Fascism is on the rise in the west, nurtured in some measure by politicians and the media. “Cannot believe we’re seeing Nazi salutes in 21st century America,” tweeted NigelFarage about Charlottesville recently in the UK. Farageis the man who stood, arms outstretched, who expressed his “concern” at having Romanians move in next door, and made apocalyptic warnings of Romanians and Bulgarians flooding Britain. Farage.
Across the western world a media and political elite scapegoats migrants for the crimes of the powerful, portrays Muslims as a homogeneous violent fifth column. “Obama answers to the Qur’an before the constitution,” declared Fox News contributors. The US constitution would be replaced with the Qur’an, they announced. Muslims would be banned from serving in high office, declared Herman Cain, a Republican candidate for the presidential nomination, a few years ago. “Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States,” was the pronouncement of Newt Gingrich, the Republican ex-speaker of the House of Representatives. Muslims were the only group Barack Obama offered “undying, unfailing support for”, declared Republican Mike Huckabee.
Those goose-stepping marchers in Charlottesville, represent the undiluted hatred that festers in the US elite. It’s the same in the UK. “What will we do about The Muslim Problem?” scrawled Trevor Kavanagh last week in Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, The Sun. “Muslims tell British: Go to hell” was what The Daily Express said. Mail Online continues to provide a platform for the far-right hate preacher Katie Hopkins, who once called migrants “cockroaches” and fantasised about using gunboats against them.
The courageous former Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiatt resigned over “anti-Muslim hate-mongering”. “The lies of a newspaper in London can get a bloke’s head caved in down an alley in Bradford,” he warned. On a daily basis, the British population is asked to blame every problem they have on foreigners, rather than those with power and wealth. “Migrants: How many more can we take?”, “Immigrants bring more crime”, “Britain must ban migrants”, “True toll of mass migration on UK life”, “The ‘swarm’ on our streets”: just the hateful headliness.
Where did they come from? Their hatred was and echoed by media moguls and mainstream politicians alike. In the UK, Brexiteers portrayed immigrants as potential criminals, terrorists, rapists and murderers; they portray critics and progressives as enemies of the people and saboteurs.
Racists and fascists are enabled and empowered by elites on both sides of the Atlantic.
What is the ‘alt-right'?
Here is a brief guide to the meaning of those expressions and others used by white supremacists and far-right extremists.
Alt-Right
The “alt-right” is a racist, far-right movement based on an ideology of white nationalism and anti-Semitism. Many news organisations do not use the term, preferring terms like “white nationalism” and “far right.”
The movement’s self-professed goal is the creation of a white state and the destruction of “leftism,” which it calls “an ideology of death.” Richard B. Spencer, a leader in the movement, has described the movement as “identity politics for white people.”
It is also anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and opposed to homosexuality and gay and transgender rights. It is highly decentralized but has a wide online presence, where its ideology is spread via racist or sexist memes with a satirical edge.
It believes that higher education is “only appropriate for a cognitive elite” and that most citizens should be educated in trade schools or apprenticeships.
Alt-Left
Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the “alt-left.” Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and “anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like.”
Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term.
“It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network,” Mr. Pitcavage said in an email. “It’s just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they don’t like ‘fake news.’”
Alt-Light
The “alt-light” comprises members of the far right who once fell under the “alt-right” umbrella but have since split from the group because, by and large, racism and anti-Semitism are not central to its far-right nationalist views, according to Ryan Lenz, the editor of Hatewatch, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Members of the alt-right mocked these dissidents as “the alt-light.”
“The alt-light is the alt-right without the racist overtones, but it is hard to differentiate it sometimes because you’re looking at people who sometimes dance between both camps,” he said.
The two groups often feud online over “the Jewish Question,” or whether Jews profit by secretly manipulating the government and the news media.
Antifa
“Antifa” is a contraction of the word “anti-fascist.” It was coined in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s by a network of groups that spread across Europe to confront right-wing extremists, according to Mr. Pitcavage. A similar movement emerged in the 1980s in the United States and has grown as the “alt-right” has risen to prominence.
For some so-called antifa members, the goal is to physically confront white supremacists. “If they can get at them, to assault them and engage in street fighting,” Mr. Pitcavage said. Mr. Lenz, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the group “an old left-wing extremist movement.”
Members of the “alt-right” broadly portray protesters who oppose them as “antifa,” or the “alt-left,” and say they bear some responsibility for any violence that ensues — a claim made by Mr. Trump on Tuesday.
But analysts said comparing antifa with neo-Nazi or white supremacist protesters was a false equivalence.
S.J.W.
S.J.W. is short for “social justice warrior” and is used by the right as an epithet for someone who advocates liberal causes like feminism, racial justice or gay and transgender rights. It is also sometimes used to imply that a person’s online advocacy of a cause is insincere or done for appearances. It became widely used during “GamerGate,” a controversy that began in 2014 over sexism in video game subcultures.
Blood and soil
Video taken at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville on Saturday showed marchers chanting “blood and soil.” The phrase is a 19th-century German nationalist term that connotes a mystical bond between the blood of an ethnic group and the soil of their country.
It was used as a Nazi slogan in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s and since then “has been transported to neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists around the world,” Mr. Pitcavage said. It is one of several Nazi symbols that have been adopted as a slogan by some members of the “alt-right.”
White Genocide
White genocide is a white nationalist belief that white people, as a race, are endangered and face extinction as a result of nonwhite immigration and marriage between the races, a process being manipulated by Jews, according to Mr. Lenz. It is the underlying concept behind far-right, anti-immigration arguments, especially those aimed at immigrants who are not white Christians.
The concept was popularized by Bob Whitaker, a former economics professor and Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management, who wrote “Anti-racist is code word for anti-white.” Mr. Pitcavage said the concept of white genocide was often communicated online through a white supremacist saying called the Fourteen Words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”!
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