Echoes of the global far-right movement
• From Italy to SA and the US, an obsession with purity and notions of superiority risk bathing us all in blood
There has been a rise of right-wing militancy, an emboldenment of white ethnonationalism and creeping fascism across Europe and North America of a magnitude not seen since the period between the two world wars.
The Weekend Financial Times of February 10 published a story on the rise of the far-right in Italy.
Giorgia Meloni, a candidate in Italy’s elections, considers herself among the inheritors of Benito Mussolini’s fascism.
In the report, a supporter identified only as “Daniela” made no bones about the hankering for the interwar fascist era in her reference to Rome: “This very city was built by Mussolini on a swamp and now what’s left?” Pointing to a group of black men she added, “There won’t be any white places left in Europe. Soon it’s all going to be black as coal.”
In SA these tendencies have produced echoes among a minority of people — as expressed by Dan Roodt of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group (Praag) — who imagine themselves as the last stand, the canary in the coal mine of western civilisation. The not so subtle subtext is that the demise of Afrikaners would signal the end of “the West”.
While it is easy to dismiss the group as a reactionary bunch or a threatened minority, they tap into a vein of politics as historically significant as it is toxic.
In 2016 Roodt was a guest and speaker at the American Renaissance conference led by Jared Taylor, a white nationalist and US white supremacist.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a social justice and civil liberties organisation, considers American Renaissance, an online magazine, pre-eminent among “hate groups” in the US.
But American Renaissance says its supporters are “race realists” who are merely as concerned about white people as black, Asian or Latin Americans are of “their own people”.
However, digging deeper into their institutional objectives and activities, it seems clear their main purposes are to preserve “white supremacy” and that they are vehemently opposed to “multiculturalism” in predominantly white societies.
Taylor believes the US ought to return to the period before 1965, when, as he explained in a talk available online, the country was 90% white. In 1993 he told a conference of Conservative Citizens that black people were “a retrograde species of humanity”. In 2005 he said that “when blacks are left entirely to their own devices western civilisation — any kind of civilisation — disappears”.
Roodt is known for his views on race and white identity and for propagating the idea that there is a “white genocide” under way in SA.
One of his central appeals is for white identity to be preserved and a contiguous concern that whites, notably Afrikaners, are being dissolved into a toxic gruel of multiculturalism.
On Praag’s website, Roodt taps into global extreme-right sentiments in an appeal for financial assistance with the statement: “Don’t let us die for the sake of proving that multiculturalism does not work.”
Based on his expressed ideals, it would appear that the Afrikaners are fully representative of “the West” and that the immigration of others into Europe and North America marks the decline of this preeminent civilisation.
Roodt, and the likes of Taylor and Meloni fail to come to terms with the fact that powers rise and fall over time, and the West’s decline is simply part of this historical process.
In political terms, the West is in decline as much because of leadership failures, the failure of the “American model” exported to the world, moral failures and increasingly diminishing vision as it is because of a veritable shift in global political economic power. Most people who pay attention to these things will probably agree that there has been a significant global shift in power “from West to East” for at least a decade.
To understand Roodt (and Taylor), it is important to know the links they establish between “the West” and “white identity”. Identity politics tends be terribly divisive and destructive — consider its application during apartheid, the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide — so the reference to “whiteness” or “white identity” is used only to engage rhetoric.
If Roodt, Taylor and emerging fascists in Italy conceive of “the West” as homologous with the “European world”, which is much more than a cartographic entity and includes what the late Angus Maddison referred to as Europe’s “offshoots”, the crude racism in their politics slips from the behind the fig leaf of civilisational discourse.
The punctum saliens of Roodt’s politics seems to lie in racism, with an attendant belief in the enduring greatness of Europeans and the attendant belief that a less pure European is a mark of western decline.
Roodt’s politics clearly tap into historical shifts towards ethno-nationalism and a retreat elsewhere in the world into dangerous forms of identity politics and a desperate search for purity.
Lamenting the rise of intolerance and ethno-nationalist pride, the British writer Mohsin Hamed captures tidily the swell of purity across the globe. From India, where “Hindu purity” is “wrenching open deep and bloody fissures in a diverse society”, to Myanmar where “Buddhist purity” is considered to be behind the massacre and expulsion of Rohingya, to the US where “white purity is marching in white hoods and red baseball caps” and where figures like Taylor of the American Renaissance make sure that the country “is rekindling its love affair with purity”.
The rise of the far-right in Italy, Germany and Austria and emerging ethnonational fractures in Spain and elsewhere in Europe should not be dismissed. It is from there that Roodt seems to draw most of his inspiration.
In his 2016 address at the American Renaissance conference Roodt tapped into the work of Martin Bosma, the Dutch politician who described Afrikaners as “canaries in the coal mine”.
According to Bosma, the Afrikaners are “the first western nation undergoing what multiculturalists propose: to become a minority and give up power.… We may ask ourselves: is that scenario to be recommended. Should we [the Dutch] fall for the multicultural call for diversity and reconciliation?”
If one accepts that the idea of the West has come and gone and that at some point in the distant future the fixed categories of “white” and “black” will cease to exist and that most of the world’s population will probably be some genetic or other variation of something in between, there is probably no cause for concern. If, however, the retreat into “purity” — whether it is conceived as white, Pashtun, Kurdish or Zulu, for that matter — continues, then we are probably in for a lot of conflict.
As for Roodt’s tryst with the US far-right — situated in the context of rising populism and the rise of the far right — it is worth referring to the declaration of Thomas Chittum, a Vietnam War veteran and a darling of Taylor’s renaissance movement, in his book on what he believes is the coming war in that country.
The US, like Yugoslavia, Chittum believes, will shatter into ethnically based “nations”. “America was born in blood, America suckled on blood, America gorged on blood and grew into a giant, and America will drown in blood,” he wrote with some drama.
While fascism is as hard to define as nailing jelly to a wall, the far-right love a bloody fight. Or, as Mussolini said, in 1934, “it is blood that moves the wheels of history”.
Populists in SA tend to share this talk of blood.
On the land issue, Julius Malema has said: “[We] are not scared of blood.… seeing blood is not what we are scared of. As long as that blood delivers what belongs to us we are prepared to go to that extent”.
In the meantime, Roodt wants to keep the blood of the Afrikaners pure, and the world seems to be slinking towards the dangers that led to the bloodshed of the Second World War.
Whatever happened to the idea that the end of history would make us all happy liberals sharing a common culture of capitalist consumerism?
It has probably gone to the same place as Woodrow Wilson’s liberal idealism of the interwar period.
WORLD SEEMS TO BE SLINKING TOWARDS THE DANGERS THAT LED TO THE BLOODSHED OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR