Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

The biggest obstacles, a recent U.N. climate report noted, are national leaders who are unwilling to regulate fossil fuel corporations, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or plan for renewable energy production.

Sculpted, sweating, bare torsos doing push-ups, bulging muscles, two scantily-clad men locked in a fight—they,…

A young man adds to a sidewalk chalk mural depicting the names of the people killed during a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, on May 15, 2022. | Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The Buffalo shooting has roots in “accelerationism,” a neo-Nazi idea linked to a wave of recent hate killings.

The weekend’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, was not merely a random act of hate. It was the product of a violent strategy, formulated in obscure neo-Nazi magazines and disseminated on the internet’s darkest corners, that aims to bring about the destruction of American society.

This idea is called “accelerationism,” and violent white supremacists like the Buffalo shooter see it as their best chance to stop the so-called “Great Replacement”: the notion that the West’s white population is being “replaced” with nonwhites, a deliberate demographic shift often blamed on Jewish cabals. Accelerationists believe that race and ethnicity create inherent divisions within Western societies, which individual acts of violence can inflame. The idea is to “accelerate” the crackup of Western governments — and bring on a race war that culminates in white victory.

In a 180-page document, the Buffalo shooter — who, per law enforcement, targeted Black people — directly credits his actions to accelerationist thinking. In a section titled “destabilization and accelerationism: tactics for victory,” he claims that “stability and comfort are the enemies of revolutionary change. Therefore we must destabilize and discomfort society wherever possible.”

These passages are directly copied from writing by the 2019 Christchurch shooter in New Zealand, whose ideas previously influenced American mass shooters in Poway, California and El Paso, Texas. Militant neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen and The Base have built their ideology around accelerationism. Some scholars of the far right have even identified accelerationist thinking among the January 6 rioters.

It is important not to overstate the influence of accelerationism in America. At present, it is an idea confined to a tiny fringe that has virtually no prospect of successfully toppling the US government or fomenting a race war.

But the fact is that we are in a period of intense political polarization driven primarily by racial and cultural divides. And abhorrent extremist theories are increasingly finding purchase in mainstream spaces. Neo-Nazi killings may not be able to incite a race war, but they are horrific events — and they can intensify our divisions in ways that deepen America’s political crisis.

Accelerationism, from a neo-Nazi journal to the streets of Buffalo

Some journalistic accounts credit the origins of modern neo-Nazi accelerationism to The Turner Diaries, a 1978 white supremacist novel that envisions the downfall of American democracy. The Turner Diaries is indeed extremely influential on the fringe right, playing a role in inspiring the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

But the text most responsible for accelerationism as we know it today is the 1980s newsletter Siege, in which neo-Nazi writer James Mason argues for the white supremacist movement to pick up where the serial killer Charles Manson left off. Manson, who exchanged letters with Mason, believed in a coming race war that he termed “Helter Skelter.” The murders committed by Manson and his disciples served, in Mason’s mind, as a model of decentralized violent action that could hasten the coming of such an event — and would be hard for authorities to stop.

If neo-Nazis emulated Manson on an individual level, acting alone rather than as part of organizations, eventually they could help spur a white uprising against the system, Mason thought. These killings, he believed, would accelerate the pace of a societal collapse already made inevitable by Jewish and nonwhite corruption, and set the stage for its replacement by a Fourth Reich.

Mason mostly languished in obscurity until 2017, when members of the militant neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen tracked him down at his home in Denver. The group was founded in 2015 and had long admired him; Atomwaffen and like-minded neo-Nazis appropriated the term “accelerationism” (which is also used by a family of academic theories on the nature of late capitalism) for their adaptation of Mason’s thinking.

After linking up with Mason, they received his blessing to continue aggressively promoting his ideas. The accelerationism they preached centered on heightening the contradictions, using violence both to target their enemies and force a harsh response from the political system. It’s an idea with clear influences on the Buffalo shooter, who claims he used a gun in the attack, which killed 10, partly because “the changes to gun laws that will be pushed [afterward] will…help my case” by inspiring a backlash against the government.

In the last half-decade or so, accelerationist ideas spread rapidly through both dedicated websites and forums with names like “Siege Culture” and “Fascist Forge,” as well as more mainstream social networks. During that time span, Atomwaffen members were linked to at least five murders.

But the white supremacist version of accelerationism does not require any organized plot or group to lead to mass murder. Accelerationist justifications for violence have so thoroughly suffused online white nationalist spaces that anyone could encounter it and draw their own murderous conclusions — as the accused Buffalo gunman did.

Christchurch and its copycats

In March 2019, a heavily armed man walked into a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and killed 51 Muslims while they prayed. It was one of the deadliest white supremacist terror attacks in modern history — and one of the most consequential.

The shooter, Brenton Tarrant, believed nonwhite population growth was an existential threat to his race. He wrote a screed titled “The Great Replacement,” and his plan for stopping the alleged “replacement” drew liberally from accelerationist ideas.

“Why did you carry out the attack? … To add momentum to the pendulum swings of history, further destabilizing and polarizing Western society in order to eventually destroy the current nihilistic, hedonistic, individualistic insanity that has taken control of Western thought,” he writes, a passage that would later be copied by the Buffalo shooter.

Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
A Muslim man adjusts flowers memorializing the 51 people killed at Masjid An-Nur mosque during a mass shooting on March 15, 2020, in Christchurch, New Zealand.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of the Christchurch shooter’s attack and writings on the internet’s racist right. The sheer violence of the assault on New Zealand’s small Muslim community turned his writings into a must-read on the racist right — and made accelerationism into one of the dominant ideas on the fringe right today.

And it inspired copycats.

In April 2019, a man named John Earnest entered a synagogue in Poway, California, and began firing on worshippers. Earnest’s writings, a mix of old-school Christian antisemitism and internet-era hatred, borrow some of Tarrant’s accelerationist ideas and cite him as a direct influence (“Tarrant was a catalyst for me personally,” he wrote).

Several months later, another white nationalist named Patrick Crusius attacked a Walmart in El Paso, specifically targeting Hispanic patrons. Like the Christchurch shooter, Crusius appeared obsessed with the idea of a demographic threat from nonwhite immigrants. He pledged his allegiance to the New Zealand killer’s way of thinking.

“I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” he wrote in a pre-attack screed. “The Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.”

After this wave of violence in 2019, the threat from accelerationist-inflected violence seemingly subsided. Atomwaffen formally disbanded its US presence in 2020 after a series of law enforcement raids targeted their leadership, though some members refounded a version of it in 2021 under the name National Socialist Order. In both 2020 and 2021, data from the Anti-Defamation League showed a significant decline in white supremacist killings from prior years — primarily because neither year saw a mass casualty attack linked to this ideology (the pandemic may well have been a factor as well).

But the threat did not go away. The shooter in Buffalo followed the 2019 pattern to a T, from citing the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory to outlining explicitly accelerationist tactical thinking to liberally plagiarizing Tarrant’s writings. The danger now is this killer inspires a new round of racist and antisemitic violence at a time when American democracy is in even greater danger.

The accelerationist threat after Buffalo

Accelerationist ideas have not stayed confined to the neo-Nazi right. The notion of sparking social collapse and a second civil war is the central premise of the “boogaloo” subculture, an all-purpose anti-government ideology that contains some neo-Nazi elements but is not fully part of the movement. This kind of adoption by other groups underscores how accelerationism is more of a broad strategic vision than a specific political program.

“Accelerationism is best understood as an anti-ideology, directed toward the destruction of the current ideological order and the political-economic system that expresses and creates that order. But in its anti-ideological thrust, accelerationism makes possible what had once been so difficult: to move the many varieties of extreme far-right tendencies in unison,” scholars Brian Hughes and Cynthia Miller-Idriss write in a 2021 brief on the idea.

In their article, Hughes and Miller-Idriss are especially concerned with accelerationism and the January 6 assault on the Capitol. They cite evidence that a broad range of accelerationist ideological tendencies participated in the attack, including some Mason-style neo-Nazis. Their survey of white supremacist social media channels after January 6 found that the most violent accelerationists saw it as evidence that their goals are actually attainable.

“January 6 represented an apotheosis for this new extreme far-right accelerationist network,” they write. “It has also become a source of renewed momentum and energy for the extreme far-right. It is a unifying symbol, an example of a victory that almost was and might still be. It has empowered and emboldened its admirers while offering an opportunity to exercise the common terrorist tactic of studying and learning from failed actions.”

Notably, January 6 was not an event primarily or even largely inspired by neo-Nazi thinking. It was a riot spurred on by Donald Trump and his allies on the right; most of the rioters were not Siege readers but rather committed MAGA believers. The radicalism of the mainstream incited a kind of violence the fringe could join in and pick up on.

In the immediate months following January 6, many (including myself) worried about a wave of ideologically driven violence that did not emerge. But the Buffalo attack proves that the danger is still there, as are the links to the mainstream. Leading conservative figures, including Tucker Carlson and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), have recently pushed sanitized versions of the Great Replacement idea that motivated accelerationist killers from Christchurch on.

The point is not that these figures literally inspired the Buffalo shooting. Rather, it’s that post-January 6 America is marked by conditions accelerationists have dreamed of: a rising receptivity to fringe racist ideas in the mass public combined with partisans of a major party demonstrating a willingness to use violence against the US government.

This does not mean that the accelerationists are likely to succeed in their goal of toppling the government; they are not. But even short of that, the persistence of the idea portends a more dangerous American future.

Conservative podcaster Steve Bannon on Monday vowed not to back down in promoting a racist conspiracy theory that was allegedly cited by suspected Buffalo gunman Payton Gendron.

On his daily War Room: Pandemic podcast, Bannon insisted reports about the “replacement theory” were meant to distract the public. Bannon has previously promoted a French book that inspired the theory, which claims that white citizens are being replaced by immigrants.

“Of course, all of the morning shows are all over Tucker Carlson and a few others about the replacement theory,” Bannon complained. “They seem to miss the point. And here’s what we’re not going to back off on. For people who have followed this show from day one, we are inclusive nationalists. Right?”

“OK? So, this is not about race,” he continued. “This is about American citizenship! This is about the value of your citizens.”

Bannon said that he was “not backing off one inch” despite the shooting.

“This is why we’re going to take over every elections board in the nation,” he remarked. “This is why we’re going to take over every medical board in this nation. This is why we’re going to take over state legislatures and D.A.s and attorney generals [sic] and secretaries of state and governors. And we’re not going to stop. We are ascendant!”

read more

On Saturday, a white supremacist walked into a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, and opened fire. He killed ten people and wounded three others; eleven of his victims were Black. The horrific attack showed the influence of other massacres by the terrorist wing of the “alt-right” that took place during the Trump presidency. The conspiratorial ideology of these attacks, once fringe, now can be found in the mainstream right wing. They also fit within the much longer history of anti-Black lynchings and white supremacist violence that have been occurring for centuries.

Six similar far right attacks killed 86 people in 2018 and 2019. Their intended targets were Muslims (51 killed in Christchurch, New Zealand), Latino immigrants (23 in El Paso) and Jews (including 11 in Pittsburgh). The Christchurch massacre set up a template that other white supremacists have followed: writing a lengthy manifesto and placing it on an online platform associated with the alt-right before the violence, and then livestreaming the attack.

The Christchurch shooting brought worldwide attention to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which is widespread in the global right wing today. The theory claims there is an intentional plan to change the demographics of majority white countries with a majority of people of color. It usually claims that Muslims and Latinos are the main replacements. In the extreme reaches of right-wing politics, Jews are supposedly behind this plan, and in the more moderate version, the Democratic Party. For both, financier George Soros is one of the puppet masters.

The Buffalo shooter cited the Great Replacement Theory and a number of other centuries-old racist tropes about Black intelligence, sexuality and violence. The attack is another instance of a much older U.S. tradition of mass murder of Black people in the name of white supremacy, one of the most recent examples being Dylann Roof’s 2015 massacre of nine people during a Bible study at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Racial justice advocates note that that the police and other agents of the state also perpetrate anti-Black violence on a regular basis.

Christchurch added one of the more recent twists to global white supremacist movements, making “ecofascism” one of its motivations. This combination of traditional fascist politics with environmentalism goes back to the “blood and soil” wing of the original German Nazi party. The new ecofascism supports immigration bans in white-majority areas — only this time, supposedly to protect the environment. The perpetrator of this most recent attack specifically offered up a self-description of being an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist.” Dany Sigwalt of the Movement for Black Lives’ Black Hive, a coalition of Black activists and organizations working to lift up Black environmental activists, says some responsibility for the appeal of ecofascism lies with the mainstream environmental movement. Because it did not understand issues of race and colonialism, it “has opened the door for a wave of eco-fascists who see killing Black people are a climate solution.”

The Buffalo-based group Black Love Resists in the Rust said they were “extremely outraged by today’s horrific incident,” which “was nothing less than an act of domestic terrorism. Our hearts are with every individual and family directly impacted by this incident.” The group organized a Sunday morning vigil, and joined “with other community organizations to provide long-term mental health and food access support to people who are impacted,” according to its Facebook page.

This attack is a deeply disturbing demonstration that alt-right ideology continues to inspire attacks on historically oppressed groups across the U.S. This movement, which gained traction in 2015, was able to unite white supremacist activists with more moderate far right populists that permitted people of color, Jews and gay men to join (the so-called alt-lite). In doing so, it created the first new wave of open organized white supremacist politics since the 1980s and ‘90s.

Together, the two wings of the alt-right — fueled by shared approaches like their innovative use of the internet, misogyny, Islamophobia, conspiracy theories, and using irony to both promote its ideas and refuse responsibility for its actions — helped elect Trump. Although a number of individuals and groups popular today have their origins in it — such as Jack Posobiec, Andy Ngo, the Groypers and the Proud Boys — the alt-right seems to have mostly burned out as a specific movement in the last couple years.

The massacre’s perpetrator was only 11 years old when Trump’s campaign started, and between 13 and 15 years old when he was in power — the period that the alt-right flourished. The Buffalo massacre shows that both the alt-right’s ideology, as well as the specific techniques it pioneered, remain influential and deadly today in a country whose history is marked by white supremacist violence.

The tsarist empire that preceded the revolutions of 1917 is often thought of as a medieval throwback. Yet reactionaries in Russia also pioneered modern methods of counterrevolution, inspiring Europe’s fascist movements.

---

Russian emperor Alexander III’s reign was a laboratory for reactionary terror. (Corbis via Getty Images)

Russia is usually thought of as an improbable birthplace for the world’s first communist revolution. Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ fantastic ambitions of revolution across the planet often overshadow the reality that, over the immediately preceding decades, the Russian Empire had been the bulwark of reaction in the industrialized world.

Though the dubious credit for inaugurating the modern authoritarian playbook is usually awarded to Benito Mussolini’s Italy, there is a strong argument that the last thirty-six years of the Russian Empire — the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, from 1881 to 1917 — provided the ultimate laboratory for state-of-emergency rule and reactionary terror. From weaponized prejudice to paramilitary street terror and the castigation and censorship of the written word, the arsenal of reaction was well developed already in Russia’s late nineteenth century.

With the quasi-enforced exile of almost the entire ruling class after 1917, creating a global diaspora of almost 2 million people, many of its ideas and methods spread around the world — with some fertilizing the political soil for fascism and Nazism.

---

Beard of Reaction

Following the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881 — after seven different attempts, including basement bombs in the Winter Palace and street shoot-outs — the Russian state was thrown into a tailspin from which it could never right itself. The so-called Tsar Liberator’s program of autocratic liberalism, featuring the emancipation of the serfs (along with modest property reform and land redistribution), selective civic advancement for Jews, localized self-government, and an independent judiciary (progressive by West European standards), was quickly vitiated by a concerted program of counterreform.

The new emperor, Alexander III, marked himself ready to break even with the most long-standing and characteristic traditions of the Romanov dynasty. Smashing the unbroken line of beardless rulers since Peter the Great’s original beard ban and accompanying beard tax of 1698, the new ruler not only appeared with an imposingly long beard but also had himself photographed dressed theatrically in the standard outfit of a Russian muzhik or peasant — a clear populist signal. His building program embraced an anti-modern visual style that hearkened back to the Byzantine and the Old Muscovite, again severing the emulation of the neoclassically oriented European style, which had gone largely unquestioned for two centuries. His historical escapism and fantasy were a new and finely tuned form of turning politics into theater, a staple of modern reaction — and fitting for a ruler who prided himself on never missing a dress rehearsal at the Marinsky Theater.

This new regime had stumbled onto a fundamental truth of modern reaction: that conservatism could be radical, too. And the true brain behind this vision was the Ober-Curator of the Holy Synod and the personal tutor of the last two emperors, Konstantin Pobedonotsev, something of a cross between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader. The critical realist painter Ilya Repin famously depicted him as a living mummy, and the symbolist Russian Jewish poet Alexander Blok envisioned him as a vampiric grand inquisitor, once writing:

In those distant, deaf years

Slumber and haziness reigned in the heart

Pobedonostsev’s owl wings

Stretched over Russia

There was no day or night

Only the shadow of those vast wings

He drew a spellbinding circle

Around Russia, gazing into her eyes

With the vitreous stare of a sorcerer

Pobodonostev labeled popular sovereignty as “the great falsehood of our time.” Decades before Joseph Goebbels, he spoke of the French Revolution as the ultimate nemesis, whose repeal he openly sought. He crafted a concerted program of censorship and vilified the intelligentsia, with dozens of newspapers banned. Further, this Ober-Curator crafted a state ideology explicitly hostile to the notion of education. He and the new emperor decisively ended both university autonomy and any higher education for women. In their correspondence, they were overtly contemptuous of secondary teaching for former serfs, and at the new network of church schools, founded by Pobodonostev, no subjects were taught other than learning to read the Bible. Any student already in university found to be political in any way was to be sent directly into military service.

Alexander III’s rule brought something of an experimental right-wing project. For the first time, a major European state would be ruled under “temporary regulations,” meaning an indefinite and conveniently undefined “state of emergency.” This empowered the state to search for and court-martial anyone deemed a threat to state security. In practice, this meant the ruthless enforcement of what would be known, somewhat speciously, as “Russification” — in essence, a form of nationalist terror. Finns lost their autonomous army and post office, nothing could be printed in Ukrainian, the universities in Warsaw and Vilna were shut down, Polish could no longer be used in high schools (even Polish literature was studied in Russian), and Lithuanians began to lose the right to use the Latin alphabet.

This new regime had stumbled onto a fundamental truth of modern reaction: that conservatism could be radical, too.

Perhaps more familiar to Americans are the waves of pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II — kindred to American lynchings and race riots — infamous for triggering the largest mass exodus in modern Jewish history. Almost half of a 5-million-strong population now saw flight as their only way out. “Pogrom,” derived from “thunder,” is one of the few words in Russian to have gained international currency, especially in its problematic adoption to describe Nazi antisemitic acts. Less understood is the program of apartheid-like lawfare unleashed against the Jewish minority. Hundreds of laws passed as “emergency decrees,” known as the “May or Interim Laws,” stripped the right to vote and to own land, and enacted harsh quotas in all public educational institutions, even restricting Jews’ freedom to adopt Christian names. Officially coordinated mass expulsions from multiple cities followed; newly appointed governor-generals of major cities, like Moscow and Kiev, began their terms with expulsions of Jews.

The early Russian Social Democrat and star of Russian letters, Maxim Gorky, who fled the country in 1906, said in response to recent events:

Is Europe really so unconcerned about having as its neighbor a country of 140 million people whom the authorities are trying to turn into animals, instilling in them hostility and hatred for anything that is not Russian, inculcating not just cruelty and violence, but a passion for violence? Do Jewish bankers in Europe understand that they are giving money to Russia to fund Jewish pogroms?

The construct of modern antisemitism as the key, conspiracy-format reactionary ideology has a clear Russian provenance. The urtext which lays out the very idea and format for demonic conspiracies of global domination, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, called a “warrant for genocide,” first emerged as part of a larger text by the Russian mystic Sergei Nilus entitled “The Great within the Small and the Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility. Notes of an Orthodox Believer.” First serialized in Saint Petersburg newspaper Znamia in 1903, it was repeatedly reprinted thanks to the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, as part of a propaganda campaign in the subsequent decade. This forged document was introduced to Berlin as early as 1919, through Colonel Fyodor Vinberg’s radical right-wing publication Luch Sveta (Ray of light), and then to the United States, in 1920, by Boris Brasol, who provided the assist for Henry Ford’s Americanized version, published as The International Jew. Brasol, a future Nazi agent and member of the German American Bund, was a former tsarist prosecutor for the Ministry of Justice who had served the last major blood libel case in modern European History, that of Mendel Beilis in Kiev in 1913. More than a definitive text of antisemitism, it is also the most profound denunciation of the modern world found in any text of political propaganda. The Protocols frames any kind of political thought or mobilization of workers or the masses as symptom of an apocalyptic design for world destruction; the text aims to silence all critical thought. It was apparently found among the last personal effects on the bedside of the Russian monarchs before their execution in Yekaterinburg in 1918; the whole family are today saints of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The 1905 Revolution — which saw the first general strike, the first military mutiny (aboard the Potemkin, as immortalized by Sergei Eisenstein), and the first soviet, or workers’ council, in Russian history — brought a level of disorder, with waves of pogroms and riots, that almost toppled the regime. And while the tsar’s manifesto, in October 1905, brought the Russian Empire closer to a European standard of parliamentary governance, with some checks and balances and a protected civic sphere, this shift also triggered an even more radical wave of reactionary mobilization. In its wake emerged nothing less than Europe’s first fascist organization, the Union of Russian People (URP), more generally known as the “Black Hundreds,” founded in November 1905.

The Black Hundreds founded ‘combat groups’ that wore yellow shirts long before Mussolini’s Black- and Hitler’s Brownshirts.

While the last two emperors are no longer thought by historians to have been behind any systematic program of pogroms, evidence abounds of their tacit support for these new political movements of the post-1905 radical right. The URP was no elite club but a mass political movement; populist and anti-bourgeois, they appealed to the peasant and the proletarian, and sought workers’ relief in the name of autocracy. Even Vladimir Lenin noted their “benighted peasant democratism,” as they expounded a form of racist anti-industrial capitalism that avoided challenging property relations of the landlord class, so familiar from later fascisms. Notably, their enemies were not just Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries but liberalism as a whole, including those conservative-minded liberals who sought a path to reform. Weapons were received from the police, subsidies from governors, and the last emperor even granted them a reception while he accepted their honorary badge. (At one time, Rasputin, the tsar’s “guru,” counted the miracle monk and Black Hundred spokesperson Iliodor as a close confidant.)

---

Street Terror

The Black Hundreds founded “combat groups” (boevye druzhiny) that wore yellow shirts (long before Mussolini’s Black- and Hitler’s Brownshirts), initiating street terror and strikebreaking, and pursuing an assassination campaign, especially against Jewish members of the liberal Constitutional Democratic (“Cadet”) Party. The Union unsuccessfully pursued the assassination of Prime Minister Sergei Witte, who had drafted the 1905 manifesto, and, during a thwarted attempt to kill Cadet leader Pavel Milyukov at an exile meeting in Berlin, Black Hundred members murdered Vladimir Dimitrevich Nabokov. A leading Cadet liberal, Nabokov, the father of the great novelist, helped to end the monarchy and the death penalty, and supported full emancipation of the Jews. His murderers, Black Hundred veterans, were sentenced but never served prison time, and went on to collaborate with the Nazis. Along with several former generals that pledged loyalty oaths to the Third Reich, these assassins even created a Russian version of the Hitler Youth under the aegis of the SS, with some ultimately fleeing to South America after the war.

Government terror after 1905 descended into mass murder, with at least three thousand hangings of “revolutionaries” in the Stolypin terror. Even such drastic measures could not stave off the near-total collapse of the Russian state into outright civil war after the February and October Revolutions of 1917. The counterrevolutionary “White” generals openly embraced — or were themselves veterans — of the Russian far right. Their reactionary program decayed into radical antisemitism replete with a biological worldview, with new “racial tests” applied for all those in the army and the provisional governments the Whites fleetingly established in the areas they occupied. The greatest outbreak of systematic killing on the European continent before the Holocaust occurred under the cover of the Whites, by the so-called Volunteer Army, in Ukraine. Organized into military operations, it murdered tens or even hundreds of thousands of Jews in Ukraine by 1921. As a rule, White military governors pardoned those implicated in the murders.

---

Black International

In the wake of their defeat by the Red Army, the Russian ruling class and the leaders of the White Armies formed a diaspora which some termed a “black international.” While few in number, imperial Russian exiles played critical roles in key moments during the birth of Nazism. Propagandists such as Vinberg, with his press outlet Crusade, based in Berlin, continued the civil war by other means. Described as a halfway house between the Black Hundreds and Nazism, he often spoke of the need to be free from both the red and gold internationals. Die Brücke, or Aufbauvereinigung, founded in Munich in 1918–19, was the organization that most firmly planted the Russian roots for Nazism, including press chiefs of former White Army generals and the later Nazi directors of press and foreign affairs. Historians trace Hitler’s conversion to the global conspiratorial element of his antisemitism to their materials.

Such cooperation and even unity among the terrorist German and Russian right had immediate and dire results: the Kapp Putsch in Berlin in 1920, the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, and the assassinations of Nabokov and foreign minister Walter Rathenau, both in 1922. The Russian dimension to the Beer Hall Putsch is largely forgotten, as the mastermind, Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a Russian Baltic German and Aufbau editor, died in the attack.

If the term “Wilhelminism” emerged to indicate an imperialist archconservative, anti-socialist political climate in the German Empire, then perhaps “Pobedonotstevism,” or “late-Romanovism,” should be introduced as shorthand for the right-wing radicalization that reached its pre–World War I heights in Russia. When the anti-revolutionary Russian headquarters collapsed in defeat at the end of the Civil War, the resulting resentment was sent spiraling across Europe — with fateful consequences. This stands as a reminder that political concepts do not always only travel from left to right, and that it was the Russian world that first confronted the collapse of the promises of modern life. Underneath Nazi rhetoric or even the modern authoritarian playbook writ large, Russia’s counterrevolutionary past is not far under the surface.

---

The right-wing freakout over peaceful protests outside the homes of Supreme Court justices and chalk on the sidewalk in front of Republican senators’ homes, built around the seeming belief that any kind of protest at all is an act of violence, is actually a piece of classic right-wing projection. Conservatives assume that all protests feature intimidation and menace, bellicose threats, and acts of violence, because they themselves know no other way of protesting, as we’ve seen over the past five years and longer—especially on Jan. 6.

read more

“This hateful, white nationalist rhetoric is not just being spread by lone gunmen. It can also be found on cable news and in the rhetoric of politicians today.”

Officials with extensive power over election administration in at least seven counties of crucial swing state found to have promoted falsehood that 2020 election was stolen by Biden

The effort to install local election officials who promote Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen has seen particular success in the crucial swing state of Georgia, where at least eight county election officials are promoters of the falsehood, a Guardian investigation has found.

The officials span the state, from suburban counties outside Atlanta to rural counties near the Tennessee and Alabama borders. All have substantial power over the administration of local, state and national elections in their counties, often with little oversight beyond scantly attended public meetings and small-town newspapers.

Continue reading…

Activist arm of right-wing Catholic outlet Church Militant is increasingly entwined with racist “groyper” movement