“Awaken, Vikings! Awaken Teutons! Awaken Celts, Gauls, Franks, and Spartans! Find your descendants, your people, your land. We need you. We need your warriors’ souls to merge with ours. We need your swords, your strength, your spirit. Awaken, warriors of old. Awaken your pale cousins from Siberia to Iberia. Awaken and taste blood once more. It is time.”
—Rachel Summers in her upcoming (Autumnal Equinox, 2017) book, The Forgetting
The extreme right is increasingly sophisticated, globalized and actively recruiting young people, a grim new study says. (“Why so serious?” –ed)
The once perpetually fractured eco-system of the far-right, from white nationalists in the US to anti-migrant groups in Europe, has become cohesive and highly adaptable. The Fringe Insurgency, a study published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, shows that while these movements may differ in ideology and scope, they are increasingly working together. Essentially, the extreme right—many of which state isolationism and nationalism as key ideologies—has globalized.
“There is certainly a real paradoxical relationship in that these very ultra-nationalistic movements started to act internationally and globalize their anti-globalist ideas,” Julia Ebner, one of the study’s authors, told VICE. “I think that’s rather ironic.”
While it may be ironic, it isn’t something to be taken lightly.
The paper is built upon on three case studies: the Defend Europe campaign, the Charlottesville rally, and the German election. It focused on, but wasn’t limited to, the alt-right, neo-Nazis, Identitarians (an European ethno-nationalist movement which works to preserve of European culture and identity) and counter-Jihadists actions. Julia Ebner and Jacob Davey, the authors of the study, analyzed 5,000 pieces of content from over 50 channels of communication including Twitter, 4chan, and far-right discord channels.
“There was really a need to start figuring out what was causing this explosion in extreme right activism globally,” Davey told VICE. “There was really a need to start getting data behind all of that and see what mechanism is allowing this to happen.
“They’re not all knuckleheads… The big thing here is that they are increasingly becoming more and more sophisticated. It’s a continuously growing and expanding process, if you look closely, they’re constantly learning from each other. They’re becoming more aware of the fact that they can have this greater impact.”
There are numerous goals for the far right—the election of populist leaders, removing hate speech laws, among them—but one of the major shared goals of the groups is to push what is known as the “Overton window.” The Overton window is the range of ideas that are acceptable in public discourse and the extreme right would like more of their fringe ideas to fall under this.
The globalization isn’t limited to online activity. Several of the groups, most prominently the Identitarians in Europe, are expanding IRL as well. The Identitarians recently met to discuss opening a British chapter which if set up could possibly work as a bridge between the Americans and the Europeans. Ebner told VICE that the group said they attempted to start a chapter in Canada but it didn’t take. However, as we’ve seen with the emergence of anti-immigration street patrol groups like the Soldiers of Odin, groups obsessed with border security such as the Storm Alliance, and a self-described anti-Islam militia like III% Canada, far-right groups are flourishing in the Great White North.
In their research, the duo found a sophisticated ecosystem that is apt at recruitment, propaganda, and mobilization. Utilizing a range of social media platforms, the far right is able to increasingly fundraise, mobilize, propagandize and, most importantly, translate their online activity into real world dollars. More than $200,000 was raised on various online platforms for Defend Europe—the Identitarian anti-refugee mission in the Mediterranean—and the donations came from around the world, not just countries in which the Identitarians exist.
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