THE FAR-RIGHT INTERNATIONAL
It is not only the Left that makes use of internationalism. From fascists in the street to heads of state, the Right is showing a willingness and enthusiasm to co-ordinate across borders. Simon Childs finds out more.
March 26, 2019
The New Internationalist
On a hot July day in 2018, as US President Donald Trump visited the UK, MEP Kent Ekeroth, from the far-right Sweden Democrats party, joined protesters on Whitehall in London for the Free Tommy Robinson demonstration. The former leader of the English Defence League (EDL), real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was serving time for disrupting the trial of a rape-gang in the course of his provocative ‘reporting’.
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THE BANNON CONNECTION
The nationalist far-right today is, counter-intuitively, internationalist, according to Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works. He argues that multiple factors are helping to create an international movement.
For starters, you have ‘alienated young men in many societies across the world’. In Europe, they find common cause in a shared belief in existential threats to the ‘European way of life’. That idea finds a sympathetic audience across the Atlantic, where it ‘resonates with the [perceived] threats to whiteness in the United States’.
Next you have numerous ultra-nationalist governments. Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, for example. The internet then connects all these disparate threads, which are given a cerebral gloss by ‘weird far-right intellectual figures’, like French journalist Guillaume Faye, author of Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon stands atop this international network. ‘Tommy Robinson’ has become a lucrative global brand. In 2018 he advertised a Deplorables Tour of Australia – a nod to Hillary Clinton’s unwise barb about bigoted Trump supporters – offering his fans a private dinner for $700. During his time in prison he gained high-profile backing, including from Steve Bannon, the former White House Chief Strategist who is treated as a Trump proxy by the media. He called Yaxley-Lennon ‘the backbone’ of Britain on an LBC radio talk show.
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https://newint.org/features/2019/02/11/far-right-international
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