Old nonsense from Griffin. In all cases, emphasis added.
I’m going to analyze excerpts from the following article (see below). I’m only going to hit the main points and delete the rest. Note that it is more than twenty years old and as part of the fisking we will enjoy how things have gotten worse for Griffin with respect to the rise of right-wing populism.
Note that I am not going to correct all of the spelling and formatting errors inherent in the copy of the article online – blame Mr. High Truster for that. In some cases, some of the original formatting – particularly some of Griffin’s snide scare quotes – have been lost. Too bad. I’m not his editor. I am also not going to include the references. If you are interested, you can find the original article yourself. You can also check out the “Roger Griffin” blog label for my previous writing about this moron.
Interregnum or Endgame? Radical Right Thought in the Post-fascist Era
Published in The Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 5, no. 2, July 2000, pp. 163-78.
Abstract
The article focuses on the two most significant forms taken by ideological mutations of the fascist species of radical right in the hostile climate of post-war Europe: internationalization (Eurofascism, Universal Nazism, Third Positionism), and metapoliticization (Revisionism, the New Right, cyber-fascism). It concludes by suggesting that the democratic fascism of some political parties is emblematic of the extreme marginalization of revolutionary nationalism, and that the most potent species of radical right ideology now consists in ethnocratic perversions of liberalism, which help perpetuate Europe’s less than democratic impact on the global community.
After all, outside of Europe, the global community is oozing with democracy. I encourage Griffin to move to, say, North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, etc. and write essays critical of the leadership and/or Marxism and/or Islam, etc.
A charred corpse lying unrecognizable in an underground bunker in Berlin, a body hanging all too recognizably upside down from the gantry of a petrol station in Milan: if single images can be worth pages of historical analysis then the fates of Hitler and Mussolini in April 1945 certainly point to a dramatic watershed in the history of the radical right.
I can rewrite that thus:
An exploded cranium spewing brain pieces and skull fragments in Dallas, a Back body lying all too recognizably dead on a motel balcony in Memphis: if single images can be worth pages of historical analysis then the fates of JFK and MLK in the 1960s certainly point to a dramatic watershed in the history of the progressive left.
Back to Griffin:
In the run up to the congress in December 1993 the MSI’s leader, Gianfranco Fini, had asserted that Fascism was now irreversibly consigned to history and its judgement…Like all Italians we are not neo-Fascists, but post-Fascists. Symbolically at least, Fiuggi [sic] was the Bad Godesberg of the European radical right. Liberal democracy had triumphed.
Fini is a turd and these mainstreaming disavowals are disgusting. Mainstreaming NEVER works.
For one thing, even if the scope of the question is restricted to Europe, the failure of the radical right to achieve hegemony has a different story in every country.
Much in common though – military defeat in WWII, followed by repressive authoritarian “liberal democracy” that prevents the people from finding real solutions to their problems.
…the right-left dichotomy is a product of the French Revolution, and the term radical right acquires its most precise connotations in the context of ideologically elaborated rejections of parliamentary liberalism of the type which first arose in late nineteenth-century Europe.
Fair enough.
Considerations of traditionalist forces operating outside Europeanized societies in a non-parliamentary context, such as Islamic fundamentalism, or of ideologically vacuous dictatorships, whether military or personal, thus need not detain us.
Of course. Griffin’s attention is only to smear and defame White rightists – what his Colored pets do elsewhere “need not detain us.”
This conjuncture of factors enables an area of empirical data which poses irreducible definitional and taxonomic problems to be cut down to size, at least for heuristic purposes, by considering within a relatively uncontentious conceptual framework those aspects of the post-war radical right which can be seen as outlets or conduits for the same ideological energies which fed inter-war fascism.
Typical Griffinian leftist academic jargon that, when stripped down to its essentials, leave us with practically nothing.
Having cleared some of the terrain it will then be possible to suggest in a more speculative spirit that the most significant development that has taken place since the war in the radical right has occurred outside the parameters of fascism: the spread of ethnocratic liberalism. The anti-liberal currents of ideology it feeds may prove even more insidious than modernized forms of the inter-war fascist right in their liberticide effects because they are so easily absorbed into the bloodstream of liberalism itself.
Let us be very clear about what is going on here. Griffin is objecting to Whites in a liberal democracy supporting an ethnocratic vision of state and society. In other words, if the ethnocentric Right plays the game of liberal democracy and wins, then that is unacceptable. To Griffin, the only acceptable, safe, and healthy outcome is for policies that he personally approves of to be triumphant. Only one outcome – his preferred outcome – is acceptable. That is why in my previous writing on Griffin I termed his preferred state of affairs as Authoritarian Democracy – in which the surface forms of democracy (e.g., parties and elections) are retained, but the fundamental essence of free choice and unconstrained outcomes are jettisoned. Griffin is more than a hypocrite; he is evil.
There is now a growing consensus that fascism is best seen as a revolutionary form of populist nationalism which emerged in the inter-war period at a time when a systemic crisis seemed to many within the Europeanized world to be affecting not only national life, but civilization as a whole.
Fair enough.
A necessary precondition for the rise of fascism was a cultural climate saturated with apocalyptic forebodings and hopes for imminent or eventual renewal captured in such works as Spengler’s Decline of the West and H.G. Wells The Shape of Things to Come. It articulated, fomented, and channelled inchoate but extraordinarily widespread longings for a new type of political system, a new elite, a new type of human being, a new relationship between the individual and society, for a more planned economy, for a revolutionary change in the values of modern life, for a new experience of time itself. The mobilizing myth which can be treated ideal-typically as the definitional core of fascism (the fascist minimum) is that through the intervention of a heroic elite the whole national community is capable of resurrecting itself Phoenix-like from the ashes of the decadent old order (palingenetic ultra-nationalism). It is this myth which informs the obsessive preoccupation with national/ethnic decadence and regeneration in a post-liberal new order which is now widely acknowledged to be the hall-mark of all fascism.
Stripped of the not-so-subtle pejorative implications, that is more or less reasonable.
After 1945 not only was ultra-nationalism widely identified with war, destruction, genocide, and calculated inhumanity on a horrendous scale, but liberal democracy underwent no serious systemic crises, and was if anything strengthened and legitimated for the bulk of its citizens (in the myth of the Free World) by the emergence of the Soviet Empire, which also had the effect of comprehensively denying political space to liberal and right-wing agitation on its own territory.
Note: “myth of the Free World.” As long as Whites and the West exist, even in today’s degenerate form, can Griffin ever see freedom anywhere?
Within a few years of the Axis defeat it had become clear to all of fascism’s more astute activists that the age of mass armed parties led by charismatic leaders was dead…
Griffin grasps too eagerly at a temporary state of affairs being permanent.
It would be misleading to suggest that all fascists recognized the extent to which their vision had been discredited by events, and have accepted the need for drastic change in their ideology and tactics in the light of the new international situation. The psychotropic power of palingenetic myth to transform despair into hope encouraged many who had believed in a fascist cause at the height of the war to enter a sustained state of denial. For decades pockets of purely nostalgic and mimetic fascism could be found in Europe, like muddy puddles in the bed of a dried-up lake.
Sigh.
But the dramatic loss of the historical climate which produced fascism forced its more flexible activists, decimated by events and acutely marginalized within their political cultures, to develop two basic strategies for keeping the dream of national rebirth alive, even if in a state of hibernation, in the bleak winter of liberal and (until 1989) communist hegemony in Europe. They can be summarized ideal-typically as internationalization and metapoliticization.
The internationalization of fascism
There had been several fascist schemes for a federal Europe before the war, especially emanating from Italy…
Of course. Can any of us be surprised that while Germans were hell bent on war, conquest, and destruction, Italians had a more constructive vision of a fascist future?
Once Germany had lost the war, a tempting explanation for the defeat without abandoning fascist principles was to accuse Mussolini and Hitler of being too narrowly nationalistic to realize the true historical purpose of fascism, namely to save European civilization as a whole from destruction at the hands of Bolshevism and Americanization.
That’s a reasonable interpretation, particularly about Hitler.
Symptoms of the Euro-fascism which emerged in the aftermath of 1945 were the launching of periodicals dedicated to the cause such as The European, Europa Nazione, and Nation Europa, the publication of major texts by Oswald Mosley, Julius Evola, Maurice Bardèche, and Francis Yockey calling for a European Federation or Empire of fascist nations, and the creation of pan-European fascist organizations such as The Nouvel Ordre Européen, The European Social Movement, and Faisceaux Nationaux et Européens. However, any notion that the radical right had found in Eurofascism an effective strategy for a coordinated assault on the citadels of power is instantly dispelled when it is realized how many incompatible schemes emerged from it: pagan and Catholic, Nietzschean and occultist, pro-Nazi (and anti-Semitic), pro-Fascist, pro-British, pro-French, and pro-Hungarian. Some saw the new Europe as equally threatened by Russia and America, and hence saw Africa as a colonial hinterland supplying an autarkic Europe with raw materials (the idea of Eurafrica was first formulated in the Salò Republic in the last years of the war). Others linked its destiny with the USA as part of an anti-communist alliance, or with Russia to form a continental bloc against decadent materialism and individualism (national bolshevism).
So what? Griffin sees strategic and tactical disagreement as delegitimizing the entire ideology, something he would not do for the Left.
By the 1970s a new generation of Universal Nazis was thinking globally and acting locally, made up principally of marginalized working class white racists targeted through propaganda directed at the educationally challenged…
Ad hominem. Better to have an alliance of erudite Griffins, with their overly complex leftist jargon, along with promotive Coloreds, right?
Universal Nazism has retained the original’s fanatical belief in the genius of Adolf Hitler…
Lie, if we include all adherents of a more universal national socialism.
An even more original form of international fascism ideologically is Third Positionism, which, influenced by some currents of Italian neo-fascism…
Of course.
The metapoliticization of fascism
An even more important ideological development within the fascist radical right than its rejection of the nation as the sole or principal focus for revolutionary energies also results from the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945…As a result overtly anti-systemic cadre movements of revolutionary paramilitaries and radical ideologues split off from ostensibly democratic political parties pursuing a fascist agenda, and it became possible for the ideological production of fascist discourse to operate relatively autonomously without any formal links with organized politics.
This is the while rhizome-slime mold Groupuscule idea of Griffin’s I’ve written of in the past and so there is no need to rehash all of that here. This is, after all, a brisk fisking.
The most notorious product of Revisionism is Holocaust Denial, which exists in various degrees of pornographic crudity and specious sophistication…
First – ad hominem. Second, some of us on the Far Right are profoundly bored by this inane topic. I don’t have an agenda of rehabilitating the type of German fanaticism that wrecked the White world. I’m deleting the rest of this area of discussion.
While it impossible to generalize about its ideological contents, the recurrent features of New Right thought are: a right-wing Gramscianism which recognizes that cultural hegemony must precede political hegemony…
Unfortunately, that has gone too far, and now elements of the Far Right use “metapolitics” as an excuse to do nothing of a practical, political nature.
The hallmark of the New Right is its belief that the present world system is not only decadent, but that it will eventually give way to a new type of civilization based on healthy mythic forces (though the new millennium nowadays often seems indefinitely postponed).
The “collapse” is always “ten years away.”
Contemporary history is thus an interregnum for the spiritually awakened (a concept derived from the Conservative Revolution). New Rightists of an Evolian bent use the alternative image of the Kali Yuga…
Paging Greg Johnson.
It is in the copious publications of Europe’s metapolitical New Right that the remarkable vitality and originality of the contemporary fascist radical right as an ideological phenomenon is to be found, as well as the most sophisticated expression of its Europeanization. Perhaps the ultimate form taken by fascism’s metapoliticization, however, is the extensive use it is now making of the Web. Thanks to the Internet, schemes for the salvation of nations, ethnic groups, Europe, the West, or the White race from their present decadence cease to be located in a movement, party, ideologue, or visionary leader, or even in a particular country or ethnic community: the secular Jeremiads and Evangeliums are everywhere and nowhere simultaneously in a suprahistorical electronic reality which has the most tenuous link with the material world.
“Most tenuous” indeed. That’s the problem.
Democratic fascism, ethnocratic liberalism, and the prospects of the radical right
The sheer quantity of groupuscules, organizations, and publications which point to the tenacity of fascism in its various modulations might lead the unwary to assume that fascism is growing in strength and still poses a challenge to democracy. Fortunately in the present case, where variants of major ideologies are concerned there is often weakness in sheer numbers, since they point to an absent centre, the lack of dynamic movement which would turn them into mutually intelligible dialects of the same lingua franca.
Meanwhile, Griffin continues to obsess over this allegedly impotent force.
Fascist ecumenicalism does not run deep, and papers over radical differences in ideology which would nip in the bud any sort of fascist international (as they did when attempts to universalize fascism formally were made in the much more propitious 1930s).
The same situation exists for the Left, which has not inhibited its progress is of course ignored.
Similarly, its metapolitics mask the fundamental impotence of visions which survive solely because their essential utopianism is never exposed by the acid test of attempted implementation.
What mendacious scum Griffin is. How can there be “attempted implementation” in the face of a repressive authoritarian “liberal democracy” that Griffin endorses and that suppresses legitimate dissent?
Creating a European Empire on differentialist lines, for example, leaving aside the preposterously surreal conditions required before such a fantasy…
Nothing to worry about then. Can Griffin stop endlessly writing about it?
…could be enacted would involve a process of enforced resettlement and ethnic cleansing which would soon leave the hundred flags of the new Europe drenched in blood.
So, because of Griffin’s imagined hysterics, Whites worldwide should just sit back and let themselves be erased by liberal democracy.
The most telling indicator of the structural impotence of the revolutionary radical right today is perhaps the emergence of electoral parties, which, despite euphemizing their fascist agenda for public consumption, have remained firmly marginalized everywhere in the world since 1945.
Would Griffin write the same in 2022?
The NSDAP or the PNF used paramilitary force to back up electoral campaigns and negotiations with the state, and made no secret of their contempt for liberalism. The modern parliamentary fascist party (e.g. the British National Party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) is more like a toothless, emaciated, old nag than a powerful Trojan horse capable of carrying revolutionaries into the citadel of power.
Well, if today’s Alternative for Germany is such a toothless nag then the German liberal democratic government can stop persecuting that political party.
The extent to which real fascism is a dead letter is exemplified by the consequence of Fini’s decision to move the MSI towards the centre from the right to take advantage of the Italian state crisis of the early 1990s.
Mainstreaming always fails.
Despite occasional bouts of media panic about the possibility of massive swings to the right triggered by neo-Nazi violence against asylum seekers or the BNP’s winning of a seat in a local election, the structural conditions are simply lacking for any fascist party to take off as a mass force in national politics anywhere in the world as long as the globalization of capitalism continues apace.
The “globalization of capitalism” is running into difficulties, no? Would Griffin sound such a triumphalist tone in 2022?
Fascists cannot afford to concede this without ceasing to be fascists.
Agreed. But right-wing populism is a means only, not an end.
…so fascists have to believe they are living on the threshold of a new age or in a protracted interregnum (or the Kali Yuga), in order to retain their commitment to the cause intact. They are temperamentally incapable of coming to terms with one of the most psychologically disturbing cosmological implications of liberal modernity: the idea of history as an intrinsically meaningless, neutral medium in which at least as long as our species survives an infinite chains of events will continually unfold generated by the largely random interaction of the lives of billions of human beings, events which disclose patterns and trends but no intrinsic purpose or continuous story.
Really? I thought leftists of Griffin’s ilk tell us that “the arc of the moral universe bends to justice.” Or is history meaningless only for the Right?
It would be academically irresponsible, however, to give this brief account what is, in a liberal perspective, a happy ending. As many reading this will have been already waiting impatiently for me to point out, another type of radical right has crept up on European society, one which is potentially of considerable virulence, not in its ability to destroy liberalism from without, but to contaminate it from within. Sometimes called radical right populism, or simply the radical right, its paradoxical qualities perhaps emerge more clearly in the term ethnocratic liberalism. It is a type of party politics which is not technically a form of fascism, or even a disguised form, for it lacks the core palingenetic vision of a new order totally replacing the liberal system. Rather it enthusiastically embraces the liberal system, but considers only one ethnic group full members of civil society.
I am deleting a large amount of text because I made the point above. All Griffin’s talk of liberal democracy is a sham, a hypocritical lie. As soon as the mere possibility of right-wing populism as a winning electoral strategy emerges, then we have a crisis. When ethnocractic (i.e., ethnocentric) forces thrive within liberal democracy, then that is a “contamination” that threatens to ruin a “happy ending.” As we well know from the antics of the Left, they accept the legitimacy of electoral politics and of liberal democracy only when they win elections. Even the possibility that the nationalist right can be electorally competitive is a “threat to democracy.” Electoral outcomes absolutely must be pre-determined victories for the Left, without the possibility of change – that is the definition of a “healthy democracy.” Giving Whites a genuine choice for self-preservation is to Griffin an unacceptable catastrophe.
I must side with the Manicheans. The modern world is not an interregnum, but it is an endgame, one being continually played out, like the eternal recurrence of world snooker competitions and European cup football on British TV…
Juvenile asshole.
….liberal Europe not just as a socio-economic fortress, but as an ethno-cultural one as well, protected by ramparts being continually reinforced. It is a concentration of ethnocentric power which, though liberal in its domestic politics, continues to operate prevalently as a radical right wing force in terms of its total impact on the global community.
The outrageous insanity of Griffin is demonstrated here. While there are a few outposts of relative sanity in Europe, the overall current situation is that of elites who hate the native population and are managing that population’s demographic replacement, natives deprived of freedom of expression and of association, vicious persecution of radical right dissidents, and an “European Union” that defends the interests of everyone in Europe EXCEPT native Europeans. That situation Griffin defines as a “radical right wing force.”
It would seem therefore that slow White genocide is making Griffin impatient. Perhaps death camps for native Europeans would be more to his liking?
The effect of propaganda put out by ethnocratic ideologues and parties can only reinforce this tendency, no matter how marginalized they are from actual government…
Griffin, meet Meloni.
…making it even more impossible for politicians to present populations with policies which would involve a substantial transfer of wealth and resources (back) from the North to the South…
First, we see that Griffin’s preferred agenda includes a “substantial transfer of wealth and resources…from the North to the South” (he can go first – please, Roger, liquidate all of your assets and give them to a Bantu defecating in the jungle). Second, note “back” – perhaps Griffin can regale us with stories of the mighty contributions of the Global South to human progress.
…or address the structural reasons for mounting immigratory pressures…
The reason being that the inferior “South” needs to move to the superior “North.”
…for fear of the mass dissent it would arouse.
I wish there actually was mass dissent about these issues.
The next few decades should decide whether a healthy liberalism can prevail or whether, in the midst of a deteriorating environment and escalating demographic explosion which the new millennium inherits from the old, its contamination takes a permanent hold.
Let’s hope for the latter. Amusingly, Griffin characterizes his preferred liberalism, that caused all of these problems, as “healthy.”
If the radical right is based on a a malfunction of human empathy, on an affective aridity..
According to Griffin, non-arid empathy manifests as: White genocide, the destruction of peoples and cultures, secret police spying and imprisoning dissidents, abrogation of freedom of expression and of association, banning political parties, and denying native peoples the right to safeguard their own existence.
…then it might be legitimate to appropriate lines written in a very different context by T. S. Eliot, someone who managed to make the transition from fellow traveller of radical right cosmologies to a pundit of high liberal humanist culture:
The desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The desert is not only round the corner.
The desert is squeezed into the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.
The desert is actually in the heart and brain of Griffin.
Griffin would make a lousy accountant. He records the credits of liberal democracy while ignoring the debits; conversely, he records the debits of the Far Right while ignoring the credits.
I define here for the first time Liberafascism – palingenetic ultra-globalism, typically manifested through authoritarian or totalitarian control of thought and speech, utilizing the coercive power of the state to proscribe dissident politics, silencing and imprisoning dissidents, in order to achieve an “utopian” new world order characterized by White genocide and Colored imperialism.
Thus, Griffin is a fascist…a liberafascist.
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