Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History

Alt/Histories

Louie Dean Valencia-García, Louie Dean Valencia-García

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000054071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories, historians, sociologists, neuroscientists, lawyers, cultural critics, and literary and media scholars come together to offer an interconnected and comparative collection for understanding how contemporary far-right, neo-fascist, Alt-Right, Identitarian and New Right movements have proposed revisions and counter-narratives to accepted understandings of history, fact and narrative. The innovative essays found here bring forward urgent questions to diverse public, academic, and politically minded audiences interested in how historical understandings of race, gender, class, nationalism, religion, law, technology and the sciences have been distorted by these far-right movements. If scholars of the last twenty years, like Francis Fukuyama, believed that neoliberalism marked an 'end of history', this volume shows how the far right is effectively threatening democracy and its institutions through the dissemination of alt-facts and histories.

1 Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History

Louie Dean Valencia-García

In 2013, members of the French ethno-nationalist youth group ‘Génération Identitaire’ (Generation Identity) posted a video to the digital video platform YouTube in an attempt to propagate a fear of immigrants whilst simultaneously claiming they had ‘discovered’ their history—as though it were something lost, hidden.¹ They asserted in their declaration, ‘We’ve rejected your history books to re-gather our memories’. The black and white video featured young, white men and women close-up, completing each other’s sentences:

We’ve stopped believing in a ‘global village’ and the ‘family of man’. We discovered we have roots, ancestry, and therefore a future. Our heritage is our land, our blood, our identity. We are the heirs to our own future… The lambda emblem, painted on our proud Spartan shields, is our symbol.²

The members of Génération Identitaire rejected the globalised world in which they grew up and took a stylised version of the Spartan’s ancient symbol (Λ) as their own, declaring war on the world they saw as a product of the cultural revolution of the 1960s—which was a culminating moment for anti-colonial struggles and for the civil rights for people of colour, women and queer people in Europe, the United States and in former colonies. Of course, these so-called ‘identitarians’ seemed to ignore the fact that ancient Sparta was never a unifying pro-Hellenic force; moreover, it had its own very queer history that certainly would have clashed with how the group imagined that ancient past.³

History, popularly, is a thing which is stretched, invented and made of stubborn clichés that refuse to give way:

History repeats itself.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Winners write the history.

History is made of fragments. Sometimes these pieces are things jotted down in a journal or a scrap of paper. History is created out of newspapers, cave paintings, buildings, art, word-of-mouth, ruins, geological or scientific investigations, statues, fables, excavations and television shows. History is saved in museums, libraries, government and organisational archives, graves, shipwrecks, pyramids, attics and Twitter. Historians sift through these ephemera in their attempt to reconstruct and understand the past. When digging through this material, historians quickly realise the truth of the matter is that nothing repeats exactly the same—although there certainly are patterns to be investigated. Culture is not static and sometimes the ‘losers’ also write history—seen in the US context where numerous American military bases have been named after Confederate ‘heroes’.⁴

If visualised, some might think of history as a Picasso painting, distorted, broken in fragments, but screaming with meaning. Others might see it as Michelangelo’s David, a form that looks perfect from one angle, but in reality, it is distorted to privilege a singular perspective. Yet still, someone might see history as something like a Georgia O’Keefe painting, natural but heavily coded. Perhaps it is like the photography of Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, whose infinitely detailed photos are comprised of layer after layer of stitched together images of the same place at different times, conveying some sort of greater truth in the final product. Yet still, others think of history like the Artemision Bronze—masculine, powerful and enduring. As traditionalists, many members of the Identitarian movement would most likely identify with this latter understanding of history.

Traditionalism, as the Italian esoteric fascist philosopher Julius Evola (1898–1974) understood it, is a sort of idealised, static idea of the past that is deeply rooted in custom and a nation’s spirit, as well as blood. The traditionalist world is one that is the ‘antithesis’ of the modern world. For Evola, and those Identitarians who have adopted his philosophy, traditionalists are those elite who stand in the ruins of modernity, who rise above depravity and degeneration, who both harden themselves against change but also have found traditionalist values that they see as now hidden from most men. To understand how the far right comprehends history one must understand that for their ideologues our contemporary age is one of decline and degeneracy. For them, an idealised, imagined past must be restored.

History has long been thought of a cyclical—at least since Polybius proposed his cycles of political evolution.⁵ Traditionalists, like Evola, conceive of history as a sort of politics of inevitability—that we rotate between a golden age, silver age, bronze age and dark (or iron) age.⁶ This type of teleology is prominent amongst many older traditions globally. In Nordic pagan tradition, a golden age (gullaldr) comes after Ragnarök, the end of our current epoch. In Christianity, humans began in paradise, suffered a fall, found redemption, but still face a coming apocalypse—followed by an eventual return to paradise for the select few. In Hinduism, there, too, are cycles. Even Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), much accredited for the explosion of humanistic thought and inquiry in the ‘Renaissance’, believed himself to be living in a ‘dark age’—much to the chagrin of medievalists.⁷ From this perspective, traditionalists see the world we live in as part of a cyclical narrative that always needs redemption. Evola writes, ‘When a cycle of civilization is reaching its end, it is difficult to achieve anything by resisting it and by directly opposing the forces in motion. The current is too strong; one would be overwhelmed’. Like Evola, many in the far right today see themselves as ‘riding the tiger’, being of an elite who is able to withstand and master the wild animal of modernity—to surf above the turbulent waters below them.⁸ For them, history has entered its low point and thus must be restarted—some believe in a theory of ‘accelerationism’—an attempt by white nationalists to hasten what they see as an inevitable race war—which has led to violent attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas.⁹

Figure 1.2 United States President Donald Trump wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat. The phrase recalls an unspecified idealised past—a fascistic palingenetic tendency. Windover Way Photography/Shutterstock.com.

Most recently, the belief in history as cyclical found its way into United States President Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric—calling to ‘Make America Great Again’. Of course, when exactly this great past was is never specified—but one surmises it is before queer people could marry, or even before there were protections for people with disabilities, or maybe before women had their right to abortion recognised by the US Supreme Court. Worse, maybe this supposed era of greatness was during Jim Crow, or before the American Civil War. Mussolini wanted to bring back the greatness of the Roman Empire. Hitler looked to the pre-Weimar years. Francisco Franco recalled the Spanish Empire and the so-called the ‘Reconquest’, which persecuted and exiled Muslims and Jews. By seeing time as cyclical, something that can be ‘brought back’, the far right celebrates an idealised past where the white man was master of his home and the colonised world. This cyclical thinking is what allows for what historian Timothy Snyder calls ‘a politics of inevitability’.¹⁰

Indeed, the traditionalist understanding of history as cyclical is inherently challenged by progressive understandings of history. In progressive narratives there is not a desire to return to the past—the past is past, but informs our present. Rather than focusing on what was, there instead is a desire to move towards a future. This type of history, too, can have its own teleology if there is an assumed end point that must be reached. Somewhat optimistically, in The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama argued,

As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty.¹¹

However, even Fukuyama wondered if the ‘present trend toward democracy’ was in fact a ‘cyclical phenomenon’.¹² Speculating about the role of economic crises in the rise of illiberal ideologies he wrote, ‘What reason, then do we have to expect that the situation of the 1970s will not recur, or worse yet, that the 1930s, with its clash of virulent anti-democratic ideologies, can not return?’¹³ Indeed, as Fukuyama later points out, both trends are possible, there are ‘cycles in the worldwide fortunes of democracy’ and there is a ‘pronounced secular trend in the democratic direction’.¹⁴ Most resoundingly, Fukuyama worried that the arrival of an ‘end of history’, a supposed triumphant win of liberal democracy, could end with a ‘last man’ who is both ‘self-absorbed’ and ‘devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in pursuit of…private comforts’. These last men would, he feared, become ‘engaged in bloody and pointless prestige battles, only this time with modern weapons’. Moreover, these last men would not have ‘constructive outlets for [their] megalothymia’ which could lead to a ‘resurgence in an extreme and pathological form’ of being. Almost prophetically, writing decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States of America, Fukuyama worried that for all the recognition Trump (and individuals like him) received, they were ‘not the most serious or the most just’. For Fukuyama, despite being in a utopic society, where the world was just and prosperous, there would always be those, like Trump, who could not satisfy their own ‘thymotic’ natures—that is to say their desire for recognition, or supremacy. Indeed, as we have already seen in the Trump presidency, bloody and pointless prestige battles are occurring. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, pathological megalothymia and a desire for supremacy have arisen—both in the forms of white supremacist ideology and American nationalist exceptionalism.

Alt-Histories

Historians Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, Denis Mack Smith and Robert Paxton have described the fascist palingenetic tendency to recast or idealise an imagined past. In Spain, after the loss of its colonies in 1898, the fascist Falange party pushed a mythical vision of ‘Hispanidad’, a type of Spanish-Nationalism that attempted to recast the Spanish ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History
• Part I Rewriting the Past: The History of History and Alternate Timelines
• Part II The Past in the Present: History in the Public Sphere
• Part III History of the Future: Law, Science and Technology
• Notes on Contributors
• Index