5 The quest for a new religion of politics1
In previous chapters, I highlighted two conceptual tools for analysing the ND related to its profound angst about aspects of modernity: the attempt to supersede the right–left political division and the desire to find revolutionary solutions for the ‘ills’ associated with modernity by seeking alternative modernities. In my second conceptual tool, I argued that the ND is not merely a throwback to ‘anti-modern’ or ‘reactionary’ values. I situated the ND’s quest for alternative political modernity within a broader modernist tendency that has its roots in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As highlighted in the previous chapter, using Roger Griffin’s (2008: 15) definition, modernism’s
common denominator lies in the bid to reinstate a sense of transcendent value, meaning, or purpose in order to reverse Western culture’s progressive loss of a homogeneous value system and overarching cosmology (nomos) caused by the secularizing and disembedding forces of modernization.
The modernists’ rebellion against modernity, according to Griffin, was ‘closely bound with the need to belong to a community united by a shared culture which acts as a refuge from the potentially life-threatening fear of personal death bereft of any sort of transcendence’. In the ND’s case, a unique synthesis of modern, postmodern, and premodern philosophies (that is, ideological mazeway resynthesis) mirrored but did not exactly replicate the creation of new ideological cocktails in previous epochs, particularly the German CR and ‘non-conformist’ thinkers of the interwar period. Using ideological mazeway resynthesis within an alternative modernist framework, the ND sought to counter the ‘excesses’ of modernity and the attendant loss of community belonging and meaning.
I have stressed that the ‘crises’ of modernity formed the backdrop behind the ND project. The ND rejected many but not all aspects of modernity because it meant: (1) the rise of rugged liberal individualism and the destruction of traditional ethnically based communities of belonging; (2) the mass standardization of the world in terms of habits and lifestyles; (3) the de-sacralization of the world and the triumph of a merely scientific view of the world; (4) rationalization based on instrumental reason, the market, and technical efficiency; and (5) universalization grounded in the global pull of a societal model, which is viewed as the most rational and superior model for humanity (Sanromán n.d.: 7).
In this chapter, I turn back to these ‘crises’ of the modern and postmodern periods by suggesting that ND intellectuals are firmly rooted within a modernist framework in their desire to create a sacralized yet secular political state, or what Emilio Gentile (2006, 1996) called ‘politics as religion’ (conceptual tool three). In contrast to premodern societies where religious authority formed the basis for political authority, the modern era is characterized by political projects, whether liberalism, socialism, or fascism, that insisted on the political supremacy of the secular state above religious authorities. Yet, like these modern political projects, the ND understood that while the modern world relegated religion to the private realm, modern man never lost the need for rituals, myths, and structured meaning associated with the premodern period. As a result, in the twentieth century, politics in general, political movements, state, nation, party, the ‘elected class’ (that is, the proletariat from the Marxist perspective), or, more ominously, the ‘chosen race’ became the vehicles for ‘politics as religion’. In Chapter 6, I highlight the ND’s desire to revive ‘premodern cultural consciousness’, or an updated variant of advancing the interests of the ‘chosen race’. In this chapter, I focus on the ND’s affinity for a civil ‘religion of politics’, as well as mimicry of traditional forms of worship in modern or postmodern contexts.
This chapter begins by highlighting the insights of two major European philosophers, René Girard (b. 1923) and Emilio Gentile (b. 1946), in respect of the notions of mimicry and ‘politics as religion’. The two notions can certainly be applied to ND thinkers as they seek to make sense of the changes of the modern and postmodern epochs, as well as the ‘loss’ represented by the demise of the premodern universe. I then trace a model of ‘political conversion’, which I apply to the ND and other revolutionaries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that the ND, like other twentieth-century political forces on the right and left, is wedded to a specifically modern, secular form of politics that is neither ‘reactionary’ nor ‘restorationist’.
Girard and Gentile
French philosopher René Girard (1987, 1981) argues that a great revelation in human history begins in the Old Testament with the story of Job and finds its apotheosis in the Passion story of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Girard insists on an anti-sacrificial reading of the Gospels that focuses on the victims of violence, thus undermining the mainstream, sacrificial understanding of Christianity that promotes the ‘contagion’ of mimetic violence (Girard 1987: 180–2, 205–15). One can certainly see how Girard’s interpretation might lead to a flawed belief that Christianity is superior among all faiths because of its explicit focus on the victims of violence. Nonetheless, the French thinker claims to offer us a way out of post-9/11 mimetic violence on a ‘planetary scale’ (Girard 2001); a mimetic violence that, as Quakers point out, first begins in our hearts and spreads like a virus to the heart of the body politic. Yet, Girard’s deeper insights are about how both right and left, as well as state and non-state actors, minimize their violence in the name of their respective political projects. Girard refused to take the position of the legitimization of political violence. He sought to unravel a truth; something hidden since the inception of human societies, namely, the ritualized and real violence against a scapegoat that simultaneously created social order and threatened to undermine it (Girard 1986). He also examines the way violence spreads in a systematic manner and how difficult it is to escape the mimetic cycle of violence once it begins (Girard 1981: 49–68).
Another European thinker, the Italian historian Emilio Gentile (2006: xiv–xix), also seeks to explain political violence and mimicry through the notion of the ‘sacralization of politics’. For Gentile, the ‘religion of politics’ is a particular form of ‘sacralization of politics’ that takes place in the modern period after the political domain gains its independence from traditional religion. Politics takes on a sacred aura with the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century (that is, the American Revolution in 1776 and French Revolution in 1789), but its roots stretch back to the humanistic idealization of Greek and Roman civic religion; new secular concepts of life, society, and the state; the Masonic tradition of rituals and symbols; and the rational bent of Enlightenment culture (Gentile 2006: 16). For the emergence of the ‘sacralization of politics’, the prerequisites include: secularization, modernization, the independence of politics from established religions, and the separation of church and state (Gentile 2006: 141). ‘Sacralization of politics’ is also an affirmation of the principle of state sovereignty vis-à-vis the church and ‘the glorification of the nation as the supreme ideal entity to which the citizen owes loyalty, devotion, and commitment’ (Gentile 2006: 16).
Gentile is adamant that the ‘sacralization of politics’ persists in the twenty-first century, but has taken its most obvious forms in the liberal republican states formed in the USA and France in the late eighteenth century, the Bolshevik Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Maoist China. Gentile calls the first two democratic experiments ‘civil religions’ and the latter totalitarian systems ‘political religions’ (Gentile 2006: xv). Whereas the former ‘civil religions’ coexist with other ideologies and respect individual freedoms, the latter ‘political religions’ are constructed around a monopoly of power, ideological monism, and the total subordination of the individual and collectivity to its ‘scared commandments’ (Gentile 2006: xv). Recall that in Chapter 1 de Benoist as a youth in the early 1960s was drawn to the ‘political religion’ of the ultra-nationalist student organization FEN, or what he called its ‘revolutionary’, ‘soldierly’, and ‘sacerdotal spirit’ in the mould of Georges Sorel or Vladimir Lenin. When only a few years later he helped create the ND in 1968, de Benoist was perhaps moving towards support for a ‘civil religion’.
Yet, the ‘sacralization of politics’ has a deeper meaning. It is created each time a political entity, whether nation, state, race, class, party, or movement, is transformed into a ‘sacred entity’: transcendent, unchallengeable, and intangible (Gentile 2006: xiv). New national states that emerged after the collapse of European colonial empires in Asia and Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s exhibited the ‘sacralization of politics’ as the main vehicle for legitimizing new political institutions and forging a national identity out of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities (Gentile 2006: 125–9). The ‘sacralization of politics’ can lead to extreme devotion in which individuals are willing to sacrifice their lives on behalf of the cause, its often deified leader, and the community. Gentile insists that the ‘religion of politics’ is a religion precisely because it is ‘a system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that interpret and define the meaning and end of human existence by subordinating the destiny of individuals and collectivity to a supreme entity’ (Gentile 2006: xiv). Modern man tried to banish religion from the world, but instead engaged in mimicry and syncretism since a civil or political religion adopts or incorporates traditional religion’s method of developing and representing a system of beliefs and myths, defining dogma, and even structuring liturgy (Gentile 2006: 141).
Let me reiterate that the ‘sacralization of politics’ means the merging of the religious and political dimensions and it is unique to modern society and mass politics. Yet, as Gentile argues, the ‘sacralization of politics’ is rather distinct from modern manifestations of the ‘politicization of religion’ such as Islamist movements that take power in order to implement their specific religious beliefs in society and the state (Gentile 2006: 141–2). A key question Gentile (2006: 130–7) asks is whether civil religions represented by the old democracies are in decline, but the spectre of Islamism, 9/11, US and Western militarism, and the rising tide of radical right-wing populist parties in Western Europe since the mid-1990s have rekindled possibilities for the ‘sacralization of politics’ in Euro-American societies.
A model of political conversion
I have broadly outlined both Girardian and Gentilean frameworks in respect of mimetic rivalry and ‘politics as religion’. My goal is to utilize both European thinkers to develop a new paradigm for understanding political ‘conversion’ and mimetic rivalry between left- and right-wing political camps. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ND under its doyen Alain de Benoist claimed that it had made a political ‘conversion’ from the revolutionary right (or CR) milieu to ‘democracy’ and that it had created a ‘post-fascist’ political synthesis. Borrowing from Roger Eatwell (1996a), could it be that the ND’s political ‘conversion’ process was only exoteric in nature by mimicking the ideas of the NL and that its esoteric orientation was of ‘true believers’ (Hoffer 1951) who never left a political pantheon of CR ideas with roots largely in the 1920s and 1930s? Given the ND’s ideological diversity, some have suggested that de Benoist has exited the revolutionary right-wing milieux and that his ‘internal’ and ‘external’ writings are consistent,2 while other ND thinkers such as Troy Southgate in Britain remain wedded to a worldview rooted in quasi-fascism, conspiracy theories, and anti-Semitism. For Eric Hoffer, the major differences among men and women is not in their doctrinal pattern of beliefs, but their absolutist ‘temper of mind’ (Sidney Hook in Hoffer 1951: xx). ‘The true believer is the believer in total solutions’, writes Sidney Hook in the introduction to Hoffer’s The True Believer (Hoffer 1951: xxi). Hoffer’s insights are applicable to the French ND leader: a true believer in his attempt to preserve the legacy of the interwar anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian CR into the new millennium. De Benoist’s defence is that CR thinkers constitute merely one current of thought among his many influences on the right, left, or beyond.
Using the model of the ND, as well as the ideas of René Girard in respect of mimetic rivalry between right and left, I examine other modern political conversions from Benito Mussolini to Christopher Hitchens. My analysis of political conversion includes four case studies: (1) contemporary intellectuals who begin on the far right or far left of the political spectrum and then claim to ‘convert’ to the opposite political side (for example, Alain de Benoist, Arthur Koestler, and Christopher Hitchens); (2) contemporary politicians who have claimed to supersede the neo-fascist milieu (for example, Gianfranco Fini and Gianni Alemanno of the AN in Italy); (3) leaders of terrorist groups who renounced extreme nationalism and the armed struggle (for example, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party – PKK – whose leader is Abdullah Öcalan); and (4) historical case studies of the birth of political ideologies such as fascism and the ‘non-conformist’ school of the 1930s and 1940s (for example, Benito Mussolini and Alexandre Marc) (Loubet del Bayle 1969; Hellman 2002). Using these examples, I trace a model of political conversion, with particular emphasis on the mimetic symbiosis and rivalry between right and left.
The premise of this chapter is that ideological/political ‘conversion’ is at least partly a quasi-religious experience based on mimicry and syncretism inherited from dominant traditional religions. Mimicry here implies the conscious or unconscious adopting of traditional religion’s method of developing and representing a total system of beliefs and myths, defining dogma and ethics, and structuring liturgy (Gentile 2006: 141). Syncretism connotes the incorporation of traditions, myths, and rituals inherited from traditional religions, but in a manner that transforms and adapts them according to the needs of its own ‘mythical and symbolic universe’ (Gentile 2006: 141). It should be stressed that ‘religions of politics’ of the modern era are in the majority of historical cases short-lived. As Gentile (2006: 141) posits, a civil or political religion
enjoys a period of vitality of variable strength, and then its capacity to inspire faith and enthusiasm starts to expend itself because of the attrition of time, the passing of circumstances that gave rise to it, generational change, or crisis and collapse in the political movement from which it was created.
As pointed out earlier, political ideologies entail a coherent, comprehensive set of normative beliefs and worldviews focusing on the problems of human nature, the processes of history, and ideal socio-political arrangements. In order to better understand left-wing and right-wing political ideologues, movements, and parties, I use Norberto Bobbio’s ‘ideal type’ heuristic distinction between left and right, with the former committed to equality and the latter wedded to inequality. As Bobbio’s distinction is an ‘ideal type’, it is clear that not all right-wing parties or movements will reject administratively or legally mandated equality (for example, mainstream conservative parties in Western Europe or North America), while not all left-wing parties or movements can practicably achieve the socialist ideal of equality of condition for all its citizens (for example, Maoist and Stalinist communist dictatorships that mocked popular, egalitarian impulses).
It is no accident that ND leader Alain de Benoist argues in line with Bobbio’s distinction that his fundamental quarrel is with egalitarianism, which, he insists in a Nietzschean vein, produced the mass ‘slave’ ideologies of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its secular derivatives, namely, liberalism, social democracy, socialism, communism, and Marxism (de Benoist 1979: 16). Egalitarianism, he insists (1979: 25), is to be rejected because it leads to the loss of cultural differences, ‘the reduction of all cultures to a world civilization’, a pseudo-multiculturalism, and the destruction of Europe’s hierarchical, plural, rooted, and pagan past.
My argument is that successful political ‘conversion’ in the context of a ‘sacralization of politics’ is a complex process that requires ten prerequisites:
I utilize Antonio Gramsci to help us understand cultural-civilizational sea changes that allow political space for new ideological syntheses (Hoare 1971; Femia 1981: 23–60). As in the Introduction and Chapter 1, I stress the role of intellectuals in a Gramscian mould. Intellectual ideas play a key role in shaping history and moulding consensus among the people in civil society in favour of or against a reigning ideological framework. While we might question the ND’s elitist, hierarchical, homogeneous notion of regional or national identity, its leader clearly understood the central importance of dominant ideas in shaping and moving history by imitating the language of his leftist opponents:
Without a precise theory, there is no effective action…. All the revolutions of history have only transposed into facts an evolution that had already occurred in the spirit. One can’t have a Lenin before having had Marx.… The French right is Leninist without having read Lenin. It hasn’t realized the importance of Gramsci. It hasn’t realized that cultural power threatens the apparatus of the state.
(de Benoist 1979: 19)
The task of understanding political conversions is daunting, yet I want to better grasp why political conversions occur, whether on the left, right, or beyond. Is conversion of a political nature similar to physiologically induced, religious conversion experiences (Sargant 1959)? Are political conversion experiences secularized versions of deep, religious conversion experiences? In a neo-liberal age, do we not require substitute conversion experiences of a political dimension? Were fascism and communism not mirrors as substitute religions (Burleigh 2006)? Is conversion a matter of realpolitik or an authentic ‘conversion’ to a new ‘faith’? It is hoped that my model of political conversion does not merely apply to the cited examples, but can be tested in respect of ideologues and political movements around the world. So, for example, how do we explain the ‘conversion’ of certain Arab intellectuals from secular nationalism or pan-Arabism to Islamism, or Tarik Ramadan’s (2004) ‘secular Islamism’ in Western Europe? Or, how about the ‘conversion’ of some ecological thinkers and movements such as the German Greens towards the neo-liberal market ideology (Talshir 2003)?
In addition, I insist that anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal esoteric beliefs are not equivalent to exoteric (or tactical) conversions to ‘democracy’ (Bar-On 2001). More to the point, two different messages can be simultaneously sent to the larger public and select, elite ‘converts’ that are guardians of a more primordial, esoteric doctrine. Certainly this insight does not apply to all ND thinkers. Furthermore, in ideologically diverse journals and in line with conceptual tool one and the desire to forge a new political synthesis superseding right and left, de Benoist never tires of pointing out that the shifting sands of the political landscape will dictate whether he converts to the right or left (Bar-On 2007: 204). This calculation will presumably be based on whether extreme revolutionaries of the right or left can better assist in the destruction of liberal democracy.
Moreover, there is a continuum of different types of political conversion processes: authentic or inauthentic (that is, idealistic or opportunistic), esoteric or exoteric, durable or flexible (the more profound the conversion experience, the more durable the conversion), survival or ‘autonomous’ conversions (for example, life-and-death versus ‘free-will’ conversions), and conversionary versus non-conversionary imitation (Girard and Williams 2003: 290–1). Girard (1987) examines the notion of ‘good contagion’ or ‘non-violent imitation’ based on a fundamental change in personality as a result of the imitation of God or Christ. This is what Girard calls ‘conversionary mimesis’ or ‘conversionary imitation’.
Case studies and political conversion processes
Let me now apply some case studies to the above-mentioned types of political conversionary processes. The case studies in question include politicians and intellectuals as diverse as Alain de Benoist, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Alexandre Marc, Gianni Alemanno, Abdullah Öcalan, and Christopher Hitchens.
Hitler’s conversion to biological racism and Nazism was authentic in that it was arguably the guiding framework of his ideology (Burleigh and Wippermann 2000). His obsessive biological anti-Semitism was idealistic and messianic in its fervour. Hitler’s moment of opportunity particularly increased after the second financial crisis in 1929 and it was at this point that Germany was ready to accept him as a national saviour, a propheta figure, and the embodiment of Nazism as a revitalization movement of mass hope (Griffin 2007a: 261, 270–1).
A series of deep-seated crises set the stage for Hitler’s rise: the political climate surrounding the stalemate of Weimar Germany’s unstable, discredited liberal parliamentary framework and the rise of a revolutionary communist left (although Mann, 2004 argues it was waning in its ability to capture power and collectivize property by the early 1930s when the Nazis seized power), and collusion of established state authorities in the wake of prolonged extra-parliamentary violence of radical sectors of the right and left. In addition, the First World War and the demilitarization of Germany in the wake of the Versailles Treaty induced a military crisis. The cultural-civilizational milieu increasingly argued that Europe was a dying civilization that needed radical rebirth to rescue it from an age of ‘materialist decadence’. The political, military, cultural, socio-economic, and ideological crises induced the flowering of organic ultra-nationalism (including Germany’s special historical mission); new statist models for popular mobilization born in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the First World War; and a desire to supersede existing liberal, conservative, or socialist solutions (Roberts 2006).
Hitler’s appeal had both esoteric and exoteric dimensions. Mein Kampf (1925–6) and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers’ Party or Nazi Party) worldview were impregnated with biological anti-Semitism and the desire for racially cleansed ‘living space’ for Aryans in the East. Peace overtures were simultaneously made to the international community, while Germans were promised a national socialism that would defeat the communist enemy and restore security and internal peace to Germany. Hitler’s ultra-nationalist, populist, and anti-Semitic positions were durable in that he held them until his suicide in 1945. His conversion to biological racism as the framework for restoring German national grandeur was ‘autonomous’, as was the conversion of millions of Germans to the Nazi mission.
High-ranking officials in the NSDAP like Albert Speer recall the period in mystical, magnetic, and messianic terms akin to deep religious experiences induced by Hitler. He was viewed as the new charismatic prophet sent by providence to guide the nation in a period of ‘decadence’ and prolonged crises towards a new, revolutionary historical beginning that embodied an alternative modernism beyond liberal and socialist solutions (Fest 2007; Griffin 2007a: 250–309). Like participants in the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Fascist March on Rome in 1922, Germans in the Nazi period must have felt that they lived at the threshold of another age and time beyond linear time; a new beginning without historical precedent that was both terrifying and exhilarating because it promised a radical break with the old systems and mass redemption in times of profound, multiple crises. Without a doubt, the repressive arm of the state brutally enforced the new conversions to Nazism, but these conversions had a degree of authenticity in large segments of the German population who felt that they were living at the threshold of a new time. Girard would insist that conversion to Nazism was a form of non-conversionary imitation because it turned away from Christ, but that is because he narrowly views the Christian message as historically unique because Christ rejected violence and Christianity made it its mission to side with the victims of violence (while institutionalized Christianity, the Inquisition and colonialism made a mockery of this claim).
If we turn to de Benoist, his conversion to ‘democracy’ is circumscribed, as it must be direct democracy in the Ancient Athenian or Icelandic moulds (Bar-On 2007: 155; de Benoist 1995b, 2003). His support for democracy bypasses his vehement rejection of liberal and socialist variants of democracy (de Benoist 1995b: 75). As mentioned earlier, de Benoist (1995b: 75) insists on a culturally homogeneous notion of direct democracy without mediators as the only true democracy because it is based on a collectivist framework and a ‘relatively homogeneous people conscious of what makes them a people’. De Benoist is certainly opportunistic in that he seeks to supersede his revolutionary right-wing origins supporting French Algeria by playing the ‘democratic’, anti-fascist card. His esoteric anti-egalitarianism remains (that is, one assumes that a ‘democrat’ is by extension in favour of egalitarianism), as does his attachment to CR authors of the interwar years who radically rejected liberal democracy and longed for the revitalization of the nation beyond the materialist ‘disorders’ of capitalism and communism.
Benito Mussolini’s ‘conversion’ to fascism is still the most stunning conversion of the twentieth century. Mussolini had been the leading light of Italian socialism from 1902 to 1914, the editor of the socialist paper Avanti!, and one of the most respected European revolutionaries of the left. He converted to pro-war leftism in 1914 by insisting that Italy was a ‘proletarian nation’ and later became fascism’s leading proponent throughout the European continent. Charges of a handsome monetary pay-off plagued Mussolini, particularly among his old leftist comrades. Nolte (1966) notes that Mussolini’s conversion period involved a grave crisis of faith for revolutionary coherence; it was gradual and never resolved fully until after the March on Rome in 1922; and it was arguably the most spiritually and physically exhausting period in his life as great shouts of betrayal rocked the Italian political landscape.
Despite his Marxist roots, it was Mussolini who was at first the model for fascists and authoritarians throughout Europe. His conversion was authentic because it founded a new, radical, secular ideological framework that combined militant socialism with ultra-nationalism. Other fascists beyond Italy often imitated Mussolini, until Hitler’s dramatic rise to power under the Nazi Party banner in 1933 (Griffiths 2005; Ledeen 1972). After 1933, it would be the Nazi rather than Italian Fascist model that was more often imitated abroad because it was more revolutionary, violent, and ‘healthy’ in its struggle against the ‘materialist menaces’ of the Bolshevik Soviet Union and the liberal capitalist USA and Great Britain. Despite fascism’s ideal that it was national and not necessarily for export, in a perfect display of mimetic rivalry both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany would be models for a ‘universal fascism’ movement that, as early as 1925 in Italy and at its height from 1933 to 1936, sought to challenge international communism and rejuvenate the 1919 martial, revolutionary spirit of what Renzo de Felice calls ‘movement fascism’ (Griffiths 2005: 72–90).
As pointed out in Chapter 1, the ND’s leading intellectual claimed to renounce his ultra-nationalist and pro-colonialist leanings of the 1960s. De Benoist expressed his ‘shame’ for backing racism and even apartheid South Africa in the 1960s (de Benoist 2012: 79). He made his ‘opening to the left’ in the 1980s by threatening to vote for the French Communists in the 1984 European elections. De Benoist embraced a ‘new right’ that claims to be neither fascist, nor liberal, and even anti-fascist, anti-racist, ‘democratic’, ecological, and NL in inspiration (Bar-On 2007: 201–3; Champetier and de Benoist 1999). In an age of increasing neo-liberal globalization, de Benoist has even been so audacious as to question the central plank of the right, namely, its commitment to the nation-state, by calling for an allegedly ‘anti-nationalist’, regionally based ‘Europe of a hundred flags’ (de Benoist 1999a).
The victory of Gianni Alemanno as the ‘post-fascist’ mayor of Rome in April 2008 is another example of an alleged political conversion from the neo-fascist right to conservative new right. One of the leading Canadian dailies, The National Post, makes no mention of Alemanno’s attachment to the allegedly ‘post-fascist’ AN or its predecessor, the neo-fascist MSI. To add to the confusion, the Sunday Times (4 May 2008) has called Alemanno a ‘former neo-fascist’, while the Telegraph (30 April 2008) dubbed him a ‘firebrand neo-fascist’. Alemanno owes his electoral victory to a rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe associated with uncertainty about globalization, aspects of modernity and the EU project, the demonization of gypsies or Roma in the Italian capital (linked with brutal criminality by Alemanno’s electoral campaign), and his call for the expulsion of 20,000 illegal immigrants from the ‘eternal city’ (Popham 2008). Point seven of Alemanno’s 16-point campaign manifesto, known as the ‘Pact for Rome’, states: ‘Immediately activate procedure for the expulsion of 20,000 nomads and immigrants who have broken the law in Rome.’ Point eight hints at a darker project of ethnic cleansing: ‘Closure of illegal nomad camps, rigorous and effective checks on legal ones and their progressive elimination.’ Unfortunately, the former centre-left Roman mayor Walter Veltroni participated in the anti-immigrant wave by threatening expulsions.
What is clear in the Alemanno case is that he has been aided by the intellectual acumen of the Italian New Right with its transnational ties to the French ND, the ‘post-fascist’ AN, and the radicalization of the entire political class on immigration issues (Ignazi 2006: 22–6). If Alemanno has become more acceptable to the conservative right, it is because the conservative right has slowly become more vociferously anti-immigrant, as displayed by the participation of the AN and LN in national coalition governments in 1994 and twice again in the new millennium. It was Gianfranco Fini, the AN leader, who became Italy’s deputy prime minister in 2003. Fascist-era songs and cries of ‘Duce’ greeted Alemanno’s victory in Rome’s city centre on 28 April 2008, the first time the right had won the capital since the Fascist era.
I argue that Alemanno’s ‘conversions’ out of the world of the revolutionary right or neo-fascism is merely exoteric rather than esoteric (Eatwell 1996a: 248–50). Alemanno understands that one cannot be an overt fascist after the race laws and Auschwitz, while fascism for him is also a metapolitical project that seeks to alter the mentalities of existing elites to turn them away from the dominant egalitarian-based, multicultural, and liberal framework (Nolte 1966; Payne 1995). Recall that it was the French neo-fascist Maurice Bardèche (1961) who in 1961 claimed that fascism would return one day ‘with another name, another face’ and few of the traits of its past: the charismatic leadership principle, party army, valorization of violence, paramilitary street violence, or the aim of totalitarianism. If fascism or radical right-wing politics are making a comeback, it is because of their rejection of the violent, jackboot ultra-nationalism of the past and greater discretionary powers, as exemplified by the discourse changes of the ND. Legal, metapolitical, and parliamentary means are mere tactical frameworks used by Alemanno that temporarily leads him to endorse liberal democracy. In Gramscian terms, Alemanno plays a ‘war of position’ that seeks to slowly convert key elites and shape a new, hegemonic mass consensus towards their anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian, and anti-multicultural theses.
In order to better understand Alemanno, we need to grasp the history of fascist and ‘non-conformist’ intellectuals in the interwar years. Academics like Ze’ev Sternhell (1996, 1994) have demonstrated how left-wing, anti-Marxist socialist dissidents, in conjunction with ultra-nationalists, already created the fascist synthesis between the 1880s and the eve of the First World War in France. A. J. Gregor (2004) shows how syndicalist, corporatist, and anarchist thinkers of the left such as Enrico Corradini and Sergio Pannunzio became major fascist theoreticians by combining their original left-wing concerns in a multiclass, regulated, nationalist developmental dictatorship in contrast to left-wing Marxist internationalism. Were there not other non-conformist thinkers like Georges Sorel or Emmanuel Mounier in France that drifted indiscriminately between left and right, united by a vehement, revolutionary, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist anti-materialism? Non-conformists of various stripes inhabited the French political landscape in the 1930s and 1940s from Marcel Déat and Jacques Doriot to Georges Valois and Alexandre Marc.
Doriot was an ardent, high-ranking communist before he founded his own popular, corporatist fascist party, the Parti populaire français (PPF) and even turned towards Vichy ultra-collaboration by organizing French fascist volunteers on the Eastern front to fight with the Nazis (Soucy 1995). Valois created one of the first fascist parties in Europe, Le Faisceau, and turned to anarchism by 1928 and, finally, resistance against Nazism (culminating with his death at Bergen-Belsen) (Douglas 1992). Marc was literally a convert – a Russian Jewish émigré to France who converted to a synthesizing blend of Nietzschean Catholicism and longed for the return of an elitist, spiritual, hierarchical, federal, personalist Europe along medieval Catholic lines (Hellman 2002). These ‘non-conformist’ forces certainly created a congenial intellectual climate that allowed the authoritarian, collaborationist Vichy regime to emerge; some gave their fully fledged support to fascist parties; and all undermined the egalitarian impulses of 1789 that were completely jettisoned even before 1940 with the Nazi invasion of France (Marrus and Paxton 1981). There is every reason to suggest that Marc and the other non-conformists were authentic, zealous converts to a ‘third way’ that was revolutionary, authoritarian, and pan-European.
How about political conversions in our century? Are all ideologies irrelevant save liberalism (or neo-liberalism), as Francis Fukuyama (1989) boldly asserted more than 20 years ago? What happens in an age of catastrophe? Do ideologies any longer have any meaning in the age of nuclear weapons, lethal suicide terrorism, environmental destruction, and the arrival of what the neo-Marxist Alexandre Kojève, following Hegel, termed the ‘universal homogeneous state’? Why have neo-fascist and radical right-wing political parties succeeded even as their mimetic, communist rivals plunge to all-time lows?
Do we not have the end of traditional conservatism with the rise of the pro-capitalist Anglo-American New Right, which is in fact a radical form of political thought based on the universal spread of capitalist markets? Has the entire planet ‘converted’ to ‘market fundamentalism’, to use Naomi Klein’s (2008) phrase, with the egalitarian left everywhere a pale shadow of its former self? Why do ecological parties even convert to the market ideology? Is Europe exhausted and will the political models of the future be supplied by South America, Asia, or the Middle East?
A man who has sat in a Turkish prison since his capture by the Turkish state in 1999 might help us understand the fate of political ideologies and conversions in the twenty-first century. While denouncing the excesses of the armed struggle and the ‘nationalist poison’ that he swallowed (Öcalan 2007: 295–7), the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan retains a Marxist, Gramscian, and Hegelian view of history in which ‘democratic civilisation’ (that is, Öcalan cites the rule of law, separation of church and state, popular political participation, the equality of sexes, and respect for minority rights) is the highest stage of human historical development and we merely wait for a new synthesis to emerge outside the West (Öcalan 2007: 277–97). Öcalan’s ‘conversion’ to ‘democratic civilisation’ is authentic in that it comes from a series of crises, including the demise of Marxism–Leninism as an animating ideology after 1989, his ignominious capture, and the political intransigence of both the PKK and Turkish state in a guerrilla war that has left 40,000 dead since 1984. Öcalan is viewed by most Turks as a bloodthirsty ‘terrorist’. For many Turks, his new ‘war of position’ is disingenuous and tactical in that it is designed to make autonomy gains for Kurds that armed conflict had made impossible.
Finally, as Christopher Hitchens (2004, 2001) made the tortuous conversion journey from the Trotskyite left to liberal democracy and even support for the US invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, he claimed to uphold one principle throughout his life: the defence of secularism. In short, Hitchens insists that his ‘conversion’ is authentic, while his leftist comrades of the old anti-colonial left today side with anti-progressive ‘Islamo-fascists’. There was a problem with the Hitchens defence of secularism. Despite its brutal human rights abuses, the Ba’athist regime in Iraq was one of the most secular regimes in the Arab world.
All of the political conversion cases under consideration, including de Benoist, Hitchens, Öcalan, Alemanno, and Mussolini, have varying degrees of authenticity and durability. In addition, the thinkers and politicians studied all embody Gentile’s ‘sacralization of politics’. They are united by a ‘religion of politics’, or a systematic framework of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that interpret and define the meaning and goal of human existence. They all seek to subordinate the destiny of individuals and the collectivity to a supreme, mythical entity, whether the state, nation, region, class, race, or supreme leader. Finally, a political conversion is complicated by tactical considerations for ideologies that are today less acceptable to the culture at large such as fascism, or even elements of the radical right. A de Benoist or Alemanno must increasingly play by the liberal ‘rules of the game’ and their acceptance of ‘democracy’ is merely exoteric rather than esoteric.
Four case studies of political conversions
I have argued that political conversion is a complex process involving numerous variables. It is also my hypothesis that many of the conversion experiences in the political realm mirror and mimic religious experiences and thus embody a secularized search for meaning. Yet, Eatwell (2006: 127– 37) argues for a distinction between political, secular transcendence in the here and now as represented by liberalism, socialism, or fascism and religious transcendence in which transcendence is primarily in the world to come. There were certainly more blurry cases, such as the Romanian Iron Guard, in which organic ultra-nationalism and Christian orthodoxy combined to create a mystical, religious Weltanschauung that embodied a clerico-fascism of complete religious and political transcendence. Having said that, political conversion among fascists, non-conformists, or the ND sought to convert its elites into totally ‘new men’ that were seen as the embodiments of the national or regional destiny of a homogeneous people in a pan-European context. These ‘new men’ were the elite vanguard in a secular age, which nonetheless embodied a political idea with an absolute religious fervour. In Gentile’s terms, they all sought to create and perfect ‘political religions’, although the argument could be made that the ND straddled ‘political religion’ and ‘civil religion’.
At this juncture, I want to more comprehensively examine four types of political conversions: intellectuals exiting the far-right or far-left milieux; neo-fascist politicians converting to ‘post-fascism’; dissident socialists turning to fascism or non-conformism; and nationalist or Marxist terrorists turning towards non-violence and democracy. For each type of political conversion, I examine the mimetic rivalry between left and right, as well as selected factors that allowed for the political conversion in question to take place.
All the intellectuals in our case studies claim to be ‘true believers’ of some political faith, although their tactical decisions change and ideologies that they might die for historically evolve and acquire new names. So, for example, from his university student days as an ultra-nationalist, pro-French Algeria supporter in the 1960s to his veneration of leftist icon Che Guevara, 1968 hero Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and NL guru Herbert Marcuse in the 1980s and 1990s, de Benoist maintained his support for a marked hierarchical elitism, a rejection of liberal democracy and its egalitarian impulses, and a desire to create homogeneous national or regional communities in the context of a heterogeneous world. Mussolini always retained his desire to overturn the hated liberal parliamentary system, but its overturning would come not from the socialist left but the fascist right (or ‘neither right, nor left’ fascist synthesis). In all the cases under consideration, we have what Gentile called ‘mimicry’ and ‘syncretism’ in that the political movements in question either mimic or adopt for their own purposes aspects of the ‘symbolic universe’ of traditional religions.
Far right or left to opposite camp
In my first case study of political conversion, I investigate intellectuals that made conversions from the far right or far left towards the opposite political pole. An example from the far right towards ‘democracy’ and ‘New Left’ is Alain de Benoist in France. Irving Kristol and Christopher Hitchens migrated from the hard, Trotskyite left to neo-conservatism or neo-liberalism. An example of several conversions, first to militant communism and ‘reconversion’ out of the ‘dogmatic left’, is the writer Arthur Koestler. He describes his conversion to communism in the following vein after a cold December evening in 1931 in which his car broke down, he was hungover after a party, had lost badly in poker, and ended up in the bed of an unknown female companion:
By the time I got back to my flat my decision was made, though I hardly felt it to be mine; it had made itself. Pacing up and down in my bedroom, I had the sudden impression that I was looking down from a height at the track along which I had been running. I saw myself with great clarity as a sham and phoney, paying lip-service to the Revolution which was to lift the earth from its axis, and at the time leading the existence of a bourgeois careerist, climbing the worm-eaten ladder of success, playing poker, and landing in unsought beds.
(Koestler in Sargant 1959: 90)
Extreme crises, stress, a search for meaning, guilt, and suggestibility pushed Koestler towards a communist ideology that he had long been drawn towards. He remained a communist for six years and describes his re-conversion away from communism in The God that failed (1949) after the emotional shocks of the Spanish Civil War when he was captured and imprisoned. The re-conversion experience induced ‘a state of inner peace which I have known neither before nor since’ (Koestler in Sargant 1959: 91).
In de Benoist’s case, the major crises that prompted his political conversion included the loss of French Algeria in 1962, the key events of May 1968 and the rise of liberal-leftist cultural power, historical crises of the anti-parliamentary left as a viable alternative to liberal democracy, the official demise of the Soviet Union as the flag bearer of communism in 1991, and the rise of the USA as the world’s sole remaining superpower (which led de Benoist to further shift from an anti-communist to anti-liberal stance in the 1990s and new millennium). Given the history of Vichyism and fascism, as well as the de-legitimization of the right after the Second World War, de Benoist chose a long-term cultural struggle against the other two tendencies of the revolutionary right: political parties and extra-parliamentary violence. This differentiated him from other revolutionary right-wing movements. The crisis of faith in the hegemonic, neo-liberal ideology, which is today de Benoist’s number one enemy, is shared by sectors of the French and European left, radical right-wing political outfits like the FN, left-wing movements in Latin America, Islamists, ecologists, and even ‘welfare liberals’. It is in this context that de Benoist seeks alliances on the left, right, and beyond in his attempt to smash liberal democracy (conceptual tool one). His strategy mimics the non-conformists and CR thinkers of the interwar period.
The de Benoist conversion process took place in three distinct phases from the 1960s to 1980s, as liberalism became more hegemonic and as the anti-liberal communist alternative became exhausted. De Benoist sought to keep alive a homogeneous notion of community identity throughout those three decades. This process led de Benoist from a colonialist, cultural defence of nation based on the superiority of the ‘white man’ and ‘race’ in the 1960s; the upholding of cultural separatism based on scientism and IQ findings in the 1970s; and ethnocultural differentialism based on the notion of the ‘right to difference’ in the 1980s (Taguieff 1994). This notion was itself mimetically borrowed from the French Socialists under former President François Mitterand. As pointed out earlier, the ideological core that remained included the cultural ‘right to difference’ and a vehement desire to overturn the hated materialist ‘disorders’ of liberalism, social democracy, socialism, capitalism, and communism.
It was clear that there was political space for the ‘new right’ ideology in that the fascist legacy was merely waiting for a time when new generations would jettison the taboo of co-operating with the radical right or neo-fascist milieux, as occurred in Italy in 1994, 2001, and 2008 and Austria in 2000 when radical right-wing parties joined national coalition governments. As with fascism and Nazism’s rise to power in Italy and Germany, it is impossible that these parties would rise to power without the collusion of non-fascists that invite fascists to the highest executive positions of the state as a prelude to the total conquest of the state (Paxton 1998). It is no accident that radical right-wing political forces made their mark in the 1980s and 1990s as the left hit its most dramatic, existential crisis with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Other non-conventional options also flourished in the period from Trotskyites to the ecological parties. There was also political space for a more intelligent, cultured right that sought to distance itself from Nazism and fascism, yet tried to subtly rehabilitate the ‘healthy’ elements of fascism from the Strasserites to Primo de Rivera or the CR (Woods 2007).
De Benoist and his major think tank GRECE were elitist, yet dynamic proponents of the ideology. As explained in Chapter 1, the ND is a Europe-wide movement of networks, think tanks, publicists, intellectuals, journalists, and ‘assorted angry men’ (Hellman 2002: 194). It seeks to rehabilitate the legacy of the revolutionary right through more acceptable legal and metapolitical mechanisms. It has contributed to the rise of anti-immigrant parties; a questioning of multiculturalism; and ambivalence about liberal democracy, the EU and globalization processes, and cultural rather than technological aspects of modernity: egalitarianism, liberalism, multiculturalism, and pluralism (Woods 2007: 39–45).
While the larger cultural milieu has not promoted ND ideas like a ‘mimetic contagion’ particularly beyond France, it is clear that their ideas have had an impact in de-legitimizing the major tenets of liberal democracy and expressing anguish about the project of modernity and the postmodern condition. Their ideas have been co-opted by conservative and radical right-wing political formations. The cultural milieu is markedly different from the interwar years where authoritarian and totalitarian solutions were in vogue, spreading like wildfire from the Bolshevik Soviet Union to Fascist Italy and Franco’s Spain to Vichy France.
De Benoist remained a ‘true believer’ of the CR milieu and a metapolitical variant of ‘anti-fascist fascism’. Organizational cohesion was attained through a diverse network of think tanks and intellectuals throughout Europe and an attempt to infiltrate key sectors of elite public opinion in the state, bureaucracy, army, mass media, and political parties (Duranton-Crabol 1988: 51, 213–17). Collusion of establishment elites ensured the return towards a discourse that the late Jean Baudrillard (1995: 135) dubbed a desire to return to a ‘white fundamentalist Europe’, excluding non-Caucasian, non-European, non-Christian immigrants. Fortuna, or a dose of luck, is necessary for any political movement. Fascism and Nazism could count on the timorous, pale responses from established authorities and the overwhelming fear of Bolshevism in both Italy and Germany in the 1920s. Certainly the liberal-left still retains a heavy armour at its disposal in terms of cultural power in France and Europe, but this liberal-left is eroding with increasing questioning of identity, immigration, and the multicultural model that pre-dates the events of 9/11 (Buruma 2006). For the ND, the Nietzschean willpower of powerful elites in the context of organizational cohesion rather than luck will move Europe towards an anti-liberal, ‘spiritual’ revolution.
William Sargant (1959: 13–20, 79–107, 128–55) has suggested that religious conversion involves intense trauma, breakdown, and suggestibility. In order to make converts more suggestible, religious figures such as the Methodist founder Charles Wesley or even Maoist and Stalinist officials utilized extreme allusions to fear, guilt, division, small-group experiences (heightening the perception that they were important), and a simple enemy or scapegoat to make the converts more suggestible. The more complete the conversion, the more the convert thought they were autonomously converting to the new faith. Adding to the suggestibility of new converts, similar techniques were utilized from ancient times to modern evangelism: ecstatic drumming, hypnotic states, the ingestion of common substances, and inducing extreme emotional states.
In the fascist epoch, parades, ritual ceremonies, bonfires, and festivals communicated a profound feeling that made the conversion experience mystical, transcendental, collective, and meaningful. In de Benoist’s case, GRECE valorized the CR ‘heroes’ of the past such as Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt; made members feel that they were a special elite destined to help the region, nation, or Europe; held pagan festivals; and perpetuated a literary canon that was martial, anti-materialist, and identity-obsessed. After years of such intense communal experiences, the convert can become lost in the higher calling of the group experience.
In 2012, de Benoist (2012: 287) stated that he ‘never broke’ with what he called the ‘sacerdotal’ and revolutionary conception of political engagement of his pro-French Algeria days. For de Benoist (2012: 287), politics is akin to a ‘religion’ that necessitates ‘total engagement’ or ‘no engagement at all’. For the ND leader, those that don’t give their all in the process of political engagement, including ‘their time, their money, or their blood’, are not worthy of his interest or respect (de Benoist 2012: 287). He is full of ‘admiration’ for total political engagement; ‘fascinated’ by a twentieth century in which men ‘voluntarily’ gave their lives in the name of a cause (de Benoist 2012: 287). The twentieth century, correctly points out de Benoist (2012: 287), is the age when ‘politics replaced religion’. In short, it is the epoch when one’s political cause became a ‘sacred commandment’.
Yet, as Gentile explains, despite the intensity of the conversionary experiences, they are inevitably short-lived. That is, a period of vitality of strength is followed by the waning of enthusiasm because of the passage of time, changing circumstances that gave rise to the movement, generational change, or crisis and collapse in the political movement from which it was created. GRECE is no longer the vibrant force it was in the 1970s, as generational differences and tactical disputes between the metapolitical and explicitly political wings sapped the movement of its original revolutionary fervour born in 1968. De Benoist was heavily criticized by other ND thinkers such as Robert Steuckers, Guillaume Faye, and Pierre Vial for his excessive intellectualism; a long-term metapolitical strategy that ceded real political power to the liberal-left; and for his failure to support the tone of the FN’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim scapegoating (that is, despite de Benoist’s official rejection of unfettered immigration).
From neo-fascist to post-fascist politicians
The second type of conversion is of neo-fascist politicians in Italy such as Gianfranco Fini (the leader of the MSI and later AN) and Gianni Alemanno, the current mayor of Rome. Both have claimed to supersede the old world of neo-fascism and insist they are ‘post-fascist’. In a 1995 MSI congress, the neo-fascist party under Fini made its ‘post-fascist’ turn. Fini has participated in national coalition governments, including under Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing former Italian prime minister. In 2003, he was deputy prime minister of Italy and went to Israel to apologize for the ‘absolute horrors’ of the Italian race laws after 1938 under Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.
The questions here are the following: have Fini and Alemanno converted to ‘post-fascism’? And does the entire political landscape increasingly lean towards some of the neo-fascist positions on identity, race, immigration, nation, or region? It is true that co-optation is not conversion, but the taboo of no longer co-operating with the far right was first broken in Italy, the land that gave us fascism. Is this not an example of historical mimesis at work?
I will not analyse the ten conversion prerequisites here, but will comment on the religious or mystical and political aspects of the MSI and AN, the parties that produced Fini and Alemanno. The march through the wilderness for the ghettoized neo-fascists had its modest beginnings in 1977 and 1981 when neo-fascists participated in Campo Hobbit, a festival of MSI youth that sought to transcend the excesses of the terrorism of both left and right in the 1970s and rethink the sterile legacy of fascism (Ignazi 2006: 22–6). The camp sought to create alternative cosmologies and strategies for a right that was then outflanked by the liberal-left. The Hobbit was written by J. R. R. Tolkien for his own children, but it appealed to neo-fascist youth like Alemanno because of its thirst for adventure, the quest of Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves against great odds, the Battle against the deadly Five Armies (its martial theme), and the mystical songs, meals, and joy of comrades fighting for a common purpose. Campo Hobbit included campfires and mystical literature, and ideological exchanges were held between non-conformists of left and right seeking alternative cosmologies and the overthrow of liberal democracy. These initiation rites had all the ingredients of ‘political religions’ and certainly contributed to the suggestibility of the new converts to a neo-fascism that had to adapt to changing times.
It was the French neo-fascist Maurice Bardèche who called fascism the ‘joy of living’ and his fascist brother-in-law, Robert Brasillach, who defined it as the ‘thirst for adventure’. It is said that when Alemanno won, the ‘Hobbit generation’ came to power in Rome; a generation that remembers these shared conversion experiences within the neo-fascist milieu and its antipathy towards liberal democracy and multiculturalism (Popham 2008).
In conjunction with cultural renewal projects like Campo Hobbit, as pointed out in Chapter 1, the ND created think tanks throughout Europe in a transnational spirit (Mammone 2008: 213–36). It sought to change the perception of the right, tarred by the brush of fascism, and to rehabilitate its legacy in more acceptable forms. Therefore Alemanno’s victory in Rome is a victory for pragmatic strategy; a strategy that downplays the fascist past and stresses law and order and even democratic and environmental discourses. And it is the story of a political climate in Italy and Western Europe that has dramatically and decidedly drifted towards the anti-egalitarian right, particularly on cultural, regional, and national identity questions. It is a victory based on the steady cultural and political return of a conservative revolutionary right that was thought buried in the ashes of the Second World War.
Enter 28 April 2008, the victory of Alemanno as the new mayor of Rome. He clearly has roots in the neo-fascist MSI and its successor the AN. He was formerly a national secretary of the Youth Front of the neo-fascist MSI. He twice lost bids to enter Rome city council in the 1980s. Alemanno persisted in defeat. In 1990, he entered the regional government in Lazio under the MSI banner. Lazio’s professional football team is dubiously known the world over for its hard-core hooligan supporters with philo-fascist and anti-Semitic sentiments. In 1994, Alemanno was elected to the MSI’s successor, the purportedly ‘moderate’ or ‘post-fascist’ AN. He was re-elected to the Italian House in 1996, 2001, and 2006. Alemanno was one of Berlusconi’s most competent ministers as his Agriculture Minister from 2001 until 2006.
We should also remember that Alemanno’s rise would not be possible without the collusion of established elites. Non-fascists like Berlusconi, Veltroni, and Prodi have colluded in the rise of Alemanno and Fini, as has the European turn towards a more anti-immigrant ‘white fundamentalist Europe’ or ‘Europe for Europeans’ that questions the merits of multiculturalism. It is also a historical truism that Mussolini’s ascent to power would not have been possible without the vascillation of King Victor Emmanuel III, or other political, military, and economic elites that no longer saw that the post-war crises could be resolved by liberals, socialists, or conservatives, while also fatally believing that the future Fascist leader could be tamed in a grand national coalition (Paxton 1998).
Alemanno’s ‘post-fascism’ has been questioned by liberal critics. He certainly had brushes with the law as a former MSI member, as did others in the party from former leader Giorgio Almirante to his father-in-law, fascist diehard Pino Rauti. Rauti was sympathetic to the pro-Nazi Salò Republic and belonged to the shadowy, neo-fascist terrorist group Ordine Nuovo in the late 1960s.
Alemanno is not alone in his anti-immigrant appeal to the ‘silent majority’ (white, Christian, and European) in an increasingly familiar right-wing populist discourse (Taggart 2000). Across the Alps in France, former FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the European continent when he reached the final round of the presidential elections in 2002 using similar anti-immigrant themes. In Austria in 2000, the populist, anti-immigrant FPÖ joined the national coalition in what amounted to an international black day for Austria. In 2008, two radical right-wing populist parties combined to garner 28 per cent of the popular vote and were candidates to join the national coalition government once again. Anti-immigrant parties scored impressive victories in supposedly mild social democratic bastions from the Netherlands to Denmark and Norway. The New Right has made a comeback in a unified Germany, seeking to make Germany a ‘normal’ nationalistic nation again (Woods 2007).
Alemanno’s dramatic rise to power was based on legal and cultural means. It is the reverse of the old fascist formula of violently intimidating and killing political opponents through the black-shirted squads. In this sense, it mimics the increasing political ascendancy of the New Right throughout Europe. When Pino Rauti split from the AN to form the fascist Fiamma Tricolore after Fini took the AN in a ‘post-fascist’ direction in 1995, Rauti claimed to continue the fascist legacy allegedly abandoned by the MSI and AN. Alemanno, however, stressed his ties to the cultural, legal wing of the neo-fascists.
Alemanno and Fini learned their lessons from neo-fascists of previous eras. The MSI’s former leader, Giorgio Almirante (1969–87), had played the double game of legality and illegality that was crucial for ‘movement fascism’, or what he dubbed the strategy of the ‘cudgel and double-breasted suit’. Almirante was a minor figure in the short-lived fascist Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic) or Repubblica di Salò as a Minister of Culture in 1944. His aforementioned strategy yielded modest results, reaching a high mark of around 8 per cent of the popular vote in the 1972 Italian elections. Yet, Almirante was grooming Gianfranco Fini, the future MSI leader, by moving the party away from fascist symbolism as early as 1970 and declaring his support for the democratic system. This strategy would reap its harvest with Berlusconi’s stunning coalition invitation to the MSI and LN in 1994.
After Berlusconi swept the right to power for the first time in 34 years in 1994, he was unceremoniously ousted from power after a short seven-month stint in office due to disagreements with coalition partners, particularly LN leader Umberto Bossi. From 1996 to 2001 when the centre-left was in power, Berlusconi was the leader of the parliamentary opposition. Between 2001 and 2006, Berlusconi wrested power from the centre-left again and included the MSI (now AN) in its coalition again with the LN. He made Gianfranco Fini, the AN leader, his deputy prime minister and Foreign Minister. Claiming to be ‘post-fascist’, Fini also took more moderate positions on immigration like ND leader de Benoist. Due to the vicissitudes of Italian coalition politics, Berlusconi’s alliance was again ousted by Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition. In 2008 his renamed party, Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL – People of Freedom), which merged with the former neo-fascist AN, was elected and he became Italy’s prime minister for a third time. The AN and LN are both anti-immigrant (the LN more overtly), with the latter virulently anti-Southern and anti-Rome. Both parties were critical for Berlusconi’s coalition success.
From socialism to the fascist synthesis
I have already briefly examined Mussolini’s stunning conversion to the fascist synthesis that began after 1914 and grew with the power of the war veterans’ experiences after the First World War. Mussolini was not alone in the period, as a host of anarcho-syndicalists, anti-Marxist socialists, and non-conformists searched for an anti-materialist ‘third way’ against conservatism, liberal democracy, and Marxist socialism. That is, Mussolini’s conversion experience marked a generation in Europe, with Henrik de Man in Belgium, Emmanuel Mounier and Alexandre Marc in France, and Primo de Rivera all converting to a ‘third way’ that was heavily elitist, statist, authoritarian, and sometimes corporatist. It was a political conversion that sought to synthesize the two great revolutionary ideas of the epoch: nationalism and socialism in an elitist, ‘spiritual’, activist, and total framework.
To make the conversion experience more authentic, non-conformists and fascists stressed style, feeling, and a sense of national belonging that crossed left–right political and material divisions (O’Sullivan 1983). Payne (1995) points out that the fascists borrowed their brown, black, blue, or green shirt colours from radical left-wing shirt movements. D’Annunzio certainly played a major role in the emergence of a fascist style with his capture of Fiume and his announcement of the Carnaro Constitution in 1920. The fascist style was grand, bold, explosive, militaristic, and stressed a community of national belonging and destiny that was historically unique. Parades, flags, shirts, banners, rituals, ceremonies for the dead, and oratorical flourishes by the divine leader created a suggestible climate that was congenial for mass conversion and the creation of a novel ‘religion of politics’.
There are undoubtedly numerous interpretations of fascism from Marxist to Freudian and institutional to elite theory. A. J. Gregor and Ernst Nolte argue that fascism was a sort of mimicry of communist Bolshevism. Nolte (in Furet and Nolte 2001: 47) insists that fascism is a revolutionary imitation of communism and cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1947 suggestion that fascism is a ‘mimicry of Bolshevism’. Gregor (2000) has the boldest claim, namely, that left-wing regimes such as Maoist China, the Stalinist Soviet Union, and other radical left-wing regimes are ‘developmental national dictatorships’ of a fascist persuasion. Girard’s insights are not incompatible with Nolte’s controversial thesis that fascism would not have been possible without the rise of communist Bolshevism. In short, Nolte (1982, 1966) argues that if there had not been a Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, there would have been no fascism in Italy in 1922 or national socialism in Germany in 1933. That is, communism was fascism’s mimetic double, which fascism tried to both mimic and outflank in its search for political power and struggle for mass identity formation.
In short, fascism was not merely a lackey of big business interests and would not have been possible without a constant interaction with its radical competitor and imitator on the left. This does not mean that fascism was completely autonomous, but it did seek to provide a unique response to its leftist and liberal competitors by borrowing from its rivals. This imitation has emanated from the extreme edges of the right and left. Neo-fascists such as former MSI leader Giorgio Almirante called Julius Evola, the architect of the Fascist manifesto of so-called ‘spiritual racism’ (in reality, a manifesto of actual racism and race laws), ‘our Marcuse, only better’. Even as a Fascist Mussolini extolled the virtues of the anarcho-syndicalist Sorel.
From nationalist and Marxist terrorists to non-violence
A number of terrorists have increasingly renounced violence and maximalist goals in light of the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Communist Soviet Union, and cycles of terrorist violence that have reinforced the power of states (Whittaker 2007: 28–38, 292–4). The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) decided to recognize Israel’s existence and take the path of the two-state solution. In Nepal, Maoists gave up their arms and participated in a national coalition government that abandoned the monarchy. PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan has called for the global spread of democratic civilization, renounced narrow nationalism, and argued against the utilization of violence.
After the crisis caused by his capture by the Turkish state in 1999, Öcalan now calls for a democratic civilization in combination with another civilizational ethos (perhaps from the Middle East, what he calls the birthplace of civilization) to forge a new, world-civilizational synthesis. His conversion is a product of largely external forces combined with internal reflections. What he has retained is the Hegelian, Marxist notion that history progressively unfolds towards a higher spiritual, socio-economic, and political reality on a global scale.
A former proponent of revolutionary armed struggle, Öcalan (2007: 255–6) today valorizes ‘contemporary democracy’ and federalist principles, while longing for a new historical synthesis of world civilizations. A new ‘democracy of the people’, argues Öcalan (2007: 237), will fail outside Euro-American societies if it is not ‘superior’ to Western democracy. This bold assertion reinforces the Hegelian idea that history unfolds towards universal, civilizational progress and that ‘contemporary democracy’ is for now the highest expression of this progress. It is also intended to counter what Öcalan views as the tendency of authoritarian states in the Middle East to rhetorically wave the banner of popular representation, while eroding democratic practices. If a new civilizational synthesis emerges, argues Öcalan, it will need to build on the real historical progress made as a consequence of the emergence of ‘democratic civilisation’: individualism, the rule of law, rule by the people, secularism, women’s rights.
For Öcalan, like de Benoist, the terrain of civil society becomes the contested territory for revolutionary activity in a Gramscian vein. In Öcalan’s (2007: 227) eyes, the conquest of civil society is where revolutionary activity should be directed because it ‘comprises the tool of democratic possibilities – that opens the door to developments hitherto impossible’. For Öcalan, the aim of a contemporary revolutionary is to supersede political and extra-parliamentary projects, while creating counter-hegemonic discourses in the cultural terrain outside the state (for example, sufi orders, dissident religious thinkers, legal networks), which will act as vehicles to change modes of thinking in the masses and eventually dislodge antiquated, authoritarian political structures in many Middle Eastern states. What Öcalan is really searching for is a Middle Eastern ‘enlightenment’ for Islamic societies. Öcalan is convinced that we progressively evolve as human civilizations. Global economic and technological interdependence, the relative autonomy of civil spaces in contemporary Turkey, and ideological convergence processes in the post-communist age allow Öcalan to engage in a Gramscian ‘war of position’ that stresses the role of civil society consensus and non-violence in the changing of historical, political consciousness.
As outlined earlier, this conversion process is authentic in that it responds to profound ideological, economic, and technological changes, but it also shares with de Benoist’s conversion tactical acumen in the context of changed political circumstances. Forced state incarceration accelerated Öcalan’s conversion out of the dogmatic Marxist orbit.
Girard, conversion, left, and right
At this juncture, I examine how Girard’s ideas about mimetic rivalry might help us understand political conversion from left to right or right to left, or right and left and beyond. Girard’s notion of mimesis can be grouped under three headings: mimetic desire, metaphysical desire, and the positive aspects of mimesis (Girard and Williams 2003: 290–1). Mimetic desire is a non-conscious imitation of others. Mimesis seeks to gain the object that the model desires. With metaphysical desire, we want to associate with the other and our deepest desire is not objects but being. We are hypnotized by the other. We can actually even convert into the identity of the other, or create a new identity by mimicking the ideas of the other. Finally, positive imitation involves an opening towards the other that is positive, selfless, and heroic; a ‘good contagion’; the imitation of Christ being ‘conversionary imitation’.
If we relate Girard’s ideas to political conversion and symbiosis between left and right, we find that left and right, particularly in the period of high ideological tension in the interwar years, imitated each other, both unconsciously and consciously. Because fascism and non-conformism were ‘latecomers’ in political space (Linz 2003: 64–70), they tended to more consciously imitate the left. Hitler said he would make ‘Munich the Moscow of our movement’, Mussolini praised the leftist syndicalists, and the Strassers longed for a national, corporatist socialism within the Nazi movement. Yet, the left also consciously or unconsciously imitated the right. Stalinism, Gregor (2000) argues, came to have national socialist or fascist traits. Both extreme right and extreme left are hypnotized by each other; the hatred of materialism, parliamentarism, capitalism, and globalization and the penchant for violence, elitism, military virtues, and party-militia frameworks uniting them. De Benoist said he would vote for the Communists in 1984 (although he claims he never did), praised Che Guevara, Gramsci, and Marcuse, and called the Greens the sole remaining force able to challenge triumphalist liberal capitalism (de Benoist 1997). He also hated and envied the left for its cultural decadence, its treason in converting to neo-liberalism, and its control of the cultural terrain, which the ND sought to control (GRECE 1998).
We can say that the left and right are rivals for power, cultural control, or dominance of political space. Yet, they are also rivals for creating a cultural and political consensus that would be most suitable to the masses of Europeans. Moreover, they are also rivals in the search for an authentic identity, in the struggle to be who they are, or in the interpretive desire to be ‘authentic’ Europeans, however this is defined. Finally, a political conversion is positive since it is not merely political, but also cultural and civilizational: it supposedly saves a civilization or people from cultural decadence and the worst tendencies of mass society. In focusing on culture, the ND sought a conversionary imitation that was not modelled on Christ, but on Nietzsche, the virility of elites, and the pagan return to a culture that was heroic, healthy, and ‘truly’ European (for example, the antithesis of ‘slave’ cultures of mass Judaeo-Christian monotheism, liberalism, and socialism). It was a conversion process that had all the ingredients of a ‘political religion’, open to the few, and claimed to take Europe back to its pagan, hierarchical roots where in Schmittian terms the political and martial dominated the economic realms.
This chapter has been based on the premise that intellectual ideas are significant and shape historical processes. Yet, I insist that concrete political and material interests also matter. More importantly, I argued that political and ideological conversions are in part a quasi-religious experience for its adherents. Following Gentile, I pointed out that contemporary conversionary experiences involve both mimicry and syncretism vis-à-vis traditional established religions. Despite the intensity of conversionary experiences, they are not necessarily permanent and durable. An ideological conversion has its rising springs and summers of extreme revolutionary intensity, but also its declining autumns and winters when ideological fervour wanes due to crises, collapse, generational revolt, and changing political circumstances.
In short, the secular modern era did not abolish the pull of traditional established religions, but only expressed it in unique forms that made the political realm ‘sacred’ in either civic or political religions. Following Sargant’s insights, I suggested that the most intense and durable political conversions are secularized variants of religious conversions. Furthermore, I sought to highlight a model of successful political conversion with ten ingredients and four case studies of intellectuals and political figures on the right, left, and beyond. Finally, I examined different conversionary processes from Girard’s ‘conversionary imitation’ to authentic and inauthentic conversions and esoteric and exoteric conversions. In most of the cases under consideration, the conversions were authentic, yet short-lived rather than durable since political circumstances, the passage of time, and ideological crises all opened up new political constellations, which undermined revolutionary fervour and the dogmas and rituals of the ‘political religion’ in question. It is hoped that the model of ‘political conversion’ and ‘religious experience’ offered might be tested more generically beyond the cognitive reach of the cases studied.
Esoteric and exoteric conversions are complicated by realpolitik considerations that compel ‘true believers’ to sometimes mask their hatred for parliamentarism and democracy, as with Mussolini before the March on Rome and de Benoist with his ‘leftist’ turn in the late 1980s and 1990s. The Irish Republican Army has put down its guns since the signing of the Good Friday Accords in 1998, but its militants cannot easily give up on the dream of a united Ireland. Could we say the same about the PLO, the two-state solution, and the longing of its hardcore supporters to ‘liberate’ all of Palestine and excise what they consider the ‘alien’ Jewish state from its midst?
The twentieth century was undoubtedly an extremely secular age with rival ideologies like liberalism, socialism, and fascism all embodying a secular ethos. We might increasingly turn secular, but modern political projects resemble ‘political religions’ with communist Bolshevism, Maoism, fascism, and Nazism being the most overtly ‘religious’. Civil religions born in the USA and France in the eighteenth century, however, have proved more durable than their counterparts, namely, totalitarian ‘political religions’. While totalitarian faiths seemed to have a greater intensity of mass support than ‘civil religions’, it is the ‘civil religions’ that had the last laugh precisely because they rely less on the repressive apparatus of the state. ‘Civil religions’ are allegedly more ‘freely’ chosen by their ‘converts’ and hence their shelf-life is more durable. Yet, in both the cases of ‘civil’ and ‘political’ religions, Gentile is correct to point out that they are short-lived. We engage in mimicry and syncretism in relation to established traditional religions in the modern political realm, but we can never create ‘gods’ that embody eternal ‘political religions’.
In this chapter, Girard and Gentile have been utilized to better understand mimetic rivalry and ‘politics as religion’. Gentile points out that the ‘sacralization of politics’ is unique to the modern world. All the political movements, intellectuals, and ideologies considered in this chapter have been bathed in ointments that gave their political projects a sacred imprimatur. This is certainly true of the ND. In its idiosyncratic ideological mazeway resynthesis that seeks alternative modernities transcending right and left (conceptual tools one and two), the ND possibly straddles ‘civil religion’ and ‘political religion’ (conceptual tool three). Recall that Gentile asserted that ‘civil religions’ coexist with other ideologies and respect individual freedoms, while ‘political religions’ are constructed around a monopoly of power, ideological monism, and the total subordination of the individual and collectivity to its ‘scared commandments’. On the one hand, the ND’s de facto reality as a cultural ‘school of thought’ with many tendencies within the context of a pluralistic, liberal democracy puts it closer to the notion of ‘civil religion’. On the other hand, the ND’s search for alternative modernities, which is structured around a hierarchical, pagan, imperial pan-European community that privileges ‘original’ Europeans, might necessitate a turn towards ‘political religion’. Moreover, Gentile (2006: xiv) also pointed out that the ‘religion of politics’ is a religion precisely because it is ‘a system of beliefs, myths, rituals, and symbols that interpret and define the meaning and end of human existence by subordinating the destiny of individuals and collectivity to a supreme entity’. For the ND, the ‘supreme entity’ is not the one God of the monotheistic tradition, but multiple Scandinavian, Germanic, and Celtic gods of the pagan, Indo-European tradition. For most contemporary political movements, including the ND, the ‘supreme entity’ also includes the movement, its leader(s), its dogmas, and the ‘sacred’ nature of the political realm itself. This ‘sacralization of politics’ is largely a product of the modern liberal republican revolutions of the eighteenth century. As the ND is a product and representative of the ‘sacralization of politics’, this speaks volumes about its modernist credentials. In its desire to erect a new, re-sacralized religion of politics, the ND was part of a larger modernist wave in both the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Girard helped us to situate political conversion in a larger cultural framework. Girard himself might be losing some faith in conversionary imitation along the non-sacrificial, non-violent model of Christ, but this speaks more to the spiritual crises of our times, the fall of firm political anchors, and the technological and material processes of a global civilization that is indeed Janus-faced in its possibilities for human redemption. There will always be positive models to imitate, but the question then arises, what does positive mean? Surely a model that might question the violence inherent in both left- and right-wing political projects is instructive and illuminating. Yet, how about a negative model in which a new Duce uses eco-fascism as the new ideology of choice to hypnotize millions? Will we see the skandalon (stumbling block) coming, or will we recognize it when it arrives because it will be based on collective national, regional, or European belonging and the feeling of apparent love for both our particular peoples and the universal planet? These are the times we live in and so we must think of apocalyptic possibilities and new political conversions, but will we be able to stop such ‘mimetic contagions’ from spreading uncontrollably into the heart of the body politic? The ND’s response is to let the ‘mimetic contagions’ spread in order to defeat liberalism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and the most ‘nihilistic’ aspects of modernity.