In the chaotic, fragmented days of the late nineteenth century, after all, Richard Wagner finished his epic, apocalyptic Götterdämmerung – rooted in the Norse account of the “twilight of the Gods”.

It was a fierce and powerful expression of the wider nineteenth-century German fascination with folk tales, myths, and national identity that would, two generations later, reach its zenith in the figure of Adolf Hitler, himself obsessed with Wagner’s opera.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, in an equally uncertain, newly-unified Italy, the futurist poet F.M. Marinetti – whose movement would become the intellectual as well as political forerunner to the nationalistic Italian fascism of the 30’s – waxed ecstatic in his “Futurist Manifesto” about his desire to “glorify war – the only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the anarchist's destructive gesture, the fine Ideas that kill, and the scorn of woman.”

And of course, in contemporary pockets of the alt-right internet, Neo-Nazi memes can be found alongside half-ironic invocations of “chaos magick” and discourse about victory in the “meme wars”: the Internet’s self-proclaimed role in getting Donald Trump elected.