for two decades”.
This realignment reflects a
geopolitical reality in which the ‘war on terror’ has revived colonial
discourses and designated Islam as the eternal Other of the ‘West’. In this situation, Israel is seen as an ally
against the Muslim peril. Thus, it is
quite logical that anti-Semitism should take the form of embracing the ‘good
Jew’, and Zionism. Yet history, and the thrust of Breivik’s
argument, suggests that even the ‘good Jew’ would not be safe from a
reconstituted European fascism.
Capitalist globalism and
Eurabia
The predominant theme of
Breivik’s manifesto, as with most fascist texts, is the over-riding importance
of the nation-state. This does not mean
support for the existing state authorities.
As he puts it: “we CANNOT and should not trust that our police forces
and military act in our interest now or in the future. Both our police forces
and military are lead by the multiculturalist traitors we wish to defeat.” (p
1240) Thus, an extra-parliamentary
movement is needed to recapture the state apparatus, and restore the
nation-state’s standing. But what has so
enfeebled the European national state?
If the immediate danger for Breivik is the
presence of Muslims, this is merely a symptom of a much larger problem internal
to European societies. Two major enemies
combine in Breivik’s purview. The first
is the capitalist globaliser, driven by greed, and the second is the “cultural
Marxist”, driven by hate. We shall deal
with an example of the first here. Like
most on the European hard right, Breivik is an opponent of the EU. He draws on the analysis of the British
‘Eurosceptics’, Christopher Booker and Richard North, to argue that it is at
root a project aimed at creating a tyrannical multinational state, inspired by
the USSR (hence, “the EUSSR totalitarian system”, p 1384) and driven by
France. The idea is that France is, in
pursuit of continental dominance and in great power rivalry with the
Anglo-American axis has sought to suppress national sovereignty in the
interests of a Greater France. (pp
294-5)
Worse, however, is that this
is bound up with the aim of pursuing a pro-Arab foreign policy. And this is where ‘Eurabia’ comes in. Bat Ye’or, one of Breivik’s muses, and the
author of the ‘Eurabia’ thesis, is credited with explaining how “French
President Charles de Gaulle, disappointed by the loss of the French colonies in
Africa and the Middle East as well as with France's waning influence in the
international arena, decided in the 1960's to create a strategic alliance with
the Arab and Muslim world to compete with the dominance of the United States
and the Soviet Union.” The result was
Eurabia, a political-cultural entity bound by markets and migration, turning
the Mediterranean into “a Euro-Arab inland sea by favouring Muslim immigration
and promoting multiculturalism with a strong Islamic presence in Europe.” (p
289)
In fact, Breivik goes
further. Citing newspapers such as the
British Daily Express (the most
right-wing of UK tabloids), he asserts that the EU has decided that “the Union
should be enlarged to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa ... has accepted
that tens of millions of immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries in
northern Africa should be allowed to settle in Europe in the years ahead ... is
planning to implement sharia laws for the millions of Muslims it is inviting to
settle in Europe ... [T]he EU is formally surrendering an entire continent to
Islam while destroying established national cultures... This constitutes the
greatest organised betrayal in Western history, perhaps in human history”. (p
318)
Like fascists past and present,
Breivik has no objection to the profit system.
He is himself someone who has invested in the stock market, and set up
two private businesses. What he objects
to is an effect of capitalism, which is its tendency to break out of the bounds
of the national state and to transport cultural, religious and political trends
with it. What he wants is the
impossible: a ‘national’ capitalism, subordinate to the imputed cultural,
spiritual and material needs of ‘the nation’.
Anticommunism: Against the
Marxist Tyranny
The 2083 manifesto pivots on anticommunism, in an era where actual
communism is thin on the ground. Most of
Breivik’s reflections on what communism is are unremarkable, if fanciful. For example, he calls upon the liberal
political economist Friedrich Hayek and the conservative tobacco salesman Roger
Scruton to explain the appeal and thematics of socialist ideology (a
totalitarian doctrine, based on wrong theories, attractive to wrong-headed intellectuals). (pp. 63-4)
It is rather when he explains the role of communists in the betrayal of
the nation that things become interesting.
For, as Markha Valenta has put, Breivik “hates the left even more than
he fears Islam”. The text of 2083 begins not with Muslims, the EU, or weapons advice, but rather
with an extended soliloquy (not, as noted above, written by Breivik) on the
influence of “cultural Marxists” in upholding “multiculturalism” and “Political
Correctness”. The burden of the argument
is as follows:
Multiculturalism is what
results when the doctrine of Marxism is transposed from economic class struggle
to culture. As a result of the failure
of socialist revolutions to spread through Europe in the post-WWI situation,
Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Georgy Lukacs attempted to locate
the source of the obstacle in the failure of Marxists to win cultural
battles. For Gramsci, the winning of
such battles meant creating a new ‘communist man’ who would be the ideal
subject for a socialist state. But to
win the culture wars meant “a long march through the society’s institutions,
including the government, the judiciary, the military, the schools and the
media”. In short, it meant taking hold
of the levers of power.
Later, this mode of analysis
was combined with Freud, in the Frankfurt school, and then linguistic theory,
to become ‘deconstruction’.
‘Deconstruction’ exists to prove that any and all texts discriminate
against minorities, and has had a powerful effect on educational theory,
helping produce the doctrine of ‘Political Correctness’. This in turn works to control language, thus
thought. Cultural Marxists, wherever
they obtain power, expropriate white European males just as much as communist
regimes expropriated the bourgeoisie, both on behalf of defined victims – whether peasants and workers, or Muslims and
minorities. (pp 21-3) In this way,
cultural Marxists have quietly formed a treasonous power bloc within the state
that is: “anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-nationalist,
anti-patriot, anti conservative, anti-hereditarian, anti-ethnocentric,
anti-masculine, anti-tradition, and anti-morality”. (p 38)
It is not just on questions of
race and culture that the white European male is persecuted. Modern feminism is also, owing to its Marxist
roots, “totalitarian”. As a result, it
is producing a “feminisation” of society and of men. Breivik regards Adorno’s theory of the
“authoritarian personality” as the key weapon in the feminist arsenal, devised
for “psychological warfare against the European male”, making him unwilling to
defend his traditional gender role. (p 37)
An important upshot of this is
that ‘Political Correctness’ stifles the unpalatable truth about important
subjects. Breivik cannot say “an evil,
retarded and supremacist death-cult that refuses to afford women and
unbelievers respect and the most basic of human rights” without being “smeared
as an ‘Islamophobe’”. Nor can he say
“Whites are generally more intelligent and creative than blacks and have,
throughout human history, solved the problems presented to the human race by
Mother nature far more effectively than blacks have” without being “vilified as
a racist”. No dissent from “the childish
Liberal fantasy of equality” is possible.
In so altering people’s conscious, the cultural Marxists have inflicted
a “mental illness”, and one that only affects “the people of the white race as
other races and cultures know full well the entirely natural order of
inequality.” (pp 400-1)
The white European male, then,
is a pitiable figure, not only expropriated, oppressed and feminised, but also
prevented from speaking of it by the Marxist dictatorship: “we, the cultural
conservatives of Europe, have become slaves under an oppressive, tyrannical,
extreme left-wing system with absolutely no hope of reversing the damage they
have caused. At least not democratically”. (p 799)
It is not necessary to ponder
the absurdities, fictions and paranoia of this analysis, taken from a Free
Congress Foundation pamphlet. It is
sufficient to note what it means to believe such things. The idea of the communist as conspirer and
traitor to the nation has been a mainstay of fascist polemic since its
inception. For Mussolini, international
socialism of the kind advocated by the anti-war Zimmerwald Left during WWI was
a “German weapon” of war, a “German invention”.
For Hitler, communist treason was Jewish treason, placing the German
masses “exclusively at the service of international Marxism in the Jewish and
Stock Exchange parties”. And while
Austrian fascists vituperated against “Judeo-Bolshevism” and the “aliens” and
“traitors” who defiled the nation, the leader of the Romanian Iron Guard
Alexandru Contacuzino excoriated communism for being “harmful to the essence of
Romania and to the national life”. Their answer was to use terror against the
Left. Breivik’s answer was to bomb
government buildings in Oslo, then descend on a Labour Party youth camp on the
island of Utøya and gun down 69 unarmed children.
Fascism: organising the
counter-revolution
“We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe, hereby declare a
pre-emptive war on all cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western
Europe.” (p 812)
Anders Breivik is not a
Nazi. His manifesto makes it clear that
he would be “offended” to be called a Nazi, and that he “hates” Adolf
Hitler. This is because he considers Hitler
a “a traitor to the Germanic and all European tribes”, whose “crazed effort for
world domination” was “reckless”. The
Nazis “knew perfectly well what the consequences would be for their tribes if
they lost, yet they went ahead and completed the job ... And people like
myself, and other cultural conservative leaders of today, are still suffering
under this propaganda campaign because of that one man.” (pp 1166-7)
Breivik hates the Nazis, then, primarily because the Nazis made things
difficult for people like him. His
objection would be moot were it possible for the Nazis to have won.
Perhaps it would not be
pressing the point too far to say that, on balance, Breivik has more in common
with the Nazis than separates him from them.
Indeed, he is sympathetic to present-day Nazis, believing that they are
“fellow patriots” and that “90% of the individuals who uses [sic]
Neonazi/fascist symbols are not real national socialists. They are only extremely
frustrated individuals who have been demonised and ridiculed for too long by
the establishment.” (p 1239) That said, the fascist agenda that he has
outlined does differ in several respects from that of historical fascism. This is because the context, especially the
geopolitical context, is radically different.
Fascism initially arose amid a crisis of liberal capitalism, a wave of
revolutionary socialist insurrection, economic turmoil, and the first signs of
the decline of European empires and the ascent of the United States. In a colonial world, characterised by
inter-imperialist rivalries, it was still possible to envision solving the
nation’s productive problems through territorial expansion – be it the
“proletarian nation” grabbing its fair share of the colonies, or the Third
Reich reaching for Lebensraum. In a
post-colonial era, far right activism has centred on a defensive white
nationalism. So it is with Breivik.
Not that Breivik is opposed to
imperialism. His appraisal of
colonialism is largely positive, and his objection to the ‘war on terror’ is
strategic. It is impossible to bring
democracy to Muslim countries such as Iraq, so “we should shift from a
pro-democracy offensive to an anti-sharia defensive.” We should “talk straight about who the enemy
is”. The real war coming is not this
politically correct “war on terror”, but “World War IV”. (pp 524 & 572) Still, having purified the nation, he wants
to batten down its hatches rather than risk any potentially compromising encounters
with nefarious aliens: “The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have
as little to do with it as possible.” (p
338)
Similarly, interwar fascists
had a steady stream of recruits among young, idealistic men socialised in
institutions which moralised violence (such as the army). They filled up paramilitary units such as the
squadristi and freikorps, where non-fascist recruits could be hardened into
fascist cadres, through comradeship and ‘knocking heads together’. Since WWII, mass recruitment for such
activities has been an endemic problem for the far right. This has left fascists with two options. The first is to seek respectability through
parliamentary campaigns, shedding explicit references to fascist or white
supremacist language and demonstrating their fitness to govern. This is problematic for fascists, for whom
control of the streets is more important than control of the council
chamber. The alternative is to find
substitutes in existing gangs with a culture of violence and nationalism. The infiltration of football gangs by the
National Front in 1970s and 1980s is an example of this. Today’s English Defence League (EDL), in
which organised fascists lead mobs of racist football hooligans in targeted
street campaigns is another. In practise,
many fascist organisations have tried to maintain both strategies concurrently.
Breivik attempts a hybrid of
these strategies. While declaring that
democratic struggle is otiose, he is embryonically aware of the need to engage
in hegemonic battles, shedding the stigma of the Third Reich. As he puts it: “Copy your enemies, learn from
the professionals”. The “cultural
Marxists” whose dominance “cultural conservatives” bridle under have
effectively concealed “their true political intentions by claiming to be driven
by humanist principles”. Thus, while
“cultural Marxists” exert dominance through front organisations supporting
human rights, feminism or environmentalism, so “cultural conservatives” should
embrace front tactics based on alliances “against Muslim extremism”, “against
Jihad”, “for free speech”, and for human and civil rights. (pp 1241-2)
Intriguingly, Breivik credits
the “British EDL” for being “the first youth organisation that has finally
understood this. Sure, in the beginning it was the occasional egg heads who
shouted racist slogans and did Nazi salutes but these individuals were kicked
out. An organisation such as the EDL has the moral high ground and can easily
justify their political standpoints as they publicly oppose racism and
authoritarianism.” He goes on to urge “conservative intellectuals” to support
the EDL and “help them on the right ideological path. And to ensure that they
continue to reject criminal, racist and totalitarian doctrines.” (pp
1242-3) We do not need to take Breivik’s
descriptions of the EDL at face value, any more than we accept his
idiosyncratic understanding of what constitutes racism. It is sensible to assume that he is aware of
the EDL’s record as a violent street gang, and that no “individuals were kicked
out” of the EDL for Nazi salutes or racist slogans. But it is two features of the EDL that he
particularly values: what he perceives as their ability to gain favourable
media coverage, and polarise opinion; and their loose model of street
organization which “is the only way to avoid paralyzing scrutiny and
persecution”. (pp 1243 & 1255)
The key to his argument,
however, is that “patriots” must begin preparing for an armed insurgency. The moral and political argument for armed
struggle is that multiculturalism, “like drugs”, has already destroyed “the
heart and fabric” of the nation, such that its subjects “possess no potential
for resistance”. As such, it is not
“remotely possible” that a “conservative, monocultural party will ever gain
substantial political influence”. “The cultural Marxists have institutionalised
multiculturalism and have no intention of ever allowing us to exercise any
political influence of significance.... It is ... lethal to waste another five
decades on meaningless dialogue while we are continuously losing our
demographical advantage” (pp 802-3) As such, “armed struggle is the only
rational approach”. (p 812)
This insurgency must attack
the “category A and B traitors” (Marxists, “suicidal humanists”, “capitalist globalists”,
etc), first and foremost, rather than Muslims whose presence Breivik deems to
be a symptom rather than the source of the problem. “We will focus on the Muslims AFTER we have
seized political and military control. At that point, we will start deportation
campaigns.” (pp 1255-6) This is not to say that Muslims cannot be
singled out. Numerous targets are
suggested because of a high Muslim population, or because they constitute a
major Muslim gathering. But the priority
is to assault “cultural Marxists” and what he regards as the centre-left
establishment. A key section on weapons
of mass destruction is headed: “Obtaining and using WMD’s against the cultural
Marxist/multiculturalist elites”. It
proceeds to outline ways of obtaining or cultivating anthrax, procuring deadly
pathogens, and gaining access to chemical agents. 2083
does not envision “cultural conservatives” getting hold of small nuclear
devices until the later days of the insurrection, between 2030 and 2070 – but
this is no reason not to think ahead, and the manifesto describes scenarios for
their acquisition and use. (pp 960-73)
Breivik envisions a
three-staged civil war in Europe, characterised at first by clandestine cells
using “military shock attacks”, followed by a phase of more advanced resistance
movements and preparations for “pan-European coup d’états, and finally a period
of coups, repression, the defeat of “Cultural Communism”, and the deportation
of Muslims. By 2083, 400 years after the
‘Battle of Vienna’ between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the
revolution is to be victorious. (p 813)
Once the revolution is successful, there is to be a transitional phase
of dictatorship in which a “patriotic tribunal” will ensure that
nationalist-minded individuals are placed in prominent positions in the
security forces, and the media, all public offices, publishing outfits, and
schools. It will choose a new “birth
policy”, and social structures will go from being “matriarchies to once again
becoming patriarchies”. It will organise
the execution of “all category A and B traitors who continue to oppose
us”. This will be followed by a shift
away from “mass democracy” to “administered democracy”. “Mass democracy does not work,” Breivik
asserts, “as has been proven.” It must be
replaced by constitutional monarchies and republics. The tribunal will continue to act as a
guardian council to ensure that the nation is inoculated against renewed
Marxist infiltration, that the fertility rate is kept to an acceptable level,
and that “the suicidal humanists and capitalist globalists do not misuse their
influence”. (pp 795-801 & 1325)
This sinister augury, supplying
– Nostradamus-like – a detailed prospectus of events, many of which the author
of these prognoses would not live to see, is of a piece with classical fascist
millenarianism. The European “tribes”
are endowed with a destiny, an apocalyptic final reckoning, out of which is to
come national redemption. It is this
which, in part, was responsible for the perpetual radicalisation of the Nazi
regime. It was ultimately this which informed
Hitler’s decision to provoke a Europe-wide war in a situation in which he was
very unlikely to win. It was this which
led to his turning on Stalin and attempting to enslave Russia, despite this
adding an impossible dimension to his war.
And it was this which culminated in auto-obliteration as Nazi planes
were sent back to bomb German cities to prevent their capture by Allied forces. The culmination of fascism is not dictatorship;
it is catastrophe.
Conclusion
Breivik’s 2083 is a fascist manifesto not because it apes the language of fuhrers and duces past, but because it has absorbed the elements of contemporary reactionary discourse and
articulated them in an agenda of mass rightist insurrection. He has eschewed many of the obsessions and
talking points of much white supremacist discourse, which has been concerned
with reviving the prospects of fascism by restoring the reputation of the Nazi
regime. He does not need Holocaust
denial to articulate his agenda, any more than he needs the hard biological
racism of the colonial period to express his supremacism. His vituperations about ‘cultural Marxism’
have, by placing crypto-communists in senior positions of authority, provided
the conspiracy that he needs to explain the nation’s parlous circumstances. The nefarious ‘Jew’ of anti-Semitic discourse
is not rejected, but is qualified, allied to a Zionist posture, and is at any
rate secondary to his wider schema.
There are other respects in which
Breivik’s manifesto is very different from classical fascist discourse. For example, there is nothing about trade
unions, very little about traditional revolutionary socialism, and also nothing
on the global economic crisis, in 2083. It is hard to imagine a Mein Kampf without
some reference to the trade unions, to winning the German workers from the
reds, and so on. To put it another way,
there is very little that is specifically addressed to the problems of the
working class, or even the insecure petty bourgeoisie. Unlike most fascist parties and intellectuals
in Europe, Breivik has no orientation toward winning over masses. In politics, he worked as part of a milieu, but
ultimately set out to make his most significant contribution to the fascist
struggle on his own. Yet, Breivik
aspires to trigger a mass movement, even if he does not attempt to offer
plausible solutions to popular problems.
And in defining a ‘revolutionary’ rightist creed that is more informed
by this conjuncture than the interwar period, 2083 outlines some of the
contours of what we can expect from fascist movements of the future.
Labels: antisemitism, breivik, fascism, feminism, gramsci, hitler, islamophobia, laclau, multiculturalism, mussolini, nazism, political correctness, racism, socialism, third reich
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