BOOKBUSTER REVIEW
The International Alt-Right
By Hermansson, Lawrence, Mulhall & Murdoch
Published by Routledge, rrp £23, available to order from Bookbuster.
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
In the last month two major reports have emerged on internet propaganda issues. Pearson’s published poll results ahead of the US Midterms, suggesting only 8% of responders thought misinformation was not an issue, 91% thought it was, and of those over two-thirds regarded it as a ‘major problem’. The kind of misinformation Pearson’s say was the core issue relates to political extremism and hate crime. At the same time, Global Witness, a human rights NGO, concluded that “social media firms are fundamentally failing in their responsibility to stop democratic processes being undermined by false, misleading and purposeful deceit.”
Whilst both reports point to issues across the political spectrum, they conclude that the far-right is most guilty. Another group, NetLab, a Rio-based centre for ‘internet and social studies’ looked into the Brazilian election run-up and concluded the majority of false news came from the right. The Guardian piece on NetLab quotes them as saying this was “harmful to Lula” and carried “significant repercussions and persistent effects.”
TWO VERY VOLUBLE CHAPS HERE IN HASTINGS
Meanwhile, despite Lula’s win, by a very narrow margin, elsewhere things are not so positive. This year the far-right won in Italy, and the Israelis welcomed back their own Teflon-coated Boris-a-like yoyo, far-right extremist Benjamin Netanyahu. Twitter has been controversially taken over by Elon Musk, and pretty much everyone fears he will sponsor more far-right content. Meanwhile, in Britain, the government is pushing an anti-immigration agenda rather hard and the opposition leader is so hell-bent on winning back the ‘red wall’ that he is stooping to much the same rhetoric.
One of the most concerning aspects of this is the tacit acceptance of what the alt-right internet trolls call ‘great replacement theory’, a paranoid fascist conspiracy-theory that ‘the white race’ is being consciously pushed out by blacks and Islamists all across Europe and the US. I personally know of at least two very voluble chaps here in Hastings that give loud proclamations of such views to all and sundry in the town centre. Meanwhile, two Tory MPs in a row have taken on the ‘ship them to Rwanda’ baton, which is frankly nuts, but apparently sort-of acceptable to certain vicious tabloids we could name.
A VERY GOOD AND FRANKLY SCARY LOOK AT THE ‘ISSUES’
Hope Not Hate curated the book The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century for Routledge in 2020. They give an in-depth background to the players of the online version of this ‘game of thrones’, and its real-world overspill. Their conclusions are petrifying, but somehow seem to be falling short of the reality as seen over the intervening two years: they seemed less convinced that a real-world infection would take hold, but in my view the rise of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the brief exposure of the true neoliberal Tory ‘soul’ under Liz Truss, and the rather bizarre recent pandering to racists by Priti Patel and Suella Braverman auger otherwise.
However, the book is nevertheless a very good and frankly frightening look at the ‘issues’ that are virally encouraged amongst the alt-right internet trolls and fringe groups and, increasingly, far-right real-world individuals close to power. These include obsessions not only with ‘race-replacement’, a paranoid scheme to match those of the crusaders and the more extreme idiots in the reformation, but also gender ideology; Russia (Putin as good guy); the gaming of algorithms (see, for example, Trump’s wing-man Steve Bannon and ‘Cambridge Analytica’ et al, Boris’s erstwhile boy-hero – now arch-enemy – Dominic ‘Gollum’ Cummings, and the current and last cabinets’ worship at the throne of Hayek and the growth-growth-growth economic terrorists…); obviously ‘identity politics’; misogyny; and odd ideological nonsense like ‘archeofuturism’; ‘identitarianism’; occultist lunacy from Hitler’s pal Evola (seriously, I’m not joking); and a general obsession with taking the worst prescriptions for action against the ‘fall of civilisations’ as per Hitler’s other pal Oswald Spengler.
A COUNTER TO THE ECOCIDAL CAPITALIST FUTURE
These people are frankly crazy, but winning in the meme-o-sphere and, increasingly, the real political world, and not just Trumpian ‘Proud Boys’ either. The left need to respond with their own alternative vision, but there are perilously few signs that it either can or will. One phrase that sticks out in the book is ‘the libertarian to alt-right pipeline’, and I think this gives a hint of the direction we need to come from to resist them: a left-libertarian (i.e. socialist-anarchist) pipeline to a socially just and environmentally sustainable future, as a counter to the ecocidal capitalist future, based on hierarchy, domination, and frankly, genocide that is the logical outcome of the forces of darkness at this moment on the ascendant pretty much everywhere. Know your enemy, and dive into this book!
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