Originally posted on Ravings of a Radical Vagabond this is a comprehensive summary of Third Positionist fascist currents old and new, and the successful insertion of their ideas into leftist milieus and alternative media outlets.

This long post started as an investigation about the Left and Syria which I started after I read the Sol Process blog’s publication of three posts concerning shady pro-Assad sources used in leftist circles (which can be read here: part I, part II, part III), and which later expanded into a more extensive investigation. I also thank the acknowledgement of my blog post by Russia Without BS, whose blog was helpful in the initial stages of my research.

Note for safety purposes: this post will contain links to far-right pages for documentation and sourcing purposes, and any link to such a page will be in bold and italic, such as this.

On Some Obscure Strains Of Fascism

I will first provide some historical context by exploring the history of early alliances between revolutionaries and reactionaries and of some lesser known forms of fascism which, unlike the majority of Western fascists who supported the United States’ anti-Communism during the Cold War, instead actively supported and rallied around the Soviet Union.

The Feudal Socialists

Alliances between revolutionaries and reactionaries are by themselves nothing new, as already in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx was criticizing the Feudal Socialists. Alliances between revolutionaries and reactionaries are by themselves nothing new: in 1848 Karl Marx was already criticizing the Feudal Socialists in the Communist Manifesto. The Feudal Socialists were members of the French and English aristocracies who had lost their privileges in the revolutions of 1830 and sought to restore the old aristocratic order by trying to appeal to the working class to attack the bourgeoisie: they presented themselves as protectors of the working class proclaiming that under their rule bourgeois exploitation did not yet exist while at the same time railing against the creation of a revolutionary proletariat which would undo the old order of society completely. The reactionary and aristocratic nature of their movements however meant that they never really gained any mass support. Those who adopted this strategy included a section of the Legitimists, the French royalists who sought a restoration of the Ancien Régime and supported the traditionalist House of Bourbon’s claim to the throne of France against the then ruling and more liberal House of Orléans.

The Maurrassians, the Sorelians and the Birth of Fascism

The Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus Affair was a crisis which erupted under the French Third Republic in 1894 when French army captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of allegedly handing over secret French military documents to the German army. Despite evidence exonerating Dreyfus, he was still arrested and court-martialed due to anti-Semitic prejudice against him. Dreyfus was not given a fair trial and was condemned to life imprisonment and dishonorably discharged, with anti-Semitic groups publicizing the affair and the public supporting the conviction.

Dreyfus’ family members were the only ones who kept on challenging the verdict and claim he was innocent until evidence surfaced that another army officer was the one who had given these documents to the German army, after which the pro-Dreyfus side gained increasing support and novelist Emile Zola wrote an open letter titled “J’Accuse!” (I Accuse!) which accused the government and the army of anti-Semitism and covering up the Dreyfus case, for which Zola was convicted of libel against the army and had to flee to England. His article had a profound impact and divided the France into two camps: the anti-Dreyfusards, comprising the Catholic Church, the army and the right wing who feared the reversal of the verdict would weaken the military establishment, and the Dreyfusards, made up of a coalition of moderate Republicans, Socialists and Radicals.

With the Dreyfusards gaining ground, a document implicating Dreyfus was revealed to be a forgery and Major Hubert-Joseph Henry confessed fabricating it. However the anti-Dreyfusards became a threat to the Republic and the Republican parties formed a coalition and a left-wing cabinet was set up to defend the Republic.

When Dreyfus was found guilty again in 1899, a year after the reopening of the case, the French President instead decided to pardon him, and Dreyfus was eventually freed and exonerated.

The Action Française and Charles Maurras

Among the most extreme nationalist movements of the late 19th century was the Action Française, founded in 1899 as part of the anti-Dreyfusard nationalist reaction, and which became dominated soon after by Charles Maurras, under whom it became a far-right neo-monarchist organization. Action Française combined support of an Orléanais monarchy based on legitimist principles and corporate representation under a neo-traditionalist state with a radical nationalism into an authoritarian, exclusionary and intolerant a ideology called “integral nationalism” conceptualizing the nation as an “organic whole” with the monarch as its head. Despite Maurras’ own agnosticism and interest in spiritualism and magic rather than Christianity, Action Française saw religion as a force of order and supported nationalism, tradition and religion, drawing its support from the Catholic public. According to Maurras’ and Action Française‘s vitriolic intolerant ideology, minorities labelled as the four “States within the State” – Jews, Freemasons, Protestants and Metics – were taking over society by secretly helping each other to positions of power. Action Française acquired a prominent position within the early 20th century nationalist movement in France through a cultivation of style and aesthetics and through an elitist yet at the same time most vitriolic propaganda. The activists of Action Française, Les Camelots du Roi (the Streethawkers of the King), sold its publications and engaged in street fights against leftists and liberals, and though it has been called the first pre-fascist “shirt movement” of radical nationalism, its upper-class elitist nature means it never sought to properly become an organized party or develop a militia. The Action Française was so extreme that the pretender to the throne rejected it and the Papacy later excommunicated Maurras in 1927.

With the outbreak of massive strikes in 1906 following the Courrières mining disaster where French 1109 coal miners died in a coal dust explosion, Action Française started involving itself in social issues by forging links with trade unions and cooperating with syndicalists against the Republic. Maurras proclaimed that the solution to the inevitability of class struggle in democracy was the installation of an authoritarian class collaborationist monarchy, and between 1906 and the outbreak of the First World War, Action Française collaborated with various syndicalist movements.

Georges Sorel and the Cercle Proudhon

Among Maurras’ collaborators was Georges Sorel, who started as an orthodox Marxist in the early 1890s and supported the Dreyfusard camp due to his conviction that socialism was a moral issue, although he later became disillusioned by how the politicians on the Left exploited the affair to join the parliamentary system and access the privileges of bourgeois institutions. Sorel’s belief of socialism being an ethical issue led him to later go through a process of significant revision of Marxism after supporting Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism against Karl Kautsky. Embracing accelerationism with the hope that the development of capitalism would modernize society and encourage class consciousness, Sorel rejected materialism as well as liberal democracy and political liberalism in favor of direct action, saw violence as an end in itself and considered that society needed to be saved and regenerated from what he considered as “humanity’s tendency to slide towards decadence”. Consistent to Sorel’s thought, however, was a rejection of bourgeois society and its values of rationalism, the Enlightenment and intellectualism and an embrace of pessimism and a cult of heroic ages and values, and his theory of myths, according to which the masses need myths to mobilize, and Sorel embraced philosopher Henri Bergson’s rejection of rationalism in favor of intuition. By the end of this process of revisionism, Sorel had become a revolutionary syndicalist for whom the “myth” of the general strike would mobilize the proletarian to act against the French Third Republic and its bourgeois system.

With the decline of strike activity in 1909 and disappointed by the push for reforms rather than revolution by the Confédération Générale du Travail, however, Sorel abandoned socialism and in 1914 he declared that “socialism is dead”. After Sorel read the second edition of the Maurras’ book Enquête Sur La Monarchie (Investigations on Monarchy) where Sorel was positively mentioned, a collaboration started between him and Maurras’ Action Française with the aim of overthrowing the bourgeois French Third Republic.

Following the failure of a common project between Sorel, his disciple Édouard Berth and the Action Française‘s Georges Valois of a national-socialist journal called La Cité Française, Valois and Berth founded a National Syndicalist political group called the Cercle Proudhon (Proudhon Circle) while Sorel, whom the group claimed as its mentor, refused to participate in the Cercle due to his own apprehensions towards the Maurrassians, and instead founded his own anti-Semitic and nationalist journal, L’Indépendance. Sorel however became dissatisfied with nationalism, left L’Indépendance in 1913 and opposed the union sacrée and the entry of France in the First World War in 1914 before later praising Lenin after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

The common theme uniting the Sorelians and the Maurrassians was their opposition to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and the aim of the Cercle was to provide a common platform for nationalists and leftist anti-democrats. The Cercle Proudhon had a particular interpretation of the works of Anarchist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, largely due to his influence on syndicalism, but also because Action Française itself was attracted to his anti-Semitism and support for the traditional patriarchal family, and their own reinterpretation of his opposition to bourgeois democracy, even though Proudhon himself was not a fascist or a proto-fascist. Out of the Cercle Proudhon, Georges Valois formed the Faisceau, the first French fascist party

The Sorelians and the Italian Fascists

At the same time that Sorel was preparing to launch La Cité Française, one his Sorel’s disciples in Italy was Arturo Labriola, who was also one of the main theoreticians of revolutionary syndicalism in Italy and in 1902 had started the publication of a revolutionary syndicalist called Avanguardia Socialista, to which contributed Sergio Panunzio, who later became one of the main theoreticians of Italian fascism. Around that time, the revolutionary syndicalists had left the Socialist Party in 1907 and the main socialist trade union, the CGL, in 1909, and founded their own Unione Sindicale Italiana (USI), becoming more heterodox in the process. Labriola developed his own theory of a “proletarian nation” according to which Italy was an exploited nation and revolutionary transformation concerned all of society instead of class alone. Among the other syndicalist leaders, Panunzio stressed the importance of violence, Robert Michels elaborated on mass mobilization and the need of new elites, and Labriola developed corporatist economic theories. These revolutionary syndicalists had an interpretation of Marxism whereby they advocated for developing Italian capitalism as a prerequisite for a revolutionary movement and were in favor of cross-class collaboration with the farmers and the workers and supported “proletarian nationalism” and Italian expansionism. In 1910, the journal La Lupa was founded by revolutionary syndicalist Paolo Orano and, like the Cercle Proudhon, united syndicalist leaders such as Orano, Labriola, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti and Michels, and nationalists around Enrico Corradini.

Some of Sorel’s Italian disciples even left the Socialist Party to join Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini, who in 1910 founded the Italian Nationalist Association. The Italian Nationalist Association itself was an upper class and elitist organization though, based on the suggestions of the syndicalists close to him, Corradini described Italy as an exploited “proletarian nation” which had to undergo a class collaborationist national revolution which would modernize and strengthen Italy and turn it into a militarist and imperialist power. This process transformed many revolutionary syndicalists into nationalist syndicalists, and many syndicalists and nationalists supported Italy’s 1911 war against the Ottoman Empire and its subsequent occupation of Libya. By 1914, the revolutionary syndicalists had significantly revised Marxism and some of its leaders became nationalists who supported Italy’s entry in the First World War on the side of the Entente, thus becoming national syndicalists who later counted among the founders of the Italian fascist movement and members of the regime of Mussolini.

The USI itself adopted a neutral stance during the war, and its interventionist national syndicalist wing was put in minority position and subsequently expelled; one of the expelled members, Alceste De Ambris, together with Angelo Oliviero Olivetti co-founded the Revolutionary Fasci of Internationalist Action, which called on Italian workers to support Italian intervention in the war. The next month Benito Mussolini, himself a former syndicalist who had read Sorel before later becoming an anti-Communist nationalist, founded the Autonomous Fasci of Revolutionary Action and started his own publication funded by pro-interventionist business interests, Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy) after his expulsion from the Socialist Party for his support of Italian intervention in the war. Olivetti’s fascio merged with Mussolini’s to form the Fasci of Revolutionary Action in December 1914, whose purpose was to mobilize the masses into supporting the war, and in 1915 Il Popolo d’Italia first referred to it as the “fascist movement”. De Ambris became one of the founders in 1918 of the Unione Italiana del Lavoro, a national syndicalist union formed out of the interventionist wing expelled from the USI, and he co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 before later becoming an opponent of fascism and Mussolini and joining the anti-fascist Arditi del Popolo. Michele Bianchi, a former revolutionary syndicalist turned national syndicalist who had helped De Ambris found the Unione Italiana del Lavoro, later joined Mussolini and helped him found the Italian Fasci of Combat and the Fascist Party, of which he became the first secretary general, and was one of the leaders of Mussolini’s March on Rome. Sergio Panunzio joined Mussolini’s first fascio, and Paolo Orano and Robert Michels later joined the Fascist Party. The Italian Nationalist Association also later merged into Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and many of its members became important figures of his regime, and within it formed part of the “Fascist Right” faction opposed to the national syndicalist “Fascist Left” faction led by Olivetti, Panunzio and Bianchi.

The Conservative Revolution

In a similar vein as Maurras’ Action Française arose a movement known as the Conservative Revolution as part of the reaction against the Enlightenment. The Conservative Revolution traces its origin to Counter-Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciples in Germany, who combined cultural criticism and anti-rationalism, and to the denunciation of liberalism and rationalism as “un-German” by nationalists like Johann Fichte and Ernst Arndt. The Conservative Revolution developed in the backdrop of the drastic transformations Germany was experiencing in the 19th century, with Otto von Bismarck’s Unification of Germany and his establishment of a semi-authoritarian system with a weak parliament, with urbanization and the rise of class antagonisms and decline in Christian faith and specifically German culture accompanying the industrialization of Germany, and with Bismarck’s persecution of socialists and Catholics, which resulted in Germans blaming the parliamentary system and its parties for these conflicts, and the spread of the wish for the rise a Caesarist a national hero who would unify German society.

The Conservative Revolutionaries attacked materialist capitalist society, castigated the press, the political parties and the new political elites, and railed against the “spiritual emptiness of life” and the “decline of intellect and virtue” of urban and commercial mass society while at the same time romanticizing earlier rural communities of kings and peasants. Unlike the traditional conservatives who sought to preserve and restore the old order, the Conservative Revolutionaries combined conservatism with revolutionary ideas and sought to break away from the present they lived in to create a future society based on a past they idealized. The Conservative Revolution was a reactionary revolt against modernity and liberal, industrial society and, while it was anti-socialist and anti-Communist, its main target was liberalism, which its ideologues held as alien to German society and equated with secularism, rationalism and humanism, exploitative capitalist society and embourgeoisement, and on which it blamed all the ills of Western society. In contrast to this, the Conservative Revolutionaries posed as defenders of national redemption, supported a return to folk-community and glorified violence in their quest for national heroism.

The Conservative Revolutionaries initially welcomed the outbreak of the First World War, which they saw as a promising break with the past. Having supported the struggle against the West, which they saw as antithetical to Germany, the Conservative Revolutionaries reviled the liberal capitalist Weimar Republic, which represented everything they opposed, and it was precisely under Weimar Germany that they came to prominence. Though the older generations of the Conservative Revolution had sought to accommodate themselves to the Republic, its younger members who had experienced the war insisted it should be replaced by a dictatorship and either worked with the German far-right seeking to overthrow it or stayed out of the political arena to delegitimize it.

The main figure of the Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany was Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, according to whom the world consisted of old and young nations, with Fate supporting the young over the old, and whereby he rationalized Germany’s defeat in the Great War by claiming that old Britain and France had co-opted the young and gullible United States. Therefore, for him, the future of Germany was eastwards, between the liberal West and collectivist Russia. Germany’s defeat and the German Revolution in which the German Empire was overthrown and replaced by the Weimar Republic gave rise to a sense of alienation and dissatisfaction among the middle classes and former officers among whom Moeller found his audience, and he subsequently animated the June Club, which was founded in 1919 and was based on national socialist and corporatist premises in addition to a strong anti-Westernism which became more pronounced after the Treaty of Versailles (the Club itself was named for the month the treaty was signed). The June Club was of considerable influence within conservative circles, and its meetings were occasionally attended by the future chancellor Heinrich Brüning and the future member of the Nazi party Otto Strasser, and in 1922 Hitler addressed one of Moeller’s seminars, though Moeller later described Hitler as “wrecked by his proletarian primitivism” after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch. The Club published a journal called Gewissen (Conscience) which lamented the decline of Germany, showed concern for the German diaspora, criticized party politics and advocated for replacing the Republic by a dictatorship. The most influential of Moeller’s publications was Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich), published in 1922 and in which Moeller summarized the resentments and aspirations of the Conservative Revolutionaries and laid down the vision of a conservative revolution which would establish a system of nationalist “socialism” uniting the classes in Germany into state he called the Third Reich, which constituted one of the most powerful anti-Republican ideas under the Weimar Republic. Moeller however had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide in 1925. Moeller’s myth of the Third Reich was appropriated by the Nazis though they later repudiated him in 1933 and denied he had had any influence on them, largely because Moeller himself was not an anti-Semite.

Oswald Spengler was another major figure of the Conservative Revolution. An opponent of liberal democracy, which he considered a “foreign concept” imported from England, he first published his magnum opus, The Decline of the West, in 1918 where he laid down his deterministic understanding of history according to which cultures develop like organisms which grow, develop, age and die, with their final stage of decline and death being when they become “civilizations”. According to his thesis, the transition from a “culture” to a “civilization” was marked by the appearance of rationalists such as Rousseau, Socrates and the Buddha, the decline of the culture-bearing elites and their replacement by the bourgeoisie, and accompanied itself by mass democracy, wars, expansionism and Caesarism: authoritarian rulers like Caesar or Augustus. For Spengler, the 19th and 20th centuries were when Europe declined from a “culture” into a “civilization”, with Napoleon being an equivalent of Alexander the Great who foreshadowed the age of Caesarism. The Decline of the West was a best-seller, largely because it comforted Germans by rationalizing the hardships of Germany as part of larger historical processes, though Moeller criticized it by claiming that, while Spengler had rightly predicted the decline of the West, Germany’s defeat had instead restored the promise of vitality. The next year Spengler published Prussianism and Socialism with the aim of uniting German socialists and conservatives against the Weimar Republic, and in which he rejected Marxism as an “English ideology” and instead asserted a corporatist, nationalist and militarist “socialism” under the authority of a monarchical and authoritarian Prussian state inspired by the “Soldier King” Frederick William I of Prussia. Spengler, who had initially voted for Hitler, faced isolation under the Nazi regime for his rejection of anti-Semitism and of racialist theories (Spengler instead adhered to a form of spiritual racism) and his criticisms of the Nazis.

Another prominent member of the Conservative Revolution was Karl Haushofer, one of the leading theoreticians of “geopolitics”, a theory of international relations developed by Friedrich Ratzel and Halford Mackinder, and which conceived relations between states in terms of social Darwinist competition according to which whoever controlled the area dominated by the Russian Empire would be the major world power. Haushofer had been a military attaché to Japan following the latter’s victory against the Russian Empire in 1905, a victory which inspired anti-colonial nationalists around the world and led to the Russian Revolution of 1905 which was itself a prelude to the Revolution of 1917. After serving in the German Army in the First World War, Haushofer became an advocate of an alliance between Germany and Russia, and eventually with China and Japan. Unlike the Nazis who prefered Western colonialism and white supremacist domination of the Third World, Haushofer instead advocated for German support for anti-colonial struggles against the British and French Empires. Haushofer however exerted influence on the Nazi party, especially through his pupil Rudolf Hess, and Hitler absorbed the concept of Lebensraum from Haushofer. Karl Haushofer eventually became disillusioned with the Nazi regime and his son Albrecht was involved in the German resistance and participated in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.

Other figures of the Conservative Revolution included Carl Schmitt, who rejected parliamentary democracy, elaborated legal theories resting on the idea that modern societies needed a “total state” to function and identified politics as the distinction between a “friend” and an “enemy”, and Ernst Jung, who supported a fascist version of the Conservative Revolution envisioning an “organic German nation”.

Shortly before Moeller’s suicide, June Club itself was dissolved and transformed into the more aristocratic Herrenklub (which Moeller had refused to join), which sponsored a journal called Der Ring, the direct successor of the then defunct Gewissen. The Conservative Revolutionaries’ influence was initially limited mostly to sections of the Republic’s institutions such as former members of the German Youth Movement (which was itself part of the Conservative Revolution) who had joined the civil service and the government in large numbers. These ideas also became widespread within the Reichswehr, the newly formed army of Weimar Republic, under the leadership of the chief of staff and later commander in chief Hans von Seeckt who was himself close to Conservative Revolutionary ideas, and which many former Freikorps members who shared ideas similar to those of the Conservative Revolutionaries joined. However, with the Great Depression, their ideas gained traction within German society and Der Ring hailed the undermining of the parliament by the succeeding Chancellors Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen (who had himself been a member of the Herrenklub and whose presidential cabinet was hailed as the culmination of the Conservative Revolution by Der Ring) and Kurt von Schleicher.

The Conservative Revolution itself was ambivalent towards the Nazis in that, while its members supported many aspects of Nazi ideology and welcomed its rise, they were elitists with a contempt for the masses reserving their ideas to an esoteric minority circle, and therefore saw themselves as paving the way for the creation of a “new Germany” in which they did not see a role for the Nazis, which they considered a vulgar mass movement and disliked those who joined it. Unlike the Nazis, the Conservative Revolutionaries expressed support for an alliance with the Soviet Union based on their own idea of a romantic and anti-capitalist “German socialism” (unlike Soviet socialism where the proletariat is the revolutionary element, their “German socialism” considered the “deeply revolutionary Völk” as its base), did not write about biological racism, and eschewed the use of the Republic’s institutions to obtain power. During the last days of the Weimar Republic, this ambivalence manifested itself in how they were were torn between opposing the Nazis, which meant supporting the Republic they despised, or siding against the Republic by supporting the Nazis, with whom they still had their differences despite shared similarities: while they welcomed the rise of the Nazis due to their shared reactionary ideals, they disliked the mass character of the Nazi movement

The attacks by the Conservative Revolutionaries on the Weimar Republic and its culture along with their spread of Caesarism and of a “sentimental brutality” shaped the mental and ideological climate that set the stage for the Nazis by making the German middle classes more receptive to Nazi ideology and paved the way for their rise: the Nazis gathered the millions of malcontents about whom the Conservative Revolutionaries had spoken and for whom they elaborated dangerous and elusive ideas. Many Conservative Revolutionaries welcomed Hitler’s rise as the way to fulfill their goal, and Der Ring supported Hitler’s Third Reich by identifying it with Moeller’s. Some Conservative Revolutionaries joined the Nazis, the most prominent example being Carl Schmitt, who went on to join the Nazi party in 1933 and become the “crown jurist” of the Nazi regime, writing the legal justification for Hitler’s massacre of the Nazi party’s Strasserist wing in the Night of the Long Knives, and later formulating the concept of Grossraum, which denotes an area dominated by a power representing a specific “political idea”, inspired by the American Monroe doctrine and based on international law to justify Hitler’s expansionism. Jung became an opponent of the Nazi regime and was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives, while other Conservative Revolutionaries opposed to the Nazis went into exile and some Conservative Revolutionaries participated in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.

German National Bolshevism

Laufenberg and Wolffheim

The very first National-Bolsheviks were Heinrich Laufenberg, a former member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who had been President of the Council of the Workers and Soldiers in Hamburg during the German Revolution, and Fritz Wolffheim, an ex-member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who was then living in Hamburg, and who were both leaders of the Hamburg branch of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the 1910s. In 1919 they submitted to Karl Radek their policy of having the working class ally with the bourgeoisie into a nationalist dictatorship of the proletariat which would fight a national liberation war (a position which would strangely be adopted by various Marxist-Leninist and Maoist groups in the late 20th century) against the Entente powers occupying Germany following WWI. Laufenberg’s and Wolffheim’s proposal was rejected by Radek and labelled as an absurdity by Vladimir Lenin himself, and they were soon expelled from the KPD. Laufenberg and Wolffheim later helped the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), but were soon expelled from it as well because of their National Bolshevism, their expulsion being Radek’s condition for admitting the KAPD to the Third Congress of the Comintern.

The Treaty of Rapallo

Following Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the Weimar Republic sought to circumvent the limitations on the Reichswehr imposed by the Treaty of Versailles through secret military collaboration whereby illegal and secret far-right German paramilitaries of the Schwarze Reichswehr, underground formations of the Reichswehr which included Freikorps, were permitted to train in Soviet territory and provide training for the newly created Red Army. This cooperation was formalized by the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922 and the secret Soviet-German Military Pact, proposed by the Reichswehr‘s Hans von Seeckt and supported by the Reichswehr‘s conservative Prussian military elite, for whom the national interests of Russia and Germany were compatible despite their ideological differences, and the Reichsbank‘s president Hjalmar Schacht negotiated for Germany to give credits to the Soviet Union while German firms were allowed to establish factories for the production of war equipment in Soviet territory.

The start of the Occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium in 1923, meant to force Germany to continue paying war reparations, however threatened this cooperation and resulted in rising nationalism in Germany, especially among the working class, and the Comintern subsequently pushed for cooperation between the Communists and the ultra-nationalists. In June 1923 Radek gave a speech to the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Comintern praising Leo Schlageter, a far-right Freikorps member who together with his unit joined the NSDAP in 1921 and engaged in sabotage against the French forces occupying the Ruhr before being executed by them in May 1923. This was a followed by a period of cooperation between the KPD and the Nazis against the Versailles Treaty during which KPD member Ruth Fischer infamously attacked “Jewish capital” in an attempt to appeal to Nazi students, and the KPD’s newspaper reprinted articles by members of the German far-right such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck even as its rank and file members were fighting against fascists on the streets.

This second National-Bolshevik wave died off during the period of growth Germany experienced from the mid- to late-1920s, though following the Comintern’s “social fascism” turn (itself partly a reaction to the SPD using Freikorps units to crush the Spartacist uprising, during which revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered) the KPD cooperated again with the NSDAP in an attempt to bring down the Social Democratic Party-led government of Prussia in 1931, again with opposition from its rank and file base and again with support from the Comintern, which wished to end diplomatic talks between France and Germany. The next year, the KPD participated in a failed strike together with the NSDAP, while again rank and file Communists instead engaged in street battles against Nazi Brownshirts, and which were damaging to the KPD by revealing its poor organizing skills and lack of workplace support and making it appear confused while helping Nazi propaganda by giving credence to NSDAP claims of being a worker friendly party without harming the Nazis’ relationship with the industrialists. This strategy, also based on the flawed accelerationist idea that the fascists’ policies would lead to a proletarian revolution and summed by then leader of the KPD Ernst Thälmann’s slogan “After Hitler, Our Turn!”, actively helped the rise of the Nazis, and the KPD refused to form a United Front with the SPD and preferred directing its attacks against the social demorats even after the Nazis seized power and unleashed their violence on the German Left.

Ernst Niekisch

The third period of National-Bolshevism came with Ernst Niekisch, a member of the SPD who had participated in the foundation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and was chairman of its Central Council. Niekisch was later expelled from the SPD for his extreme nationalism, after which he joined the Old Social Democratic Party of Germany, which he pushed towards a more nationalist direction and called for a “Prussian-Slavonic bloc” from Vlissingen to Vladivostok, and became involved with the Conservative Revolution, though he never adhered to the “Prussian socialism” of the Conservative Revolutionaries and maintained his original Communist outlook. Niekisch saw the Russian Revolution as a national form of class struggle, advocated for a nationalist form of Communism and together with Conservative Revolutionary Ernst Jünger he joined the Consortium for the Study of Soviet Planned Economy (ARPLAN), which aimed to establish cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union, and which he saw as the only way of opposing the Treaty of Versailles. Niekisch was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Nazi regime in 1934 and was released after the Second World War, becoming an orthodox Marxist and moving to West Germany following the suppression of the 1953 workers uprising by the German Democratic Republic with Soviet support. Among those influenced by Niekisch was Otto Paetel, who formed the Group of Social Revolutionary Nationalists, which opposed the Versailles Treaty, supported close cooperation with the Soviet Union and saw anti-capitalism as the means to free Germany from Western occupation. Unlike Niekisch, who was staunchly anti-Nazi, Paetel attempted to work with the Hitler Youth and many members of his organization also belonged to the “left wing” of the Nazi party of Gregor and Otto Strasser.

The Brownshirts and the Strasserists

Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, many Communists from the KPD defected to the Nazis, being derisively labeled as “Beefsteak Nazis”- Nazis who were “Brown on the outside and Red on the inside”. These former Communists joined and had a significant presence in the Sturmabteilung (abbreviated as the SA, also known as the Brownshirts and the Stormtroopers), the Nazi paramilitaries led by Ernst Röhm.

Ernst Röhm

Ernst Röhm was a veteran of the First World War, and an officer in the Imperial German Army and the Reichswehr who served in the Freikorps which destroyed the socialist Bavarian Soviet Republic. In 1919, he joined the recently formed German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the NSDAP, or the Nazi party) the next year, and Röhm soon became a close friend and ally of Hitler and helped him found the Sturmabteilung. In 1923 he participated in the Beer Hall Putsch, and after the failure of the coup he was tried and found guilty of high treason and discharged from the Reichswehr before spending two years as military advisor in Bolivia. Röhm was recalled back to Germany by Hitler after the latter’s electoral success in 1930 to take command of the SA. Röhm drastically expanded the SA and turned them into a paramilitary force which helped Hitler’s to power between 1930 and 1933 by fighting against Communists, engaging in racist and especially anti-Semitic violence, and intimidating opposition to the Nazis.

Röhm and the SA belonged to a left-wing section of the Nazi party adhering to a “socialist” form of Nazism advocating for the overthrow of the German upper classes, nationalizations, and programs to support the petite bourgeoisie which was still anti-Semitic and anti-Communist, and Röhm saw the Brownshirts as the core of the “revolution” envisaged by this wing of the Nazi party. Following Hitler’s seizure of power, Röhm began agitating for a fascist “revolution” and calling for the the formation of a “people’s army” by merging the Reichswehr into the much larger SA, which terrified the army, the Junker landowners and the industrialists whose support Hitler needed to secure his power and for his plans to rearm Germany. Hitler himself had considered the socialist slogans as merely propaganda to attract the masses and regarded the SA as a force whose purpose was to provide the violence needed to propel the Nazi party into power which had become expendable, and when the agitation of the SA dissatisfied with Hitler’s alliance with the German capitalists began threatening his goal of succeeding President Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler had Röhm killed and the SA leadership purged in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives, encouraged by Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring, who were Röhm’s enemies within the NSDAP. This was interpreted as a positive event by the KPD who tried appealing to SA members.

Gregor and Otto Strasser

Strasserism was a form of National-Socialism advocated by the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, both German veterans of the First World War who later served in the Freikorps which destroyed the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Gregor took part in the Kapp Putsch of 1920 which attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic and replace it with a reactionary authoritarian state while Otto joined the Social Democratic Party and opposed the coup. Both Gregor and Otto later joined Hitler’s Nazi party, Gregor joining the SA and expanding the Nazi party in Bavaria taking part in the Beer Hall Putsch, following which he was imprisoned for a few weeks until his election to the Bavarian Landtag allowed him to be freed, and after Hitler was released from jail and the ban on the NSDAP was lifted in 1925 he organized and expanded the Nazi party in northern Germany while Hitler was banned from speaking publicly. Otto, who had been a friend of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in the early days of the June Club, was allegedly the one who had introduced the idea of the Third Reich to the Nazis.

The Strasser brothers led a left-wing faction of the Nazi party adhering to a Völkisch and anti-Marxist form of “socialism” which advocated for nationalizations and a mass action, worker-based and anti-capitalist while still extremely anti-Semitic and anti-Communist form of Nazism, with Otto interpreting Stalinism as a Russian form of National-Socialism and advocating for cooperation with the Soviet Union and with the anti-imperialist peoples of the East such as China and India against the “declining” West. The Strasser brothers opposed Hitler’s alliance with industrialists, and this as well as rivalry between Gregor Strasser and Hitler led to clashes between them, and Otto was expelled from the Nazi party in 1930 and formed the Black Front before later going in exile and later returning to West Germany after the Second World War, where he remained active among neo-fascists. In 1930 Hitler removed Gregor from his position as head of the NDSAP’s propaganda which he had occupied since 1926, and gave his position to Goebbels. After Gregor was proposed the post of Vice-Chancellor in 1932, the rift between Strasser and Hitler increased, and Strasser resigned at the end of the year and retired from politics. Gregor Strasser was later arrested and killed and his faction of the Nazi party was purged during the Night of the Long Knives.

Francis Parker Yockey

As Anarchist researcher Kevin Coogan details in his book, Francis Parker Yockey was born in Chicago, Illinois in the United States, where he briefly flirted with Marxism in his youth before soon abandoning it for fascism. After reading Oswald Spengler and meeting Carl Schmitt, Yockey came under the influence of the Conservative Revolutionaries, including Haushofer, and was influenced by their ideas on cultural elites and geopolitics, their support of an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union and their advocacy of German support for anti-colonial struggles.

Yockey would later associate with fascists during the Interwar period and during the Second World War including Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund, the National German-American Alliance, the Silver Shirts, the America First Movement, among others. During WWII, Yockey would enlist in the US army despite opposing the entry of the US in the war, disappearing for two months after pro-Nazi saboteurs with ties to his family were arrested by the FBI (the FBI suspected Yockey himself was on an espionage mission for Nazis in Mexico) before returning and being honorably discharged after a mental breakdown in 1943. Yockey soon applied for a post at the Office for Strategic Services but was refused a job there because of his Nazi sympathies.

The defeat of the Nazi regime did not weaken Yockey’s commitment to fascism and he instead became more active in pro-fascist activity, becoming dedicated solely to reviving fascism. However many of these groups were anti-Communist and therefore would refuse to work with Yockey, with George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party and his allies spurning Yockey and calling him a “neo-Strasserist” due to the idea of an alliance between the Left and the Right and working with anti-Zionist Communists being central to Yockey’s ideas.

In 1946 Yockey obtained a position in the US War Department as attorney for the Nuremberg Trials, undoubtedly to help some of the Nazi war criminals being tried. In Germany Yockey would spend his time forming ties with German fascists operating underground against the Allies and agitating against the US occupation of Germany and against what he perceived to be the “biased procedures” of the trials, causing him to be fired from his position the next year.

Following this he fled to a small village in Ireland where he wrote his heavily Spengler-influenced book Imperium with the aim of reviving fascism. In Imperium he rejects the biological racism of the Nazis and opts for a cultural racism instead, though he still defended the Nazis by denying the Holocaust in his book (while privately acknowlegding the existence of the Holocaust and praising the Nazis’ atrocities) which he dedicated to Hitler, being one of the very first Holocaust deniers ever, and considered the rise of the Nazi regime as an “European revolution”. Yockey, like Spengler, was opposed to parliamentarism and other models derived from the French Revolution, but unlike Spengler who did not stress anti-Semitism, Yockey himself was an avowed anti-Semite, and the crux of the ideology laid out by his book was that Europe was being eroded by liberalism, which he saw as a “Jewish plot to undermine European culture”, and was occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, and that therefore Europe had to eschew nationalism and nation-states to instead unite into a fascist superstate which would “rejuvenate European culture” and be capable of opposing the two superpowers of the Cold War. This idea of a superstate was influenced by Carl Schmitt’s concept of the Grossraum.

Shortly after writing Imperium, Yockey lived in London, UK, where he worked for a short time for the European contact section of fascist Oswald Mosley‘s Union Movement, allowing him to form ties with an underground fascist network throughout Europe, including Alfred Franke-Gricksch, a former SS official and the leader of the neo-Nazi Bruderschaft organization. Following Yockey’s falling out with Mosley, he formed with the support of baroness Alice von Pflugl and the help of former Mosleyites the European Liberation Front, whose aim was to “liberate” Europe from the US and the USSR.

Yockey’s perception of the United States was itself negative in that he considered it to be little more than a “bastardized colony of Europe which had devolved from the influence of non-European minorities” and had “come under Jewish control”, and he therefore considered the impact of American capitalism as more destructive than Soviet repression for European culture and thus considered Soviet control as preferable to American domination of Europe. Hence he urged fascists to not collaborate with American anti-Communism during the Cold War and unlike most fascists who collaborated with US intelligence during the Cold War, Yockey’s European Liberation Front instead remained neutral and had a pan-European approach of geopolitics, with Yockey praising Soviet policy in Germany and seeking to secretly organize neo-Nazis in West Germany who would then collaborate with the Soviet military against American occupation. His aim was of course to form the European fascist superstate whose designs he laid out in Imperium.

Having lost his political ties in the United Kingdom, Yockey instead entered West Germany clandestinely, with army documents stating Yockey was “promoting a National Bolshevist movement” and contacting ex-Wehrmacht and ex-Nazi officers, among whom the Socialist Reich Party, a Strasserist party whose founder the ex-Wehrmacht member Otto Ernst Remer praised Imperium. Remer attacked Konrad Adenauer as an American puppet, denied the Holocaust and dismissed the Nazi regime’s atrocities as “Allied propaganda”, and agitated against the Allied occupation of West Germany while never criticizing East Germany and the Soviet Union, instead saying that he would “show the Russians all the way to the Rhine” should a conflict erupt between the US and the USSR, with Remer’s SRP receiving funding from the Soviets in the early 50s, something the Communist Party of Germany with which the SRP temporarily worked against Adenauer did not receive.

Yockey then traveled around Europe, distributing copies of his book to prominent neo-fascists, including French fascist Maurice Bardèche (himself one of the very first post-war Holocaust deniers like Yockey) and Julius Evola.

In Europe, Yockey participated in a conference by the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), Europe’s first neo-fascist party founded by veterans of Mussolini Italian Social Republic, which was also attempting to form fascist networks. The conference amounted to little due to the aims of the various fascist groups involved present being at odds with each other and with internal strife within the MSI itself over whether to adopt an “Atlanticist” strategy and align with NATO and the West or a pan-European “Third Position” strategy opposed to both the Americans and the Soviets, with the anti-Communist MSI eventually allying with NATO and the US who were more concerned with opposing the Italian Communist Party instead of punishing fascists in these early days of the Cold War. Yockey’s advocacy of allying with the Soviet Union did not find very receptive audiences among these fascists, with many pan-European fascists including Julius Evola, who had erstwhile praised Yockey’s book, being skeptical his ideas.

Returning to the USA, Yockey worked with infamous anti-Communist US senator Joseph McCarthy and with H. Keith Thompson, an American fascist who was the American representative of the Socialist Reich Party and worked for the defence of Otto Ernst Remer. Thompson defended Hitler and the Nazi regime and would remain in connection with Yockey until his death. In 1950 he would give a speech at a conference by far-right preacher Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Party where he would call the Nuremberg Trials a “sham” and claim the supposed existence of “global Jewish conspiracy”.

In the early 1940s Stalin initially adopted a pro-Zionist foreign policy (despite Lenin himself having condemned Zionism as a reactionary bourgeois movement) with the hope that Israel would be a socialist bulwark against British hegemony and supported the UN plan for the Partition of Palestine (and by extension endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine) and the subsequent creation of the colonial Israeli state. The Soviet Union was the second state to recognize Israel after the United States, though the Soviet bloc soon did a foreign policy volte face and threw its support behind Arab nationalist movements after Israel emerged as a Western ally. However, far from being merely anti-Zionist and in opposition to Israel only, Soviet policy in Stalin’s later days became outright anti-Semitic and the Eastern bloc faced a wave of anti-Semitic purges in the 1950s which included the Night of the Murdered Poets and the Doctors’ Plot. It is in this context that Yockey, visiting Europe again, found himself attending the 1952 show trials in Prague during which eleven Jewish members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party including its secretary general Rudolf Slánský were executed on charges of being Zionists, Trotskyists, Western imperialists and Titoists (Slánský was, on the contrary, staunchly anti-Zionist). Yockey considered this to be the end of American hegemony in Europe and thought it “foretold a Russian break with Jewry”, which he saw as “a favorable development in the fight to liberate Europe”. For Yockey, the wave of anti-Semitic purges was a “declaration of war by Russia on the American-Jewish leadership” and he therefore cooperated with Soviet bloc intelligence and became a paid courier of the Czech secret services who themselves worked for the KGB, and he started advocating for a tactical alliance between fascists and the USSR to end the American occupation of Europe.

Back to New York, Yockey’s report on the Soviet bloc anti-Semitic purges led James Madole of the National Renaissance Party, an American Nazi party, to endorse the campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans” and “Zionists” (which here is a coded anti-Semitic term referring to Jews rather than to the actual colonialist ideology of Zionism). Madole declared Communism as a mask for Russian nationalism following the triumph of Stalin over Trotsky, whom they saw as the leader of the “Jewish internationalist faction”, thus in his eyes transforming what fascists consider to be “Jewish Bolshevism” into National Bolshevism. The National Resistance Party itself started praising the Soviet Union and had portraits of Hitler and Stalin on its wall, attracting both Communists and Nazis, and certain American fascists started praising the Soviet Union as result.

Dissatisfied with the anti-Communism of the majority of the US far-right who was not very receptive to his National Bolshevik ideology and was at odds with his sympathy for the Stalinist USSR and for Third Worldist movements, Yockey traveled around the world, clandestinely going to East Germany and possibly to the USSR, writing propaganda for the Egyptian Information Industry and meeting Egyptian president Abel Gamal Nasser, under whom thousands of Nazi war criminals (including Yockey’s collaborator Otto Ernst Remer) fleeing Europe found refuge in Egypt.

Yockey spent some weeks in Cuba shortly after the Cuban revolution where dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown, seeking to form new ties again though his attempts failed, before being arrested by the FBI in 1960 and imprisoned. In jail, Yockey is recorded to have lamented the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and praised Hitler as a hero. Yockey eventually committed suicide in jail by swallowing cyanide, allegedly to protect his contacts.

Before his suicide, Yockey was visited in jail by Willis Carto, who would then become one of the main advocates of Yockey’s ideology in North America, although Carto rejected Yockey’s own rejection of biological racism and his anti-American and pro-Soviet position. Carto’s organization, the Liberty Lobby, distributed Yockey’s writings through its newspaper Spotlight, and its publisher Noontide Press republished Imperium.

Therefore Yockey’s core ideology could be seen as consisting of: a cultural rather than biological racism, rejection of nationalism in favor of a European superstate, and support for pro-Soviet and Third Worldist forces against American hegemony and liberal democracy, which he considered to be a “Jewish plot”. Yockey’s ideology has been very influential among post-war neo-fascists and his book is distributed among Nazis and white supremacists, with former leader of the neo-Nazi British National Party John Tyndall praising Imperium, and is influential among far-right neo-pagans and occultists.

The European New Right

Yockey would become the ideological predecessor of the Third Position and the European New Right, among whose prominent members are Jean-Francois Thiriart, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. A main feature of the European New Right is its criticism of American imperialism and of the “economism” of liberalism and its attempt to form alliances or infiltrate far-left opponents of Western imperialism and globalization.

Jean-Francois Thiriart

Jean-Francois Thiriart was briefly a leftist in high school before joining the National Legion and the Association of the Friends of the German Reich, two far-right organizations, later serving in the Waffen-SS for which he would be imprisoned after WWII. After his imprisonment he would retire from political life until the 1960s when he re-entered politics due to his belief that Europe was losing its status as a cultural center, especially after the independence of the Congo and the Algerian Revolution during which he organized in favor of Belgian settlers who wanted Belgium to reconquer the Congo as well as support for the French Secret Army Organization seeking to maintain Algeria as a French colony through a brutal and bloody campaign of massacring Algerians.

Thiriart saw the Belgian and French loss of the Congo and Algeria as pan-European affairs rather than in purely nationalist terms and he founded the organization Jeune Europe with the aim of creating a united Europe which would have its own nuclear arsenal and would be independent of the USA and the USSR whom he considered were dominating Europe and had turned it into a battlefield, thus echoing Yockey in his pre-1952 days, though Thiriart himself had never apparently known or read Yockey. Like Yockey, Thiriart also despised parliamentary democracy and instead advocated for an anti-egalitarian totalitarian state.

Thiriart would also try denying being a fascist and distancing himself from his Nazi past, instead calling the Left-Right division as outdated (in typical fascist rhetoric) and advancing a philosophy called Communitarianism which claimed to transcend the division between the Left and the Right though Jeune Europe had open ties with Nazis and used openly fascist imagery. Thiriart from then on advocated for a union of Europe and the Soviet Union, which he considered to be more Russian than Communist as from the early 50s, into a “massive white power bloc from Brest to Vladivostok”. Here he was echoing Yockey again.

Following the Sino-Soviet Split, Thiriart started advocating for supporting China against the Soviets in an attempt to make the latter lose its grip on Europe to pave the way for a rapprochement between Europe and Russia, as well as supporting revolutionaries in Latin America and the Black Power movement in the Unites States to end American hegemony on Western Europe. He would further restructure Jeune Europe along the line of a Leninist vanguard party, drop the open Nazi imagery of his organization and repudiate his earlier positions on Algeria and the Congo.

From then on, Thiriart moved towards a “National-Communist” perspective which was significantly influenced by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s adoption of an ultra-nationalist National Communism as state ideology, no doubt the result of Romania’s inclusion of former Iron Guard fascists within its intelligence apparatus, and Romania’s break with the Soviet Union and shift towards the People’s Republic of China. In 1966, Thiriart himself met Ceaușescu who contributed an article to Thiriart’s publication and would then help Thiriart met Zhou Enlai, from whom Thiriart attempted in vain to obtain Chinese support for Jeune Europe.

Thiriart worked with Argentine politician Juan Perón, who saw his own views of Latin American unity and integration as tied to Thiriart’s ones on European unity and who saw Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as heroes just like Thiriart did (for which obviously neither Castro nor Che themselves should be blamed), during Perón’s exile in Madrid where he also courted many members of the European far-right (Norberto Ceresole, who was for a time a close advisor of Hugo Chavez, was an associate of Perón. This red-brown tendency of Ceresole was also reflected by his association with Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and with Roger Garaudy, a Holocaust denying Communist who was himself praised by Hassan Nasrallah and Muammar Gaddafi).

Thiriart would adopt a policy of forming ties with the Left from now on, praising Ho Chi Minh’s struggle against America which he saw as an inspiration, and visited many Arab states trying to obtain support for a potential armed organization who would fight “American occupation” in Europe, and speaking at a Ba’ath party conference and meeting with Saddam Hussein, who was then only a colonel in the army. However receptive the Ba’ath party was to Thiriart’s proposal, it scrapped this project following the Soviet Union’s refusal to support it. He also attempted to form ties with Palestinian resistance organizations during this period. Thiriart retired again from public life after his failure to obtain significant support, though his few public appearances would keep on being vehicles for his anti-Americanism.

[Note: During Thiriart’s retirement, one of his followers, Renato Curcio, would go on to found the Red Brigades radical leftist organization which was active in the 70s and 80s in Italy. Another disciple of Thiriart, Claudio Mutti, would form the Italian-Libyan Friendship Organization after Muammar Gaddafi took power in Libya and later took part in organizing a “Nazi-Maoism” movement with the help of pro-China student groups, forming the Lotta Di Popolo organization, and would later meet Aleksandr Dugin in the 90s before arranging for Thiriart to visit Russia. Some Italian militants influenced by Thiriart would even adopt Hitler, Mao, Gaddafi and Juan Perón as heroes, and had slogans supporting a “fascist dictatorship of the proletariat” and praised both Hitler and Mao together.]

The collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged him to start working with the National-European Communitarian Party (PCN) a small party made up of former Maoists and neo-fascists, and run by Luc Michel, who identified himself as a National-Communist and acted as Thiriart’s secretary. In 1992, Thiriart would lead a PCN delegation of National-Communists to Russia to meet fascists who were now able to operate openly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thiriart met Yegor Ligachyov, who was receptive to Thiriart’s idea of a union between Europe and Russia against America. Ligachyov suggested it should be in the form of a revived Soviet Union, which Thiriart accepted, paralleling Yockey’s post-1952 National-Bolshevik positions.

Thiriart died from a heart failure in late 1992, his followers setting up a second European Liberation Front to continue Thiriart’s project. The European Liberation Front kept contacts with the Russian coalition of the National Salvation Front and supported the National Salvation Front during the 1993 crisis opposing it to Boris Yeltsin in Russia.

Alain de Benoist

Among the neo-fascists to come out of Thiriart’s ideological orbit is Alain de Benoist, who has exerted a substantial influence on the New Right. In his teenage years, De Benoist joined Thiriart’s Jeune Europe out of sympathy for the French occupation of Algeria in the late 50s and would later be a member of the editorial board of Europe-Action, a successor organization of Jeune Europe after the latter was banned by the French government.

During this period De Benoist was a standard mainstream neo-fascist opposed to Communism, defending apartheid and supporting the American imperialist war in Vietnam. Dissatisfied with the then state of the far-right and its inability to challenge the Gaullist French state, De Benoist would instead opt for giving up on the biological racism and conspiracy theories of the far-right and instead favor a more intellectual approach, and in reaction to the radical leftist movement of May 1968 he founded the think tank GRECE (which is the acronym for Groupement pour Recherches et Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne, the French translation of Research and Study Group for the European Civilization). Inspired by the theories of Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci on cultural hegemony (for which the by-then long deceased Gramsci should not be blamed), De Benoist would advocate for fighting an ideological war to influence mass culture as foundation for political change, a theory called “metapolitics”. GRECE consequently published material rehabilitating fascists such as ideologues of the Conservative Revolution and supporters of National-Bolshevism such as Ernst Niekisch.

De Benoist’s ideological evolution was also marked by a shift towards hostility to Christianity, which in his view had “colonized” Indo-Europeans by force, and support for a revival of pre-Christian European polytheism, which echoed Julius Evola. Accompanying this shift was an increasing anti-Americanism of De Benoist, who hated the “American way of life” and “it’s inane TV serials, chronic mobility, ubiquitous fast food, admiration of the almighty dollar and its quiescent, depoliticized populace”. He opposed free-market capitalism, appropriating left-wing critiques of liberalism by decrying it as an ideology reducing every aspect of human life to purely economic value, thus producing a totalizing consumer society which was inescapably totalitarian.

Paralleling Yockey and Thiriart before him, De Benoist came to consider American imperialism and liberal democracy as more dangerous than Soviet Communism, writing “Better to wear the helmet of a Red Army soldier than to live on a diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn” in 1982 (which would be repeated in 2017 by Richard Spencer, a prominent figure of the American fascist “Alt-Right” movement), supporting Third World struggles while condemning NATO and voting for the Communist Party in the French elections of 1984.

Against accusations from other neo-fascists of having defected to the New Left, De Benoist would just like Thiriart before him claim he was out of the Left-Right spectrum and instead supported “a plural world grounded in the diversity of cultures” against a “one-dimensional world”. This concept, called “ethnopluralism”, meant that De Benoist had gone from a white supremacist to a supporter of separate ethnic and cultural identities and regionalism against what he was as a “homogenizing global market”, putting him at odds with the vision of a pan-European superstate of Thiriart.

This concept of “ethnopluralism” would find its way among wider far-right circles, with Jean-Marie Le Pen re-using it in his xenophobic declarations and neo-fascists adopting it to ‘soften’ their racist rhetoric.

The end of the Cold War signified the end of the Left-Right divide for De Benoist and following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he would visit Russia in 1992, months before Thiriart’s own delegation, where he would meet many figures of the opposition to Boris Yeltsin and proclaim that politics consisted of anti-system forces against the “establishmentarian center”, effectively advocating for a Left-Right coalition against liberal democracy.

Third Positionist Fascism

Among the movements close to the European New Right is Third Positionism, a strand of fascism which stands in opposition to both capitalism and communism and has its origins in “classical” fascism and in the Strasser brothers.

The Movimento Sociali Italiano’s adoption of an electoral course during the 50s and 60s resulted in the formation of a number of neo-fascist offshoots of the MSI who preferred extra-parliamentary methods and sought to replace parliamentary democracy with a fascist dictatorship.

Terza Posizione

Among these were the Evola-influenced Ordine Nuovo and the Avanguarda Nazionale which would be dissolved by the Italian state in 1973 because they were attempting to revive fascism, which was illegal in Italy’s post-war constitution. Following their dissolution, many of their ex-members along with members of Mutti’s Lotta di Popolo would come together to form Terza Posizione, whose ideology was based on Julius Evola’s work and was one of the “pioneers” of post-war Third Positionist fascism. Following the 1980 Bologna massacre in which a suitcase blew up in a train station in Bologna, Italy, killing 85 people and wounding 200 others, the group would come under investigation as prime suspect behind the attacks and two of its prominent members, Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello, fled to the United Kingdom.

The International Third Position

In the UK, Fiore met Nick Griffin and Derek Holland, former members of the far-right National Front who had formed a Third Positionist faction within the NF called the Political Soldier wing, which opposed to the NF’s own electoral politics. In 1986, dissensions within the NF led Griffin and Holland to break away from the NF and form their own organization named the Official National Front (ONF). Unlike the National Front, the ONF supported ethnic regionalism in the UK and praised Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar Gaddafi and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, a position close to that of Otto Ernst Remer’s, and in 1988 Griffin and Holland traveled to Libya on invitation by the Libyan government.

Following a further split in the Official National Front, Griffin, Holland and Fiore would become the founding members of the International Third Position (ITP), and Holland and fellow ITP member Colin Todd visited Iraq shortly before the Gulf War as part of a ITP delegation. Patrick Harrington meanwhile went on to found the National Liberal Party, the party and later think tank Third Way, and Solidarity-The Union for British Workers.

The ITP would itself undergo multiple splits, with Griffin leaving in 1990 and later joining the British National Party (BNP), and later succeeding John Tyndall at the party’s head before being expelled from it in 2014 and founding his own party, the British Unity. Another member, Troy Southgate, left in 1992 to later form in 1998 the “National-Anarchist” National Revolutionary Faction, which again true to Third Positionist habits appropriates left-wing imagery and aesthetics for a reactionary, fascist ideology. “National-Anarchism” cannot be considered a legitimate form of Anarchism since only did it not develop out of any existing Anarchist thought, but Anarchists themselves have been at the forefront of opposition to fascism for many decades.

The Tricolour Flame, Forza Nuova and CasaPound

The Movimento Sociale Italiano would rebrand as a supposedly more moderate conservative party (though it maintains its fascist imagery and does not repudiate the party’s ties to Mussolini’s regime), leading its hardliner fascist faction to form Tricolour Flame, a Third Positionist fascist party.

A pro-Fiore and pro-Morsello faction within Tricolour Flame would grow while they were in “exile” in the UK and later split from Tricolour Flame and became an ultra-Catholic fascist party of its own named Forza Nuova, and when Fiore and Morsello returned to Italy, they were made the leaders of Forza Nuova. Once allied to the Ukrainian far-right Svoboda party, Forza Nuova later shifted to a pro-Russian and pro-Donbass position after the Euromaidan, with one member even going to, ironically, fight against “Kiev fascists”.

A sibling of Forza Nuova is CasaPound, named after fascist and anti-Semite Ezra Pound, which also grew out of Tricolour Flame, and whose members call themselves the “Fascists of the Third Millennium”. CasaPound is virulently xenophobic and anti-immigration, and has been behind many attacks against leftists and refugees in Italy while also adopting the New Right concepts of “ethnopluralism” and of metapolitics, and appropriating leftist methods such as squatting and occupying buildings, criticizing globalization and austerity, supporting workers and running social centers. Among CasaPound’s affiliates is Solidarites-Identites (Sol.ID), an “ethnopluralist” NGO which is active in Syria, Burma, Kosovo, Palestine and South Africa.

Red-Browns in Russia

Russian National Bolshevism

The origins of Russian National Bolshevism differ from interwar German National Bolshevism and have their roots in the Russian Civil War which followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent counter-revolutionary power grab by the Bolshevik Party, when Lenin made concessions to Russian nationalists to stabilize the newly formed Soviet Union and many Tsarist White movement members and defectors from the proto-fascist Black Hundreds switched sides and joined the Bolsheviks.

[Note: Many prominent revolutionaries at that time condemned the counter-revolutionary acts and the authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks, with Emma Goldman becoming disillusioned with the situation in Russia and denouncing the Soviet Union as state capitalist, Otto Rühle saying that the struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against Bolshevism, and Russian Anarchist Voline, who had participated in the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions, labeling the USSR under Stalin as red fascism.]

Among former White movement supporters who joined the Bolsheviks was Nikolai Ustrialov, who saw the Bolshevik Revolution as the way to reestablish Russia as a great power, called for the end of the Russian Civil War and for Russian nationalists to collaborate with the Bolsheviks, which Ustrialov and Russian emigres in Prague published in their publication named Smena Vekh while adopting the “National Bolshevik” name after Ustrialov read Niekisch. The Soviet government subsequently subsidized Smena Vekh, which became influential in the USSR and though Ustrialov himself initially praised Stalin before being executed during his purges, a number of Smenavekhites became influential ideologues in the Soviet establishment.

Following the failure of the Spartacist uprising in Germany and Stalin’s victory in the power struggle which followed Lenin’s death in the Soviet Union, the mixture of nationalism and Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union developed into some kind of National Bolshevism as result of the USSR’s adoption of the “Socialism in One Country” policy in 1925, the adoption of which was also partly motivated by the need to reassure Germany that the Soviet Union’s priority was to maintain the Treaty of Rapallo instead of exporting revolution.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Another period of Red-Brown collaboration followed the crisis resulting from the failure of the Western powers’ appeasement policy towards Hitler when he violated the Munich agreement (from which the Soviet Union had been excluded) by annexing Czechoslovakia, leading Stalin to openly negotiate a potential alliance against Hitler with Britain and France, while also secretly negotiating with Germany. To the shock of Western powers and Communists around the world, in August of that year the German-Soviet Credit Agreement and the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were signed, followed by about five hundred German Communists who had previously sought exile in the Soviet Union being deported by Stalin back to Germany. These treaties were accompanied by secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe into Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence, and the next month the Nazis and the Soviets invaded Poland, with the Soviet and Nazi troops holding joint parades at Brest-Litovsk and Lvov. After this the USSR and Germany held further talks which resulted in another treaty whereby the Nazis ceded Lithuania to the Soviets in exchange for Stalin recognizing Hitler’s occupation of Warsaw and Lublin, and which included protocols concerning a population transfer between Germany and the Soviet Union as well as sharing of intelligence to repress Polish resistance to the occupation. More talks in Moscow concerned the expansion of economic and political cooperation between the Nazis and the Soviets, which Molotov and Ribbentrop openly declared would be a “solid foundation for peace in Eastern Europe”.

[Note: When Jean-Francois Thiriart came out of retirement in the 80s, he praised the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and declared that it made the Soviet Union the geopolitical heir of Nazi Germany.]

When Britain and France declared war on Germany in reaction the invasion of Poland, the Comintern instead suspended all anti-fascist activity and forced Communist parties to condemn the war as imperialist and oppose war credits, causing the collapse of the anti-fascist Popular Fronts. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed another economic agreement in 1940 whereby the USSR sold raw material to the Nazis, who would provide the USSR with war equipment, helping Germany circumvent the sanctions imposed by Britain, and unresolved talks about the possibility of the USSR joining the Axis ensued. The agreement ended only when Hitler violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, prompting the USSR to enter the war on the side of the Allies, during which Stalin used nationalist rhetoric about fighting the “Great Patriotic War” to mobilize the Red Army.

This nationalist policy was continued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the ensuing Cold War, where it made use of both Russian nationalism and Marxism-Leninism for mobilization, and the nationalist factions of the Soviet establishment tolerated and supported National Bolshevism, especially through the Communist Youth League and the Red Army.

Post-Soviet Fascism

With the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union and the whole Eastern bloc, numerous fascist and ultra-nationalist movements emerged and took advantage of the rise in poverty, decrease in standards of living and corruption resulting from the massive privatization of Boris Yeltsin’s made in USA disastrous “shock therapy” to strengthen their positions. As part of the backlash against Yeltsin, Aleksandr Barkashov, a former member of Pamyat (an anti-Semitic organization which blames a “Zionist Masonic plot” for the Russian Revolution and for all of Russia’s ills) and the founder and leader of neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity, allied with former KGB officer Aleksandr Stergilov (himself an open anti-Semite), to form the Russian National Assembly (RONS), which wanted to remove Yeltsin through constitutional means and advocated the unification of all Slavs from the former USSR and of which many members were active duty intelligence officers, Stergilov explaining that the security organs “were always composed of patriotically-minded people”.

This process of unification of the opposition to Yeltsin culminated with the formation of the National Salvation Front, the alliance of the most hardline of Yeltsin’s opponents composed of fascists, Russian ultra-nationalists, Tsarist monarchists and Stalinists, which coalesced out of resentment at Russia’s downfall from a major world power to a weak state plagued by instability and crises, and had close ties to a parliamentary bloc called “Russian Unity”. The co-chairman of the National Salvation Front was Aleksandr Prokhanov, who was also the editor in chief of Dyen, the mouthpiece of the National Salvation Front, which published the vilest anti-Semitism such as excerpts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and expressed support for Western neo-Nazis. Also involved in the National Salvation Front were Aleksandr Dugin, who was published in and helped edit Dyen, and Eduard Limonov, a former Russian exile who had been part of punk and leftist circles in the US, met Alain de Benoist in Paris, and participated in the Yugoslav war on the side of Radovan Karadzic before returning to Russia and joining the red-brown opposition to Yeltsin. Limonov was conscious that overt fascism had no means of succeeding in Russia because of the legacy of the Soviet Union’s participation in the Second World War and therefore he decided to attempt introducing it there through covert ways, and he and Dugin instead formed the National Bolshevik Front, which was itself part of the National Salvation Front and occupied a prominent position in the Russian counter culture. Another prominent member of the National Salvation Front was Gennady Zyuganov, who had previously taken part in discussions with Alain de Benoist and Jean-Francois Thiriart during their visit to Russia in 1991 and later founded the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which despite its name is an ultra-nationalist and reactionary organization which opposes “cosmopolitanism”, claims “Zionists” are plotting to take over the world, called for banning Jewish organizations in Russia together with fascist party Rodina in 2005, and whose member Albert Makashov is an outspoken and virulent anti-Semite (a red-brown trend which is very common among many Stalinist parties of states which were once part of the former Soviet bloc).

[Note: When Otto Ernst Remer returned to Germany in the 1980s, one of his followers was Bela Ewald Althans, a former collaborator of neo-Nazi Michael Kühnen with whom he was a leader of the Action Front of National Socialists before it was banned by the German government in 1983. After his expulsion from high school and being disowned by his parents, teenage fascist Althans became a follower of Remer, who introduced him to important members of the fascist underground, and became leader of Remer’s Freedom Movement, whose aim was the signing of a second Rapallo agreement.

In 1988, Althans traveled to the United States and stayed with former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon Tom Metzger, and in 1992 and 1993 he visited Russia on “fact-finding missions” sponsored by Holocaust denier and Hitler apologist Ernest Zundel, where he met Aleksandr Barkashov, who supported an alliance with Germany, unlike Limonov. Zundel enthusiastically declared that Russia would be the center of a future neo-Nazi movement, and visited Russia again in 1994 with Althans, where the former bought a gold embossed edition of Mein Kampf in Moscow and met with Barkashov’s Russian National Unity and opponents of Yeltsin like Stergilov, with whom Zundel claimed to have “talked of pan-Slavism in a new racialist form”, leading Zundel to declare Russians as “the racial guards on the eastern frontier” who were, according to him, “protecting Europe from Muslims and Chinese people”. In December of that same year, however, Althans was condemned to eighteen months in prison for distributing Holocaust denial videos, and in 1995 a three-and-a-half year sentence was added to his term while he claimed to no longer be a neo-Nazi in court. After his release, Althans dissociated himself from any far-right activity and disappeared from public life.]

Following Yeltsin’s decision to dissolve the Russian parliament in 1993, the National Salvation Front attempted to form a shadow government and wrestle power from him during the following crisis, resulting in a showdown opposing Yeltsin to a red-brown alliance which included the National Salvation Front and Aleksandr Barkashov’s neo-Nazis in front of the Russian White House, and after Yeltsin sent the tanks to storm the Russian White House, a large number of his red-brown opponents were killed or wounded and many opposition leaders were thrown in jail, Dyen was banned along with many opposition newspapers and, with Western cheerleading, Yeltsin consolidated his increasingly dictatorial power through a constitutional reform drastically increasing the President’s powers before decreeing new elections. The winners of these elections, however, included the the KPRF, which won 32 seats in the State Duma, and the misleadingly-named far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia of hardline far-right nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky (who had been close to Eduard Limonov around that time, Limonov having toured him around Paris in 1992, where he introduced Zhirinovsky to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who subsequently endorsed Zhirinovsky’s presidential bid), which won 59 seats, as result of the anti-Yeltsin protest vote. In February 1994, this Duma dominated by Yelstin’s opponents granted amnesty to Yeltsin’s imprisoned enemies, with Dyen reappearing under the name of Zavtra, Barkashov maching freely in Moscow and Limonov starting his own newspaper, Limonka.

Faced with economic and social deterioration in Russia, Yelstin took an increasingly racist populist turn and started targeting ethnic minorities in Russia in the mid-1990s and in 1994 invaded Chechnya. At this point the National Salvation Front began to disaggregate, prominent National Salvation Front members criticizing the war while Zhirinovsky, Limonov and Barkashov instead supported Yeltsin’s policies and the bloodbath unleashed in Chechnya, with Limonov leaving the Front and lambasting its members opposed to the war as “moderates”. Around this time Limonov broke with Zhirinovsky, who went on to throw his support behind Yeltsin in 1998. Limonov criticized Barkashov’s open Nazism and called it counterproductive since the memory of the Nazis’ atrocities and the legacy of the massive loss of lives of the Soviet people during the struggle against fascism in WWII meant that fascism and Nazism were rejected in Russia and, in his view, the only way for fascism to be introduced there was in more discreet forms. After Barkashov’s rebranding as a “serious politician” in 1995 to distance himself from the Nazi label, Limonov’s National Bolshevik Front continued collaborating with Barkashov’s Russian National Unity, which by 1998 had expanded into 64 of Russia’s 89 regions, running military camps indoctrinating youth into fascist ideology while local and regional authorities were lenient and even collaborated with Barkashov, the situation of Russia at that time being compared by Martin A. Lee to that of the Weimar Republic – a situation which helped the rise of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB official turned right-wing authoritarian whose popularity was boosted by his bloody and brutal handling of the war in Chechnya and was appointed by Yeltsin as acting president. Around that time the National Bolshevik Party experienced a split and in the spring of 1998 Limonov parted ways with his associate Aleksandr Dugin. Limonov went on to ally with liberal Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front and join the opposition to Vladimir Putin in the 2000s. The National Bolshevik Party was among the organizers [archive] of the anti-Putin protests known as the Dissenters’ March and Limonov later became one of the leaders of The Other Russia opposition coalition together with Kasparov.

Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr Dugin was born in the Soviet Union in 1962 and joined the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1979 before being expelled from it because of his associations with the esotericist Golovin Circle led by fascist mystic Yevgeny Golovin, for which he translated Julius Evola’s works. Following the Demokratizatsiya under Mikhail Gorbachev, Dugin joined Pamyat and became a member of its Central Council in 1988 before Barkashov, who saw him as an ideological rival, had Dugin expelled from it in 1989 for attempting to introduce new ideas to the organization, after which he traveled to Western Europe where he met Alain de Benoist and Jean-Francois Thiriart, who strongly influenced his anti-Americanism and his support for Russian traditionalism. This proximity of Dugin to the European New Right explains why the ideology of the National Bolshevik Front he later founded was closer to Niekisch’s National Bolshevism than to that of the Smenavekhites.

Dugin then returned to Russia and founded Arktogaia, which published material expressing support for a conservative social revolution in Russia which would lead to the creation of a traditionalist, authoritarian and spiritual society. Around this time, Dugin proposed to Limonov (who was also regularly published on Matt Taibbi’s and Mark Ames’ The eXile in the later part of that decade) to form the National Bolshevik Front, which was materialized in 1993. The purpose of the National Bolshevik Front was to use a National Bolshevik reinterpretation of Russian history reconciling its monarchist and Communist periods to help the formation of anti-liberal coalitions at a time when the red-brown alliance was struggling against Yeltsin, and Dyen itself was associated with Arktogaia during this period (Gennady Zyuganov declaring that Russians were “the last power on the planet capable of mounting a challenge to the New World Order – the global cosmopolitan dictatorship” was clear evidence he was influenced by Dugin). It was also at that time that Dugin started publishing his own journal, Elementy with the primary aim of propagating a “revolutionary nationalist” ideology to radicalize the red-brown alliance and reconcile its fascist and Stalinist sections, and which praised figures of the Conservative Revolution and members of the Nazi regime, and published the first Russian translations of Julius Evola. This attempt to radicalize the red-brown alliance was exemplified in an essay by him written in 1992 and titled Fascism – Red and Borderless, where he tried to link Russia to European fascism by evoking the “left wing” of German fascism which supported an alliance with the Soviet Union and was eliminated by Hitler and tried blaming the Second World War on the West rather than on fascism.

In 1997, Dugin wrote The Foundations of Geopolitics as a lecturer at the Academy of the General Staff with the help of Leonid Ivashov, a Russian colonel and former Soviet military officer who was the head of the International Department of the Russian Ministry of Defense from 1996 to 2001. The Foundation of Geopolitics became the basis for Russia’s own school of geopolitics and was instrumental in establishing the acceptance of geopolitics in Russia after it had been considered a fascist discipline under the Soviet Union. Dugin however left the National Bolshevik Party in 1998 after being dissatisfied with it and sought to increase his contacts, writing the program of the KPRF, and becoming advisor to KPRF member and the Speaker of the Russian State Duma Gennady Seleznyov (which was crucial in helping Dugin’s rise from the fringe circles of Russia’s fascist scene to the Russian Federation’s establishment), while also praising figures of the NSDAP and Nazi Germany such as the Strasser brothers especially, and calling for a “fascist fascism”. As from 1998, Dugin also re-articulated his anti-Semitism by declaring those he deemed “subversive, destructive Jews without a nationality” as enemies while being supportive of Zionism and forming ties with Israeli ultra-nationalist groups who believe every Jewish person should live in Israel, which aligns with the ideology of “ethnopluralism” espoused by Dugin and the European New Right, but also with Dugin’s hope that these ultra-nationalists would destabilize the region and allow Russia to dominate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Dugin’s call for a “red and unbound fascism” means he adapted his ideology and turned it into what Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman describe as “an aggressively open system“, integrating elements from across the political spectrum to fight its total enemy, that is liberalism represented by the United States. For this purpose, he combined his National Bolshevism to Eurasianism, an ideology developed by White émigrés who saw the Russian Empire as a “natural” necessity and considered the October Revolution to be a “conservative revolution” that preserved imperial continuity and national individuality of Russia and saved it from a period of Westernization and Europeanization started by Peter the Great. The result of this synthesis was a “Neo-Eurasianist” ideology whose worldview is one where a “Sea Power” centered around the United States and the United Kingdom form an “Atlanticist New World Order” which “dilutes national and cultural diversity” through globalization and is engaged in an eternal confrontation against a “Land Power” centered around a Russian-oriented “Eurasian New Order” which resists globalization. In Dugin’s view, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a “Unipolar World” dominated by the globalized, liberal West, and in reaction to this he advocates for [archive] the formation of a “Multipolar World” by creating an “Eurasian empire” with a hierarchical, “ethnopluralist”, patriarchal and traditionalist society, with himself as the heir of an alleged “Eurasian Order” which he claims had supposedly existed secretly for centuries. This shows how Dugin has adapted his ideology with time while its core remained the same throughout the years: in the early 90s, Dugin had claimed that representatives of this “Eurasian Order” had been present in the Abwehr, the Nazi regime’s military intelligence, and in the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the SS (Dugin had called Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst and one of the main architects of the Holocaust, a “convinced Eurasianist”, and claimed that Heydrich had been the victim of an “Atlanticist” plot), and labeled the KGB as an “Atlanticist” agent while calling the Waffen-SS and more specifically its division in charge of research the history of the “Aryan race”, the Ahnenerbe, “an intellectual oasis in the framework of the National Socialist regime”.

Another example of this adaptation is that since the early 2000s, he started distancing himself from the term “fascism” and adopted the labels of “Conservative Revolution”, “National Bolshevism” and “New Socialism” while instead claiming to be an anti-fascist and accusing his opponents of being Nazis and fascists, though Dugin never changed the core of his ideology and is still effectively a fascist. This also accompanied itself with attempts by Dugin to infiltrate the Western Left through an anti-Western but pro-Russian conception of “anti-imperialism”, as Eric Draitser, himself a left-wing journalist and former victim of Dugin’s manipulation recounts on CounterPunch, and also through direct collaboration, such as with members of Greek left-wing coalition Syriza in 2013. In 2001, he formed the Eurasia Movement and the Eurasia Party and in 2005 he formed the Eurasian Youth Union, and after he left the Rodina bloc in 2003 [archive] he has chosen a metapolitical strategy to realize his fascist goal. While Dugin’s influence in Russia is exaggerated, such as when he is called “Putin’s Rasputin”, he nevertheless is influential within sections of the Russian establishment (the head of United Russia’s ideological directorate and deputy culture minister in charge of the film industry, Ivan Demidov, is an Eurasianist close to Dugin) and military and used to be the head of the Department of Sociology of Internal Relations at the Moscow State University until thousands petitioned for him to be fired after he made calls to mass murder Ukrainians in 2014. Dugin has been hosted [archive] and promoted [archive] by Russian state television RT, formerly known as Russia Today, which now tries to downplay Dugin’s influence and distance itself from him. However Duginists like Mark Sleboda, Manuel Ochsenreiter and Tiberio Graziani are regularly hosted as experts on Russian state-owned international media, especially Sputnik International (formerly RIA Novosti and The Voice of Russia), the radio broadcaster owned by the Russian state.

Influence on Western Fascists

The European New Right and Third Positionists became more influential following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which meant the loss of the Communist bogeyman against which the majority of Western fascists had agitated throughout the Cold War, and the neoliberal counterrevolution started under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s accompanied by globalization meant that the new bogeyman for fascists was “globalism“, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory whereby a tiny secret elite was working to undermine national sovereignty to form a “One World Government” and uses immigration for these ends. A common fixation of these conspiracy theories is philanthropist billionaire George Soros, who is regularly blamed for being behind every sort of social movement. In Europe, the far-right rebranded itself by co-opting leftist causes such as LGBT rights and secularism and anti-establishment politics abandoned by the old left-wing parties which caved in to “Third Way” politics and using them for their own reactionary cause, and went from opposing Communism and supporting the United States to opposing the United States and what their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories call the “Zionist lobby” and instead rallying around the Russian state, especially after the rise to power of Vladimir Putin and his brand of authoritarian right-wing politics.

This influence of the New Right’s ideas among the larger fascist movement has also resulted in its integration within larger fascist networks spanning around the world. For example, one of Dugin’s disciples, Nina Kouprianova, is married to white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. Kouprianova has translated Dugin’s works which were published by Spencer’s publishing house, the Washington Summit Publishers. Spencer himself, before he came to the public eye, has been hosted on RT regularly as commentator concerning [archive] Libya [archive], Syria [archive], US foreign policy [archive], Vladimir Putin [archive] and was allowed to promote his white nationalism under the guise of discussing racist police violence [archive], discussing the Black Lives Matter movement [archive], discussing national security [archive]. More recently, Aleksandr Dugin has also been platformed on Infowars [archive], run by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Alex [archive] Jones [archive] himself has been hosted by RT as a long [archive] time [archive] “expert” [archive] since the days when he used to host [archive] Lyndon [archive] LaRouche [archive].

The LaRouche Movement

The LaRouchite Cult And Its Ideology

While Lyndon LaRouche and his movement are easily dismissed as being a ludicrous group of weird conspiracy theorists and cranks, researchers Chip Berlet, Matthew Lyons and Matthew Feldman say this outward image acts as a smokescreen for the real nature of this organization: a violent fascistic cult which is an inciter of hate against Jewish and British people as well as presently the prime worldwide distributor of coded anti-Jewish literature based on the anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The LaRouche Movement itself functions as a totalitarian cult with the aim of promoting Lyndon LaRouche, who exerts a dictatorial control over the whole movement, and is organized into a corporatist structure which is itself complemented by an intelligence division as well as multiple defunct and still-existent front groups and numerous publications.

The ideology of the LaRouche movement itself views the world as dominated by “an Anglo-Jewish oligarchy which is behind a conspiracy to weaken Western society through international banking, drug trafficking and Zionists, with the British being behind a plot to balkanize the US and the Queen as responsible for drug trafficking”. Their view of history is that one of an eternal war opposing good “Platonists” to evil “Aristotelians” according to which “good humanists” have been in a conflict for millennia against an “evil oligarchy” based initially in Babylon, then Venice and presently Britain’s House of Windsor, being effectively a form of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and they often target Jewish people in positions of power, such as Kenry Kissinger and the Rothschild family, as members of this alleged conspiracy. LaRouche’s answer to this supposed conspiracy lies in a “humanist” dictatorship who would rule on behalf of industrial capitalists, with Lyndon LaRouche himself of course at its head. The core of LaRouche’s ideology can be described as a coded form of Illuminati, Freemason and “Jewish banker” conspiracy theories which are internally consistent despite being their outlandish appearance.

The organization’s methods of mass recruitment involve psychological manipulation by convincing its victims the whole world is a police-controlled environment perpetually feeding them misinformation, the result of which being a global collapse happening for which they are held responsible unless they submit fully to LaRouche, who will “teach them how to think”, and to his ideology which proclaims Lyndon LaRouche as the savior who will fix all this wrong. New members are made to undergo what amounts to psychological torture to erase their past and turn them into “new individuals” with new personalities subservient to the cult and younger members are forced into what amounts into indentured labor to raise funds. A Security Division is also present, responsible for supposedly protecting LaRouche and keeping dissident members in line, investigating members who appear disillusioned and making it difficult for anyone asking questions to to leave the organization.

The History of LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche served as a non-combatant in the US army in the Second World War, after which he was briefly close to the Communist Party USA before joining the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1949. Within the SWP, LaRouche was part of a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency which was later expelled by the SWP in late 1963 and early 1964, following which he shortly joined the Spartacist League before founding the National Caucus for Labor Committees (NCLC) with the aim of gaining control of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) until the SDS expelled the NCLC in 1969.

Following 